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 his curiosity and was promptly invited to spend the following Sunday at Beaulieu's home in the country.

Beaulieu lived in a very small Louis Thirteenth hunting lodge in the outskirts of St. Germain. The lodge had some acres of park surrounding it, with what the English call "an ornamental water" and some groups of fine old limes. There were fine old flinty walls draped with ivy, a snailery, an antique glass-house and here and there a graceful urn carved from stone.

In this little park Beaulieu did most of his landscape work, arranging and rearranging nature. He painted many pictures in the course of a year, priced them modestly and sold them readily. Con sequently he was a rich man for an artist and ought to have been very happy.

Madame Beaulieu was only half her husband's age—if he really was her husband—and very pretty. She was a little thing, compactly made, with a rich mouth and smoldering yellowish brown eyes. She made a great fuss over Edward on the occasion of his first visit and of his second. They succeeded in making him feel as much at home as if he had always known them and had always been made welcome in their house. And it was arranged that in the spring, when the St. André murals were finished, he should come to visit them

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 and paint landscapes in the little park, under Beaulieu's direction.

Spring came. It was lovely in Paris and it was lovelier in the country. Feeling that he had learned a whole lot about painting the human form divine, Edward packed his kit and removed himself bag and baggage to the Beaulieus.

Bartow-on-the-Sound seemed a very long way off. Dear Mother's letters under a texture of affection showed a cold and undiminishing resentment. Every letter contained some reference to her health. She no longer, it seemed, ever felt quite herself. She had not of course consulted a doctor. Doctors were always for bed and rest. Others might afford themselves these luxuries, but not Dear Mother. She had to keep going. It was a pity, perhaps, that old age was approaching, that she upon whom others had always leaned should have no one to lean on—no one but James, dear James. He at least would never leave his old mother while she lived—"or," as Edward ungenerously thought, "while any money remained in her purse"—and of course your father. The "and of course your father" was a kind of sneer—of course. And Edward resented it.

At first Alice had written often and Edward had written oftener. Then she had been presented to society and had perhaps begun to lose interest in a

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 young man who so obviously preferred art to herself. And Edward perhaps, so filled with new contacts and enthusiasms, had begun to lose interest in her. Either he had really begun to lose interest or else resentment at the changed tone and diminished frequency of her letters had numbed his feelings for her. There was nothing in her later letters upon which he could have put his finger and said, "But I'm not" or "But I haven't," but nevertheless they had a quality which always made him feel as if he were being found fault with and put upon the defensive. Sometimes he wondered if he had written too frankly about the St. André murals and the nude models. But it couldn't be that. Alice wasn't a fool.

In the Beaulieus' little hunting-lodge he had a stone room in a gable. It had an arched ceiling, a hooded fireplace, leaded windows and walls four feet thick. The door was of oak, bound with highly wrought iron. When the bolt was shot it would have taken artillery to batter it down. His chief window looked out over the ornamental water and at the groups of limes beyond. In the morning sparrows, some of which quarreled and some of which made love, gathered in the ivy outside this window and wakened him. Very soon after the sparrows wakened him there would come an ancient Breton woman wearing upon her head

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 a fabulous cap of starched linen and bearing in her hands a japanned tray delicately set with chocolate and cream and rolls of bread and rose-petals of butter.

By ten o'clock, if it didn't rain, Edward and Beaulieu would be in the park painting. They painted from ten to twelve and from three to five. Every day when it didn't rain Edward painted two small landscapes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Beaulieu believed in painting much boldly rather than a little with infinite pains.

As Edward's landscapes dried he painted other landscapes on top of them, but there was one view of the ornamental water with a group of old limes beyond to which he returned oftenest. This view, especially in the afternoon, furnished a beautiful problem and pattern in lights and shadows and reflections. And one afternoon he solved the problem, and when he had finished, the water that he had painted looked wet and the sunlight looked like sunlight. This miracle persisted even after the little canvas had been carried into the house and examined in the sobering light of the living room. It persisted after the paint had dried and flattened into the canvas. Beaulieu was triumphant.

"It is I who have taught the Master," he said. "I told him never to forget that it was light he was

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 trying to paint—not forms or fabrics, but light. Every morning as we have set up our easels I have said, 'Do not forget,' and every afternoon I have said the same thing. That, with a hint or two about mixing his colors, with a little specific statement upon which colors are permanent and which are not, is all that I have had to do. And now what has he done? He has painted a sunlight more warm and limpid and golden than I am able to paint myself."

Sometimes Madame Beaulieu brought a campstool and a parasol and watched the gentlemen paint. Sometimes she would say, "Pretty." More often she came in silence and watched in silence and went away without saying a word. Beaulieu seemed to adore her. If she had faults he was blind to them or explained them away. If she was extravagant, so were all women. If sometimes she lost her temper about nothing at all and made terrific scenes, so did all women.

Whenever he remembered how tender and loying she could be it was easy to forgive all the little failings. At least she was loyal to him, and faithful. And of all good qualities he prized those most highly.

There was a fine old beech tree in a far corner of the park. At certain hours the leaves of this tree broke the light of heaven into thousands of

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 charming, dappling fragments and scattered them on the ground beneath. It was one of Beaulieu's favorite subjects, and Edward had tackled it more than once.

One day as he was starting to draw it for the third or fourth time Madame Beaulieu came to look on. She watched him for a minute or two and then suddenly she walked out in front of him and leaning toward the trunk of the old tree, turned, rested her hand on the great bole and faced him. She looked very charming in the dappled light.

"Is it to be a portrait?" Edward asked.

Madame nodded. "A surprise for father," she said. "Can it be done in one sitting?"

"In two," said Edward.

And in fact he finished the little open-air portrait in two sittings of two hours each. He had had some good luck, some happy accidents. It was the most likable thing he had ever done. He leaned back and saw that he had done all he could.

"Come and see how pretty you look," he said.

Madame Beaulieu came slowly forward from under the broken light of the tree and stood looking over his shoulder.

"Do I look like that—to you?" she asked.

"Yes," said Edward. "Just like that."

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 She leaned over until her cheek was close to his. "You are a charming boy," she said.

Her cheek touched his. It must have been by accident. He was sure of that. She laughed and straightened herself.

"Father will be so pleased," she said.

He was. He raved about the portrait. He was the luckiest man in the world. His wife was the most beautiful creature in the world, and his young friend had been able to immortalize her on canvas.

Beaulieu and Madame Beaulieu ought to have been two of the happiest people in the world. And Beaulieu was one. Why Madame Beaulieu could not manage to be happy was one of those little mysteries of female psychology. On the credit side of life (1) she had an amiable, loving and talented husband, a little too fat perhaps, but not too old; (2) she had a house and grounds so charming and coquettish that only much money and several hundred years of time could have duplicated them; (3) she had a charming little apartment in Paris; (4) she was allowed to be extravagant without any complaint; (5) she was pretty and popular; (6) she was really very fond of Beaulieu.

Now what was lacking? What didn't she have that she needed to make her happy? Undoubtedly

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 what she needed was sometimes one thing and sometimes another. Edward was her present source of discontent. He had lived under the same roof with her now for many weeks and she hadn't succeeded in making him fall in love with her.

Why did she want Edward to fall in love with her? Chiefly because he wouldn't. She did not want a serious love affair, an episode which, becoming known, would involve her in scandal and cause a breach with Beaulieu. Her bread was too well buttered for that and she knew it. She wanted Edward to be hopelessly unhappy, while she pretended to be. She wanted his love of her to tinge with melancholy the whole of his remaining life. She wished to play the leading rôle in a drama of passion and renunciation.

Over the portrait painting she had touched Edward's cheek with hers. If her cheek had been a cobweb the contact would have affected him as much and no more. She tried other wiles. And she really charmed the boy very much without touching his heart or his desires.

One day Beaulieu had to go to Paris on business and he suggested for the two who were to remain behind a sketching expedition to the ruins of a St. Bernard monastery—a beautiful tracery of stone arches in the midst of a dark forest.

From Madame Beaulieu's point of view the ex-

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 pedition ought to have been a great success. A violent thunderstorm put an end to Edward's sketching and they took refuge in an ancient Gothic vault. There they were imprisoned for several hours.

At one time the lightning struck close at hand, and following a deafening crash of thunder Madame Beaulieu screamed and flung herself into Edward's arms for protection and pressed her warm, soft body close against him. He comforted her and reassured her as calmly as if she had been one of his own sisters.

The next crash of thunder was farther off. The storm withdrew, sweeping its wet skirts after it. Madame Beaulieu withdrew herself from Edward's cool embrace. She was angry and at the same time amused. What a fool the boy was!

Her next attack was by indirections. "It is curious," she might say to him, "that once in a while there is born into the world a male being with the nature of an iceberg. It may be a man, it may be a dog. Such creatures have no wish beyond eating and drinking and sleeping."

"But," Edward might answer, "wouldn't that be the most comfortable and least offensive creature there could be? It wouldn't ever make any trouble for anybody."

"Sometimes I am afraid we have such a creature

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 living in the house with us. And it isn't Beaulieu. The day de la France brought his pretty daughters to 'five o'clock' it was obvious that the younger girl was taken with you at sight. She is pretty as a flower and yet you observed her and admired her, if you did admire her, much as if she had been a Chinese porcelain. A young man of your age should at least be thinking of marriage."

"On two hundred and fifty francs a month?" Edward smiled.

"You will soon be earning a lot of money. Beaulieu says so. He burst out swearing only the other day. He said:  ' Mon dieu! It may sound preposterous, but that boy of ours—that little Edward Eaton—is already one of the first painters in France.

"Did he say that—truly?"

Edward blushed deeply and felt for a few moments as if tears were trying to force themselves into his eyes.

"He did so—truly. And what he says he means—the dear old cabbage."

Edward laughed now. "And he said I was little!"

Edward was much bigger than Beaulieu, taller and broader, but without fat.

"You are really a tall, strong man," said Ma-

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 dame. "But one thinks of you as a boy, and sometimes as an idiot."

"Why an idiot?"

"Because you can only be young once. A time will come when you will wish to remember that you were once young. And you will not be able to remember."

"Why won't I?"

"Because you never do anything or start anything that could be worth remembering."

On another occasion she was more direct and Edward could not quite dodge the issue.

"But," he said gravely, "how can a man lead the romantic life you seem to think he ought to lead if he doesn't feel romantic about anybody?"

"Have you never felt romantic about anybody? Tell me the truth."

"Yes," he said, "I have and I do. We were children together. But lately something seems to have happened. Perhaps she thinks that I ought not to have gone away from home for so long to study art."

"And perhaps," said Madame, a little Viciously, "she has interested herself in some more ardent admirer."

"Perhaps," said Edward.

Before the summer ended Madame Beaulieu knew all that there was to be known about the

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 Ruggles; how instead of taking other people's beliefs for granted they asked questions and did their own thinking; how they lived in a city founded by French Huguenots—people who had claimed the same privilege for themselves; and how they had always been kind and helpful to Edward.

One day Edward received a letter from Alice. It was very short and perhaps a little cool, but it caused a sharp disturbance in his breast.

It was not pleasant for Edward to think that Alice found anything to attract her in his brother James.

He told Madame Beaulieu the news and she pretended to be pleased; but she wasn't. She began at once to consider what she could do to make a little innocent mischief between the lovers.

Autumn was very beautiful that year. The

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 whole of September and the half of October resembled that brief American season which is called Indian summer. It was a warm, hazy, soft, golden time that smelled of pears ripening against walls.

Edward lingered in the Beaulieus' house and painted the autumn. What he should do when he had finished painting out of doors with Beaulieu he did not know. Some of the wise old painters who came to see Beaulieu said one thing and some said another.

There came a friendly letter from Townley. With the letter came a short story by a new writer named Heller and an offer of fifty dollars apiece for three illustrations. The story was about a wasp, and models for the illustrations were always to be found between the hours of sunrise and sunset, among the ripening pears on the south end of the Beaulieu house.

In three days the illustrations were finished and on their way to New York. Even Edward felt that the wasp hero was sufficiently comical and sinister. He was pleased with himself and hoped that Townley would send him some more commissions. He did not wish to be an illustrator, but to a boy earning between forty and fifty dollars a month a hundred and fifty dollars all in a lump, with the possibility of more such lumps in the not too distant future, was rather thrilling.

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 namely, that in spite of the decisions, and in spite of the very useful discussions we shall have discussions in Germany which will not help matters forward but will rather put them back. The differences within the party have remained. The majority of the party holds the point of view of what is here called the Centre. The Centre has only just arisen. The comrades here have often departed from their point of view. They have become crystallised in the course of the last few weeks. And it is no chance that in Germany all the comrades of the Central Committee, all the leaders who hold this point of view, have taken up a more consistent attitude towards the theses than has been the case in Moscow. It is a fact that there has been no hesitation on this question, The theses of Radek and Brandler were rejected.

If all the three groups return to Germany with the will and belief that the German Party needs a swing to the left as it does bread and air—

(: Quite right.)

(: Quite right.)

(: Brandler Says, quite right!)

That the theses formulated by Zinoviev are correct and give a foundation for the struggle; if they do not act as factions, tendencies and groups; if all groups are prepared to take up new positions in view of the new facts, and if we are able to bring the party up to the proper political level, then I think the Moscow consultation will help us forward.

The resolutions were then voted on jointly and were carried unanimously, without abstentions.

Bearing in mind that the unity, harmony, and solidarity of the German Communist Party must be maintained in all its work and struggles, the undersigned have considered it their duty to vote against the political theses of the Executive Committee on the lessons of the October events in Germany.

The basis for unity, harmony, and solidarity in the party must be complete clarity in the attitude to be adopted to the disputed questions arising out of the October events. A clear and definite recognition of the errors committed by the party and the defects it has betrayed, and their causes and consequences, is an indispensable preliminary if the party is to make good its errors and correct its defects and if it is to go forward to the forthcoming decisive struggle as well-prepared as possible to be the leader of the revolutionary proletariat. The political theses lack a certain clearness and definiteness. They have not cleared up the contradiction in opinions, and have therefore not removed the con-


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RV 62 (ROADS INTO LONDON) to the infinite number already existing should be able to sign his work as an artist signs his picture. But that, too, is a universal sentiment and a "note" of all roads into London, a note of London itself. It arises out of the innate altruism that there is in us all, or out of the universal desire to "know."

If one stayed to think, one would like to know what kind of poor wretch set the fifth stone in the third tier of the Pyramid of Cheops.

62

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 He hoped that the money would arrive before the Ruggles. He wanted to spend it all on them.

Beaulieu had sent the best of Edward's twohour sketches to an art dealer and several of them had been sold for small sums of money. To Edward the future looked very bright. If the Ruggles encouraged him he would try to scrape together enough money to go to Rome with them. Beaulieu had fired his imagination with descriptions of spring in the old Roman forum—the heavenly color of the sunshine and of the old marbles, the smell of the acacias, the jasmine and the violets.

Alice herself began to haunt his dreams. And it made him remorseful to think how little he had really missed her.

"Edward," said Madame Beaulieu reproachfully, "you should not show any other woman how impatient you are. It isn't polite."

"But they are my oldest friends!" he exclaimed. "And they have always been so charming to me."

"They!" mocked Madame.

She was becoming the victim of nervous, irritable moods. Sometimes she uttered philosophies so reckless and heartless that Beaulieu looked at her with pained amazement. Once or twice he reproved her, very sharply—for him.

And it seemed to Edward that these two dear

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 people who had been so good to him and who had seemed so much in love with each other were no longer getting on so well together.

Madame was often contradictory and difficult to please. Sometimes if her judgment upon a painter or a writer was not accepted without question she flounced off in a huff. She wished that Beaulieu would not smoke cigarettes. She wished that he would not eat so much. One needn't be fat if one didn't choose to be fat. Why did he keep her buried in the country? Why couldn't he give up landscape and be a fashionable portrait painter?

All these fault-findings were quite unnecessary and as disagreeable as they were meant to be.

Beaulieu began to confide in Edward.

"Of course I am too old for her," he would say, "but there is nothing sudden about that. And I was always too fat; but she never complained about it before. Just when everything was going along so merrily and happily she pulls these tantrums. And she doesn't seem to care what she says. She knows very well that if I do not live in the country I cannot paint landscapes. And if I cannot paint landscapes I cannot sell landscapes and we would hardly have any money at all. She knows that at my age I cannot turn to portraiture,

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 and yet she keeps urging me and nagging at me to make the change.

"Why cannot I paint portraits? For a simple reason. I can draw trees and rocks and even cows and sheep and horses, but I cannot draw people. I never could. It is left out of me. The moment I try to draw a face I become confused. My art is baffled. I must try to draw it as it is, when my whole training has been to make 'arrangements.' If I could put both the eyebrows up in one corner of the face and add as many noses as seemed necessary to make an agreeable composition, it would be different. But the rules of portraiture will not permit . . ." Here he would shrug his shoulders in a comic mockery of despair.

Then it would be Madame's turn to confide in Edward; but she made no bones about doing this in her husband's presence.

"He neglects me," she would say. "He thinks only of himself and his work. All I ask for is the little loving attentions that every woman asks for and that I do not get . . . He doesn't make love to me any more . . ."

Here Beaulieu would interrupt, "But I do—all the time—with every thought I think—with every gesture I make."

And Madame would deny the truth of this, and presently there would be as plain-spoken a quarrel

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 as there might have been if a third person had not been present, and Edward would find himself in a painfully embarrassing position.

They were French people. Therefore they were frank. They did not make of love and marriage the same mysteries that the more hypocritical Anglo-Saxon makes of them. And when both were sufficiently exasperated, neither left anything unsaid if the saying of it might score a point against the other.

Their reconciliations were as sudden as their quarrelings. And they were almost equally warm and frank and embarrassing to the puzzled spectator. When the opportunity presented itself Beaulieu would apologize for the quarrel and explain it.

"Every woman is a dramatist. She dramatizes herself and her surroundings. She likes to feel that something terrible is going on and that she is the center of it. No woman really likes the idea of being peaceful and contented and self-effacing. They do not admire good sense for its own sake. When a woman says 'I can't' she means 'I won't.' When she says 'never' she means 'not right now.' And when she says 'forever' she means nothing at all . ..

"I am not talking about bad, spoiled women. I am talking about good women . . . The good

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 God must have made Adam in a hurry since He omitted from him so much that is petty and small and unreasonable; but when He came to make Eve He found that He had all those materials on His hands and He did not let any of them go to waste—not so much as one little malice or uncharitableness. . ."

Edward became uncomfortable in the Beaulieus' house. Where formerly there had been none there were now several quarrels a day. And in the course of these rows the entire history of Beaulieu's relations with Madame was gradually revealed.

They were not married—to each other. Beaulieu was not married at all. Madame Beaulieu had a husband, who because she had abandoned him and their small daughter felt vengeful and would not divorce her.

That didn't matter, Beaulieu said. "We are really married," he said, "because we have loved each other for so long and because we have been faithful to each other. And that, priest or no priest, is a true marriage."

Beaulieu and Madame Beaulieu's husband had been friends. Beaulieu had often stopped with them. Theirs had been a quiet, peaceful country life. Too quiet. Too peaceful. Madeleine's energies had begun to seek diversion. She had fallen

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 in love with Beaulieu. She had finally made him believe that in private her husband was brutal to her and that his affectionate and even-tempered conduct in public was a mask of hypocrisy.

All this Edward picked up bit by bit as the couple in their irritation and anger flung reticence aside and insisted upon washing their dirty linen in public.

But on this point or that there was often disagreement. Had Madeleine's husband really been unkind? At the time Beaulieu had believed so. Now he did not. Whether he had been or not, Madeleine now believed that he had been. Only she could possibly know.

"He was a brute to me," she would say, "but his was a coarse, honest brutishness and not the refined cruelty of this fat painter."

Here Beaulieu almost in tears: "How dare you say that I am ever cruel to you? You know very well that I wouldn't hurt a fly. You shall judge, Edward. Do I strike you as a man capable of cruelty?"

Here Edward might smile faintly and shake his head. He was very miserable and he wanted to escape. He felt as if he was living on the top of a volcano. But when he suggested going they joined forces to prevent him from doing any such thing.

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 One day he learned about the final break between Madeleine and her husband and her elopement with Beaulieu. Beaulieu told him the story.

"I was much younger," he said, "and I believed all that she told me. I was not in love with her then, but she had touched my deepest sympathies. One night I heard them quarreling. Presently she began to scream as if she was being beaten. The next thing I knew she was hammering on my door with both fists, calling upon me to save her. At the same time I could hear her husband saying in a hoarse, terrible voice: 'I shall not forgive you for this! I shall not be able to forgive you.'

"I unlocked my door and opened it.

"I tried to pacify them. We were all in our nightgowns. We must have looked ridiculous.

"Madeleine flung herself into my arms. My embarrassment was pitiable. I tried to push her away from me. She only clung the closer . . . I give you my word of honor, Edward, that I had never so much as spoken a single word of love to her. Now I listened in a horrified silence while she in her rage and in her determination to hurt him told her husband that for a long time we had been lovers.

"At that awful moment I admired my old friend immensely. He looked for a space like a man

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 who had been suddenly frozen into a statue. Then he spoke in a calm voice:

You have accused Beaulieu,' he said, 'of something which I for my part do not believe, but which it would be utterly impossible for a gentleman to deny. To your face and in your presence it would be impossible for him to deny the charge that you have made. But whether you have spoken the truth or whether you have lied, every thing between us is over. I am through. If Beaulieu wishes to risk your selfish, dissatisfied, drama-loving nature he is welcome to. It is nothing to me. I shall not even be angry. You will, however, both of you leave this house in the morning. And you will not either of you come back—ever.'

"Then he said,  ' B—rrr! It is cold!' and turned on his bare heel and marched off. We could hear him locking and double-locking the door of their bedroom.

See what you have done!' I said. And I tried to take her arms from about my neck. But she only clung the tighter. She said, 'I love you—I love you.'

"When a woman sacrifices her home and her position and her honor for a man what can that man do? In nine cases out of ten he will end by playing her game . . . I cannot tell you, Edward, how sweet she was and how good for years and

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 years—during all the time of my poverty and unsuccess. And now that we have everything she is not contented. . . The next thing we know she will be accusing you of being her lover."

"Oh!" exclaimed Edward, his face paling a little, "she wouldn't do that!"

But she did—the very next night.

It seemed that Madame Beaulieu wished, once more before she died, to have something terrible going on of which she should be the center. All women, it seems, have this wish at times, but there are a few women who are able to resist the temptation. And it is to these few that the whole race of women owes its good reputation as wives and mothers.

Women, like horses, have long memories. Madame Beaulieu had such a memory. She never forgot any little trick or stratagem which she had once worked successfully, and she had supreme faith in her ability to make precisely the same trick work again.

Edward was waked that night by the sound of clenched fists pounding upon his door and the voice of Madame Beaulieu screaming to him for help. Edward was neither sophisticated nor worldly wise; nevertheless that which first flashed into his mind was the truth. His instinct told him that Madame Beaulieu had had a falling out with

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 Beaulieu and that she was about to repeat the episode of long ago. If Edward could have trusted this instinct he would not have opened his door. But he could not trust it—not absolutely. It was just barely possible that Madame Beaulieu was in her right mind and really needed his help. It was possible that Beaulieu, who was fat and middle-aged, had had a stroke. It was possible that the house had caught fire. It was possible that thieves had made an entry. Incredible things were possible. All this flashed through his mind as he rushed to the door, fumbled a moment with the bolt and pulled it open.

Madame Beaulieu pitched forward into the room and Edward caught her as she was falling. If he had been carefully rehearsed he could not better have seconded her will to make trouble. She clung to him and when she began to call him her lover and to count aloud upon his protection he knew without looking that Beaulieu himself had arrived upon the scene.

A lowered gas-jet which burned all night in the upper corridor of the house, and touches of the moon, lighted their faces.

Beaulieu's face was a violent red and a network of swollen veins made him look really terrible. He was so angry that at first he could not articulate.

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 Madame from the unwilling shelter of Edward's arms called him a brute and a monster and boasted how for weeks with Edward as her guilty partner she had deceived him.

It may be that she really wanted to end her long and happy relationship with Beaulieu and be driven from the house with Edward, who thereafter would be in honor bound to support her and care for her. It is more likely that she had simply lost her temper and preferred to make as many people as possible miserable and did not at the moment care what happened.

Edward was in a state of horrible embarrassment. He wished that the floor would open and swallow him, that he had never been born. Embarrassment began slowly to give place to disgust. The cold of the stone floor was rising through his feet and ankles. And then suddenly and without other warning he did the very wisest thing that he could have done under the circumstances. He screwed his eyes into two knots, opened his mouth wide, tipped his head back and then, with incredible violence, sneezed. He tried to speak and sneezed again.

The swollen veins in Beaulieu's face shrank and he began to speak in a hoarse, jerky way.

"You once worked this game on me," he said, "but you shan't work it on him."

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 Here Edward sneezed again.

"I know exactly how innocent I was when you accused me of being your lover, and I know that Edward is just as innocent."

Edward's sneeze sounded like a blast of gratitude. Beaulieu went on:

"I've tried everything but one, in the hope of curing your temper. I've tried patience and generosity. That is no good with women. Our ancestors, the ancient Gauls and Romans, had a better way. Their slogan was kill or cure."

He stepped suddenly forward, and as Edward sneezed again and Madame Beaulieu turned her head to see what was going to happen, he hit her under the point of the chin with all his might and main. And for the next two hours Madame Beaulieu was like the dead in Ecclesiastes. She knew nothing.

Edward put on his slippers, stopped sneezing and helped carry Madame Beaulieu back to her bed. Her little face looked as sweet and gentle as a kitten's, and as innocent of wrongdoing.

Edward was for bathing her temples with cold water, but Beaulieu, who was still very angry, said: "Why revive her? She is better this way. She has what she deserves." And he added, "If I've killed her this is of course the end, but if I haven't, then it is perhaps a—beginning." His face soft-

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 ened. "It will be best, my friend," he said, "for you to go back to Paris by the first train in the morning. Heaven knows I am very sorry for what has happened. But it was not my fault."

"And I don't see how it can be mine," said Edward. "I suppose it sounds silly to you, but I've never been any woman's lover."

"It doesn't sound silly," said Beaulieu. "If Solomon at the end of his days had been able to say as much I should have more respect for his wisdom."

Edward went back to his warm bed, but he could not sleep. Mingled with the anger and disgust which he still felt were disturbing memories. Those moments during which he had held, however unwillingly, the charming body of Madame Beaulieu in his arms had marked the end of his childhood.

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 tradiction, but have rather concealed it by lengthy phrases, and have thus opened the door for misinterpretations. We think that the political theses betray the following very serious defects:

They give an incomplete and partly incorrect presentation of the causes which led to the October defeat.

They have not explained why the "Saxon experiment" miscarried; What in reality were the mistakes committed; and what were the effects of the experiment as a whole.

They fail to declare in an unambiguous manner whether under the existing circumstances the party was right in not taking up the armed struggle. They say nothing as to what mass actions the party should have taken in order to cover the retreat.

They do not contain the necessary criticism of the errors and defects of the policy of the so-called "left party opposition" and thereby make it extraordinarily difficult to get the opposition to abandon their errors and to secure co-operation between the party majority and the opposition.

The political theses are not calculated to put an end to the differences within the German Communist Party, and they give the sections of the Communist International no adequate picture of the October events and their consequences and lessons.

The undersigned therefore expect that the Enlarged Executive will devote its attention to the October events and revise the theses which have been adopted.

On the other hand, the theses on the trade unions and on organisation correspond with the views of the majority of the party, and the Central Committee and the undersigned were able to vote in favour of them.

Although the undersigned earnestly maintain views above set forth regarding the political theses, nevertheless in the summary vote of the three theses on the German Question, they voted in favour of the decision of the Executive as a whole, because the theses adopted on the trade unions and on organisation are of the greatest importance for the practical work of the party. The undersigned acted in the conviction that, in view of the forthcoming difficult struggles of the proletariat against fascism, unity in the leadership and the membership of the German Communist Party is urgently necessary. The Party can become the revolutionary leader in these struggles of the working class and of all sections of the population, whose interests have come to clash sharply with those of the bourgeoisie only if it comes forward in agitation, propaganda, and action, in the clearest and most resolute manner as a united communist party displaying maximum revolutionary activity, and calling forth maximum activity on the part of the masses in the fight for power and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The undersigned regard it as their clear duty, and the duty of all comrades who share their point of view, to maintain iron discipline and to help the leaders to mobilise the Party and the


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ITHOUT any further warning the Ruggles family arrived in Paris and put up at the old hotel of France et Choiseul. A short, friendly note—not from Alice but from her father—informed Edward of these facts and invited him to meet them at Voisin's for dinner.

Alice had changed. That was the important thing. She had become cool and aloof. It hardly seemed as if they could have grown up together and been intimate friends.

To the eyes she was lovelier than ever, but mentally she seemed to have traveled a long way and to have left Edward far behind. And mentally she seemed also to have parted company with her father and mother.

They dined and thereafter sat for an hour talking. It was an impersonal conversation—not one of the old warm, intimate, joking talks. Ruggles, a thorough man of the world in New Rochelle, seemed a little provincial and naïve in Paris. It was obvious that he did not know his way about. Mrs. Ruggles had been digging into French his-

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 tory and wanted everybody to know it. Only Alice appeared thoroughly and even exasperatingly at ease.

They left Voisin's and strolled back to the hotel, Alice and Edward ahead. Edward felt hurt and troubled.

"You've changed a lot since I saw you last," he said finally.

"Yes," she said, "a lot."

"You're prettier if possible; but I don't think you like me any more."

"I do."

They paused to look at the flaming posters in front of the Nouveau Cirque and then passed slowly on.

"Do you know the Louvre well?" asked Alice.

"Only a little. I've been saving it for you."

"That's fine. When shall we begin?

"Tomorrow?"

"Will you come for me?"

"About ten?"

"We could have luncheon somewhere and spend the day, couldn't we?"

"I bet we can!"

"I want to know the Louvre from A to Z. And then the Luxembourg. And between times I want to see everything that you've been doing."

"It would be kinder to look at my stuff first."

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 "Tell me this—are you going to be very, very good?"

"There's lots of work to do before I even think how bad or how good I'm going to be. But I'm still glad I've got the chance to find out. It's such fun to draw and paint."

It was as if they had met for the first time, had not taken a great fancy to each other and had not hit upon anything of common interest to talk about.

Edward asked about home news. She told him of county happenings, deaths, births and marriages.

"Seen anything of my people?" he asked.

"Only James—he goes everywhere, you know."

"Yes. He was always the dude of the family."

"Don't you think that perhaps there is more to James than meets the eye?"

Edward laughed and said, "Lots and lots."

"You don't like him. But I do."

"Truly?"

"Really and truly. You should hear him boast about you. Don't you ever feel your ears burning? That's James and I boasting about our friend and brother, the Heaven-born artist."

Still talking about James, they reached the arched entrance to the France et Choiseul. Here they waited until Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles came up.

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 "Good night," said Edward, "and thank you. I've had a splendid time."

"Have you?" said Mrs. Ruggles a little quizzically. "That's fine."

"Eddie and I are going to do the Louvre tomorrow," said Alice, "starting here at ten sharp."

"Are you?" said Mr. Ruggles and he looked even more quizzical. "Well, that's fine."

They finished saying good night. As the Ruggles family passed through the archway the magnificent old Swiss porter came out of his lodge and in stentorian tones called across the courtyard to the room clerk, "Monsieur et Madame Roog-ells et Mademoiselle Roogells qui rentrent!"

And Mr. Ruggles and Alice chuckled to themselves.

Edward, the tones of the Swiss porter echoing in his ears, hurried home. The evening, or Alice rather, had been a horrible disappointment. He had imagined that they would take up their friendship exactly where they had left off—that is, just short of being definitely engaged to be married, just short of being really in love. Instead they had met as strangers. Edward's heart ached and he could have cried. He had never had but the one real friend in all his life and she had turned cold.

Did all women fail one? Dear Mother, Ruth, Sarah, John's wife, Madame Beaulieu and now

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 Alice? "Why," he thought, "she treated me as if we were meeting for the first time and she didn't care if it was the last."

But he comforted himself with the thought that the next day he would ask her what he had done to offend her and keep on asking until she gave him the answer.

They spent nearly the whole of the next day in the Louvre. Their intention to tackle the paintings first, then the statuary and then the odds and ends from Charlemagne's sword to the snuff-box of Napoleon fell by the wayside; for they ran plump into the Venus of Milo and had to sit down on a bench and look at her for a long time. Then the Victory of Samothrace held them spellbound and they went out to luncheon without having looked at any paintings at all. And it was not until then that Edward asked her why she was so changed toward him and what it was that he had done to offend her.

"Why, Eddie," she said, and there was a kind of pitying look in her eyes, "I haven't exactly changed. I love you better than almost anybody and always will, but—well, girls are funny animals. If you'd stayed around Westchester maybe we'd have run away or done something foolish like that; but you didn't stay around and after a while

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 "I got to thinking that maybe it was just as well you hadn't . . ."

"You have changed," said Edward, "and I haven't." He only looked glum, but he felt very tragic.

"Well," she said, "don't let's talk about it. You're a dear and I'll always love you and be your friend. I only came abroad because I wanted to see you, and Paris with you. That's the honest truth. If it hadn't been for you I'd have wanted to stay in New York . . . Shall we look at more statues this afternoon and start in with the pictures tomorrow?"

"Whatever you like," said Edward without enthusiasm. "How long do you really think your father means to stay in Paris?"

"Not long, I think. He wants to spent the winter in Italy and Corsica. He was wondering last night if you couldn't tear yourself away for a while and come to Corsica as our guest."

"That would be wonderful," said Edward, who had always longed to see Corsica. And he told her that he would accept the invitation if her father didn't change his mind.

"Father won't. Father doesn't, and he thinks the world of you."

They finished luncheon and returned to the museum and spent the afternoon looking at pictures.

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 They looked at pictures till their eyes refused to have emotions of any kind and the backs of their necks ached.

Edward called a cab and drove her back to the hotel.

"I'm a fool to paint," he said. "There are too many pictures already. I don't feel as if I ever wanted to look at another picture as long as I live. If I ever go through those Rubens galleries again it will be blindfold. I never knew how much I hated muscular fat women with no eyebrows and red hair . . . But wasn't he a marvel? Acres and acres of paint and every brushful smeared on so that it would do the most good!"

"There are too many pictures," Alice agreed, "but most of them are awful. And you are going to be better than almost anybody. So what's the use of complaining? Rubens was a great and mighty lord, wasn't he? Where did he find the time for everything?"

"I don't suppose he had to look," Edward said. "There's always lots of time lying around loose and all you have to do is to take it."

"Oughtn't you to be working instead of chasing around with me?"

"Never!" he said stoutly, and they both laughed.

But there wasn't to be so much chasing around. They did the Louvre and the Luxembourg to-

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 gether and some churches, and then Alice and her mother began the real business of Paris, which is shopping and having dresses made, and Edward began the picture which he intended to send to the Salon in the spring.

He had been thinking about this picture for a long time. Sometimes it was going to be a landscape and sometimes it was going to be three nymphs dancing. Then it became a nocturne—one of the bridges across the Seine at night. Then it became the same bridge only from a different angle; the night ceased to be clear and became foggy, with stars showing where the fog was thin, and when he had made a lot of sketches and experimental star and fog effects, the angle of the bridge had to be changed once more and he decided to introduce the dancing nymphs into the foreground.

At this point the Ruggles departed for Italy. Edward saw them off in the rain. He promised to join them in Corsica in the early spring. But there was only one thing certain. If there had ever been anything between himself and Alice it was over. During all their meetings she had held him at arm's length. Sometimes it seemed as if she had a kind of maternal tenderness and pity for him. But more often it seemed as if she had no sentiment for him at all.

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 Somehow he had gathered that there was another young man in her life and that his own romance had been blasted in the bud.

He hurried home along the Quays and as he turned the corner of the rue des Saints Pères the rain began suddenly to fall in a torrent. He lowered his head and ran at top speed. As he reached the shelter of the archway of the building in which he slept and worked a voice hailed him: Allo—Mistaire Eaton."

The voice belonged to Anne Brie—one of fifty models whom he knew by name and reputation. She had never worked for him and he had never even seen her at work; but once they had sat side by side on a sofa in a friend's studio and done some laughing.

Allo, Anne!" he mimicked. "What are you doing in my tunnel?"

"Saving myself from the rain," she said. "I was going to supper—got caught—and ducked in here. Got anything to eat in your studio?"

"I shouldn't wonder," said Edward. "Come up."

He felt no more embarrassment than if she had been a man, for even the most moral artist finds it necessary to be casual about the conventions.

They supped upon bread without butter and rillettes de Tours out of a glass jar. And they

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 drank chocolate made with water instead of milk.

Anne was charming and made herself very much at home. When she had turned all of Edward's canvases so that she could look at them she began to praise him. She said that he was a wonder, that she had worked in all the studios and ought to know. What was he going to send to this year's Salon? He told her about his bridge with the fog and the stars and the nymphs dancing.

She objected.

"Nymphs don't dance all the time," she said. "That is in pictures they always dance; but in real life they behave like real people."

"They would, of course, wouldn't they?" Edward agreed. And his face lighted with enthusiasm. She had given him a notion. He began to haul out his sketches for the bridge, but there was no angle which suited him, so that he had to use gestures to convey to her what was in his mind.

"Listen," he said. "Imagine that you have gone down to the river's edge and that the bridge, of course, is above you. There is an incline near the first arch, an incline of small cobblestones that dips into the river. Three shop-girls tempted by the heat and almost hidden by the fog are going for a swim. They are giggling for fear that someone will catch them at it—and, if it isn't the policeman, they don't care too much. Beyond and

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 above is the arch and the parapet and the fog and the stars—and perhaps the little needle tip of the Saint Chapelle spire. . . I can't think of anything more foolish to paint, and yet it fills my head and I think it might be very arresting and charming."

"Who are you going to have for your nymphs—shop-girls?"

"I shan't need any models just yet. I've got to get the composition absolutely settled first."

"Wish you'd try me."

"Gladly—but you won't be angry if I say you're not just what I have in mind."

"Naturally not. I get that often. Tastes differ. I think that I have a very pretty body but lots of artists say that I look too much like a child."

"Well," said Edward, "one of these days when the time comes we'll have to see what we think."

While he was putting some chunks of coal into the stove Anne made a flank movement on his bedroom and returned with a double armful of clothes, socks and odds and ends which were really in a savage state of masculine neglect.

Anne seated herself and began to sort the possible from the impossible. She made three piles.

"These," she said, "are to be thrown away. Those only need to be laundered, and the rest I will

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 make into a package and take home with me to mend."

"Where do you live, Anne, in case I want a model?"

She gave him her address and he wrote it down. Then presently, the rain having stopped, she gathered together the clothes which were to be mended and departed as casually as she had come.

And to Edward, all at once, the studio seemed extraordinarily empty.

It was a very rainy winter and the young man's loneliness was heavy upon him. He longed for the spring and Corsica, but these were a long way off.

He had many friends but they were mostly serious, hard-working friends and he saw so little of them at this time that he felt as if he didn't have any. One day Anne came with his mended clothes and made chocolate for him and went. He wished she had not been in such a hurry. The dreary studio with the rain-stained lights had been brightened by her presence.

For several days he could not get her out of his mind. But although the arrangement of his picture had reached a point where he wished to make some studies from living models, he did not at once send for her. Some instinct told him that if he wished to keep free from entanglements he had

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 better not see her too often. He thought seriously of inviting some other model to pose for him. And all that prevented him from doing this was the fact that he had promised Anne the first trial.

Finally he wrote to her and said that if she was not under engagement and still wished to work for him he would be glad to talk with her. He wrote this letter, mailed it and regretted having done so. She was a popular model, however, and he comforted himself with the hope that she had plenty of employment.

But she appeared at the studio before it seemed as if she could have received the letter. She was all smiles, eager to work with him on his picture and delighted that he had remembered his promise.

Perhaps she did look a little too much like a child, but she had a lovely golden brown coloring and was delightful to draw. She gave him his poses without the slightest difficulty or awkwardness, and the artist in him at once suppressed the man. It was not until she had dressed and gone home that his thoughts became once more haunted and troubled by her.

They worked thus for several weeks. Friends began to talk about Edward's picture and to bring other friends to see it. Many older artists came. From all these brothers of the brush he received praise and support. And throughout the Latin

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 quarter it was the accepted fact that the young Edward Eaton's genius had blossomed and that he was doing a wonderful thing.

He worked himself thin. Anxiety would wake him in the night and he would rise and light a candle and go shivering to see if his work still looked right to him.

One afternoon in the middle of work he stepped back from his easel and looked at his picture long and critically. Then suddenly he smiled a broad schoolboy grin and said, "Why, it seems to be finished." He was immensely surprised. "It's all done," he said—"finished."

Then Anne came and stood beside him and looked too. For a long time. She was a talkative little person and he wondered why she didn't say anything. He stole a look at her sidewise and saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

"What's the matter, Anne?"

"Nothing. It's been a happy time and now it's over."

"Hm'm. We're not going to end our career with this picture."

"You'll be going to Corsica now to be with those American friends of yours."

"Not right away."

"It amazes me to think that you would have

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 made just as beautiful a picture with any one of a hundred models."

"Nonsense! The credit for this picture is yours too. If you don't know that, you don't know anything . . . Get your clothes on and we'll go somewhere or other and have a fine dinner and celebrate."

She obeyed meekly and Edward waited, still smiling, but no longer admiring his picture. He was smiling at the thought of models in general and Anne in particular. She always did her dressing and undressing with the utmost modesty behind the screen. And between times gave no more thought to modesty or immodesty than a fly.

During the making of the nocturne, Anne and Edward had dined together a good many times, and the Quarter had begun to talk about them. But the Quarter talked very pleasantly. Because in France as in the South Seas human nature is supposed to emanate from God and on that account to be highly respectable.

On this particular night they dined in the Café Brabant, which at the time was enjoying a huge popularity among the students and models. They had it to themselves, and, in old Madame Brabant, a friend who could be unusually patient with overdue accounts.

Certain students, having attracted Anne's and

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RV 56 (ROADS INTO LONDON) expectation of a city rejoicing with illuminations; it was the most gracious of surprises and an unforgettable thing. But that is London.

Yet these great roads are oppressive when they are empty. To enter London in a faint, saffron dawn, along with the market wagons, is to be not awed by an immense humanity but disturbed by entering what seems some realm of the half supernatural. You are coming to Covent Garden, you sit at the shaft-tail beside the driver, he is half invisible in the night, taciturn and half asleep. At last the street lamps appear, at first solitary and brave in the dark, then more frequent and growing palely unnatural before the dawn; the colours of the large horses begin to show, and the innumerable "pulls up," with their signposts and the yellow paint of the housefacings. Or you may lie softly enough high up on a bed of cabbages.

There used to be at the back of the Camden Town Road a little hay market that I knew well—it may be there still for all I know—and it was far better to come in on top of the hay, half under the tarpaulin, with the sweet scent, the warmth and the half dozing, the pure air of the early dawn. It is purest of all on a Monday, because fewer chimneys have been smoking. One saw the solitary streets for immense distances with, all along the roadways, little heaps that turned out to be cats crouching over garbage or courting; they are the sign visual of London at the dawn, with an air of mystery as of an unsuspected population revealed unawares. But all the empty streets giving out 56

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 Edward's attention, drank toasts to them and made a semblance of shaking hands with them. Anne and Edward blushed comfortably and Anne shook her head with vehemence. This only gave the students excuse for loud laughter.

"Hereabouts," said Anne contentedly, "if a man and a woman are seen twice together in public—the murder is out. I am afraid, my poor Edward, that I have already compromised you beyond repair. But we don't care what they say—do we?"

"Don't you?"

"Not that!" She snapped her fingers.

"Well, I do care," he said. "It's hard on you, of course; but it's an enormous compliment to me." Anne was in high spirits. "A compliment," she said, "which you have done absolutely nothing to deserve."

The waiter came to Edward's rescue and received his order for dinner.

"We won't drink the ordinary wine tonight," said Edward. "Tell Madame to give us a nicely warmed bottle of good Bordeaux."

The end of the dinner found them happy and talkative, their elbows on the table, their faces close together, and the wine half drunk.

Edward kept thinking to himself, "What a charming companion she is!" Anne kept thinking: "If this silly boy really loves me, why in the name

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 of all the saints doesn't he say so and have done with it? It must be obvious to him, now, what the answer would be. I'm certainly crazy about him."

She was a clever girl, who having posed for artists since childhood had a vast smattering of art. She flattered Edward and warmed his heart. She made him believe for the time being that he was far more talented than he really was, and destined to go to the very top of fame's ladder.

They finished their bottle of wine slowly, and then because it was so warm and cheerful in the café and because they had begun to exchange confidences and found it immensely profitable and entertaining, they ordered a half-bottle of the same and sat on for an hour more.

Then Edward paid his check and they rose and went out into the night. It was a soft and pleasant night for the time of year, not a shiver in the air.

As the door of the restaurant closed behind them Anne shrugged her little shoulders with a gesture half of amusement and half of disappointment. She had done her best to make Edward say that he was in love with her, and she had failed.

"When do you go to Corsica?" she asked.

"In about six weeks."

"Shall you do another picture in the meantime?"

"I don't know. I'm pretty well out of paints, and unless something turns up I can hardly afford

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 to buy more, and the trip to Corsica too. I think I'll have to work in black and white. It won't hurt me."

"I suppose I'll have to look about for some work too."

Then Edward declared himself, and in a way that surprised and delighted her.

"I don't like to think of your posing for anyone but me," he said, in a kind of exasperated voice.

"You don't! Truly?"

"No. I don't."

"Why not?"

"I just don't."

Anne laughed in the darkness. A soft little laugh full of triumph.

"Edward," she said, "couldn't I have one last look at the picture before I go home?"

Edward did not answer.

She took his arm in a gentle possessive way and they walked slowly to the building in which he lived and worked.

Edward waked and lay in the darkness and wondered what Dear Mother would think of him now, if she knew, and Dearest Grandmother and his sisters, and his father, and John and Alice, and her mother and father. He told himself that he did not care; but telling was no use, he did

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 care, and he hoped that none of them would ever know. Being found out was the great crime after all. For the rest he felt a kind of blissful contentment. He had misjudged women altogether. Here at his side, so silently asleep that you might have thought her dead, lay a girl so sweet, so loving, so gentle, so understanding, so solicitous that the whole world seemed changed for him and made more beautiful, and all his old cynicisms seemed to have been swept away.

It was wonderful how silently she slept. He stopped his own breathing that he might listen to hers. He could not hear it and became alarmed. . . He had seen a play recently at the Grand Guignol—a little horror of a play—in which just when it is high time for him to be gone by the latticed window in the dawn, the wife discovers that the lover has died. . . Edward shook Anne nervously by the shoulder and spoke her name.

She wasn't dead.

The whole of life—for a while—seemed to have changed for the better. The morning was exquisite—just like spring—and his mail consisted of one letter from Townley, containing commissions to illustrate two stories—these were being

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 forwarded under separate cover—and an advance payment of two hundred dollars.

Within a few seconds after receiving and reading this letter he had made the mistake of telling Anne all about it. Two hundred dollars—a thousand francs—and two hundred more to follow when the finished illustrations had been received, was a lot of money in the Paris of those days. And Anne, who a moment before had been prepared and willing to work her hands to the bone for Edward, had sudden visions of a life of ease and plenty and of endless jollifications. The money made her feel rather important, and for the first breakfast of their life together she gave Edward chocolate which was burnt. But she sat on his knee while he drank it and so he never knew.

And indeed for some weeks he labored under the impression that everything in this world is just about right, and that nothing is ever burnt or spoiled. The stern moralist will perhaps regret that these weeks should have been the happiest that Edward had ever lived or that he was ever going to live. But the stern moralist is seldom a Parisian, or a supporter of the theory that God and nature may have put the sex impulse into man for precisely the same reason that they put it into flowers, molluscs, mastodons, ants, wasps and bees—namely, that occasionally it should be obeyed.

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 Certain flowers, it is true, go to seeds and die, and some argue that in these cases undoubtedly the death is the punishment of the sin. Others, however, point questioningly to the high Sierras where the sequoia trees have been honeymooning for thousands of years.

Edward did not want to know anything about Anne's past. He closed the eyes and ears of his mind to it. He knew that she loved him with all her heart, and that was enough knowledge. And he believed that toward him at least she would never show any failure of tenderness and understanding. He did not realize that when a woman has given herself, even if it is not for the first time, her curious sense of justice makes her feel that in return she is entitled to everything in sight, including the moon.

A letter came from Alice and was the first cause of trouble between them. It was in English of course and Anne couldn't read it. Edward translated and Anne made it sufficiently obvious that she did not believe his translation to be quite literal. It was. There was nothing in Alice's letter which anybody might not have been allowed to read. It was a friendly letter and reminded him of his promise to join the Ruggles family in Corsica. The time was about ripe for that. The

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 Ruggles family was about to move to Genoa. Would he join them there?

"Of course you're not going—now. You don't need her any more. You have me."

The slighting insinuation was not lost upon Edward, but he answered patiently. "I think I ought to go, don't you? I don't want to—not now. But they are the oldest friends I have, and I promised and I don't want to hurt their feelings."

"That's for you to say. When there is a question of two women, it is always the man's prerogative to choose between them."

He tried to put his arm around her and was repulsed—with a kind of a cold fury. Anne had about decided to work herself into a rage.

"It is only for a short time," said Edward.

"That's what you say."

"But Anne, don't you believe what I say? I couldn't tell you lies."

"You're in love with her."

"I'm not. I'm in love with you. And she doesn't care that about me . . . Be reasonable."

If he had been more experienced he wouldn't have said, "Be reasonable." He would have picked up the nearest loaded cannon and said, "Go ahead and make a fool of yourself."

She was going to, anyway. And what she managed forthwith to invent and shout aloud concern-

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 ing Alice and Edward had better not be printed.

And how did the scene end? As all such scenes do, time after time, until at length, perhaps after many years, the patience of the male, and his love, come to the end of the same road and the scene ends differently—fatally, sometimes.

This time it ended in tears, from Anne, and plaintive little wolf-yelps of self-pity and contrition; and on Edward's side it ended in a fury of pity and a hugeness of forgiveness that were almost godlike—and then the usual mutual happy storm of passion.

After two days of peace Anne's brow suddenly puckered a little and she said in a flat Voice, "You needn't think that I'm not going to amuse myself while you are in Corsica."

"Oh, Anne—I thought that that was all settled."

"I'm not so easy to get rid of as you think."

"Oh, Anne!"

"Then take me with you."

Silence.

"You're ashamed of me."

"Oh, Anne, won't you please stop?"

She wouldn't. And there was another row. During this row Edward wished that he had never been born, that having been born innocent he had

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 so remained, and he would have taken oath in a court of law that the lilies and languors of virtue are incomparably better friends and neighbors and roommates than the roses and raptures of vice.

But he did his best to go on keeping the peace.

Edward's well-grounded habit of doing what he said he would do when he said he would do it was at the root of the trouble. Having promised the Ruggles to join them in Corsica he could only feel that the promise ought to be kept. Then one morning he waked with a new thought altogether. If Anne was so dead set against his going to Corsica, and so blatantly jealous and suspicious of Alice, why go? Why not break his promise and go somewhere else with Anne?

He did, and to his surprise it was to Corsica that they went. Anne chose to. Perhaps she hoped that there would be a chance meeting with Alice, at which it would be easily seen which of the heroines had walked off with the hero. But the Ruggles did not stay long in Corsica and the meeting did not take place. Edward painted his famous picture of the brigand's house and was very pleased with it, and with himself, and made love to Anne with redoubled fervor.

There is no Mann Act in Corsica. They came and went as they pleased, arousing only a tolerant,

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 good-natured and perhaps envious interest. And presently, their money all spent and their faces brown and rosy from the sun, they returned to Paris.

Edward will never forget that vacation. If it did have its sinful sides, it had a glory of warmth and color and perfume and tenderness which almost compensated. His conscience didn't trouble him much at the time—indeed, all that did trouble him was the possibility of a chance meeting with the Ruggles—and it doesn't trouble him much now.

And be it said for conscience's sake that before leaving Paris the impetuous and generous youth had begged Anne to marry him and she had refused. Her reasons for refusing were excellent. She was already married. But what had become of her husband was another matter. She did not know. Nobody knew.

On the way to Corsica and on the way back, and during the whole of their stay on that exquisite island, she had behaved beautifully. There had been no tempers and no fault-findings. And they might have gone on being happy an indefinite period of time.

An accumulation of letters which Edward found waiting for him, however, so hurt his peace of mind that happiness was no longer possible.

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 There was a letter from Dear Mother, the usual highly moral, complaining letter, and this had the usual depressing effect on him, and there was a letter from his father the cheerfulness of which was so obviously forced that it depressed him even more, and worst of all there was a letter from Ruth. She seldom wrote to him, and when she did she usually had something disagreeable to say. The present occasion was no exception.

Ruth and her husband, through friends recently returned from Paris, had heard all about Edward's "goings on" with "that woman" (Anne?) and were grieved and shocked beyond measure. She, Ruth, had felt her duty so strongly in the matter that she had not been able to rest until she had told the miserable tidings to Edward's father. She had indeed, at some inconvenience to herself, made the trip to Bartow for the purpose. That was that! Father would use his judgment about telling mother. Ruth hoped that he would not feel obliged to tell Dear Mother, as the knowledge would very likely kill her.

Ruth imagined that Edward must be so infatuated with that woman, or some other woman, that he could hardly find time to be interested in home news; still, she felt it her duty to set down such items as he ought, if only theoretically, to be interested in.

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 As for herself, she forced herself to go a good deal into society for her husband's sake. Her back troubled her at times, and she was far from strong. Dear Mother—well, she was still Ruth's ideal of a mother and a Christian gentlewoman, but disappointment in her sons would undoubtedly kill her dead in the long run. She had not seen John or heard from him in a long time. Mark was having trouble with his wife ("or perhaps it is she, poor woman, who is having trouble with him"); "but James, whom I am really learning to like and understand, goes everywhere and keeps up the family name and prestige."

She spoke of their father last. He had been found unconscious on the floor of his church and had been obliged to confess that for a long time he had been suffering from heart attacks.

"He is not long for this world, and if you have learned all that you need to know about art, and other things, don't you think it time to think about coming home and doing your duty by your parents? Heaven knows they have done their duty by you."

The next day there came a letter from Edward's father.

"This," he wrote, "my dear boy, is a postscript to my last. Ruth has been to see me, for the sole purpose, apparently, of retailing some nasty gos-

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 sip about you. But I am incapable of judging any man's actions without hearing both sides, and do therefore refrain from all comment. I hope you are coming home before very long. Townley has sent me copies of the illustrations. I am very proud of you, and happy to think that you are going to be able to make your way in this world without capitulations of any kind to anybody."

And Edward realized that he ought indeed to begin to think about going home. As a creative artist he was now able to stand on his own feet. Money was more easily earned in America than in Europe, and it would be possible for him to return to Paris whenever he saw fit.

He did not, however, feel that it would be right or indeed possible for him to break off his relationship with Anne. Perhaps he really loved her. At any rate, now that their violent quarrels were becoming a dim memory, he grew daily more attached to her. He would have married her without hesitation if it had been possible, and even consulted a lawyer about obtaining a divorce for her. It seemed, however, that this would require both money and influence and Anne herself discouraged the notion.

"We are doing very well as it is," she said. "We are faithful to each other and we have all our interests in common. Why worry?"

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 Worry began for Edward with the return of the Ruggles family to Paris. He received a note from Alice begging him to call, and he said nothing about this note to Anne, and he called at the first opportunity. His motives in denying Anne his confidence were excellent. She had upon a previous occasion proved herself utterly unworthy of it, and he believed in peace even at the price of deception.

In the course of two weeks he saw Alice exactly five times. At those meetings nothing was said or done or thought which need have troubled Anne in the least. The barrier which Alice had erected between herself and Edward was still in place. They were old friends and no more. Still, Edward deceived Anne as carefully and elaborately as if he had been carrying on a base intrigue and his conscience did not trouble him. When a woman who has no grounds for being jealous persists in being jealous, she does not invite honesty or candor. Edward knew that if Anne knew that the Ruggles were in Paris and that he was seeing them, there would be a terrible row, and he could not believe that such a row would be of any particular benefit to anybody and therefore did his very best to avoid it.

Of course he could have seen Alice just once, and he could have told her why he ought not to

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 see her any more. But he balked at that. He found it impossible to tell an American girl he was living quite openly with a very jealous young woman to whom he was not married. Alice had always pretended to be immensely broad-minded, but he imagined that her broad-mindedness dealt with general rather than particular lapses, and he avoided the issue.

Alice did not seem to be enjoying her usually blissful good health. She had lost weight, color and energy. Europe had not agreed with her, and her parents were in a hurry to get her home. At last they were able to fix the date of their departure, and at that, as if she felt the opportunity might never occur again, Alice began to make a great to-do about seeing the whole of Paris that she had not yet seen. It was a large order and put Edward in an embarrassing situation. She insisted upon his going about with her, and Anne began to feel neglected.

One night Anne amused herself by shooting an arrow into the air. She said, "Why didn't you tell me that your friends the Ruggles were back in Paris?"

Edward's face answered for him. He had no other answer. The question had been too sudden and unexpected.

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 "You have seen her—that Alice—that old sweetheart of yours?"

Edward tried to speak with great calmness and dignity.

"They are very old friends of mine," he said. "It would be preposterous for me to refuse to see them. If you were reasonable I would have told: you. But you aren't reasonable and so I didn't. Yes. I've seen them a number of times. They are going back to America Saturday and I shall see them before they go."

"Oh, no, you won't!" said Anne. "But I shall. I shall go to see them and tell them what I think of them—you brute!"

The fit was upon her and she raged unmeasurably and injuriously. She must have been heard in the street below. Fellow lodgers stopped their various activities the better to listen.

Edward pleaded with her, protested his innocence and became by turns furious, pitiful and cold with disgust. She called him the most horrible names she could think of and she was able to think of worse names for Alice.

He tried to take her in his arms and soothe her. She pounded his face with her little fists and tried to scratch his eyes. Then suddenly, shouting at the top of her lungs that she was about to throw herself in the river, she rushed from the room

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 down the long flights of stairs and out into the Street of the Saintly Fathers. It was raining hard. Of course Edward didn't believe that she would drown herself, and he knew that the very best thing for him to do was to stand pat, as the poker players say, and wait until her rage cooled and she came whimpering back; but he dared not risk the one chance in a thousand that she would do what she had threatened. So with a heavy, resentful heart he followed her. When Anne perceived that she was followed, she chose to pretend that she was being followed to be hurt. So she began to scream, not too loud, and to run.

Edward caught up with her in a few strides and seized her by the arm. "For Heaven's sake behave yourself!" he cried.

Anne screamed and fought as if she was being feloniously attacked. She tore herself loose and darted off in the direction of the river.

Nothing in the whole of creation is half so reckless as a woman when she has made up her mind to punish and humiliate a man. No law of decency or reasonableness binds her. She does not care what she says or what she reveals or what she invents if only it will hurt.

So Anne, perceiving a thick-set burgher under an umbrella, who had paused to see what the run-

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 ning was all about, flung herself upon him and cried, "You're a man—save me!"

The burgher was middle-aged, respectable and wise. He shook her off and turned to Edward. "Drunk?" he asked laconically.

Anne's mind turned completely over. She shook her fist in Edward's face and said, "Are you going to stand there and let him say that I am drunk? And you call yourself a man!"

Edward had turned icy cold with shame and disgust. "I am going home," he said, "and you had better come too and behave yourself."

This time it was Anne who followed Edward. At almost every step she spoke injuries. The burgher, smiling under his umbrella, made off in the opposite direction.

Edward felt that his love for Anne was dead. He was wrong. When her anger had passed, she wept and made him believe that all the wicked things she had said and done and threatened were for love of him. In all the world she had only Edward. If he abandoned her, as indeed she thought he ought, she would have nothing, nobody.

She crept onto his knees and snuggled her face against his. She lifted his arm and put it around her. She fought against his coldness and his aloofness as if they had been two devils. She kissed

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 him and kissed him; but he would not kiss her back. He had made up his mind that all was over between them.

When Anne perceived that it was really a question of a final break, she begged for just one more chance.

"Don't you understand that if you leave me—I'll die? I wouldn't blame you a bit for leaving me after the way I've acted, but I'd die just the same. You don't know how much I love you."

Edward: "You have objectionable ways of showing it at times."

Anne: "But you don't want me to die—do you?"

Edward: "Of course I don't want you to die."

Anne (feeling that she has won a small victory): "I love you so much that there is nothing else in the world and I'm not able to see beyond you."

Edward: "If you really loved me, you'd trust me. Imagine me cutting up and making a fool of myself just because you wanted now and then to see some old friends of yours."

Anne: "But you're not jealous. Can I help it if I am jealous?"

Edward: "You don't even try."

Anne: "But I am going to try. I am never going to be bad any more. I swear it."

Edward (beginning to relent and to be a little

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 glad that there is a pretty girl on his knees): "If you are bad again—I'll leave you like a shot out of a gun. We have everything to make us happy and contented and we are going to have more and more—and you insist on spoiling it."

Anne: "But I see that too. And I won't be bad any more. Won't you forgive me?"

Edward: "Of course."

Anne: "Of course! That's not forgiving me. That's just words. I might be sitting on a dead man's knees. Your arm is like the arm of a corpse."

Edward tightened the corpse arm and she sighed happily and he kissed her. His kiss was cool. It was like the kiss of a parent for an erring child. Nevertheless Anne smiled to herself. She had won her battle. She would have been willing to stake her life that his next kiss would be warmer. It was.

Thereafter for a few days Anne was very good indeed. It seemed as if she had really determined to get the better of her crazy temper and foolish jealousy. And she made no further objection to Edward's seeing the Ruggles.

The night before they left Paris he had dinner with them and after dinner strolled with Alice in the Tuileries Gardens. She said she had something to tell him that she had not felt like telling

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 him before. He must have noticed that something had happened to her? That she was different? Yes, he had noticed that at once. And it had hurt him.

"Well," she said, "after you went away I was very unhappy and hurt. I had no right to be, but I was. I thought that if you really liked me, you wouldn't have found it so necessary to go to Paris to learn painting. I thought you could have studied in New York just as well. I tried to be very gay, just the same, and went to lots of parties and danced all night and flirted my silly head off . . . but I guess we never really did care about each other—did we?"

"Maybe not," said Edward defensively.

"Everywhere I went there was always a certain man. He made me believe that he was there because I was, and for no other reason."

Now although Edward loved Anne, this statement gave him a sharp twinge of jealousy. And he said rather sullenly: "I see."

Alice took no note of the sullen tone. "I got to care about him," she said simply. "I got so that I really cared."

There was a little time of silence.

"Do I know him?" Edward asked.

"Yes. You know him . . . Father and mother didn't approve one little bit. That's why we came

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 right of the proletariat in its fight against the exploiters. To strike against the workers' revolution is an act of hostility against the working class and is therefore a crime against Russian and international socialism. The strikes of the bourgeoisie and the backward sections of the workers against the proletariat and its authority will never be permitted by the trade unions. This was the first lesson of the October revolution.

As for the strike wave roused by the October revolution itself and directed against the bourgeoisie as a means of destroying the bourgeois apparatus, immediately the victory of the workers became apparent the leading organs of the trade unions called upon the workers to set the factories and works going immediately. In its manifesto of the 28th October, the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions declared that "strikes and demonstrations of workers in Petrograd only do harm to the working class," and proposed "that all economic and political strikes immediately cease and that everybody commence work and carry it on in complete order." The same happened in other towns and particularly in Moscow, where the Council of Trade Unions on October 28th called upon the workers to strike and to armed battle; but on November 4th, as soon as the struggle ended, it proposed to the workers immediately to end the strike called out by the active participation of the workers in the armed conflict, and to return to the factories and commence work.

The October revolution was victorious under the battle-cries of "peace," "land" and "workers' control," The demand for peace and land we can understand, but what is this "workers' control," which was one of the most popular demands on the eve of the October revolution? The idea of workers' control arose in the first days of the February revolution. It aimed at subjecting the whole private, commercial, industrial and financial apparatus to the control and influence of the labour organisations. It meant that the factory committees and the responsible union would keep under observation the state of the factories, the supply of raw material and the financial side of the businesses, and would control the quantity of materials that came in and went out of the factories. This was the first attempt in history to limit the independent authority of the employer in his undertaking.

The idea of workers' control arose directly out of the struggle of the workers with the bourgeoisie as a weapon against the deliberate attempts to bring the factories to a standstill and disorganise production for the purpose of defeating the proletariat by starvation, and thus retard the revolution. In practice, workers' control meant that the factory committee in


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 abroad. They wanted me to have a chance to get over it. That was fair enough, and I was willing to come. Because I knew that I wouldn't get over it—ever."

"Why don't your father and mother approve?" asked Edward.

"I don't think that you'll approve when you know who he is. I don't know that I do."

"You don't?"

"I don't think we'll be happy. I try to look at it from the cold-blooded point of view of an outsider. And when I manage to look at it that way—well, then I don't think that it is a bit wise or sensible. But then you see I'm really an insider, and not a bit cold-blooded . . ." She spoke now with sudden passion: "And I can't give him up. I won't give him up."

Many phrases rose to Edward's lips, but it seemed foolish to utter any of them. Finally he said: "I don't know what to say, Alice. I don't even know who the man is and—well, I wish it was just the very last thing that had ever happened, but you say it isn't, and I don't know what to say."

"The man is your brother James."

Edward's eyes grew round with astonishment. And then the pupils narrowed with pain and resentment. "You're joking."

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Rh most trifling details Now, I dare say—in this brief moment or two you've discovered any number of things about me.

Nothing of consequence, Mr. Chetwood—I have scarcely more than asked myself why you rushed off and sent that telegram in such a frightened hurry—what possible excuse you could have had for gulping down that tumbler of raw brandy at the "Lion's Head" on the way back—why your friend with the auburn hair left so suddenly by the terrace window—and what there can possibly be about the safe in the lower part of that desk to cause you such painful anxiety.

Ha! ha! very good! Very good indeed! If those things were only true now, I'd be wonderfully impressed. It would be absolutely

You'll excuse me, I trust.

(First a second's thought after reading, as he sees that is not observing him—then speaking). Ah—it's from—er—Miss Faulkner! Well really! She begs to be allowed to see—Mr. Holmes. She absolutely implores it! ( looks slowly up as though scarcely interested.) Well, I suppose I shall have to give way. (Turns to ) Judson!

Sir.

(emphasizing words in italics). Ask Miss Faulkner to come down to the drawing-room. Say that Mr. Holmes is waiting to see her.

Yes, sir. (Bows and exits upstairs.)

(trying to get on the free and easy style again). It's quite remarkable, upon my soul! May I ask—(turns toward )—if it's not an mpertinent question, what message you sent up that could have so aroused Miss Faulkner's desire to come down?

(looking up at innocently). Merely that if she wasn't down here in five minutes I'd go up.

(slightly knocked). Oh, that was it! (Going up into the alcove.)

Quite so. (Rises and takes his watch out.) And unless I am greatly mistaken I hear the young lady on the stairs. In which case she has a minute and a half to spare. (Moving down stage by piano—taking opportunity to look at keys, music, etc.)


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 She laid her hand lightly on his arm. He could feel that it was trembling slightly.

"Please don't say anything against him," she said. "It's happened. And it's not going to unhappen. And I'm going through with it for better or worse . . . and he loves me. He really does love me, and that's all that really matters—isn't it?"

Edward laid his hand warmly over hers. "But Alice, dear," he said, "you're not happy—and that is all that really matters."

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DWARD was so unhappy that he couldn't keep it to himself. Anne believed that he was unhappy because Alice had left Paris; her jealousy got the better of her good resolutions and she started to work herself into a fury.

Edward simply caught up his hat and started coldly from the room. He was in the mood to leave Anne forever and ever. But she followed him down all the stairs, abusing him in a voice that grew stronger and stronger as her passion rose.

He dared not go out into the street. She would have followed and made a laughing-stock of him. He turned and caught her by the wrist—firmly but not roughly. At once she began to scream that he was hurting her. "Kill me if you must," she screamed, "but don't torture me!"

He was helpless. He tried to dart past her and run back to the studio, but she grappled with him.

"Let go of me," he said savagely, "or I will hurt you."

There must have been a dangerous look in his eye, for she did let go and she lowered her voice.

"Why are you so cruel to me?" she said.

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 "I cruel to you! Oh, you fool! Why do you have to spoil everything?"

He went up the stairs slowly and wearily. She followed. When he reached the studio, he walked to a window and stood looking out. He was so miserable that he would almost have liked to throw himself out of the window and get his neck broken.

He even considered the notion.

Anne came and leaned against him. "I am sorry," she said. "I'll never do it again."

"I've heard that before."

"But this time I am serious. I mean it."

"When I am depressed and unhappy, instead of trying to help me, you stage a terrible scene. It is intolerable. You ought to be whipped."

"I know I ought. And if you really whipped me and hurt me it might make me behave. Women who are beaten occasionally are nearly always well behaved. I wish you would whip me."

"You know that I won't . . . I am going to tell you why I have been so depressed. Miss Ruggles is going to marry my brother, and she will be very unhappy."

"That is nothing to me."

"No. You have no heart where anyone but yourself is concerned. But I've known her ever

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 a since we were children. We have been like brother and sister, and I want her to be happy."

"You'd better marry her yourself."

"Are you going to start another scene? I advise you not to. My temper is pretty well lost, and that is the best advice I ever gave anyone."

For several hours both belligerents were sulky and miserable. Then came dinner and the amusing sights and sounds of a Latin Quarter restaurant to relieve the tension. Edward was always he ready to forget and forgive at the slightest excuse, and Anne for all her jealousies and bad temper was really in love with him, and they went to their home finally as affectionate and happy as a couple of turtle-doves.

When Edward had taken Anne into his life and heart he had not given much thought to the future or to his relationship with other people. He had already perceived the drawbacks of being tied to Anne, and of course the tempers were really horrible, but he perceived also that there were very real advantages. He was never lonely or bored, and life had a genuine domestic touch.

She was a thrifty young woman with a passion for mending. And she could make even a few broad copper pennies do a lot of work.

He wished sometimes that he had no other ties or obligations in the world. He was going to be

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 a very successful painter—and soon. Everybody said so. And it seemed a pity that he should have to have anything on his mind but the painting. In his day-dreams he pictured to himself a summer place with a fine big studio, outside of Paris, and a winter place—well, perhaps in Spain. He could earn enough money to make them very comfortable, and Anne would administer the money and cause the servants to work and the house and garden to be full of flowers. In time she would become so sure of Edward's single-hearted love and devotion that she would stop all her tempers and jealousies. He would paint her charming rosy body hundreds of times. All they would have to do would be to live happily and work happily and the world would be at their feet.

Meanwhile Edward's illustrations had impressed themselves upon certain editors in the United States, and he had so many orders that the execution of them interfered with his painting. He did not wish to be an illustrator; but it was wonderfully pleasant to earn so much money so easily and to have a growing bank account. And it was good training—doing things that you didn't especially want to do just as well as you could possibly do them.

One day he read in a stray copy of the Paris Herald that the ship Albacore was two weeks over-

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 due and that nothing had been heard of her. The Albacore was John's new ship, and Edward was so startled that his heart almost stopped beating. . . But then of course nothing could happen to John. John was an institution. He was the first institution in the family. But at the end' of a few hours Edward was so worried that he got Anne's permission—he always had to have that—to cross the river and visit the office of the Herald.

The Albacore was still missing.

Edward returned to Anne and told her all of his anxieties. He told her about John being married and having a child—but without any reference to James—and he said that he didn't know what was going to become of them if anything happened to John.

"And Anne, darling," he said, "if anything has happened to John, you'll just have to let me go back to New York to help straighten things out. And I ought to see my father, who is sick. I've got to go. You see that, don't you?"

But Anne, when she wished, could see more than the truth in any statement.

"You wish to go to New York," she said, "so that you can save that Alice from your brother James—so that you can save her for yourself."

"You know that I love you, and not anybody

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