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194 lead, and that there is a resource of strong, untrained common sense in the masses on which a state may be built in complete security.

No sooner, however, have we accepted this doctrine as orthodox and indisputable matter of political faith, than we are told that educated men and others who have enjoyed exceptional advantages, or who have acquired any of those forms of training which make men better — not than other men, but than they would themselves have been without the expenditure of capital and labor — have a duty to perform: to lead, guide, and instruct the real rulers. It is asserted that when the masses go astray it is the fault of the educated classes who did not instruct them. Therefore we arrive at this doctrine: if a young man desires to fit himself to discharge the duties of life well, he needs to spend his youth in study and work, he needs to accumulate capital and to subject himself to discipline. This is a duty which is incumbent on all and is enjoined on all, without exception. If, however, some conform to it and some do not, let it not be maintained that the former shall have wealth and honor and power in the society. On the contrary, only the latter shall have those things; for, since all the things which improve men are hard and irksome, and the mass of mankind shirk them, and the power rests with the mass, the "minority" receive as their share the function of persuading the "majority" to do right, if they can, and if they do not succeed, they bear the responsibility for whatever goes wrong. Such a doctrine is profoundly immoral, for there is a dislocation involved in it between work and reward.

We encourage our children to earn and save and we stimulate them to look forward to the accumulation of wealth. We explain to them the advantages of capital.


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 get regarding it so far, has been one sent me by Mr. R. E. Dennett; who says "The sleeping sickness though prevalent throughout Kakongo and Loango is most common in the north of Loango and the south of Kakongo, that is north of the river Quillou and among the Mussorongo.

"What the cause of the sickness is, it is hard to say, but it is one of those scourges which is ever with us. The natives say any one may get it, that it is not hereditary, and only infectious in certain stages. They avoid the dejecta of affected persons, but they do not force the native to live in the bush as they do a person affected by small-pox.

"Pains in the head chiefly just above the nose are first experienced, and should these continue for a month or so it is to be expected that the disease is Madotchila, or the first stage of the sleeping sickness.

"In the word Madotchila we have the idea of a state of being poisoned or bewitched. At this stage the sickness is curable, but as the sick man will never admit that he has the sickness and will suffer excruciating pain rather than complain, and as it is criminal to suggest to the invalid or others that he is suffering from the dreadful disease, it often happens that it gets great hold of the afflicted and from time to time he falls down overcome by drowsiness.

"Then he swells up and has the appearance of one suffering from dropsy, and this stage of the disease is called Malazi, literally meaning thousands (Kulazi=one thousand, the verb Koula to become great and zi the productive fly.)

"This appears to be the acute stage of the disease and death often occurs within eight days from the beginning of the swelling.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 would not be proper, for ome Reaons, to trouble the Reader with the Particulars of our Adventures in thoe Seas: Let it uffice to inform him, that in our Paage from thence to the Eat-Indies, we were driven by a violent Storm to the Northwet of Van Diemen's Land. By an Obervation, we found ourelves in the Latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes South. Twelve of our Crew were dead by immoderate Labour, and ill Food, the ret were in a very weak condition. On the fifth of November, which was the beginning of Summer in thoe Parts, the Weather being very hazy, the Seamen pied a Rock, within half a Cable's length of the Ship; but the Wind was o trong, that we were driven directly upon it, and immediately plit. Six of the Crew, of whom I was one, having let down the Boat into the Sea, made a hift to get clear of the Ship, and the Rock. We rowed, by my computation, about three Leagues, till we were able to work no


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148 power is increased by agricultural improvements only; it is increased by all improvements in any department of industrial effort; it is especially increased by the extension of the cultivated area of the globe, that is, by settling new countries. This last mode of increasing social power is also the easiest.

From the increase of industrial power there follows advance in science, fine arts, literature, and education, which react again on the social power to stimulate it and accelerate the rate of its activity, thus increasing its efficiency.

The point which here seems most important is to keep the sequence and relation of things distinct and dear. The notion that progress proceeds in the first instance from intellectual or moral stimuli, or that progress is really something in the world of thought, and not of sense, has led to the most disappointing and abortive efforts to teach and "elevate" inferior races or neglected classes. The ancestors of the present civilized races did not win their civilization by any such path; they built it up through centuries of toil from a foundation of surplus material means, which they won through improvements in the industrial arts and in the economic organization.

In this connection also we are brought to another question which must be regarded as one of the most important to be clearly answered for successful discussion of social problems. It is assumed to be the task of political economy or social science to account for "the degradation of mankind," or to find out the reasons for degradation of mankind as a preliminary step toward the cure of that degradation — which latter is taken to be the task of those sciences. But we are met at once by the question: Is the degradation of


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 longer, being already pent with Labour while we were in the Ship. We therefore truted our elves to the Mercy of the Waves, and in about half an hour the Boat was over-et by a udden Flurry from the North. What became of my Companions m the Boat, as well as of thoe who ecaped on the Rock, or were left in the Veel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lot. For my own part, I wam as Fortune directed me, and was puhed forward by Wind and Tide. I often let my Legs drop, and could feel no bottom: But when I was almot gone, and able to truggle no longer, I found myelf within my Depth; and by this time the Storm was much abated. The Declivity was o mall, that I walked near a mile before I got to the Shore, which I conjectur'd was about eight a-clock in the Evening. I then advanced forward near half a mile, but could not dicover any ign of Houes or Inhabitants; at leat I was in o weak a Condition that I did not oberve them. I was extremely


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Author:Charles Waddington

Works

 * Memoirs of Zehir-Ed-Din Muhammed Baber (1826)

title: Author:Charles Waddington


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 tired, and with that, and the heat of the Weather, and about half a Pint of Brandy that I drank as I left the Ship, I found my elf much inclined to leep. I lay down on the gras, which was very hort and oft, where I lept ounder than ever I remember to have done in my Life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours; for when I awaked, it was jut daylight. I attempted to rie, but was not able to tir: For as I happened to lie on my Back, I found my Arms and Legs were trongly fatened on each ide to the Ground; and my Hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the ame manner. I likewie felt everal lender Ligatures acros my Body, from my Armpits to my Thighs. I could only look upwards, the Sun began to grow hot, and the Light offended mine Eyes. I heard a confued Noie about me, but in the Poture I lay, could ee nothing except the Sky. In a little time I felt omething alive moving on my left Leg, which advancing gently forward over my Breat,


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Rh capable, became rigid, chiefly, as it appears, because the sanction of religion was given to the traditional and stereotyped forms. Also the power of social support which lay in the fertility of the soil had been exploited to its utmost. The arts by which more product might have been won advanced only very slowly — scarcely at all. There was hardly any emigration to new land. Hence a culmination was reached, after which there must be decline and decay. The achievements of the Egyptians were made in the period when they were growing up to the measure of the chances which they possessed.

In their case we can see a nation pass through the stages from the first to the last. Other nations, which are in full contact with the rest of the human race, undergo constantly renewed impulses to advance and they undergo periods of reaction. The phenomena are broken and confused and it is not easy to interpret them.

In the case of the individual also it is emphatically true that it is not the man who is rich who is happy; it is the man who is growing richer than he has been. Hence this great happiness is possible to all, for it is just as intense for a man who has been used to five hundred a year and is now winning eight hundred as it is to the man who has been having twenty thousand and is now winning twenty-five thousand.

Progress, therefore, means winning more social power; it goes along with increase of power and is the proof and the realization of such increase. The arts of life all contribute to the increase. Although it has been said that social power means power of an individual to produce, from the land, a surplus of subsistence beyond his own needs, yet it will not be understood that this


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 "Then comes the stage Ntolotolo, meaning sleep or mock death.

"The next stage is called Tchela nxela nbela, that is the knife cutting stage, referring to the operation of bleeding as part of the cure ; and the last stage of the disease is called Nlemba Ngombo. Lemba means to cease. The rites of Lemba are those which refer to the marriage of a woman who swears to die with her husband or rather to cease to live at the same time as he does. Ngombo is the name of the native grass cloth in which, before the Nlele or cotton cloth of the white man appeared, the dead were wrapped previous to burial. Thus in the name Nlemba Ngombo we have the meaning of marriage to the deathly winding sheet or shroud.

"I remember how poor Sanda (a favourite servant of Mr. Dennett's, a mussorong boy) was taken sick with pains in his head which I at first mistook for simple headache. As he was of great service to me I kept him in the factory instead of sending him to town (the custom with invalids in Kakongo is that they should go to their town to be doctored). I purged him and gave him strong and continued doses of quinine and he got better; but from time to time he suffered from recurring headache and drowsiness, and on one occasion when I was vexed at finding him asleep and suspecting him of dissipation, was going to punish him, I was informed by another servant that the poor fellow was suffering from the sleeping sickness. I at once sent him to town with sufficient goods to pay his doctor's bill, and his relations did all in their power to have him properly cured, taking him many miles to visit certain Ngangas famed for the cure of this fell disease.

"He came back to me well and happy. The next year

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 came almot up to my Chin; when bending mine Eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human Creature not ix inches high, with a Bow and Arrow in his Hands, and a Quiver at his Back. In the mean time, I felt at leat forty more of the ame kind (as I conjectured) following the firt. I was in the utmot Atonihment, and roared o loud, that they all ran back in a fright; and ome of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the Falls they got by leaping from my ides upon the Ground. However, they oon returned, and one of them, who ventured o far as to get a full ight of my Face, lifting up his Hands and Eyes by Way of Admiration, cryed out in a hrill, but ditinct Voice, Hekinah Degul: The others repeated the ame Words everal times, but I then knew not what they meant. I lay all this while, as the Reader may believe, in great Uneaines: at length, truggling to get looe, I had the fortune to break the Strings and wrench out the Pegs that fatened my


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 left Arm to the Ground; for, by lifting it up to my Face, I dicover'd the Methods they had taken to bind me, and, at the ame time, with a violent pull, which gave me exceive Pain, I a little looened the trings that tied down my Hair on the left fide, o that I was jut able to turn my Head about two inches. But the Creatures ran off a econd time, before I could eize them; whereupon there was a great Shout in a very hrill Accent, and after it ceaed, I heard one of them cry aloud, Tolgo Phonac; when in an intant I felt above an hundred Arrows dicharged on my left Hand, which pricked me like o many needles; and beides they hot another Flight into the Air, as we do Bombs in Europe, whereof many, I uppoe, fell on my Body, (though I felt them not) and ome on my Face, which I immediately covered with my left Hand. When this hower of Arrows was over, I fell a groaning with Grief and Pain, and then triving again to get looe, they dicharged an-


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 however, the malady returned, and he went to town and gradually wasted away. They told me that sores upon one of his arms had caused him to lose a hand, which he lived to see buried before him. Sanda was of royal blood, so his body was taken across from the north bank to San Antonio or Sonio, on the south bank of the Congo, and there he was buried with his fathers.

"Another sad case was that of a woman who lived in the factory.

"As a child, it appeared afterwards, she had suffered from the disease, and had been cured by the good French doctor then resident in Landana (Dr. Lucan). I knew nothing of this at the time, and put her sickness down to drink, but got a doctor to see her. He could not make out what was the matter, but thought it might possibly be some nervous disease; altogether we were completely puzzled.

"On one occasion during my absence she nearly tortured one of her children to death by stabbing her with a needle. On my return, and when I heard what she had done, I was very angry with her, and turned her out of the factory, and shortly afterwards the poor creature died in the swelling state of the disease.

"Joaõ (a more or less civilised native) tells me that one of his wives was cured of this sleeping sickness. She was living with him in a white man's factory when she had it, and on one occasion fell upon a demijohn and cut her back open rather seriously—the white man cured her so far as the wound was concerned. A native doctor, a Nganga or Kakamucka, later on cured the sleeping sickness. He first gave her an emetic, then each day he gave her a kind of Turkish bath; that is, having boiled certain herbs in water, he placed her within the boiling decoction under a covering

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 WHAT IS THE "PROLETARIAT"?

latest social agitation is marked by a fondness for big words and high-sounding phrases. The words which are most in favor are not those which are especially sonorous but those which have a philosophical clink and are a little pedantic; and as for the phrases, it is interesting and remarkable to notice in what mouths one may find a forlorn tatter of Hegelian philosophy. The leaders of the movement have created a dialect all their own, which has a strange and foreign sound to the uninitiated, and which suggests far-reaching observations on social philosophy to those who can find the occult significance of the phraseology. It is certain that it becomes a fashion and an affectation among the adherents of the movement to use the terms and bandy the catch phrases of the sect. They are largely the victims of the "phrase."

The dialect of a movement, however, is never a matter to be treated with indifference; in its origin, and in the mouths of the leaders, it had a motive and a logical sense. No American artisan can understand what he means when he talks about the "bourgeoisie" or the "proletariat." The former word certainly is entirely exotic; if it be explained to mean the middle class, it has no application to American society, and it has lost all the side signification which gives it its importance in Europe, when it is so explained. Such words are a part of the foreign dress of a set of ideas which are not yet naturalized. The word, however, cannot be given


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 other Volly larger than the firt, and ome of them attempted with Spears to tick me in the Sides; but, by good luck, I had on me a Buff Jerkin, which they could not pierce. I thought it the mot prudent Method to lie till, and my deign was to continue o till Night, when my left Hand being already looe, I could eaily free my elf: And as for the Inhabitants, I had reaon to believe I might be a match for the greatet Armies they could bring againt me, if they were all of the ame Size with him that I aw. But Fortune dipoed otherwie of me. When the People oberved I was quiet, they dicharged no more Arrows: But by the Noie I heard, I know their Numbers encreaed; and about four Yards from me, over-againt my right Ear, I heard a knocking for above an hour, like that of People at work; when turning my Head that way as well as the Pegs and Strings would permit me, I aw a Stage erected, about a foot and a half from the Ground, capable of hold-


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 of cloth, making her perspire freely. Towards nightfall he poured some medicine up her nostrils and into her eyes, so that in the morning when she awoke, her eyes and nose were full of matter; at the same time he cupped and bled her in the locality of the pain in the head. What the medicines were I cannot say, neither will the Nganga tell any one save the man he means shall succeed him in his office.

"The native doctors appear to know when the disease has become incurable and the life of the patient is merely a question of a few days, for once while I was at Chemongoanleo, on the lower Congo I heard the village carpenter hammering nails into planks, and asked my servant what they were doing. 'Building Buite's coffin,' he said. What, is he dead?' said I. 'No, but he must die soon,' he answered. This statement was confirmed by the relations of Buite who came to me for rum as my share towards his funeral expenses. Imagine my feelings when shortly after this Buite, swollen out of all likeness to his former self, crawled along to the shop and asked me for a gallon of rum to help him pay his doctor's bill.

"A doctor of the Congo Free State began to take an interest in the sickness and asked me to persuade some one suffering from the disease to come and place himself under his care, promising that he would have a place apart made for him at the station, so that he could study the sickness and try to cure the poor fellow. After a good deal of trouble I got him a patient willing to remain with him, but owing to some red tape difficulty as to the supply of food for the sick man this doctor's good intentions came to nought. A Portuguese doctor here also gave his serious attention to the sleeping sickness, and it was reported

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162 up by the leaders because the essence of their cause is in it with its acquired and historical side significations.

Proletariat should be a term of reproach. A proletarian at Rome was a man, who, having no property, could serve the state only with his offspring (proles), whom he gave to military service. No class in any modern state could correspond to that class at Rome. The only persons in a modern state to whom the name might perhaps have been transferred with some convenience are tramps and vagabonds, men without homes, family, calling, property, or reputation. The name has, however, been adopted and accepted without any dislike. It is a grand, foreign, classical, pedantic, and mysterious term, into which it is easy to distil all the side significations of class hatred and social rancor which any one may wish to transmit. After all it means nothing but what we used to call the masses, and it has just the same lack of definition and the same vagueness of limit in its social application. The new term, however, already begins to give precision to the social body which it specializes as a fighting faction. Such is the purpose and the utility of it.

If we try to define the limits of the class so named according to the present usage of language, it appears, in the first place, that there is no exclusion at the bottom. The term is most significant when used politically, and there are none who have political standing who are not available allies. Hence the proletariat includes all the dependent and delinquent classes so far as they have not lost political privileges.

It is the upper limit which is vague and undefined. Not all wage-receivers are in the proletariat, for those who get more than some vague limit or whose wages are paid at longer intervals (highly skilled laborers and


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 ing four of the Inhabitants, with two or three Ladders to mount it: From whence one of them, who eemed to be a Peron of Quality, made me a long Speech, whereof I undertood not one Syllable. But I hould have mentioned, that before the principal Peron began his Oration, he cried out three times, Langro Dehul an: (thee words and the former were afterwards repeated and explained to me.) Whereupon immediately about fifty of the Inhabitants came and cut the trings that fatened the left Side of my Head, which gave me the Liberty of turning it to the right, and of oberving the Peron and Geture of him that was to peak. He appeared to be of a middle Age, and taller than any of the other three who attended him, whereof one was a Page that held up his Train, and eemed to be omewhat longer than my middle Finger; the other two tood one on each ide to upport him. He acted every Part of an Orator, and I could oberve many Periods of Threatnings,


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 that he had found a cure for it in some part of a fresh billy-goat. This good man wanted a special hospital to be built for him and a subsidy so that he might devote himself to the task he had undertaken. His Government, however, although its hospitals are far in advance of those of its neighbours on the Coast, could not see its way to erect such a place."

All I need add to this is that I was informed that the disease when it had once definitely set in ran its fatal course in a year, but that when it came as an epidemic it was more rapidly fatal, sometimes only a matter of a few weeks, and it was this more acute form that was accompanied by wild delirium. Another native informant told me when it was bad it usually lasted only from twenty to forty days.

Monteiro says the sleep disease was unknown south of the Congo until it suddenly attacked the town of Musserra, where he was told by the natives as many as 200 died of it in a few months. This was in 1870, and curious to say it did not spread to the neighbouring towns. Monteiro induced the natives to remove from the old town and the mortality decreased till the disease died out. "There was nothing in the old town to account for this sudden singular epidemic. It was beautifully clean and well-built on high dry ground, surrounded by mandioca plantations, the last place to all appearance to expect such a curious outbreak."

Monteiro also observes that "there is no cure known for it," but he is speaking for Angola, and I think this strengthens his statement that it is a comparatively recent importation there. For certainly there are cures, if not known, at any rate believed in, for the sleeping sickness in its own home Kakongo and Loango. There is a great difference in the

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Rh salaried men) are not included. Not all the employed are in it, for high officials would not be recognized as belonging to it; not all laborers are in it, for we are all laborers except the little group of people of leisure. The President of the United States is an employee and a laborer. Not all capitalists are excluded from it, for many of its members have important savings. Here, however, we undoubtedly come nearest to a definition; for those who have savings would almost all break loose from the proletariat as soon as they recognized the sense of many of its propositions. This fact is so well known that those among the artisan and manual labor classes who have savings are regarded with peculiar dislike in the circles of proletarian agitation. The great millionaires are not denounced with such vigor as the "mean, sneaking workingman who has saved a few dollars which he has laid away in the savings bank, or who has built a little house and rents it for seven or eight dollars a month." "I have seen that class of men," said one orator, "march out by the bench-full as soon as I began to talk about interest and rent. I can talk to great capitalists and employers, but I can do nothing with those men." Still, on the other hand, not all who have not capital would be included; for there are plenty of people who have good incomes, all of which they spend, whose style of life would prevent them from being recognized as members of the proletariat. Peasants in Europe and farmers here do not belong to it; it is a city class quite as much as the bourgeoisie.

At the end of the last century a great revolution took place in which the bourgeoisie wrested political power from the nobles. The peasants and the town mob shared in the revolution and the latter finally got control of it. When the excesses had provoked reaction


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 diseases, flora and fauna, of the north and south banks of the Congo—whether owing to the difficulty of crossing the terrifically rapid and powerful stream of the great river I do not know. Still there was—more in former times than now—much intercourse between the natives of the two banks when the Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1487. The town called now San Antonio was the throne town of the kingdom of Kongo, and had nominally as provinces the two districts Kakongo and Loango, these provinces that are now the head centres of the sleep disease. Yet in the early accounts given of Kongo by the Catholic missionaries, who lived in Kongo among the natives, I have so far found no mention of the sleep disease. It is impossible to believe that Merolla, for example, could have avoided mentioning it if he had seen or heard of it. Merolla's style of giving information was, like my own, diffuse. Certainly we must remember that these Catholic missionaries were not much in Loango and Kakongo as those provinces had broken almost entirely away from the Kongo throne prior to the Portuguese arrival, so perhaps all we can safely say is that in the 15—17th centuries there was no sleep disease in the districts on the south bank of the Congo, and it was not anything like so notoriously bad in the districts on the north bank.

Before quitting the apothecary part of this affair, I may just remark that if you, being white, of a nervous disposition, and merely in possession of an ordinary amount of medical knowledge, find yourself called in to doctor an African friend or acquaintance, you must be careful about hot poultices. I should say, never prescribe hot poultices. An esteemed medical friend, since dead, told me

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 that when he first commenced practice in West Africa he said to a civilised native who was looking after his brother—the patient—"Give him a linseed poultice made like this"—demonstration—"and mind he has it hot." The man came back shortly afterwards to say his brother had been very sick, but was no better, though every bit of the stuff had been swallowed so hot it had burnt his mouth. But swallowing the poultice is a minor danger to its exhibition. Even if you yourself see it put on outside, carefully, exactly where that poultice ought to be, the moment your back is turned the patient feeling hot gets into the most awful draught he can find, or into cold water, and the consequences are inflammation of the lungs and death, and you get the credit of it. The natives themselves you will find are very clever at doctoring in their own way, by no means entirely depending on magic and spells; and you will also find they have a strong predilection for blisters, cupping and bleeding, hot water and emetics; in all their ailments and on the whole it suits them very well. Therefore I pray you add your medical knowledge and your special drugs to theirs and for outside applications stick to blisters in place of hot poultices.

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Author:Sidney James Owen

Works

 * The Siege of Madras (1867)
 * Occasional notes on British-Indian subjects (1868)
 * The Mussulman, the Maratha and the European (1869)
 * India on the Eve of the British Conquest (1872)
 * Anglo-Indian rule historically considered (1876)
 * The Fall of the Mogul Empire (1912)

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will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and so on; but he knows more—namely the actions of higher spirits on the human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.

The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul—non-human spirits—and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they please—practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I will therefore here

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 custom in some families to enter all such records in a book especially made for the purpose, and furnished with an index which enables the Kō-kwai player to refer immediately to any interesting fact belonging to the history of any past game.

The reader will have noticed that the four kinds of incense used were designated by very pretty names. The incense first mentioned, for example, is called by the poets’ name for the gloaming,—Tasogaré (lit.: “Who is there?” or “Who is it?”)—a word which in this relation hints of the toilet-perfume that reveals some charming presence to the lover waiting in the dusk. Perhaps some curiosity will be felt regarding the composition of these incenses. I can give the Japanese recipes for two sorts; but I have not been able to identify all of the materials named:—


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sat by her open window writing "A Pleasant Incident of My Vacation" in the moments when there was nothing to distract her attention. But a good deal was happening that afternoon. Three times the door bell rang in quick succession, and she heard Katie Sullivan muttering: "Ring, ring, ring! God save us!" as she pounded to the door, heard the rattle and slam of bureau drawers from her mother's room.

Great-aunt Ann came first. The brougham glittered in the sun; Prince jingled his harness. Then the Shady Lawn victoria. Plum-colored Albert jumping down from the box, he and Aunt Clara helping out the small, slow, important bundle that was Great-aunt Deborah.

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 Last, the anticlimax of Mrs. Plummer, with her yearning stretch of chin and stringy neck, and the Bersagliere hat she wore "because of, my Italy," propping her bicycle against the fence.

Hearing her mother's silk petticoat descend, Christabel took pad and pencil out to the piece-box at the top of the stairs in order not to miss anything, and presently heard her name.

"I wanted to ask you if you thought Christabel would be in a little play I've written for the children, a little fantasy, Princess Brighteyes and Prince Trueheart, I called it"

"Thee couldn't have made a better choice for Princess Brighteyes," Aunt Ann said, and Mrs. Plummer answered, nervously:

"Well, as a matter of fact—hm!—you see I felt that since Christabel was going to be the leading lady in the little French play—Mademoiselle Soulas happened to tell me—and Annette Perry says she's having her do the solo dance at the dancing-school exhibition, why, I thought it wasn't fair to Christabel to ask

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 her to do anything that would take too much time, so I—hm! hm! I asked little Helen Barnes to be Princess Brighteyes"

"Asked who?" Aunt Deborah questioned.

"Asked Helen Barnes," Aunt Ann said, coldly. "Thee knows, Sister Deborah, that stout plain child, Caleb Barnes' granddaughter."

"Thee means the child with the large front teeth?"

"Of course I would rather have had Christabel, but since I asked little Helen Barnes"

"Oh yes, of course. And Christabel is very busy," Mrs. Caine murmured, politely.

"A court lady seems a very tiny part to offer Christabel, such a born little actress."

Helen Barnes! Christabel thought. I just despise that old Helen Barnes! I wouldn't be in that old play for anything

But a vision of herself as a court lady floated before her. Only a court lady, but simply taking the shine out of Princess Brighteyes. She

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 could see herself, in her mother's new claret-colored evening dress, unconscious, lost in her part; she could hear people saying: "Who is that exquisite child with the sensitive face? See, she has forgotten it isn't real; she is a court lady. The other children are acting their parts, but she is living hers." "Yes, mother dear," she whispered. "Yes, Mrs. Plummer, I'll try to be a court lady"

The conversation moved on from her and was no longer interesting. But still she hung over the banisters, for she had caught sight of her reflection in the glass of an engraving of the Sistine Madonna, and gazed at herself against a background of saints and angels until her mother's voice broke the enchantment and sent her tiptoeing back to her room before she answered, "Yes, mother dear?"

"Come down a minute, darling."

In the mirror over the fireplace Christabel saw herself again as she laid her smooth peach-pink cheek against the great-aunts' withered dead-leaf faces, Aunt Clara's doughy white-

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 ness, Mrs. Plummer's sallowness. Dark bright eyes with fringing lashes, dark auburn satin hair, feathers of eyebrows delicately drawn on a white brow. She went back and gave Aunt Ann, who was sitting opposite the mirror, an extra hug.

"Mrs. Plummer wants to know if you will take part in a little play she's written, darling."

"Princess Brighteyes and Prince Trueheart—I want you to be one of the court ladies, dear. I'm afraid it's a very tiny part, but"

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Plummer. I'd love to. I'll try to be a court lady."

Aunt Ann and Aunt Deborah exchanged proud glances, and Aunt Clara whispered a piercing "Sweet!" As for Amy Caine, she threw her arms about her little daughter and kissed her.

"No, Christabel, you cannot wear my red silk. Now, come, be mother's dear little daughter and get into your costume."

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 Sobs from the floor where Christabel had cast herself.

"Come, Christabel."

Heartbroken moans.

"You look so sweet in your costume; everyone said so when you wore it at Ernestine's party."

On the bed lay the chintz panniers and net fichu that might have represented Martha Washington or The Sweetest Girl in Dixie or just that faithful st-and-by, Old-fashioned Lady. With her face still hidden, Christabel kicked in its direction and cried in a muffled voice:

"I'd rather die!"

"Now, Christabel, get up and wash your face. Mother's simply astonished! A big girl like you! Nobody's going to notice your costume. Come"

"No! No! No-o-o!"

The front door slammed. Mr. Caine had come home early to accompany his ladies to

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 the house that all Germantown spoke of as the Edith Johnson Plummers'.

"Christabel, there's father! You don't want him to see you acting like a baby."

"Oh, fah-h-h-ther!"

"Hello! What's the matter with my little girl?"

"The child's got a notion in her head that nothing will do but to wear my new red silk—and here's her own nice costume"

"Oh, father, I'd rather die than wear that horrible old thing. You'd be so ashamed of me!"

"Amy"

He nodded meaningly toward the hall, and Mrs. Caine followed him out, closing the door. Christabel's sobs stopped; she lay rigid, listening to the murmur of voices. Then, stepping out of her slippers, she tiptoed to the door and pressed against it.

"Well, but, Fred—all those children! And Edith Plummer'll probably have something messy like ice-cream afterward, and it'll be my

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 only new dress this winter. Do you really think?"

"Did you notice what was worrying her? She wasn't thinking of herself; she was afraid we'd be ashamed of her."

Tears flooded Christabel's eyes again; her lip quivered. I only want them to be proud of me, she thought. That's the only reason I'm being in this awful old play, just to try to make them happy.

"I know, bless her heart! She's thrown herself into this as if the whole thing depended on her. You know that's the only reason I would like to let her wear what she wants, she's been so sweet about having such a tiny little part; never a word of complaint, and you know it would have been natural. I don't know when she hasn't had the leading part in really everything. Of course it's none of my business, but I can't help feeling it's a little funny of Edith Plummer"

"I'd let her wear it."

"Well—I will, then."

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 Christabel left the door and stepped into her slippers. Just below her chest was a spreading warmth, a tingling that flowed through her. Darling mother and father, she thought, and suddenly lifted her shoulder and quickly, lightly kissed it.

When she saw herself in the mirror, hair turned up from smooth white neck, eyelashes stuck into points by forgotten tears, exquisite in the claret-colored silk with its pouring train, she flung her arms tight around her mother's neck and cried: "Oh, mother dear, you're so good to me! I'm so happy I think I'll die!" But in the Edith Johnson Plummers' library she was no longer happy. No one was noticing the court lady, except her father and mother. Helen Barnes, in Mrs. Barnes' white satin dress and a gilt paper crown, was getting all the attention.

"Sweet Princess Brighteyes," Prince Trueheart said, belligerently, and paused.

"From afar" Mrs. Plummer prompted.

"From afar."

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 "I come"

And the insufferable Princess Brighteyes replied:

"Nay, thooth, Printh Trueheart, that may never be."

Silence from the Prince.

"Pray, dost thou love" from Mrs. Plummer.

"Oh yes—Pray does thou love another more than me?"

"Nay, but on me there rethth a cruel thpell.

Draw"Draw [sic] clother, and the thtory I will tell."

"Heavens!"

"Get out of the way, children!"

"What's happened?"

"One of the children's fainted—Christabel Caine."

"Here—put her here on the sofa'

"Look out, children!"

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 "Here's the water!" cried some one, sprinkling it all over the claret-colored silk.

"Poor little thing, the excitement was too much for her!"

"So highly strung"

"Isn't it unusual for a person who's fainted to have such high color?" Helen Barnes' mother asked. "The child's cheeks are scarlet."

Christabel stirred, moaned faintly.

"She's coming to!"

Christabel opened her eyes and saw people kneeling about her, saw the scared and solemn children on the outskirts. Princess Brighteyes' crown had been knocked off in the excitement. "Where am I?" the court lady murmured, and then, "Mother" and buried her face in Mrs. Caine's bosom.

"There, darling, there! Now you're all right. Now my Christabel's all right!"

"Well, well! What a girl, to give us such a fright!"

"Father!" She put out a weeping-willow hand.

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 "Hadn't we better take her home?"

"Oh, no, no! I don't want to spoil the play. I'm—all right." She smiled bravely.

"Are you sure you're all right, darling?"

"Oh yes, mother dear, but, oh, did I spoil the play?"

"Did you hear that?"

"Ah-h-h! Sweet!"

"I really don't think it would hurt her to stay, Fred."

"Look, she can sit right here in this big armchair, just like a throne!"

"Yes, just like a throne for little Queen Christabel!"

"Mother?"

"Right here, darling, and father's on the other side. And any time you'd rather go, just tell us."

"Mother, will Mrs. Plummer forgive me for spoiling the play?"

"Mrs. Plummer, we want to know if you'll forgive us?"

"Well, I just guess Mrs. Plummer will!

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 And now," said Mrs. Plummer, with a playful curtsy, "is it Your Majesty's wish that the play goon? All right, children. Shoo, shoo, shoo! Let's get back to our places. Let's see, Helen, where had you gotten to? Does anyone remember?"

The children fumbled for their lines. The command performance proceeded.

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whole, Christabel approved of her family and her surroundings. The house in which she grew up was small and rather shabby, but carriages with coachmen and footmen stopped at it, bringing hothouse grapes to lie in the fruit-dish on the sideboard, hothouse flowers to fill the vases. And lack of money could be bravely borne, since Aunt Ann and Aunt Deborah sent her to boarding-school, Aunt Lydia helped with her clothes, Aunt Susannah paid for the summer when she and five other high-born maidens of Germantown followed Mrs. Plummer's yearning profile, flat heels, and streaming cock-feathers through Ann Hathaway's garden, the Louvre, and Saint Peter's.

The great-aunts lived on estates with smooth lawns, weeping trees, and formal flower-beds, with names like Shady Lawn and The Cedars—places that looked and sounded like high

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 class cemeteries, Great-uncle Johnnie said. Surrounded by old family servants, silver, portraits, by tribes of unmarried daughters and widowed daughters-in-law, they made a rich dim background against which Christabel felt herself shining, simple and unspoiled.

The great-uncles were dead long ago, except Uncle Johnnie, who had never married. He had been engaged when he was young to a distant cousin, Ellen Caine, who had jilted him and run away with her brother's tutor. That had hardened him, Christabel feared. Because really Uncle Johnnie was trying, sometimes. He can't be happy, she decided, because real happiness comes only with unselfishness, living for others, and if anyone ever lived for himself, it was Uncle Johnnie. But he had the appearance of enjoying life. He had a notable wine cellar; he had a small glasshouse in which he grew melons at the cost of about forty-five dollars a melon; he had his boots made to order; and he was fond of experiments with port and cheese and time that made his

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 sisters fold their handkerchiefs about their noses. And he had a disquieting way of looking as if some secret joke amused him. Christabel agreed with Aunt Clara, who said it was such a pity for himself that Uncle Johnnie seemed to like to laugh at people instead of with them.

Among the great-aunts and the one great-uncle Christabel felt like a flower in a November garden. But that was the sort of thing one couldn't say about oneself. There were drawbacks to being the only member of the family that poetic description applied to, and the only one who had a poetic imagination.

The great-aunts cherished their treasure, and she loved them in return, finding their absurdity touching, listening to the battles that raged as to whose gardener could grow the best gloxinias, to the battle-cry, "There, Sister Susannah, beat that if thee can!" and melting with an ageless understanding. For they are such children, she thought, only wanting to have the biggest, never really seeing the velvety dark,

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 blue petal curving against the light. But they, too, considered her a child, and sometimes she felt smothered by their solicitude. One day I will get away from it all and live my own life, she promised herself. No matter how hard it is, no matter how much I suffer, I must live. And she had bright pictures of herself living—somewhere, anywhere but in Germantown. She saw firelit faces turned toward her, young painters and writers gathered around her under the snow on a sloping roof. It was more vivid to her than the ballrooms where she danced with Caleb Barnes, 3d, or ate chicken salad with William James Russell, young gentlemen approved of by the aunts, who were, she feared, a tiny bit snobbish. If you only knew how little all this means to me, she would think with secret amusement, accepting a glass of lemonade from Caleb, smiling at William James.

For although she "came out" at a tea at Shady Lawn, carrying first Aunt Deborah's rosebuds frilled with lace, then Aunt Ann's

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 froglike orchids, before she permitted herself Gerald Smith's red roses, although she went to the Assemblies with Uncle Johnnie, and to all the débutante parties, she was not just a society butterfly. She wrote poems, and they were sometimes printed in magazines.

It was through Aunt Susannah that she met Talbot Emery Towne, the president of a small refined publishing company. The three dined together at The Cedars. Christabel, turning her face from Aunt Susannah's withered cheeks and watered silk to Mr. Towne's stock and silvery sideburns, felt herself dewy with youth, tender with compassion toward age. Oh, poor old darlings, she thought, gazing at them from wide eyes whose starriness she felt herself, and hearing vaguely something about literary London. Holding your little shields of memories, pretty speeches, pheasant with bread sauce, tawny port, between you and the Dark Archer who draws near you. Her heart swelled with pity as she answered, sweetly, "Yes, Aunt Susannah," or, "Oh, Mr. Towne, really?"

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 After dinner she followed Aunt Susannah's instructions and melted into the conservatory. She knew her poems were being shown to the publisher. She stood still, staring at a plant with big heart-shaped leaves, bronze-green, centered and splotched with pink. Her heart thudded as if it would shake her to pieces. But when in answer to, "Christabel, child, where is thee?" she went back to the drawing-room and saw Susannah's beaming face and the bland benevolence of Talbot Emery Towne's, each with a pot of green and pink-splotched leaves floating in the air above it, she knew her poems were as good as published.

The book appeared on a small select spring list: A Pilgrim in Palestine, by Lady Elizabeth Cook-Paynter; I Remember, I Remember, by Canon J. D. R. Wormsley; Ask Me No More, A Novel, by Caroline Trimmingham Wales; The Pot Beneath the Thorn Bush, by Eimar O'Sullivan, Stars and Wild Strawberries, by Christabel Caine

Christabel Caine, Christabel Caine, Stars

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Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/455

Rh

——— The same. In "Littell's living age." v. 155, 5th series v. 40. 8° Boston, Littell & co., no. 2009, Dec. 23, 1882, p. 726-741.

(W: E:, translator). See (Adam Gottlob). The gods of the north. 1845. See also (Esaias). Frithiof’s saga. 1835.

(Anders). The history of Sweden. Translated from the original [Swedish by Anne von Schoultz]. Edited by Mary Howitt. 2v. 12° London, E: Bentley, 1844.

(Gerhard.) See. Department of the interior.

(F., illustrator). See (Eugène). Thorvaldsen. 1873.

(Antonio). The invasion of Denmark in 1864. 2 v. 12°. London, R: Bentley, 1864.

(Francis). Vacation tourists and notes of travel in 1860, 1861, 1862-3. 3 v. 8° Cambridge and London, Macmillan & co., 1861-64.

Contains: 1860. Journal of a yacht voyage to the Faroe islands and Iceland. By J: W. Clark, pp. 318-361, 1 map, 2 ill.:— Norway. By H: F. Tozer, pp. 362-421, 2 ill. 1862-3. The ancient shell-mounds of Denmark. By Mrs. Lubbock, pp. 357-371.

(The) and salmon fishery laws of Norway. [Anon.] 16°. London, Trubner & co., 1877.

Norge. (Old Norway); or, our holiday in Scandinavia. [Anon.] 12°. London, 1862.

(S: Rawson). Letters relating to the mission of sir Thomas Roe to Gustavus Adolphus. 1629-30. sm. 4°. [London], 1875. [Camden society, n. s. no. 14: The Camden miscellany, v. 7].

(C: J: Spencer G: Canning, 3d baron). See.

(Erik Gustaf). The history of the Swedes. Translated from the Swedish, with an introduction and notes, by J: H. Turner. The first portion, (comprising the first three volumes of the original,) from the earliest period to the accession of Charles the tenth. [1654.] 8° London, Whittaker & co., [1845.]

(Archibald). Notes for a comparison of the glaciation of the west of Scotland with that of Arctic Norway. In "Royal society of Edinburgh. Proceedings." v. 5. 8°. Edinburgh, Neill & co., 1866, pp. 530-556, 10 ills.

(Amliot, pseud?) The Scandinavian question. Practical reflections by Arnliot Gellina. Translated from the Swedish original by an English Scandinavian. [Sir George Stephens.] 8°. London, J: R: Smith, 1857.

. The story of Gisli the outlaw. From the Icelandic by G: Webje Dasent. "With illustrations by C. E. St.


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 and Wild Strawberries, by Christabel Caine. She came back to her name in print, over and over again. Christabel Caine

The day the book was published she sat at her desk, surrounded by propped-open copies whose drying ink said "For Aunt Deborah, with her Christabel's love," "Dearest love to Aunt Ann from Christabel," or, full of meaning, "Christabel to Gerald." Now and then she had to dip into a poem—"Cherry Blossoms," "The Old Pain," "Scarlet Slippers"—reading through her own eyes, through Gerald's, through the eyes of the new man at the dinner last night. Then through her own eyes again.

So young, so touched by the fire. I am dedicated to my work, I have chosen the difficult path, she thought. I have chosen the lonely way. And really Eleanor Atkinson's luncheon, the Palmers' box party at the Mask and Wig, even the walk up the Wissahickon she was going to take with Gerald if it ever stopped

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 raining, were unimportant to her compared with her book.

From her desk drawer she took an old composition book labeled "My Secret Journal," and wrote:

"It's been a wingéd day, because today has come. What can I say of this thing, a book of poems to others, but my Heart's Blood to me? My pain has gone to make it, and my petal dreams, and no one will know that I cut my feet on the stars when I gathered some of my Singing Words."

She read this, chewing the end of her pen, and added:

"God, give me a Brave Heart and a Singing Soul—give me courage to follow the Path Difficult."

All right for other girls to care about dresses and men and good times. They were not the dedicated spirits, the children of light. She

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 had explained all this to Gerald; she would explain again. It isn't that I don't like fun, Gerald; it isn't that I don't long to play; but my work must come first. The last time they had had a good talk about her vocation Gerald had said, suddenly, "You have an awfully spiritual expression!"

She went to the mirror now to see if she had. And as she gazed the pure colors and clear outlines blurred, she slipped to her knees, and with uplifted face whispered, "I accept!"

"I can't understand her poems," Uncle Johnnie said to the aunts, flapping the pages this way and that. "What does this part mean, about building a house from the small bleached bones of a little field mouse? What does she mean by tired little tunes?"

"I think they're all lovely, and thee isn't required to understand poetry, Johnnie," Aunt Eliza answered. "Will thee have a cup of tea?"

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 "A glass of sherry and a biscuit, please. Now look here, Eliza, what's all this about?

"Wait until William has brought thy sherry, please!"

"All right now?

"Thee needn't look at me that way, Johnnie, I didn't write it. Thee knows thee can say things in poetry that wouldn't do in conversation, and I'm sure it's lovely, they're all lovely, only I hope people won't think they mean anything."

"It must have been very hard to find all the rhymes," Aunt Deborah's faint old voice sighed

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 from the fireside chair that held heaped shawls and a clattering cup and saucer.

"Has thee seen these notices of the dear child's book?" Aunt Susannah pulled them from her knitting-bag. "A clipping bureau sends them to me—did thee ever hear of such a thing? Talbot Towne told me about it. 'Exquisite little songs' And here's another: 'Reminiscent of Christina Rossetti' ! 'Whipped cream and sugared rose leaves' Thee might throw that one in the fire, Johnnie; it's not worth keeping. Here's one that says 'underlying feeling of spirituality.' I'll leave them here so all of thee can read them."

"How many copies has thee bought, Johnnie?" Aunt Ann asked, suspiciously.

"Oh, plenty," Uncle Johnnie answered, finishing his sherry.

"I don't know where mother's going to put them if she buys any more."

"What's that, Clara?" Aunt Deborah quavered.

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 "I said I didn't know where thee was going to put any more Stars and Wild Strawberries, mother. We have them in the attic and in the china closet—even under my bed. I suppose thee's all in the same fix?"

The aunts nodded. Uncle Johnnie walked over to the fireplace and stood balancing from heels to toes, looking at Ophelia over it, floating in her nightgown through a stew of waterlilies, with ghosts of his sisters moving dimly on the glass that covered the painting. What an absurd picture, he thought, and what an art treasure Eliza considers it. With his back to the room he yawned widely. They're off again, he thought, not troubling to separate the excited soft babble into words. Go it, girls!

"Does thee, Johnnie? Johnnie!"

"I beg your pardon, Ann?"

"Does thee think the child should go to New York? Thee knows her heart's set on it. She says people are too good to her here, that she's smothered in comfort and kindness, that she

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 needs to be lonely in order to write. Wasn't that it, Sister Eliza?"

"Yes, that was it. But she was so sweet. She said she was so afraid we'd think she was ungrateful, or didn't love us enough, but it was just that she loved us all too much and was too happy with us, that it kept her from what she feels is the work she must do."

"She does look on it as a true vocation. Thee knows I was unalterably opposed to the notion at first. We all were, weren't we? And what poor Fred and Amy will do without her I can't imagine. But I'm beginning to think perhaps we ought to let her go."

"What does thee think, Johnnie?"

"I've always thought writing could be done wherever there was a pen and ink and paper, if you had something to say," Uncle Johnnie answered.

Aunt Susannah looked at him and closed her eyes. "Talbot Emery Towne promises to keep an eye on her," she said. "And thee told me thy friend's daughter had rooms in a house

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 where Christabel could live, didn't thee, Clara?"

"Adeline Benjamin's daughter—they're the Benjamins, thee knows, and before she was married she was one of the Boyds. And Christabel and she took to each other when they met. But Fred and Amy thought those rooms were more than they could afford."

"I think it can be managed," Aunt Eliza said, and again the heads nodded, all but Uncle Johnnie's.

"Of course Adeline's daughter is an artist."

"Oh!"

"But still, it's only flowers. I imagine she's a very sweet girl."

"It would be worth more than the extra rent to feel some one was taking care of Christabel."

"I should have thought Christabel could take care of herself," Uncle Johnnie said, and Aunt Ann answered:

"Johnnie, thee always did delight in being perverse."

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," said Boyd Benjamin, leaning in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of her coat, her cigarette wagging to her words, "I must say this place looks exactly like you."

"It is nice," Christabel agreed.

"Everything done?"

"Everything but the curtains. Gobby Witherspoon said he'd come in and help me hang them."

"Gobby's having a wonderful time thinking he's in love with you!"

Poor old Boyd, Christabel thought. Imagine having to get one's emotional satisfaction from another woman's love affairs! And she saw herself as she must seem to strong clumsy Boyd—fragile and flower-like, surrounded by adorers; the fairy-tale princess whose glamour poor old Boyd must share, if only in imagination. She answered, warmly gentle:

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 "He's been perfect to me. You all have. I wonder why?"

"So do I!" Boyd gave her an affectionate blow with a large hand. "You noticed I said thinking he's in love with you."

"Yes, I did. I don't think you do Gobby justice, Boyd. I think just because he's so sensitive and because he does things—well, like making these curtains—you don't any of you realize how much depth and strength there is there. Take Elliott Foster, for instance. Gobby's perfectly devoted to Elliott, and I know Elliott thinks Gobby's a light-weight."

"Now Elliott! There's a different matter. There's somebody who really is in love with you."

"Oh no, Boyd! Nonsense! He isn't at all!"

"All right, you know best. Do you want me to screw the teacup hooks into the cupboard?"

"Thank you. They're—Oh, you've found

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 them. What in the world makes you have such a wild idea? About Elliott, I mean?"

"Oh, nothing."

"No, really, Boyd. He hasn't been near me all week."

"Doesn't that just prove what I'm telling you? He doesn't dare come. He's afraid to admit to himself the way he's feeling. But I saw him looking at you the other day."

"When did you?"

"Up in the studio the day you were all there for tea. You went over to the window and said something about the first star, and he sat looking at you as if he was bewitched, and then grabbed his hat and bolted. Don't you remember?"

Christabel remembered. She could see the scene as clearly as if she were sitting in the front row of a theatre. The firelight shining on Boyd's paintings of passionate petunias and eggplants of heroic size, Boyd with her short hair and manly clothes leaning against the mantelpiece, a cigarette hanging from the cor-

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 ner of her mouth; gentle Gobby with his turquoise bangle, on a cricket close to the blaze, having one last piece of pastry; Donatia Platt, so affected and arty, all big beads and hammered silver, acting like a fool over Elliott Foster. And Christabel herself in her autumnleaf-brown dress, her face and throat warm ivory in the firelight, outlined against deepening blue. She could even hear her voice saying, "The first star"; she was touched by the sadness in it. Certainly soon after that Elliott had gone, together with the unattractive Platt. At the time it had not seemed significant, but now, in the light of Boyd's words

"He's fighting it," said Boyd. "He's afraid you'll interfere with his work. In fact, I don't believe he even knows he's in love with you, yet, but I do. Look! Look what's coming! Welcome, little Goblin!"

"Take off my hat for me, Boyd; I haven't a hand. Greetings, Lady Christabel!"

"Unload him, Christabel. Gobby, don't you know it isn't the thing to come through the

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 streets of the great city wrapped in sea-green sik? You might be misunderstood."

"I've had hundreds of little boys following me for blocks. That's your last pair of curtains, Christabel. Hlere's a pot of carnations, my dear. Did you think you could get them in pots outside of Italy? Put it here by the Della Robbia Look, please look at Boyd's expression of suffering! I suppose we seem very old-fashioned and sentimental to her. And, my dears, look at this old copper tray I got from a Russian Jew in Allen Street! You'll always have to sit so that it comes behind your head, like a halo—look! Sweet Saint Christabel!"

"What's in this?"

"Dear Boyd, you're so curious. Cherry tarts, in hopes Christabel will ask me to stay to tea."

"Oh, I do! I ask you both!"

"Can't, thanks. 'By, children."

"How brusque Boyd is," Gobby observed, unwinding a huge pale-blue muffler. "Have

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 you an old newspaper to put on this chair? And if you'll hand me the curtain rod. There's something perfectly ruthless about her—and as for her flower paintings, they frighten me to death. Those obscene calla lilies! Are these folds all right?"

"Just a teeny bit more—there. But surely you don't take her paintings seriously, do you, Gobby? Nobody does, do they, except, of course, poor darling old Boyd herself? Oh, oh, how sweet it looks! The curtains make all the difference in the world!"

"It's a perfect background for you now."

"Is it, Gobby? Am I nice enough for this lovely room? How good you've all been about helping me—I can't imagine why! You, Elliott"

"Oh, that reminds me—I saw Elliott, and he said he was coming over. He was going to stop at Donatia Platt's first for her book of Beardsley drawings he said he'd promised to lend you!"

"I think he's in love with Donatia."

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 "Well, she's in love with him, and I did think he was with her, sort of; not crazy, the way she is, but I always thought Elliott had a mother-fixation, and I thought he'd sort of transferred it to Donatia. Shall I fill the kettle?

"What?"

"Dostoevski. The Insulted and Injured."

"I wasn't going to say, 'What is it?' I was going to say, 'What a marvelous book it is!' What were we talking about? Oh, Donatia."

"Yes, and Elliott. He really seems to have been avoiding her for the last week or so."

"She's a lovely person."

"Yes, she's a wonderful girllook, shall we draw the curtains, or leave them open?"

"Leave them open." And she almost said, "So we can see that first little star, like a silver fish in a deep blue sea," but since Elliott was coming she decided to save it. "But, Gobby,

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 I do feel something about Donatia—you know I have this queer way of feeling people, sometimes I think that's why I get so exhausted. I get simply limp, and yet I wouldn't be less sensitive, though one does pay a terrible price. But I do feel something not quite—well, not quite fine about her."

"Oh, well, of course she's small-town Middle West. Her name really was Harriet Ruth; she changed it to Donatia to go with her personality. Did Elliott tell you? I think she does pretty well, considering, but naturally, compared with you"

"Oh, now, I don't mean thatcome in! Elliott! Just in time, the kettle's boiling, and look! The first star peeping through my sea-green curtains! It's a little silver fish in the deep blue ocean of dusk. See, Elliott. The first star."

"My work must come first, always," said Christabel, as they sat with their empty tea-

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 cups. And gazing into the fire that leaped and fell, she saw long days packed full of work, she felt herself tingling with work that could be done now that the curtains were up and the teacup hooks screwed in.

Gobby slowly licked cherry juice from his fingers. "Well, I like work myself, sort of—sometimes. That reminds me, don't forget you're posing for me tomorrow. Heavens! I wish some one would get just that turn of the head. Look, Elliott! Don't move, Christabel! Look at that, with the firelight on her cheek and throat—which is she, fire or snow?"

"You make me sound like a Maeterlinck character."

She knew now what to think of Maeterlinck. She had loved him when she lived in Germantown. He had given her unhappy princesses, lost and wailing in the mist, their hair falling about them in shining cascades; graves suddenly blossoming with lilies; velvet bees with soap-bubble-colored wings, flying home to secret golden hives. But since Elliott and

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The incense used at a Kō-kwai ranges in value, according to the style of the entertainment, from $2.50 to $30.00 per envelope of 100 wafers—wafers usually not more than one-fourth of an inch in diameter. Sometimes an incense is used worth even more than $30.00 per envelope: this contains ranjatai, an aromatic of which the perfume is compared to that of “musk mingled with orchid-flowers.” But there is some incense,—never sold,—which is much more precious than ranjatai,—incense valued less for its composition than for its history: I mean the incense brought centuries ago from China or from India by the Buddhist missionaries, and presented to princes or to other persons of high rank.


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 Gobby and Boyd had laughed indulgently and said, "Good old Maeterlinck!" the magus, the keeper of the mysteries, had become the good old prestidigitator, whose most famous trick was to produce from his sleeve a flock of bluebirds that nested in hundreds of Tea Rooms and Gifte Shoppes everywhere.

Barrie was lost to her, too. She had said "Barrie" and instantly they had responded:

"Oh, Barrie!"

"Delicious Barrie!"

"Charming Barrie!"

"And now all together, boys and girls! One, two, three"

"sical Barrie!"

And she had known she didn't think so much of Barrie. But she must read some—what was it? Dostoevski.

"Only to Give, Give, Give," she wrote in her Secret Journal. "To Sing with a clear shiningness, no matter out of what loneliness and pain, and make the Song the sweeter for

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 the suffering. To feel the happy-hurt of the Beauty-of-Things, and make others feel it. To share the Bread of Beauty through my Work."

Gobby liked that phrase particularly when she showed it to him. He was doing a portrait of her, and so was Elliott. Gobby's, like all his pictures, was made from bits of mirror, carpet fuzz dyed with Easter-egg dyes, and the insides of alarm clocks, but Elliott's was a recognizable Christabel.

As the sittings went on she couldn't help feeling sure that Boyd was right about Elliott loving her. When she thought of Donatia Platt there was a warm, breathless lightness in her chest instead of the clenched heaviness she had felt before. She went out of her way to see Donatia now, to praise her to Elliott, who answered absent-mindedly. And when people reported catty remarks made about her by Donatia, she tried only to pity her.

She was getting ready to go to Donatia's one afternoon when Gobby arrived.

"I'm taking her over some things for her

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 party tonight. You can help me carry them. My wine-glasses, and that bunch of calendulas. I thought they'd go with her orange curtains."

"Oh, Christabel, you're awfully sweet, but"

"But what, Gobby?"

"Well—let me take them. Don't you bother."

"Nonsense! Why shouldn't I go?"

"Well, you're too sweet and loving to understand, but I think maybe—well, I mean, you know how Donatia feels about Elliott, and how Elliott feels about you"

"What perfect nonsense!"

"Oh, I know! You have to be told a thousand times before you believe anyone l—likes you. But Donatia knows how Elliott feels, if you don't. Well, to tell you the truth, though I haven't any business to, I've just been there and she was crying, and she sort of burst out about how she wished she was dead"

"Oh, poor girl! I must hurry to her! You're

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 mistaken, Gobby. It's Donatia Elliott loves. He doesn't love me." She pulled on her embroidered cap before the mirror, fluffing out dark auburn tendrils over her ears, looking deep into her own shining eyes. "I don't say that he didn't think he was—well, crazy about me for a little while, but of course I had to stop that, knowing how Donatia felt, and that's why the way she's acting now does hurt me a little, when I've done everything to try to make Elliott appreciate her. I wouldn't say this to anyone in the world but you, Gobby, but Donatia hasn't been very kind to me, and so I must love her just twice as hard, don't you see?"

Donatia's eyes were red and her voice hard when Christabel and Gobby came in with their offerings, but that evening she was blazing with laughter and excitement. What does Elliott see inher? Christabel thought, watching them together. Make-up just plastered on—and her voice when she gets excited! Donatia, indeed!

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 Harriet Ruth Platt. The clenched tightness came back in her chest. She called:

"Elliott! Come here a minute!" And then: "Oh, Donatia darling! Were you talking to him? I didn't notice! Keep him!"

Will he come? she thought, will he come? And her whole being willed, Come, so intensely that she felt weak with relief when he said, "Excuse me a minute, Donatia," and came across the room.

She began to talk wildly to anybody, everybody but Elliott, hearing her own voice as if it belonged to some one else, glowing from the admiring laughter that broke over her words. "She's turned the hostess into an innocent bystander," she heard a girl whisper; but the man she whispered to only answered, "Did you hear what that was she said?"

"What did you say those mandarin oranges were, Christabel?"

"Mandarin oranges are Chinese emperors. Fat little men in imperial yellow crêpe, with their hands tucked into their sleeves."

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 "What are the grapes? Ask her what the grapes are."

"Oh, the grapes are the emperors' smooth little concubines in their robes of water-green silk."

"Let's be emperors and concubines! Let's dress up!"

"I speak for the sofa cover!"

"I choose that batik!"

"I have an idea. Where's your white scarf with the gold embroidery, Donatia? You know, that one I gave you?"

"Here it is, Elliott! What are you going to be?"

"I want it for Christabel. Here, let me bind it tight around your head and under your chin. Cross your hands, this way. My God! Look, everybody! Look! Did you ever see such a marvelous mediæval Madonna?"

"She must be in a shrine. Here, lift her up on the table! Give us the flowers, Donatia, and look—put the candles around her. On your knees, worshipers!"

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 "I'll never forget you with that white-and-gold thing round your head," Elliott told Christabel, taking her home. "You've never looked so lovely. Listen! Why don't we go back and borrow it from Donatia and you come over tomorrow morning and let me do a sketch of you? Come on!"

"Oh, we can't go back now!"

"Why not? We haven't been gone five minutes. She won't be in bed or anything."

"I don't think she'll want to lend it to me."

"She'll love to lend it to you."

"I'm afraid not. I wouldn't say this to anyone in the world but you, Elliott, but Donatia hasn't been very kind to me."

"Now you're doing her an injustice. You feel things that aren't intended, you're so sensitive and tender-hearted."

"Do I, Elliott? Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I am unjust to her. Anyway, I feel that you're a very understanding person, and if you say so, we'll go back."

Donatia's face was scarlet as she opened the

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 door to them, and the room was filled with a smell of burning. "My scarf? Yes, of course." She looked around the room, and Christabel looked, too. Candle grease, grape skins, a macaroon crushed into the rug, Gobby's blue muffler left behind. "Some one must have gone off with it. It isn't here."

Christabel looked only once at the filmy charred rag of white and gold in the fireplace. She threw her arms around Donatia and kissed her scorched cheek, crying, "You've given us a heavenly evening!" before she ran—floated—flew down the stairs, hand in hand with Elliott.

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wrote in her Secret Journal: "Let me work at white heat, let me be molten in the flame!

"What is anything in comparison with this lonely shining Joy of Creation? This welling of the water from the deep below the deep, this blessed privilege of being the cup to hold the water that brims over for the thirsty? Nothing must interfere with my work, no thoughts of self, no selfish joy or sorrow. The bees have flown far, in orchards and meadows. Now I call them back to the hive, and in darkness and silence they make the golden honey.

"Oh, Passion of Work, fill me and flood me! Is there a World? I forget."

She had inked her finger, so she washed her hands and rubbed cold cream into them, looking at them critically. Elliott said her hands made him believe in God. She tried them in different positions.

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 Well, now to work.

First she cleared her desk of the quill in its glass of shot, the snowstorm paperweight Gobby had found for her, her mother's latest letter, Mrs. Talbot Emery Towne's invitation to Sunday luncheon, an invitation to read from her poems at the Saturday Salon, and a note from Elliott, which she reread, glowing pleasantly. Then she sharpened a handful of pencils and put them in a row by a pile of yellow paper.

If she didn't answer Mrs. Towne's invitation before she began to work, it would be a gnat in her mind. And that Salon thing. She wrote the notes. What should she wear when she read her poems? In spite of the dirty snow, it was too near spring for velvet. Her blue dress with lace collar and cuffs? That made her look like a demure child. She was going to read the three unpublished poems that made up "Love on the Mesa," "Vermillion paint and slanting eagle feather," "The yellow cactus bloomed for us today," and "Death coiled and rattling in the blue rock shadow." She could

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 see herself, hear herself, hear her audience. How has that child lived long enough to have felt so deeply, to have suffered so?

The earth in her pot of hyacinths was hard and gray. White hyacinths to feed the soul. She watered it, watching the water bubble up through the cracks. She yawned.

Now to work.

She was writing a romance of old Spain, called Carnation Flower. "Chapter Eight," she wrote, and gazed at the words. Then she drew three lines under them and yawned again.

Now what? Annunciata had to be gotten to the bull-fight, but how to get her there? A true artist never wrote:

"Chapter Eight.

"Annunciata went to the bull-fight to see Juan" though that was what must be conveyed.

How to begin the chapter? She pulled book after book from her shelves and dipped in to see how other authors did. Dostoevski, Hardy,

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 James. She would sit at the feet of the masters.

"Two days after the incident I have described I met her"

"On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable world was a weird multitude of skeletons"

"It will probably not surprise the reflective reader"

Somehow they were not helpful. Lesser lights might show the path.

Enery,' said Mrs. Hawkins, severely, as the cutlets sputtered in the pan"

"Corinthia sat in her coach, her cheeks glowing faintly, her full skirts drifting like snow about her"

Christabel tumbled the books back into their places, and wrote quickly:

"Annunciata sat in her box, her skin glowing faintly with the patina of pale old gold, a snowfall of white lace drifting across hair that reflected the light like black water. She was in white except for the red rose, deep as velvet,

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 that held the mantilla to the extravagant comb, and the great fan, painted with death and glory, that hid the passionate beating of her heart. The dark eyes curtained by proud lids, the beautiful scornful mouth, the languid hand unfurling the fan, were calm, but as Juan ran into the bull ring she was a flame wrapped in snow."

Then she stopped again.

How could she write about passion until she had felt it in more than the general way all artists feel everything? Didn't she owe it to her art to live more fully? She had been thinking so, off and on, all winter, and now spring made her sure. These conventions, these old taboos! Chains to a soul that longed for freedom, chains that one touch of truth and courage would break.

She knew Elliott loved her. That he had never told her so in words only made her more certain, especially after talks with Boyd Benjamin, full of thrilling psychological explana tions. Chiefly, Boyd said, he was afraid of

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 admitting his passion because it might interfere with his work. Interfere! Christabel laughed with tender mockery. It would release the floods of artistic creation in him as well as in her. We will be together on the mountain tops, my dearest. You and I together, and the world forgotten. We will know the deepest and the highest, we will know heart-piercing reality.

No use in hesitating, now that she had decided. "Oh, at last!" she whispered to herself as she stepped out of her clothes and inte her best chemise. Her hands were snow against her flaming cheeks. She went over to her desk and read the last words she had written. "She was a flame wrapped in snow."

How her heart was pounding! She patted Lilas blanc behind her ears and got out fresh gloves. The slushy snow made galoshes necessary. That was annoying.

At the door she paused and covered her face with her hands. "Oh, my dear, be very gentle to me," she whispered.

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 Elliott's door was unlocked, but his room was empty. It had always been set in order for company when she had visited it, and the way it looked now was a surprise. A cat and a loaf of bread lay in his unmade bed, assorted objects on the floor had to be stepped over, obscene pictures were drawn with red chalk on the walls. Christabel looked at them, feeling how astonishing it was that she, brought up as she had been, could be so broad-minded and tolerant about them, could even admire the cleverness of their execution.

She shook her head with a little motherly, smiling sigh. She gathered up boots, paintrags, and a frying-pan with bits of egg still stuck in it, and pushed them behind a bulging curtain. She took his best silk muffler, hanging over a chair back, to dust with, and then threw it after the boots and frying-pan. The sheets went, too. The curtain bulged like a sail in a storm.

She saw herself and Elliott in varied striking tableaux. She saw him kneeling, kissing the

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 hem of her skirt. "My little saint! My little shining saint!" She felt his arms about her; his kisses closed her eyes. Oh, my dear, be very gentle to me!

She set the kettle to boil, and lit the candles on either side of the primroses she had brought him. "Blessed!" she said aloud, and kissed them. Shining pale yellow in the candlelight, symbols of innocent gentleness. The time she had had getting them! The clerk had been a perfect fool, and she had told him just what she thought when he had tried to make her take the ordinary mauve ones.

She had meant to have Elliott come, tired and lonely out of the cold, to find her there with her great grave gift of love and understanding and peace. Three accompanying gentlemen had been no part of her plan. But there they were, looking more startled than she felt, for their conversation on the stairs had been loud and unstudied.

They got tea jerkily behind another curtain; she heard their agitated murmurs and smelled

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 scorching toast. Then came the sound of scraping. But she prudently refused the dingy slices, remembering where the loaf had lain.

There was a chair for Christabel. The others sat on the floor at her feet. Elliott, Peabody Baxter, whose drawings sometimes appeared in The Dial, a Russian model, and a timid youth who kept on a large muffler throughout for fear his collar was not clean enough for this radiant being.

The Russian understood no English, but turned his face to each speaker, his mouth full of scorched toast, his childlike eyes shining happily.

"Isn't it dreadfully sloppy?"

"Dreadfully! The penalty of spring is slush."

"Did you notice my primroses, Elliott? They make me feel four years old again, with apple cheeks and a fresh white pinny."

If there had been no primroses in her childhood, there were plenty in the Kate Greenaway books that she had almost succeeded in forget

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 ting were fairly recent purchases, the books on whose fly-leaves she had written Christabel Caine in large childish letters.

"Spring in England"

"Oh! Primroses in the hedges—wet primroses with tall pink stems and crisp ruffled leaves!"

She could hear her voice, charming, with a little breathless catch in it now and then. She did not so much think, I am like a primrose, as hope some of the gentlemen were thinking it. Like a primrose, innocently gay, fresh, touching

She outstayed the others. Even Elliott's nervous offers to take her home had no effect.

"Don't send me away, my dear. I have something I must say to you. Help me!"

"I certainly will, if you'll tell me"

"It is so foolishly hard! And I ought to be able to say it as easily, as simply, as a bird sings, as those primroses bloom."

"I"

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 "I won't be so silly, so frightened! Elliott! I have seen everything!"

"I—uh—uh"

"You have been wonderful in your silence, and I know it was because you were afraid of startling me, shocking me, wasn't it? Don't think I didn't understand, and love you for it. But one doesn't need words for the greatest things, I think, and I have understood your wordless message, dear. You do care for me a little, don't you?"

"Oh, I should say I do! Why, I really practically—worship you. You know I do, Christabel! I sort of feel—well, religious, when I'm with you"

"Love is religion, I think. But don't make asaint of me, my dear. I'm just a woman who needs her lover's arms."

She waited for him to answer, but he remained silent and motionless, gazing at her with an expression of adoring horror, so she went on.

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 "Can't we speak to each other truly? Must there be this barrier of pretense between us?"

"Oh, Christabel, of course! I mean, of course not—I mean"

"I have come to you. Do you understand? Will you take my gift?"

He knelt before her. His head went down in her lap. She bent above him tenderly; she stroked his hair with a hand she couldn't keep from shaking.

"Look at me, my lover!"

"Do you mean—Christabel! Do you mean you'll be engaged to me?"

Well, perhaps it's better, she thought, relieved and disappointed, as she received his teverent kiss. Because, after all, one must think of others. Mother and father, the aunts. Love isn't true love if it makes us selfish. A cloud of white satin and tulle floated through her mind, trailing a fragrance of orange-blossoms. Poor Gerald Smith. I, Christabel, take thee, Elliott Yes, this was better.

While her hand, steady now, still stroked his

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 hair, she shifted her position, for the chair was beginning to get a little hard. What is he thinking about? she wondered. Should she carry lilies, or a prayer-book? Donatia Platt in an orange smock blotted out the gleaming vision of herself in her wedding dress, and the phrase popped into her mind, she didn't know why, Sacred and Profane Love.

What are you thinking about, my darling? What words can I find that are beautiful enough to break this beautiful silence between us?

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face any sacrifice with you gladly—oh, gladly!" Christabel told Elliott. "I know life isn't going to be easy for us, darling, but what does anything matter as long as we have each other? And I want you to promise not to mind my family if it doesn't quite understand. You see, it's a darling family, but it loves me a little bit too much; it has silly ideas about me, and so, though you're the most wonderful man in the world, the dear geese aren't going to think even you are good enough for their marvelous, wonderful Christabel!"

"Well, they won't be so very far wrong. I"

She put a hand across his mouth and he kissed it, thinking again, how good it smells! How can I ever be worthy of her? If I could only make her happy. But her eyes had an other-world look in them; she spoke of sacrifice so often, beautifully, he thought, but sadly.

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 After all, getting married wasn't entirely sacrifice. Some people seemed to enjoy parts of it, at least. But Christabel, with her shining eyes and gallant words, sometimes made him feel as if he had helped her into the tumbril and started her off toward the guillotine.

There can be sacrifice on both sides, he thought. It's not going to be so easy to paint the things I want to paint, with a wife to support.

"We're never going to interfere with each other's work," she said.

"Well, but the kind of thing I do now isn't bringing in enough to live on."

"Dearest, I know you can find other things, just to do in your spare time. You see, you don't realize how wonderful you are, and I do! I believe in you, Elliott!"

"What sort of things?"

"Oh, cover designs and things like that."

"I loathe the idea!"

She looked wounded.

"Of course I'd do anything to make our mar-

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 riage possible, but that sort of thing is simply soul-destroying."

"I don't see why. Think of the people you could reach, the good you could do!"

"I'm trying to do serious work, Christabel. I can't do popular stuff. I"

"My dear, don't I know! I'm just the same; I couldn't bear it if people in general liked my writing. If you speak as truly as you can, and as beautifully, refusing to shriek and scream and get easy effects, how can you expect to be heard through all the noise of bad popular writing?"

"What I mean about my painting"

"Painting isn't writing, Elliott. Of course you must go on with your real work, but you could easily do other things just for relaxation. Why, look at some of the advertisements! Beautiful! And they pay tremendously!"

"You don't understand."

"Oh, Elliott! How you hurt me!"

And then he had to comfort her, tell her she did understand, always, ask for her forgiveness.

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 He might as well get to work on canned peaches and silk stockings, he thought, for he was so upset most of the time now that he couldn't concentrate on decent painting. But he hugged to himself for comfort the thought that theirs was a great love, and the greater the love the greater the suffering, according to the classics. And he must be loyal to her, even if he didn't want to be—but he did, he did! He loved her as no woman had ever been loved before, he assured himself. And he must be as loyal as she who promised him so sweetly:

"Nothing the family, can say will ever change me."

So he had expected her family to despise him. Not that I care, he thought, in the train on his way to be inspected, sustaining himself by the memory of the still life of calla lilies he was painting. Let them despise me! I despise them! I care less than nothing what anyone in the world thinks of me, except Christabel. He moved his head up and down to ease the pain in the back of his neck, and looked

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 at his new mauve shirt and dark purple tie in the glass of the train window.

But now, sitting with Uncle Johnnie after dinner at Aunt Deborah's, on the last evening of his Germantown visit, he knew the family considered him a nice young man. They beamed approval, they had offered an allowance, a little house to be built in a corner of Shady Lawn, a position in Cousin William Starkweather's advertising business, with a salary that would make living easy. He had been completely accepted as one of them on the day when Aunt Eliza took him for a drive and showed him the spot in the cemetery where he would be buried. She had been so pleased about it, and had so glowingly described the beauty of the dogwood there in the spring—"You'll enjoy that, with your artistic eye"—that he had felt his faltered thanks to be inadequate.

But I'll do whatever they want me to do, for Christabel's sake, he decided. The calla lilies that had comforted him at first had grown

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 fainter and fainter through the week—now they floated between him and the butler bringing in coffee, and faded away completely. I'd give anything to make her happy, he thought, and made himself remember the way she had looked coming downstairs tonight in her white dress, the quick handclasp she had given him as she left him alone with Uncle Johnnie.

"Thank you, sir," he said, taking a cigar he didn't want. He felt faint with fatigue. All week he had been lost in a regiment of old women, picking up balls of wool, drinking rivers of tea, trotting for miles through conservatories full of rare plants, waxen or hairy, while he agreed with voices flung briskly back or quavering feebly from bundles of shawls, saying that Christabel was a wonderful person. Shady Lawn, The Cedars, Ferncroft. Great-aunts Deborah, Eliza, Lydia, Hannah, Susannah, and Ann. They melted from one to another in his mind, figures in a fever-dream. Cups of tea, balls of wool, hairy, spiny, waxen

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 plants, and his mouth aching from its constant stretch of nervous smile.

Being engaged was marvelous, of course, but it was exhausting. Emotion took it out of one, and having to be intense and real all the time. The room was hot and made his head swim—or was it the cigar?

"Here, have another drop of brandy," said Uncle Johnnie.

Elliott for one wild moment wanted to put his head down on Uncle Johnnie's shoulder and burst into tears. He wanted to say, "How have you managed to keep free among them all?" But the butler opened a window and the brandy spread through him reassurringly. Once more he was himself, the happiest man in the world, except for the knowledge that he could never be worthy of the wonderful girl he was engaged to.

Mr. Caine was in bed with a cold, and Mrs. Caine went upstairs early, with elaborate yawns. Christabel and Elliott stood gazing into the fire. He was remembering some ad-

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 vice Uncle Johnnie had given him that evening. "Don't be so reverent with her. Women like men to be rough." He thought of a brainless athlete named Gerald Smith, all bulging muscles and curly yellow excelsior for hair, who seemed to enchant Christabel by snatching her at parties they had been to, and dancing her off with never a question as to whether he might have the pleasure. And suddenly Elliott threw his arms around Christabel and pulled her down on the sofa with such force that it surprised them both. But then, once he had kissed her, he wasn't sure he knew how to go on being just rough enough. Besides, he felt too tired tonight. He slid down to the floor, his head against her knees, and she began to stroke his hair. It made him feel sleepy, and before he could stop himself he gave a loud gasping yawn.

She pushed his head impatiently and he twisted around and gazed up at her.

"What's the matter, darling?"

"Oh, nothing." Her sigh was almost a sob.

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 He searched his mind for something to please her.

"I was just thinking how wonderful it was to sit here together in silence, and yet each of us knowing everything the other was thinking and feeling."

But it was no good. He saw one of her moods coming over her as clearly as he had seen the bright fluidity of water dull and harden in freezing cold. Moods called by Christabel herself, as he had read in her Secret Journal, "those dark cold tides that drown me." He tried again, apprehensively:

"You look so beautiful in this dim light."

It did not need the sound that from anyone else he would have called a snort, to tell him that could have been better. He hurried on:

"I'm always afraid of being too rough with you—of shattering something exquisite by a touch or a word when you look the way you're looking now."

She relaxed enough to lay her hand on him lightly, as if in accolade.

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