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 MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER
 
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 OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS 
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
 
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 A HAZARD 
 OF NEW FORTUNES 
 
 BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY ALEXANDER HARVEY 
 
 TWO VOLUMES IN ONE 
 
 1ODER 
 
 
 xppc 
 
 @ 
 
 
 BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC. 
 
 PUBLISHERS .' . 
 
 .' . NEW YORK
 
 Printed in the 
 
 United States of America 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
 Three significant facts challenge our attention at the 
 outset in considering the work of William Dean Howells as 
 an author. In the first place he is a literary artist perhaps 
 one of the very greatest of literary artists. In the next place 
 he is the champion of realism against romanticism. Finally 
 he had no college education. He is a self-taught man. 
 
 In characterizing Howells as a literary artist we meai 
 that his work has beauty, precisely as the sculpture of the 
 Greeks has beauty. There is in his writing the "thrill" 
 derivable from contemplation of, say, a statue by Praxiteles, 
 or a beautiful woman. All of us are not sufficiently sophis- 
 ticated to account for the nature of this pleasure in reading 
 Howells. It is a secret of style and that secret has baffled 
 generations of great critics. Shakespeare had this secret, 
 and so had Virgil and Milton. The English language is a 
 more exquisite instrument because of the beauty of the man- 
 ner of Howells when he tells his story. This explains the 
 difficulty of indicating the greatest work of the author of 
 "A Hazard of New Fortunes." Every one of his novels has 
 this inexplicable charm of style. Nor must it be supposed 
 that it is a charm appreciable only by the initiated. A 
 stylist of true power can charm even the casual reader with 
 his manner. It is the spell of beauty. Who can say wh ; 
 there is in the spell of a woman's beauty, or in the spell of 
 a beauty exemplified in the work of Corot? There are 
 artists who can introduce this effect of beauty into what- 
 ever they achieve, be they poets, painters, sculptors, archi- 
 
 2041731
 
 x INTRODUCTION 
 
 tects or musicians. Howells is in that great company. The 
 proof is afforded by stories like "A Modern Instance," one 
 of the most beautifully constructed novels in the English 
 language. Beauty is not necessarily power in the sense that 
 Balzac has power. Balzac is at times strangely deficient in 
 beauty from the artistic standpoint. Compare his "Eugenie 
 Grandet" with "The Rise of Silas Lapham." In this tale 
 of the Boston merchant Howells has woven an exquisite 
 tapestry of words and phrases. 
 
 The realism for which Howells stands involves a rather 
 more complex literary idea than that of mere beauty. Real- 
 ism as a term in literary criticism is difficult to define in a 
 phrase that will pass muster with its friends. Speaking 
 generally, Howells stands for a reflection of what to him is 
 life. There must be a strict fidelity to facts of human ex- 
 perience. The reader must be vividly impressed with the 
 idea that the people of whom he reads in a novel are like 
 himself, people who say and do what he would or say in the 
 same circumstances, or, if not, that they are people of a 
 kind he has met, even if they be different from himself. This: 
 conception of the functions of the novelist implies an amaz- 
 ing capacity for observation of life, for the analysis of char- 
 acter. The "plot" of the story must exclude the element 
 of the purely imaginative, the fantastic, the wildly ex- 
 travagant in the "romantic" or unreal definition of those 
 terms. Life must not be spun out of the writer's head but 
 studied at first hand. The young person reading -Howells 
 is, therefore, never misled into a view of life based upon 
 dream elements. His head is never filled with "nonsense." 
 The young girl is not set to a task of reverie, with a fairy 
 prince in the background ready to save her from terrible 
 adventures with heavy villains. 
 
 It might be thought that Howells has given himself a hard 
 task. He takes the daily lives of American men and women, 
 some of them in Europe, and without varying a jot from 
 the actualities of their experience he proceeds about the busi-
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 ness of telling a story. The result is intensely exciting. 
 This is the miracle of the Howells' method. It is very dif- 
 ficult to convey to an "outsider" the nature of the excite- 
 ment afforded by reading Howells. A summary of his most 
 tremendous "plot" is like a record of a commonplace summer 
 in a conventional atmosphere. We listen to the talk of 
 people we have all met, saying the things we have all heard. 
 There is no marked eccentricity of character delineation in 
 the Dickens manner no Wilkins Micawbers come up out 
 of the void, no great "Mel" of the Meredithian order stuns 
 us. The young ladies are very young sometimes and very 
 ladylike in Howells. Their names are the names we all 
 know. Howells enters more closely into the details of 
 everyday life than most novelists care to do. The furnish- 
 ings of a room, the appearance of a hotel dining palace, the 
 swish of a dress these things concern him tremendously. 
 The physical aspect of a young man or of an old one will 
 concern him also. 
 
 Why do we revel in these commonplaces? One expla- 
 ,^ nation is undoubtedly the quality of the Howells' humor. 
 He is one of the most exquisite humorists in the language 
 so exquisite, indeed, that it is difficult to see how he could 
 be happily translated into any other language than his own. 
 There is no "horseplay" in the Howells' humor, no display 
 of qualities associated with the American name in this field. 
 It would be unfair to compare it with that of Jane Austen, 
 although Howells has all her delicacy, all her subtlety. He 
 has more action. The humor is not merely in the "slyness" 
 of the manner. Howells has a different attitude to life. The 
 humor of Jane Austen is feminine and Anglo-Saxon whereas 
 that of Howells is steeped in flavors that are Gallic. There 
 is something paradoxically French in the humor of Howells, 
 a quality almost Celtic in its gusto. Nevertheless, it is a 
 humor of the kind which most critics agree to call "quiet." 
 Still, he can be uproarious in his effect upon the reader. 
 This feature of his work emerges most conspicuously in his
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 dialogue. It has wit without extravagance of the forced 
 note, reality without dullness. It grows out of the situation 
 in which the characters find themselves. It is saturated with 
 the gloriously high spirits of youth, its freshness, its readi- 
 ness to see the bright light through whatever gloom. 
 
 The life story of Howells is very significant in the light 
 of the fact that his educational opportunities in the insti- 
 tutional meaning of the term were so few. He was born in 
 Ohio in a very small town as long ago as 1837. His father 
 was a printer in the professional sense of the word, that is 
 to say a man of unusual education and of wide culture, who 
 combined the functions of publisher and editor in the con- 
 duct of a paper that had won for itself local influence and 
 political importance. Howells learned to set type when he 
 was a mere boy. A genius so striking as his was sure to 
 illustrate the well-worn truth that nothing really worth learn- 
 ing can ever be taught. There is something ridiculous in the 
 notion that anyone could have "taught" William Dean How- 
 ells to "write." His entry upon the formal literary career 
 was preceded by a period of activity in his father's establish- 
 ment as typesetter and proofreader and then as reporter in 
 the legislature for a newspaper in Columbus. He had sent 
 his first contributions to The Atlantic Monthly before the 
 outbreak of our Civil War. They were poems as well as 
 essays. For writing the "campaign" life of Lincoln he was 
 made consul at Venice. 
 
 There never was a time when Howells did not study liter- 
 ature that of continental Europe as well as that of the 
 Anglo-Saxon world. His facility in the acquisition of Euro- 
 pean tongues was a matter of course in one with his sense 
 of words. He seems to have paid more attention to Italian 
 literature than to that of the French, but here a general 
 remark is dangerous. No writer gets the French spirit so 
 completely in all that relates to literature on its artistic 
 side. "My Literary Passions" is the most arresting revela- 
 tion of the unfolding of a writer's mind. He is Puritanical
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 as well as realistic here. Those tendencies accentuated 
 themselves when he returned to his native land, working 
 in New York and going to Boston later the period of his 
 service in The Atlantic Monthly. He reviewed, noted, 
 sketched, read, edited long before he won his way as a novel- 
 ist, long before he deemed himself equipped for the part. 
 The conception of the novelist's art formed by Howells ren- 
 ders a work of fiction by an inexperienced young man an 
 absurdity, a contradiction in terms. We need not wonder, 
 then, if his great novels are the work of his maturity. 
 
 Howells won for Boston its fame for "culture" with those 
 directly outside its influence. He created the Boston young 
 lady, famous for her doubts, her philosophy, her scruples 
 and her delicacies. The inner exclusive world of scholars 
 and professors, with its sprinkling of scholar merchants and 
 intellectual politicians knew of this position of Boston. How- 
 ells took the fame of the town in this detail into the street. 
 His Bostonians are known wherever the language they speak 
 has echoed. He rediscovered the Athens of America and 
 made it the theme of paragraphs in the newspapers. In 
 "fact, the possibilities of American life as dealt with in the 
 realistic manner were a surprise to the readers of novels. 
 It ought to be pointed out here, nevertheless, that Howells 
 brought to his realism a genius for style, a humor of the 
 rarest kind, a dramatic instinct that could make the most 
 of the slightest situation, a knowledge of the American char- 
 acter altogether unprecedented and an experience in the 
 circles he described which no other man of his generation 
 could be given credit for. This is a very important point 
 in estimating the theory of realism against romanticism upon 
 which his art is based. Had he been a mediocrity his real- 
 ism would have had no vogue. His imitators are for the 
 most part beneath contempt, being destitute of his rare 
 equipment. 
 
 It has been insisted that "A Hazard of New Fortunes" is 
 the most "important" of all the novels of Howells. The
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 coming of a new time is distinctly foreseen by the artist who 
 created this masterpiece. The somewhat smug and com- 
 placent America which told itself that all the problems of 
 "democracy" had been solved is here given a blow. It was 
 a great blow at the time. It might be thought a gentle tap 
 on the cheek in this age. The nation is in the first faint 
 breath of the spirit that was to bring Socialism to all man- 
 kind as the central economic idea of a world proletariat. 
 The things which the book is concerned with are common- 
 places now, but the picture of the time when they were 
 strange and new is vivid. We have the humor, the dialogue, 
 the insight into character, the dramatic instinct for the su- 
 preme moment, the style and the plot the combination of 
 many merits into a single effect which is the gift of Howells, 
 the power that makes "A Hazard of New Fortunes" a work 
 of art as well as a wonderful story. 
 
 ALEXANDER HARVEY.
 
 "We have the humor, the dialogue, the instinct into char- 
 acter, the dramatic instinct for the supreme moment, the 
 style and the plot the combination of many merits into a 
 single effect which is the gift of Howells, the power that 
 makes 'A Hazard of New Fortunes' a work of art as well 
 as a wonderful story."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES 
 VOL. I
 
 A HAZAED OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 PART FIRST. 
 I. 
 
 "Now, you think this thing over, March, and let 
 me know the last of next week," said Fulkerson. 
 He got up from the chair which he had been sitting 
 astride, with his face to its back, and tilting toward 
 March on its hind-legs, and came and rapped upon 
 his table with his thin bamboo stick. " What you 
 want to do is to get out of the insurance business, 
 anyway. You acknowledge that yourself. You 
 never liked it, and now it makes you sick ; in other 
 words, it 's killing you. You ain't an insurance man 
 by nature. You're a natural-born literary man; 
 and you 've been going against the grain. Now, I 
 offer you a chance to go with the grain. I don't say 
 you 're going to make your everlasting fortune, but 
 I'll give you a living salary, and if the thing suc- 
 ceeds you '11 share in its success. We '11 all share in 
 its success. That's the beauty of it. I tell you, 
 VOL. I. 1
 
 2 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 March, this is the greatest idea that has been struck 
 
 since " Fulkerson stopped and searched his 
 
 mind for a fit image "since the creation of man." 
 
 He put his leg up over the corner of March's 
 table and gave himself a sharp cut on the thigh, and 
 leaned forward to get the full effect of his words 
 upon his listener. 
 
 March had his hands clasped together behind his 
 head, and he took one of them down long enough 
 to put- his inkstand and mucilage-bottle out of 
 Fulkerson's way. After many years' experiment of 
 a moustache and whiskers, he now wore his grizzled 
 beard full, but cropped close ; it gave him a certain 
 grimness, corrected by the gentleness of his eyes. 
 
 "Some people don't think much of the creation 
 of man, nowadays. Why stop at that 1 Why not 
 say since the morning stars sang together ? " 
 
 "No, sir; no, sir! I don't want to claim too 
 much, and I draw the line at the creation of man. 
 I 'm satisfied with that But if you want to ring 
 the morning stars into the prospectus, all right; I 
 won't go back on you." 
 
 " But I don't understand why you 've set your 
 mind on me," March said. "I haven't had any 
 magazine experience, you know that ; and I haven't 
 seriously attempted to do anything in literature 
 since I was married. I gave up smoking and the 
 Muse together. I suppose I could still manage a 
 cigar, but I don't believe I could " 
 
 "Muse worth a cent." Fulkerson took the 
 thought out of his mouth and put it into his own
 
 A HAZARD OF NjBW FORTUNES. 3 
 
 words. " I know. Well, I don't want you to. 
 I don't care if you never write a line for the thing, 
 though you needn't reject anything of yours, if it 
 happens to be good, on that account. And I don't 
 want much experience in my editor ; rather not 
 have it. You told me, didn't you, that you used 
 to do some newspaper work before you settled 
 down?" 
 
 "Yes; I thought my lines were permanently cast 
 in those places once. It was more an accident than 
 anything else that I got into the insurance business. 
 I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my living 
 by something utterly different, I could come more 
 freshly to literature proper in my leisure." 
 
 " I see ; and you found the insurance business 
 too many for you. Well, anyway, you've always 
 had a hankering for the inkpots ; and the fact that 
 you first gave me the idea of this thing shows 
 that you've done more or less thinking about 
 magazines." 
 
 " Yes less." 
 
 "Well, all right. Now don't you be troubled. 
 jt know what I want, generally speaking, and in 
 this particular instance I want you. I might get 
 a man of more experience, but I should probably 
 get a man of more prejudice and self-conceit along 
 with him, and a man with a following of the literary 
 hangers-on that are sure to get round an editor 
 sooner or later. I want to start fair; and I've 
 found out in the syndicate business all the men that 
 are worth having. But they know me, and they
 
 4 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 don't know you, and that 's where we shall have the 
 pull on them. They won't be able to work the 
 thing. Don't you be anxious about the experience. 
 I Ve got experience enough of my own to run a 
 dozen editors. What I want is an editor who has 
 taste, and you Ve got it ; and conscience, and you 've 
 got it ; and horse-sense, and you Ve got that. And 
 I like you because you 're a Western man, and I 'm 
 another. I do cotton to a Western man when I 
 find him off East here, holding his own with the 
 best of 'em, and showing 'em that he 's just as much 
 civilised as they are. We both know what it is to 
 have our bright home in the setting sun ; heigh "? " 
 
 " I think we Western men who Ve come East are 
 apt to take ourselves a little too objectively, and to 
 feel ourselves rather more representative than we 
 need," March remarked. 
 
 Fulkerson was delighted. " You Ve hit it ! We 
 do ! We are ! " 
 
 " And as for holding my own, I 'm not very proud 
 of what I Ve done in that way ; it 's been very little 
 to hold. But I know what you mean, Fulkerson, 
 and I Ve felt the same thing myself ; it warmed me 
 toward you when we first met. I can't help suffus- 
 ing a little to any man when I hear that he was 
 born on the other side of the Alleghanies. It 's per- 
 fectly stupid. I despise the same thing when I see 
 it in Boston people." 
 
 Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers 
 and then the other, and twisted the end of each into 
 a point, which he left to untwine itself. He fixed
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 5 
 
 March with his little eyes, which had a curious 
 innocence in their cunning, and tapped the desk im- 
 mediately in front of him. " What I like about you 
 is that you 're broad in your sympathies. The first 
 time I saw you, that night on the Quebec boat, I said 
 to myself, ' There 's a man I want to know. There 's 
 a human being.' I was a little afraid of Mrs. 
 March and the children, but I felt at home with 
 you thoroughly domesticated before I passed a 
 word with you ; and when you spoke first, and 
 opened up with a joke over that fellow's tableful of 
 light literature and Indian moccasins and birch-bark 
 toy canoes and stereoscopic views, I knew that we 
 were brothers spiritual twins. I recognised the 
 Western style of fun, and I thought, when you said 
 you were from Boston, that it was some of the same. 
 But I see now that it 's being a cold fact, as far as 
 the last fifteen or twenty years count, is just so 
 much gain. You know both sections, and you can 
 make this thing go, from ocean to ocean." 
 
 "We might ring that into the prospectus, too," 
 March suggested, with a smile. " You might call 
 the thing From Sea to Sea. By the way, what are 
 you going to call it ? " 
 
 "I haven't decided yet; that's one of the things 
 I wanted to talk with you about. I had thought of 
 The Syndicate-, but it sounds kind of dry, and it 
 don't seem to cover the ground exactly. I should 
 like something that would express the co-operative 
 character of the thing ; but I don't know as I can 
 get it."
 
 6 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Might call it The Mutual" 
 
 " They 'd thiiik it was an insurance paper. No, 
 that won't do. But Mutual comes pretty near the 
 idea. If we could get something like that, it would 
 pique curiosity ; and then if we could get paragraphs 
 afloat explaining that the contributors were to be 
 paid according to the sales, it would be a first- 
 rate ad." 
 
 He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon 
 March, who suggested lazily, "You might call it 
 The Round-Robin. That would express the central 
 idea of irresponsibility. As I understand, every- 
 body is to share the profits and be exempt from the 
 losses. Or, if I'm wrong, and the reverse is true, 
 you might call it The Army of Martyrs. Come, that 
 sounds attractive, Fulkerson ! Or what do you 
 think of The Fifth Wheel 1 That would forestall the 
 criticism that there are too many literary periodicals 
 already. Or, if you want to put forward the idea of 
 complete independence, you could call it The Free 
 Lance ; or " 
 
 " Or The Hog on Ice either stand up or fall down, 
 you know," Fulkerson broke in coarsely. "But 
 we '11 leave the name of the magazine till we get the 
 editor. I see the poison 's beginning to work in 
 you, March; and if I had time, I'd leave the 
 result to time. But I haven't. I've got to know 
 inside of the next week To come down to business 
 with you, March, I shan't start this thing unless I 
 can get you to take hold of it." 
 
 He seemed to expect some acknowledgment, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 7 
 
 March said, " Well, that 's very nice of you, 
 Fulkerson." 
 
 "No, sir; no, sir! I've always liked you, and 
 wanted you, ever since we met that first night. I 
 had this thing inchoately in my mind then, when 
 I was telling you about the newspaper syndicate 
 business beautiful vision of a lot of literary fellows 
 breaking loose from the bondage of publishers, and 
 playing it alone " 
 
 " You might call it The Lone Hand ; that would 
 be attractive," March interrupted. " The whole 
 West would know what you meant." 
 
 Fulkerson was talking seriously, and March was 
 listening seriously ; but they both broke off and 
 laughed. Fulkerson got down off the table, and 
 made some turns about the room. It was growing 
 late ; the October sun had left the top of the tall 
 windows ; it was still clear day, but it would soon 
 be twilight ; they had been talking a long time. 
 Fulkerson came and stood with his little feet wide 
 apart, and bent his little lean, square face on March: 
 " See here ! How much do you get out of this thing 
 here, anyway ? " 
 
 " The insurance business 1 " March hesitated a 
 moment, and then said, with a certain . effort of re- 
 serve, "At present about three thousand/' He 
 looked up at Fulkerson with a glance, as if he 
 had a mind to enlarge upon the fact, and then 
 dropped his eyes without saying more. 
 
 Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much 
 or not, he said, ."Well, I'll give you thirty-five
 
 8 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 hundred. Come ! And your chances in the suc- 
 cess." 
 
 " We won't count the chances in the success. 
 And I don't believe thirty-five hundred would go 
 any further in New York than three thousand in 
 Boston." 
 
 " But you don't live on three thousand here 1 " 
 
 " No ; my wife has a little property." 
 
 " Well, she won't lose the income if you go to 
 New York. I suppose you pay six or seven hundred 
 a year for your house here. You can get plenty 
 of flats in New York for the same money ; and I 
 understand you can get all sorts of provisions for 
 less than you pay now three or four cents on the 
 pound. Come ! " 
 
 This was by no means the first talk they had had 
 about the matter; every three or four months during 
 the past two years the syndicate man had dropped 
 in upon March to air the scheme and to get his im- 
 pressions of it. This had happened so often that it 
 had come to be a sort of joke between them. But 
 now Fulkerson clearly meant business, and March 
 had a struggle to maintain himself in a firm poise of 
 refusal. 
 
 " I dare say it wouldn't or it needn't cost so 
 very much more, but I don't want to go to New 
 York ; or my wife doesn't. It 's the same thing." 
 
 " A good deal samer," Fulkerson admitted. 
 
 March did not quite like his candour, and he went 
 on with dignity. " It 's very natural she shouldn't. 
 She has always lived in Boston ; she 's attached to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 9 - 
 
 the place. Now, if you were going to start The 
 Fifth Wheel in Boston " 
 
 Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but 
 decidedly, " Wouldn't do. You might as well say 
 St. Louis or Cincinnati. There 's only one city that 
 belongs to the whole country, and that's New 
 York." 
 
 " Yes, I know," sighed March ; " and Boston be- 
 longs to the Bostonians ; but they like you to make 
 yourself at home while you 're visiting." 
 
 " If you '11 agree to make phrases like that, right 
 along, and get them into The Round-Robin some- 
 how, I '11 say four thousand," said Fulkerson. " You 
 think it over now, March. You talk it over with 
 Mrs. March ; I know you will, anyway ; and I 
 might as well make a virtue of advising you to 
 do it. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you 
 let me know before next Saturday what you've 
 decided." 
 
 March shut down the rolling top of his desk in 
 the corner of the room, and walked Fulkerson out 
 before him. It was so late that the last of the chore- 
 women who washed down the marble halls and stairs 
 of the great building had wrung out her floor-cloth 
 and departed, leaving spotless stone and a clean 
 damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her. 
 
 " Couldn't offer you such swell quarters in New 
 York, March," Fulkerson said as he went tack-tack- 
 ing down the steps with his small boot-heels. " But 
 I Ve got my eye on a little house round in West 
 Eleventh Street, that I 'm going to fit up for my 
 1*
 
 10 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 bachelor's hall in the third story, and adapt for The 
 Lone Hand in the first and second, if this thing goes 
 through ; and I guess we '11 be pretty comfortable. 
 It's right on the Sand Strip no malaria of any 
 kind." 
 
 " I don't know that I 'm going to share its salu- 
 brity with you yet," March sighed in an obvious 
 travail which gave Fulkerson hopes. 
 
 " Oh yes, you are," he coaxed. " Now, you talk 
 it over with your wife. You give her a fair, unpre- 
 judiced chance at the thing on its merits, and I 'm 
 very much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesn't 
 tell you to go in and win. We 're bound to win ! " 
 
 They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice 
 beetling like a granite crag above them, with the 
 stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance fore- 
 shortened in the bas-relief overhead. March ab- 
 sently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange 
 after so many years' familiarity, and so was the well- 
 known street in its Saturday-evening solitude. He 
 asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it 
 were an omen of what was to be. But he only said 
 musingly, " A fortnightly. You know that didn't 
 work in England. The Fortnightly is published once 
 a month now." 
 
 " It works in France," Fulkerson retorted. " The 
 Revue des Deux Mondes is still published twice a 
 month. I guess we can make it work in America 
 with illustrations." 
 
 " Going to have illustrations ? " 
 
 " My dear boy ! What are you giving me 1 Do
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 11 
 
 I look like the sort of lunatic who would start a 
 thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century with- 
 out illustrations 1 Come off ! " 
 
 " Ah, that complicates it ! I don't know anything 
 about art." March's look of discouragement con- 
 fessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him. 
 
 " I don't want you to ! " Fulkerson retorted. 
 " Don't you suppose I shall have an art man 1 " 
 
 " And will they the artists work at a reduced 
 rate too, like the writers, with the hopes of a share 
 in the success 1 " 
 
 " Of course they will ! And if I want any par- 
 ticular man, for a card, I '11 pay him big money 
 besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches 
 on my own terms. You '11 see ! They '11 pour in ! " 
 
 "Look here, Fulkerson," said March, "you'd 
 better call this fortnightly of yours The Madness of 
 the Half -Moon ; or Bedlam, Broke Loose wouldn't be 
 bad ! Why do you throw away all your hard earn- 
 ings on such a crazy venture ? Don't do it ! " The 
 kindness which March had always felt, in spite of 
 his wife's first misgivings and reservations, for the 
 meny, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature 
 trembled in his voice. They had both formed a 
 friendship for Fulkerson during the week they were 
 together in Quebec. When he was not working the 
 newspapers there, he went about with them over the 
 familiar ground they were showing their children, 
 and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as 
 very entertaining about it all. The children liked 
 him, too ; when they got the clew to his intention,
 
 12 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 and found that he was not quite serious in many of 
 the things he said, they thought he was great fun. 
 They were always glad when their father brought 
 him home on the occasion of Fulkerson's visits to 
 Boston ; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospi- 
 tality, welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of 
 his admiration for her husband. He had a way of 
 treating March with deference, as an older and abler 
 man, and of qualifying the freedom he used toward 
 every one with an implication that March tolerated 
 it voluntarily, which she thought very sweet, and 
 even refined. 
 
 "Ah, now you're talking like a man and a 
 brother " said Fulkerson. "Why, March, old 
 man, do you suppose I 'd come on here and try to 
 talk you into this thing if I wasn't morally, if I 
 wasn't perfectly, sure of success ? There isn't any 
 if or and about it. I know my ground, every inch ; 
 and I don't stand alone on it," he added, with a 
 significance which did not escape March. " When 
 you've made up your mind, I can give you the 
 proof ; but I 'm not at liberty now to say anything 
 more. I tell you it 's going to be a triumphal march 
 from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for the 
 procession along the whole line. All you 've got to 
 do is to fall in." He stretched out his hand to 
 March. " You let me know as soon as you can." 
 
 March deferred taking his hand till he could ask, 
 " Where are you going 1 " 
 
 " Parker House. Take the half-past ten for Xew 
 York to-night."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 13 
 
 "I thought I might walk your way." March 
 looked at his watch. " But I shouldn't have time. 
 Good-bye ! " 
 
 He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they 
 exchanged a cordial pressure. Fulkerson started 
 off at a quick, light pace. Half a block away he 
 stopped, turned round, and seeing March still stand- 
 ing where he had left him, he called back joyously, 
 " I Ve got the name ! " 
 
 What ? " 
 
 " Every Other Week? . 
 
 It isn't bad." 
 
 Ta-ta 1 "
 
 IL 
 
 ALL the way up to the South End March pro- 
 longed his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in 
 Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump 
 refusal to go to New York on any terms. His 
 daughter Bella was lying in wait for him in the hall, 
 and she threw her arms round his neck with the 
 exuberance of her fourteen years, and with some- 
 thing of the histrionic intention of her sex. He 
 pressed on, with her clinging about him, to the 
 library, and, in the glow of his decision against 
 Fulkerson, kissed his wife, where she sat by the 
 study lamp reading the Transcript through her first 
 pair of eye-glasses : it was agreed in the family that 
 she looked distinguished in them, or at any rate 
 cultivated. She took them off to give him a glance 
 of question, and their son Tom looked up from his 
 book for a moment ; he was in his last year at the 
 high-school, and was preparing for Harvard. 
 
 "I didn't get away from the office till half-past 
 five," March explained to his wife's glance, "and 
 then I walked. I suppose dinner's waiting. I'm 
 sorry, but I won't do it any more." 
 
 At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who
 
 A HAZAUD OF NEW FORTUNES. 15 
 
 babbled at him with a voluble pertness, which her 
 brother had often advised her parents to check in 
 her, unless they wanted her to be universally 
 despised. 
 
 " Papa, "she shouted, at last, "you 're not listening !" 
 
 As soon as possible his wife told the children they 
 might be excused. Then she asked, "What is it, 
 Basil 1 " 
 
 " What is what 1 " he retorted, with a specious 
 brightness that did not avail. 
 
 " What is on your mind I " 
 
 " How do you know there 's anything 1 " 
 
 " Your kissing me so when you came in, for one 
 thing." 
 
 "Don't I always kiss you when I come in ? " 
 
 " Not now. I suppose it isn't necessary any more. 
 Cela va sans baiser." 
 
 " Yes, I guess it 's so ; we get along without the 
 symbolism now." He stopped, but she knew that 
 he had not finished. 
 
 " Is it about your business 1 Have they done 
 anything more." 
 
 " No ; I 'm still in the dark. I don't know 
 whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they 
 ever did. But I wasn't thinking about that. Ful- 
 kerson has been to see me again." 
 
 " Fulkerson 1 " She brightened at the name, and 
 March smiled too. " Why didn't you bring him to 
 dinner 1 " 
 
 " I wanted to talk with you Then you do like 
 him?"
 
 16 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " What has that got to do with it, Basil 1 " 
 
 " Nothing ! nothing ! That is, he was boring 
 away about that scheme of his again. He 's got it 
 into definite shape at last." 
 
 " What shape 1 " 
 
 March outlined it for her, and his wife seized 
 its main features with the intuitive sense of affairs 
 which makes women such good business-men, when 
 they will let it. 
 
 " It sounds perfectly crazy," she said finally. 
 " But it mayn't be. The only thing I didn't like 
 about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to 
 chance things. But what have you got to do with 
 it?" 
 
 " What have I got to do with it ? " March toyed 
 with the delay the question gave him ; then he said, 
 with a sort of deprecatory laugh, " It seems that 
 Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met 
 that night on the Quebec boat. I opened up pretty 
 freely to him, as you do to a man you never expect 
 to see again, and when I found he was in that news- 
 paper syndicate business, I told him about my early 
 literary ambitions " 
 
 " You can't say that / ever discouraged them, 
 Basil," his wife put in. "I should have been will- 
 ing, any time, to give up everything for them." 
 
 " Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant 
 idea to him. Perhaps I did; I don't remember. 
 When he told me about his supplying literature 
 to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says 
 I asked, ' Why not apply the principle of co-opera-
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 17 
 
 tion to a magazine, and run it in the interest of the 
 contributors 1 ' and that set him to thinking, and he 
 thought out his plan of a periodical, which should 
 pay authors and artists a low price outright for their 
 work, and give them a chance of the profits in the 
 way of a percentage. After all, it isn't so very dif- 
 ferent from the chances an author takes when he 
 publishes a book. And Fulkerson thinks that the 
 novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity, 
 if it didn't arouse public sympathy. And the long 
 and short of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help 
 edit it." 
 
 " To edit it ? " His wife caught her breath, and 
 she took a little time to realise the fact, while she 
 stared hard at her husband to make sure he was not 
 joking. 
 
 " Yes. He says he owes it all to me ; that I in- 
 vented the idea the germ the microbe." 
 
 His wife had now realised the fact, at least in a 
 degree that excluded trifling with it. " That is very 
 honourable of Mr. Fulkerson ; and if he owes it to 
 you, it was the least he could do." Having recog- 
 nised her husband's claim to the honour done him, 
 she began to kindle with a sense of the honour 
 itself, and the value of the opportunity. "It's a 
 very high compliment to you, Basil ; a very high 
 compliment. And you could give up this wretched 
 insurance business that you 've always hated so, and 
 that 's making you so unhappy now that you think 
 they 're going to take it from you. Give it up, and 
 take Mr. Fulkerson's offer ! It 's a perfect inter'
 
 18 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 position, coming just at this time ! Why, do it ! 
 Mercy!" she suddenly arrested herself, "he wouldn't 
 expect you to get along on the possible profits 1 " 
 Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion. 
 
 March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give 
 himself the pleasure of the sensation he meant to 
 give her. " If I '11 make striking phrases for it and 
 edit it too, he '11 give me four thousand dollars." 
 
 He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands 
 deep into his pockets, and watched his wife's face, 
 luminous with the emotions that flashed through 
 her mind doubt, joy, anxiety. 
 
 " Basil ! You don't mean it ! Why, take it ! 
 Take it instantly \ Oh, what a thing to happen ! 
 Oh, what luck ! But you deserve it, if you first 
 suggested it. What an escape, what a triumph over 
 all those hateful insurance people ! Basil, I 'm 
 afraid he '11 change his mind ! You ought to have 
 accepted on the spot. You might have known I 
 would approve, and you could so easily have taken 
 it back if I didn't. Telegraph him now ! Run right 
 out with the despatch ! Or we can send Tom ! " 
 
 In these imperatives of Mrs. March's there was 
 always much of the conditional. She meant that 
 he should do what she said, if it were entirely right ; 
 and she never meant to be considered as having 
 urged him. 
 
 "And suppose his enterprise went wrong?" her 
 husband suggested. 
 
 "It won't go wrong. Hasn't he made a success 
 of his syndicate ? " 
 
 "He says so yes."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW I ORTUNES. 19 
 
 " Very well, then, it stands to reason that he '11 
 succeed in this, too. He wouldn't undertake it if 
 he didn't know it would succeed ; he must have 
 capital." 
 
 "It will take a great deal to get such a thing 
 going ; and even if he 's got an Angel behind 
 him " 
 
 She caught at the word : " An Angel ? " 
 
 " It 's what the theatrical people call a financial 
 backer. He dropped a hint oi something of that 
 kind." 
 
 "Of course, he's got an Angel," said his wife, 
 promptly adopting the word. " And even if he 
 hadn't, still, Basil, I should be willing to have you 
 risk it. The risk isn't so great, is it? We 
 shouldn't be ruined if it failed altogether. With 
 our stocks we have two thousand a year, anyway, 
 and we could pinch through on that till you got 
 into some other business afterward, especially if 
 we 'd saved something out of your salary while it 
 lasted. Basil, I want you to trj T it ! I know it will 
 give you a new lease of life to have a congenial 
 occupation." March laughed, bit his wife persisted. 
 " I 'm all for your trying it, Basil ; indeed I am. 
 If it 's an experiment, you can give it up." 
 
 "It can give me up, too." 
 
 " Oh, nonsense ! I guess theie 's not much fear of 
 that. Now, I want you to telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, 
 so that he '11 find the despatch waiting for him 
 when he gets to New York. I '11 take the whole 
 responsibility, Basil, and I '11 risk all the conse- 
 quences."
 
 III. 
 
 MARCH'S face had sobered more and more as she 
 followed one hopeful burst with another, and now 
 it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smile, 
 and said : " There 's a little condition attached. 
 Where did you suppose it was to be published ?" 
 
 " Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should 
 it be published 1 " 
 
 She looked at him for the intention of his question 
 so searchingly that he quite gave up the attempt to 
 be gay about it. " No," he said gravely, " it 's to 
 be published in New York." 
 
 She fell back in her chair. " In New York ? " 
 She leaned forward over the table toward him, as if 
 to make sure that she heard aright, and said, with 
 all the keen reproach that he could have expected, 
 " In New York, Basil ! Oh, how could you have let 
 me go on ? " 
 
 He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning, " I 
 oughtn't to have done it, but I got started wrong. 
 I couldn't help putting the best foot forward at first 
 or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I 
 didn't know that you would take so much to the 
 general enterprise, or else I should have mentioned
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 21 
 
 the New York condition at once ; but of course that 
 puts an end to it." 
 
 "Oh, of course," she assented sadly. "We 
 couldn't go to New York." 
 
 " No, I know that," he said ; and with this a per- 
 verse desire to tempt her to the impossibility awoke 
 in him, though he was really quite cold about the 
 affair himself now. " Fulkerson thought we could 
 get a nice flat in New York for about what the 
 interest and taxes came to here, and provisions are 
 cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my 
 time of life. If I could have been caught younger, 
 I might- have been inured to New York, but I don't 
 believe I could stand it now." 
 
 " How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil ! 
 You are young enough to try anything anywhere ; 
 but you know I don't like New York. I don't 
 approve of it. It 's so big, and so hideous ! Of 
 course I shouldn't mind that ; but I 've always lived 
 in Boston, and the children were born and have all 
 their friendships and associations here." She added, 
 with the helplessness that discredited her good-sense 
 and did her injustice, " I have just got them both 
 into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti's, and you 
 know how difficult that is." 
 
 March could not fail to take advantage of an occa- 
 sion like this. " Well, that alone ought to settle it. 
 Under the circumstances it would be flying in the 
 face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact 
 of a brilliant opening like that offered me on The 
 Microbe, and the halcyon future which Fulkerson
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 promises if we '11 come to New York, is as dust in 
 the balance against the advantages of the Friday 
 afternoon class." 
 
 " Basil," she appealed solemnly, " have I ever in- 
 terfered with your career ?" 
 
 " I never had any for you to interfere with, my 
 dear." 
 
 " Basil ! Haven't I always had faith in you ? 
 And don't you suppose that if I thought it would 
 really be for your advancement, I would go to New 
 York or anywhere with you V 
 
 " No, my dear, I don't," he teased. " If it would 
 be for my salvation, yes, perhaps ; but not short of 
 that ; and I should have to prove by a cloud of wit- 
 nesses that it would I don't blame you. I wasn't 
 born in Boston, but I understand how you feel. 
 And really, my deai," he added, without irony, "I 
 never seriously thought of asking you to go to New 
 York. I was dazzle 1 by Fulkerson's offer, I J ll own 
 that ; but his choice of me as editor sapped my con- 
 fidence in him." 
 
 " I don't like to hear you say that, Basil," she en- 
 treated. 
 
 "Well, of course there were mitigating circum- 
 stances. I could se) that Fulkerson meant to keep 
 the whip-hand himself, and that was reassuring. 
 And besides, if the Reciprocity Life should happen 
 not to want my services any longer, it wouldn't be 
 quite like giving up a certainty ; though, as a matter 
 of business, I let Fulkerson get that impression ; I 
 felt rather sneaking to do it. But, if the worst
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 23 
 
 comes to the worst, I can look about for something 
 to do in Boston ; and, anyhow, people don't starve 
 on two thousand a year, though it 's convenient to 
 have five. The fact is, I'm too old to change so 
 radically. If you don't like my saying that, then 
 you are, Isabel, and so are the children. I've no 
 right to take them from the home we 've made, and 
 to change the whole course of their lives, unless I 
 can assure them of something, and I can't assure 
 them of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and 
 it 's certainly prettier than New York. I always feel 
 a little proud of hailing from Boston ; my pleasure 
 in the place mounts the further I get away from it. 
 But I do appreciate it, my dear, I 've no more desire 
 to leave it than you have. You may be sure that if 
 you don't want to take the children out of the 
 Friday afternoon class, I don't want to leave my 
 library here, and all the ways I 've got set in. We '11 
 keep on. Very likely the company won't supplant 
 me, and if it does, and Watkins gets the place, 
 he'll give me a subordinate position of some sort. 
 Cheer up, Isabel ! I have put Satan and his angel, 
 Fulkerson, behind me, and it 's all right. Let 's go 
 in to the children." 
 
 He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat 
 in a growing distraction, and lifted her by the waist 
 from her chair. 
 
 She sighed deeply. " Shall we tell the children 
 about it ? " 
 
 " No. What 's the use, now ? " 
 
 " There wouldn't be any," she assented. When 
 C
 
 24 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 they entered the family room, where the boy and 
 girl sat on either side of the lamp working out the 
 lessons for Monday which they had left over from 
 the day before, she asked, " Children, how would 
 you like to live in New York 1 " 
 
 Bella made haste to get in her word first. "And 
 give up the Friday afternoon class ? " she wailed. 
 
 Tom growled from his book, without lifting his 
 eyes, "I shouldn't want to go to Columbia. They 
 haven't got any dormitories, and you have to board 
 round anywhere. Are you going to New York 1 " 
 He now deigned to look up at his father. 
 
 " No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me 
 against it. Your perspective shows the affair in 
 its true proportions. I had an offer to go to New 
 York, but I Ve refused it."
 
 IV. 
 
 MARCH'S irony fell harmless from the children's 
 preoccupation with their own affairs, but he knew 
 that his wife felt it, and this added to the bitterness 
 which prompted it. He blamed her for letting her 
 provincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulker- 
 son's offer quite as much as if he had otherwise 
 entirely wished to accept it. His world, like most 
 worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He 
 was no richer than at the beginning, though in 
 marrying he had given up some tastes, some prefer- 
 ences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging 
 them later, with larger means and larger leisure. 
 His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her 
 pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he 
 had renounced ; but she had acquiesced, and they 
 had been very happy together. That is to say, they 
 made up their quarrels or ignored them. 
 
 They often accused each other of being selfish 
 and indifferent, but she knew that he would always 
 sacrifice himself for her and the children ; and he, 
 on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly 
 trusted in her. They had grown practically tolerant 
 of each other's disagreeable traits ; and the danger 
 VOL. I. 2
 
 26 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that really threatened them was that they should 
 grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with 
 each other. They were not sentimental, they were 
 rather matter-of-fact in their motives ; but they 
 had both a sort of humorous fondness for senti- 
 mentality. They liked to play with the romantic, 
 from the safe vantage-ground of their real practi- 
 cality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. 
 Their peculiar point of view separated them from 
 most other people, with whom their means of self- 
 comparison were not so good since their marriage as 
 before. Then they had travelled and seen much of 
 the world, and they had formed tastes which they 
 had not always been able to indulge, but of which 
 they felt that the possession reflected distinction on 
 them. It enabled them to look down upon those 
 who were without such tastes ; but they were not 
 ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much 
 with contempt as with amusement. In their un- 
 fashionable neighbourhood they had the fame of 
 being not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapt 
 up in themselves and their children. 
 
 Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, 
 and Mr. March even more so, among the simpler 
 folk around them. Their house had some good 
 pictures, which her aunt had brought home from 
 Europe in more affluent days, and it abounded in 
 books on which he spent more than he ought 
 They had beautified it in every way, and had un- 
 consciously taken credit to themselves for it. They 
 felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how perfectly it
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 27 
 
 fitted their lives and their children's, and they 
 believed that somehow it expressed their characters 
 that it was like them. They went out very little ; 
 she remained shut up in its refinement, working the 
 good of her own'; and he went to his business, and 
 hurried back to forget it, and dream his dream of 
 intellectual achievement in the flattering atmosphere 
 of her sympathy. He could not conceal from him- 
 self that his divided life was somewhat like Charles 
 Lamb's, and there were times when, as he had ex- 
 pressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its division 
 was favourable to the freshness of his interest in 
 literature. It certainly kept it a high privilege, a 
 sacred refuge. Now and then he wrote something, 
 and got it printed after long delays, and when they 
 met on the St. Lawrence, Fulkerson had some of 
 March's verses in his pocket-book, which he had 
 cut out of a stray newspaper and carried about for 
 years, because they pleased his fancy so much ; they 
 formed an immediate bond of union between the 
 men when their authorship was traced and owned, 
 and this gave a pretty colour of romance to their 
 acquaintance. But for the most part, March was 
 satisfied to read. He was proud of reading criti- 
 cally, and he kept in the current of literary interests 
 and controversies. It all seemed to him, and to his 
 wife at second-hand, very meritorious ; he could not 
 help contrasting his life and its inner elegance with 
 that of other men who had no such resources. He 
 thought that he was not arrogant about it, because 
 he did full justice to the good qualities of those
 
 28 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 other people ; he congratulated himself upon the 
 democratic instincts which enabled him to do this ; 
 and neither he nor his wife supposed that they were 
 selfish persons. On the contrary, they were very 
 sympathetic ; there was no good cause that they did 
 not wish well ; they had a generous scorn of all 
 kinds of narrow-heartedness ; if it had ever come 
 into their way to sacrifice themselves for others, 
 they thought they would have done so, but they 
 never asked 1 why it had not come in their way. 
 They were very gentle and kind, even when most 
 elusive ; and they taught their children to loathe all 
 manner of social cruelty. March was of so watchful 
 a conscience in some respects that he denied himself 
 the pensive pleasure of lapsing into the melancholy 
 of unfulfilled aspirations ; but he did not see that if 
 he had abandoned them, it had been for what he 
 held dearer ; generally he felt as if he had turned 
 from them with a high altruistic aim. The practical 
 expression of his life was that it was enough to 
 provide well for his family; to have cultivated 
 tastes, and to gratify them to the extent of his 
 means ; to be rather distinguished, even in the 
 simplification of his desires. He believed, and his 
 wife believed, that if the time ever came when he 
 really wished to make a sacrifice to the fulfilment of 
 the aspirations so long postponed, she would be 
 ready to join with heart and hand. 
 
 When he went to her room from his library, 
 where she left him the whole evening with the 
 children, he found her before the glass thoughtfully
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 29 
 
 removing the first dismantling pin from her back 
 hair. 
 
 " I can't help feeling," she grieved into the mirror, 
 " that it 's I who keep you from accepting that offer. 
 I know it is ! I could go West with you, or into a 
 new country anywhere ; but New York terrifies 
 me. J don't like New York, I never did ; it dis- 
 heartens and distracts me ; I can't find myself in it; 
 I shouldn't know how to shop. I know I 'm foolish 
 and narrow and provincial," she went on ; " but I 
 could never have any inner quiet in New York ; I 
 couldn't live in the spirit there. I suppose people 
 do. It can't be that all those millions " 
 
 " Oh, not so bad as that ! " March interposed, 
 laughing. " There aren't quite two." 
 
 "I thought there were four or five. Well, no 
 matter. You see what I am, Basil. I 'm terribly 
 limited. I couldn't make my sympathies go round 
 two million people; I should be wretched. I sup- 
 pose I'm standing in the way of your highest 
 interest, but I can't help it. We took each other 
 for better or worse, and you must try to bear with 
 me " She broke off and began to cry. 
 
 " Stop it ! " shouted March. " I tell you I never 
 cared anything for Fulkerson's scheme or enter- 
 tained it seriously, and I shouldn't, if he 'd pro- 
 posed to carry it out in Boston." This was not 
 quite true : but in the retrospect it seemed suffi- 
 ciently so for the purposes of argument. "Don't 
 eay another word about it. The thing 's over now, 
 and I don't want to think of it any more. We
 
 30 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 couldn't change its nature if we talked all night. 
 But I want you to understand that it isn't your 
 limitations that are in the way. It's mine. I 
 shouldn't have the courage to take such a place ; 
 I don't think I 'm fit for it ; and that 's the long 
 and short of it." 
 
 "Oh, you don't know how it hurts me to haye you 
 say that, Basil." 
 
 The next morning, as they sat together at break- 
 fast, without the children, whom they let lie late on 
 Sunday, Mrs. March said to her husband, silent over 
 his fish-balls and baked beans : " We will go to New 
 York. I Ve decided it." 
 
 " Well, it takes two to decide that," March re- 
 torted. " We are not going to New York." 
 
 " Yes, we are. I 've thought it out. Now, listen." 
 
 " Oh, I 'm willing to listen," he consented airily. 
 
 " You Ve always wanted to get out of the insur- 
 ance business, and now with that fear of being 
 turned out which you have, you mustn't neglect 
 this offer. I suppose it has its risks, but it's a 
 risk keeping on as we are; and perhaps you will 
 make a great success of it. I do want you to try, 
 Basil. If I could once feel that you had fairly seen 
 what you could do in literature, I should die happy." 
 
 " Not immediately after, I hope," he suggested, 
 taking the second cup of coffee she had been pour- 
 ing out for him. " And Boston ? " 
 
 "We needn't make a complete break. We can 
 keep this place for the present, anyway ; we could
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 31 
 
 let it for the winter, and come back in the summer 
 next year. It would be change enough from New 
 York." 
 
 " Fulkerson and I hadn't got as far as to talk of a 
 vacation." 
 
 " No matter. The children and I could come. 
 And if you didn't like New York, or the enterprise 
 failed, you could get into something in Boston 
 again ; and we have enough to live on till you did. 
 Yes, Basil, I 'm going." 
 
 " I can see by the way your chin trembles that 
 nothing could stop you. You may go to New York 
 if you wsh, Isabel, but I shall stay here." 
 
 " Be serious, Basil. I 'm in earnest." 
 
 " Serious 1 If I were any more serious I should 
 shed tears. Come, my dear, I know what you mean, 
 and if I had my heart set on this thing Fulkerson 
 always calls it 'this thing' I would cheerfully 
 accept any sacrifice you could make to it. But I 'd 
 rather not offer you up on a shrine I don't feel any 
 particular faith in. I 'm very comfortable where I 
 am ; that is, I know just where the pinch comes, and 
 if it comes harder, why, I 've got used to bearing that 
 kind of pinch. I 'm too old to change pinches." 
 
 " Now, that does decide me." 
 
 "It decides me, too." 
 
 "I will take all the. responsibility, Basil," she 
 pleaded. 
 
 " Oh yes ; but you '11 hand it back to me as soon 
 as you've carried your point with it. There's 
 nothing mean about you, Isabel, where responsibility
 
 32 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 is concerned. No; if I do this thing Fulkerson 
 again ! I can't get away from ' this thing ' ; it 's 
 ominous I must do it because I want to do it, and 
 not because you wish that you wanted me to do it. 
 I understand your position, Isabel, and that you 're 
 really acting from a generous impulse, but there's 
 nothing so precarious at our time of life as a generous 
 impulse. When we were younger we could stand 
 it ; we could give way to it and take the consequences. 
 But now we can't bear it. We must act from cold 
 reason even in the ardour of self-sacrifice." 
 
 " Oh, as if you did that ! " his wife retorted. 
 
 " Is that any cause why you shouldn't ? " She 
 could not say that it was, and he went on trium- 
 phantly : " No, I won't take you away from the 
 only safe place on the planet, and plunge you into 
 the most perilous, and then have you say in your> 
 revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from 
 the first, and you gave way because you saw I had 
 my heart set on it." He supposed he was treating 
 the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter 
 between husband and wife there is always much 
 more than the joking. March had seen some pretty 
 feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once 
 charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of 
 middle-age, which were very like those of less 
 interesting older women. . The sight moved him 
 with a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hinder- 
 ing and vexatious. 
 
 She now retorted that if he did not choose to take 
 her at her word he need not, but that whatever he
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 33 
 
 did she should have nothing to reproach herself with ; 
 and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped 
 him into anything. 
 
 " What do you^mean by trapping ? " he demanded. 
 
 " I don't know what you call it," she answered ; 
 " but when you get me to commit myself to a thing 
 by leaving out the most essential point, / call it 
 trapping." 
 
 " I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I 
 got you to favour Fulkerson's scheme, and then 
 sprung New York on you. I don't suppose you 
 do, though. But I guess we won't talk about it 
 any more." 
 
 He went out for a long walk, and she went to 
 her room. They lunched silently together in the 
 presence of their children, who knew that they 
 had been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent 
 to the fact, as children get to be in such cases ; 
 nature defends their youth, and the unhappiness 
 which they behold does not infect them. In the 
 evening, after the boy and girl had gone to bed, 
 the father and mother resumed their talk. He 
 would have liked to take it up at the point from 
 which it wandered into hostilities, for he felt ifc 
 lamentable that a matter which so seriously con- 
 cerned them should be confused in the fumes of 
 senseless anger ; and he was willing to make a tacit 
 acknowledgment of his own error by recurring to 
 the question, but she would not be content with 
 this, and he had to concede explicitly to her weak- 
 ness that she really meant it when she had asked 
 2*
 
 34 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 him to accept Fulkerson's offer. He said he knew 
 that ; and he began soberly to talk over their pro- 
 spects in the event of their going to New York. 
 
 " Oh, I see you are going ! " she % twitted. 
 
 " I 'm going to stay," he answered, " and let them 
 turn me out of my agency here ! " and in this bitter- 
 ness their talk ended.
 
 V. 
 
 His wife made no attempt to renew their talk 
 before March went to his business in the morning, 
 and they parted in dry offence. Their experience 
 was that these things always came right of them- 
 selves at last, and they usually let them. He knew 
 that she had really tried to consent to a thing that 
 was repugnant to her, and in his heart he gave her 
 more credit for the effort than he had allowed her 
 openly. She knew that she had made it with the 
 reservation he accused her of, and that he had a 
 right to feel sore at what she could ,not help. But 
 he left her to brood over his ingratitude, and she- 
 suffered him to go heavy and unfriended to meet 
 the chances of the day. He said to himself that 
 if she had assented cordially to the conditions of 
 Fulkerson's offer, he would have had the courage to 
 take all the other risks himself, and would have had 
 the satisfaction of resigning his place. As it was, 
 he must wait till he was removed ; and he figured 
 with bitter pleasure the pain she would feel when he 
 came home some. day and told her he had been sup- 
 planted, after it was too late to close with Fulkerson. 
 
 He found a letter on his desk from the secretary,
 
 36 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Dictated," in type-writing, which briefly informed 
 him that Mr. Hut boll, 1~ Inspector of Agencies, 
 would be in Boston on Wednesday, and would call 
 at his office during the forenoon. The letter was 
 not different in tone from many that he had formerly 
 received ; but the visit announced was out of the 
 usual order, and March believed he read his fate in 
 it. During the eighteen years of his connection 
 with it first as a subordinate in the Boston office, 
 and finally as its general agent there he had seen 
 a good many changes in the Reciprocity ; presidents, 
 vice-presidents, actuaries, and general agents had 
 come and gone, but there had always seemed to be 
 a recognition of his efficiency, or at least sufficiency, 
 and there had never been any manner of trouble, no 
 question of accounts, no apparent dissatisfaction 
 with his management, until latterly, when there had 
 begun to come from headquarters some suggestions 
 of enterprise in certain ways, which gave him his 
 first suspicions of his clerk Watkins's willingness to 
 succeed him ; they embodied some of Watkins's 
 ideas. The things proposed seemed to March un- 
 dignified, and even vulgar ; he had never thought 
 himself wanting in energy, though probably he had 
 left the business to take its own course in the old 
 lines more than he realised. Things had always 
 gone so smoothly that he had sometimes fancied a 
 peculiar regard for him in the management, which 
 he had the weakness to attribute to an appreciation 
 of what he occasionally did in literature, though in 
 saner moments he felt how impossible this was.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 37 
 
 Beyond a reference from Mr. Hubbell to some piece 
 of March's, which had happened to meet his eye, no 
 one in the management ever gave a sign of con- 
 sciousness that their service was adorned by an 
 obscure literary man ; and Mr. Hubbell himself had 
 the effect of regarding the excursions of March's pen 
 as a sort of joke, and of winking at them, as he 
 might have winked if once in a way he had found 
 him a little the gayer for dining. 
 
 March wore through the day gloomily, but he had 
 it on his conscience not to show any resentment 
 toward Watkins, whom he suspected of wishing to 
 supplant him, and even of working to do so. 
 Through this self-denial he reached a better mind 
 concerning his wife. He determined not to make 
 her suffer needlessly, if the worst came to the worst ; 
 she would suffer enough, at the best, and till the 
 worst came he would spare her, and not say any- 
 thing about the letter he had got. 
 
 But when they met, her first glance divined that 
 something had happened, and her first question 
 frustrated his generous intention. He had to tell 
 her about the letter. She would not allow that it 
 had any significance ; but she wished him to make 
 an end of his anxieties, and forestall whatever it 
 might portend by resigning his place at once. She 
 said she was quite ready to go to New York ; she 
 had been thinking it all over, and now she really 
 wanted to go. He answered, soberly, that he had 
 thought it over, too ; and he did not wish to leave 
 Boston, where he had lived so long, or try a new
 
 38 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 way of life if he could help it. He insisted that he 
 was quite selfish in this ; in their concessions their 
 quarrel vanished ; they agreed that whatever hap- 
 pened would be for the best ; and the next day he 
 went to his office fortified for any event. 
 
 His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with an 
 aspect which he might have found comic if it had 
 been another's destiny. Mr. Hubbell brought 
 March's removal, softened in the guise of a promo- 
 tion. The management at New York, it appeared, 
 had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell's, and 
 now authorised him to offer March the editorship 
 of the monthly paper published in the interest of 
 the company ; his office Avould include the author- 
 ship of circulars and leaflets, in behalf of life insur- 
 ance, and would give play to the literary talent 
 which Mr. Hubbell had brought to the attention of 
 the management ; his salary would be nearly as 
 much as at present, but the work would not take 
 his whole time, and in a place like New York he 
 could get a great deal of outside writing, which they 
 would not object to his doing. 
 
 Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of 
 a place in every way congenial to a man of literary 
 tastes, that March was afterward sorry he dismissed 
 the proposition with obvious irony, and had need- 
 lessly hurt Hubbell's feelings ; but Mrs. March had 
 no such regrets. She was only afraid that he had 
 not made his rejection contemptuous enough. " And 
 now," she said, " telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, and we 
 will go at once."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 39 
 
 "I suppose I could still get Watkins's former 
 place," March suggested. 
 
 " Never ! " she retorted. " Telegraph instantly ! " 
 
 They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might 
 have changed his mind, and they had a wretched 
 day in which they heard nothing from him. It 
 ended with his answering March's telegram in 
 person. They were so glad of his coming, and so 
 touched by his satisfaction with his bargain, that 
 they laid all the facts of the case before him. He 
 entered fully into March's sense of the joke latent 
 in Mr. Hubbell's proposition ; and he tried to make 
 Mrs. March believe that he shared her resentment 
 of the indignity offered her husband. 
 
 March made a show of willingness to release him 
 in view of the changed situation, saying that he 
 held him to nothing. Fulkerson laughed, and 
 asked him how soon he thought he could come 
 on to New York He refused to reopen the ques- 
 tion of March's fitness with him ; he said they had 
 gone into that thoroughly, but he recurred to it 
 with Mrs. March, and confirmed her belief in his 
 good-sense on all points. She had been from the 
 first moment defiantly confident, of her husband's 
 ability, but till she had talked the matter over 
 with Fulkerson, she was secretly not sure of it ; 
 or, at least, she was not sure that March was not 
 right in distrusting himself. When she clearly un- 
 derstood, now, what Fulkerson intended, she had no 
 longer a doubt. He explained how the enterprise 
 
 differed from others, and how he needed for its 
 D
 
 40 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 direction a man who combined general business 
 experience and business ideas with a love for the 
 thing, and a natural aptness for it. He did not 
 want a young man, and yet he wanted youth its 
 freshness, its zest such as March would feel in a 
 thing he could put his whole heart into. He would 
 not run in ruts, like an old fellow who had got hack- 
 neyed ; he would not have any hobbies ; he would 
 not have any friends nor any enemies. Besides, he 
 would have to meet people, and March was a man 
 that people took to ; she knew that herself ; he had 
 a kind of charm. The editorial management was 
 going to be kept in the background, as far as the 
 public was concerned; the public was to suppose that 
 the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care for a 
 great literary reputation in his editor he implied 
 that March had a very pretty little one. At the 
 same time the relations between the contributors 
 and the management were to be much more inti- 
 mate than usual. Fulkerson felt his personal dis- 
 qualification for working the thing socially, and he 
 counted upon Mr. March for that ; that was to say, 
 he counted upon Mrs. March. 
 
 She protested he must not count upon her ; but it 
 by no means disabled Fulkerson 's judgment in her 
 view that March really seemed more than anything 
 else a fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers ; 
 and the sort of affectionate respect with which Ful- 
 kerson spoke of him laid for ever some doubt she had 
 of the fineness of Fulkerson's manners, and recon- 
 ciled her to the graphic slanginess of his speech.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 41 
 
 The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave 
 her approval to it as superbly as if it were submitted 
 in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson must not sup- 
 pose she should ever like New York. She would 
 not deceive him on that point. She never should 
 like it. She did not conceal, either, that she did 
 not like taking the children out of the Friday even- 
 ing class ; and she did not believe that Tom would 
 ever be reconciled to going to Columbia. She took 
 courage from Fulkerson's suggestion that it was pos- 
 sible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New 
 York ; and she heaped him with questions concern- 
 ing the domiciliation of the family in that city. He 
 tried to know something about the matter, and he 
 succeeded in seeming interested in points necessarily 
 indifferent to him.
 
 VL 
 
 IN the uprooting and transplanting of their home 
 that followed, Mrs. March often trembled before 
 distant problems and possible contingencies, but she 
 was never troubled by present difficulties. She kept 
 up with tireless energy ; and in the moments of de- 
 jection and misgiving which harassed her husband 
 she remained dauntless, and put heart into him when 
 he had lost it altogether. 
 
 She arranged to leave the children in the house 
 with the servants, while she went on with March to 
 look up a dwelling of some sort in New York. It 
 made him sick to think of it ; and when it came to 
 the point, he would rather have given up the whole 
 enterprise. She had to nerve him to it, to repre- 
 sent more than once that now they had no choice 
 but to make this experiment. Every detail of part- 
 ing was anguish to him. He got consolation out of 
 the notion of letting the house furnished for the 
 winter ; that implied their return to it ; but it cost 
 him pangs of the keenest misery to advertise it ; and 
 when a tenant was actually found, it was all he 
 could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife's 
 love and patience as a man must to whom the future
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 43 
 
 is easy in the mass, but terrible as it translates itself 
 piecemeal into the present. He experienced remorse 
 in the presence of inanimate things he was going to 
 leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an 
 anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his 
 heart. Again and again his wife had to make him 
 reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She 
 convinced him of what he already knew ; and per- 
 suaded him against his knowledge that he could be 
 keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in 
 Boston if they could not stand New York. She 
 ended by telling him that it was too bad to make 
 her comfort him in a trial that was really so much 
 more a trial to her. She had to support him in a 
 last access of despair on their way to the Albany 
 depot the morning they started to New York ; but 
 when the final details had been dealt with, the 
 tickets bought, the trunks checked, and the hand- 
 bags hung up in their car, and the future had massed 
 itself again at a safe distance and was seven hours 
 and two hundred miles away, his spirits began to 
 rise and hers to sink. He would have been willing 
 to celebrate the taste, the domestic refinement of the 
 ladies' Avaiting-room in the depot, where they had 
 spent a quarter of an hour before the train started. 
 He said he did not believe there was another station 
 in the world where mahogany rocking-chairs were pro- 
 vided ; that the dull red warmth of the walls was as 
 cosey as an evening-lamp, and that he always hoped 
 to see a fire kindled on that vast hearth, and under 
 that aesthetic mantel, but he supposed now he never
 
 44 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 should. He said it was all very different from tnat 
 tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had waited 
 the morning they went to New York when they 
 were starting on their wedding journey. 
 
 " The morning, Basil ! " cried his wife. " We went 
 at night ; and we were going to take the boat, but 
 it stormed so ! " She gave him a glance of such 
 reproach that he could not answer anything, and 
 now she asked him whether he supposed their cook 
 and second girl would be contented with one of those 
 dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New 
 York flats, and what she should do if Margaret, 
 especially, left her. He ventured to suggest that 
 Margaret would probably like the city ; but if she 
 left, there were plenty of other girls to be had in 
 New York. She replied that there were none she 
 could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not 
 stay. He asked her why she took her, then ; why 
 
 he did not give her up at once ; and she answered 
 that it would he inhuman to give her up just in the 
 edge of the winter. She had promised to keep her ; 
 and Margaret was pleased with the notion of going to 
 New York, where she had a cousin. 
 
 " Then perhaps she '11 be pleased with the notion 
 of staying," he said. 
 
 " Oh, much you know about it ! " she retorted ; 
 and in view of the hypothetical difficulty and his 
 want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom, from which 
 she roused herself at last by declaring that if there 
 was nothing else in the flat they took, there should 
 
 be a light kitchen and a bright sunny bedroom for
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 45 
 
 Margaret. He expressed the belief that they could 
 easily find such a flat as that, and she denounced his 
 fatal optimism, which buoyed him up in the absence 
 of an undertaking, and let him drop into the depths 
 of despair in its presence. 
 
 He owned this defect of temperament, but he said 
 that it compensated the opposite in her character. 
 " I suppose that 's one of the chief uses of marriage ; 
 people supplement each other, and form a pretty 
 fair sort of human being together. The only draw- 
 back to the theory is that unmarried people seem 
 each as complete and whole as a married pair." 
 
 She refused to be amused ; she turned her face to 
 the window and put her handkerchief up under her 
 veil. 
 
 It was not till the dining-car was attached to their 
 train that they were both able to escape for an hour 
 into the care-free mood of their earlier travels, when 
 they were so easily taken out of themselves. The 
 time had been when they could have found enough 
 in the conjectural fortunes and characters of their 
 fellow-passengers to occupy them. This phase of 
 their youth had lasted long, and the world was still 
 full of novelty and interest for them; but it re- 
 quired all the charm of the dining-car now to lay 
 the anxieties that beset them. It was so potent for 
 the moment, however, that they could take an objec- 
 tive view at their sitting cosily down there together, 
 as if they had only themselves in the world. They 
 wondered Avhat the children were doing, the chil- 
 dren who possessed them so intensely when present,
 
 46 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 and now, by a fantastic operation of absence, seemed 
 almost non-existent. They tried to be homesick for 
 them, but failed ; they recognised with comfortable 
 self-abhorrence that this was terrible, but owned a 
 fascination in being alone ; at the same time they 
 could not imagine how people felt who never had 
 any children. They contrasted the luxury of din- 
 ing that way, with every advantage except a band 
 of music, and the old way of rushing out to snatch 
 a fearful joy at the lunch-counters of the Worcester 
 and Springfield and New Haven stations. They 
 had not gone often to New York since their wed- 
 ding journey, but they had gone often enough to 
 have noted the change from the lunch-counter to 
 the lunch-basket brought in the train, from which 
 you could subsist with more ease and dignity, but 
 seemed destined to a superabundance of pickles, 
 whatever you ordered. 
 
 They thought well of themselves now that they 
 could be both critical and tolerant of flavours not 
 very sharply distinguished from one another in 
 their dinner, and they lingered over their coffee 
 and watched the autumn landscape through the 
 windows. 
 
 " Not quite so loud a pattern of calico this year," 
 he said, with patronising forbearance toward the 
 painted woodlands whirling by. "Do you see how 
 the foreground next the train rushes from us 
 and the background keeps ahead of us, while the 
 middle distance seems stationary 1 I don't think I 
 ever noticed that effect before. There ought to be
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 47 
 
 something literary in it : retreating past and advanc- 
 ing future, and deceitfully permanent present: 
 something like that 1 " 
 
 His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap 
 before rising. "Yes. You mustn't waste any of 
 these ideas now." 
 
 " Oh no ; it would be money out of Fulkerson's 
 pocket."
 
 VII. 
 
 THEY vent to a quiet hotel far down-town, and 
 took a small apartment which they thought they 
 could easily afford for the day or two they need 
 spend in looking up a furnished flat. They were 
 used to staying at this hotel when they came on for 
 a little outing in New York, after some rigid winter 
 in Boston, at the time of the spring exhibitions. 
 They were remembered there from year to year ; 
 the coloured call-boys, who never seemed to get any 
 older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March, 
 by name even before he registered. He asked if 
 Mrs. March were with him, and said then he sup- 
 posed they would want their usual quarters ; and in 
 a moment they were domesticated in a far interior 
 that seemed to have been waiting for them in a 
 clean, quiet, patient disoccupation ever since they 
 left it two years before. The little parlour, with its 
 gilt paper and ebo.iised furniture, was the lightest 
 of the rooms, but it was not very light at noonday 
 without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up 
 for them. The uproar of the city came to it in a 
 soothing murmur, and they took possession of its 
 peace and comfort with open celebration. After all*
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 49 
 
 they agreed, there teas no place in the world so de- 
 lightful as a hotel apartment like that ; the boasted 
 charms of home were nothing to it ; and then the 
 magic of its heing always there, ready for any one, 
 every one, just as if it were for some one alone : it 
 was like the experience of an Arabian Nights hero 
 come true for all the race. 
 
 " Oh, why can't we always stay here, just we two ! " 
 Mrs. March sighed to her husband, as he came out 
 of his room rubbing his face red with the towel, 
 while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnet 
 and hand-bag on the mantel. 
 
 " And ignore the past 1 I 'm willing. I 've no 
 doubt that the children could get on perfectly well 
 without us, and could find some lot in the scheme of 
 Providence that would really be just as well for 
 them." 
 
 " Yes ; or could contrive somehow never to have 
 existed. I should insist upon that. If they are, 
 don't you see that we couldn't wish them not to be ? " 
 
 " Oh yes ; I see your point ; it 's simply incon- 
 trovertible." 
 
 She laughed, and said : " Well, at any rate, if we 
 can't find a flat to suit us we can all crowd into 
 these three rooms somehow, for the winter, and 
 then browse about for meals. By the week we 
 could get them much cheaper; and we could save 
 on the eating, as they do in Europe. Or on some- 
 thing else." 
 
 " Something else, probably," said March. " But 
 we won't take this apartment till the ideal furnished 
 VOL. I. 3
 
 50 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 flat winks out altogether. We shall not have any 
 trouble. We can easily find some one who is going 
 South for the winter, and will be glad to give up 
 their flat ' to the right party ' at a nominal rent. 
 That's my notion. That's what the Evanses did 
 one winter when they came on here in February. 
 All but the nominality of the rent." 
 
 " Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and 
 still save something on letting our house. You can 
 settle yourselves in a hundred different ways in New 
 York, that is one merit of the place. But if every- 
 thing else fails, we can come back to this. I want 
 you to take the refusal of it, Basil. And we '11 com- 
 mence looking this very evening as soon as we 've 
 had dinner. I cut a lot of things out of the Herald 
 as we came on. See here ! " 
 
 She took a long strip of paper out of her hand- 
 bag with minute advertisements pinned transversely 
 upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering 
 nondescript vertebrate. 
 
 "Looks something like the sea-serpent," said 
 March, drying his hands on the towel, while he 
 glanced up and down the list. "But we shan't 
 have any trouble. I 've no doubt there are half a 
 dozen things there that will do. You haven't gone 
 up-town ? Because we must be near the Every Other 
 Week office." 
 
 " No ; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn't called it 
 that ! It always makes one think of ' jam yesterday 
 and jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day,' in Through 
 the Looking-glass. They 're all in this region."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 51 
 
 They were still at their table, beside a low window, 
 where some sort of never-blooming shrub symme- 
 trically balanced itself in a large pot, with a leaf to 
 the right and a leaf to the left and a spear up 
 the middle, when Fulkerson came stepping square- 
 footedly over the thick dining-room carpet. Ho 
 wagged in the air a gay hand of salutation at sight 
 of them, and of repression when they offered to rise 
 to meet him ; then, with an apparent simultaneity 
 of action he gave a hand to each, pulled up a chair 
 from the next table, put his hat and stick on the 
 floor beside it, and seated himself. 
 
 " Well, you 've burnt your ships behind you, sure 
 enough," he said, beaming his satisfaction upon 
 them from eyes and teeth. 
 
 " The ships are burnt," said March, " though I 'm 
 not sure we did it alone. But here we are, looking 
 for shelter, and a little anxious about the disposition 
 of the natives." 
 
 "Oh, they're an awful peaceable lot," said Ful- 
 kerson. " I 've been round amongst the caciques a 
 little, and I think I 've got two or three places that 
 will just suit you, Mrs. March. How did you leave 
 the children ? " 
 
 " Oh, how kind of you ! Very well, and very 
 proud to be left in charge of the smoking wrecks." 
 
 Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she 
 said, being but secondarily interested in the chil- 
 dren at the best. " Here are some things right in 
 this neighbourhood, within gunshot of the office, 
 and if you want you can go and look at them to-
 
 52 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 night ; the agents gave me houses where the people 
 would be in." 
 
 " We will go and look at them instantly," said 
 Mrs. March. "Or, as soon as you've had coffee 
 with us." 
 
 " Never do," Fulkerson replied. He gathered up 
 his hat and stick. " Just rushed in to say Hello, 
 and got to run right away again. I tell you, March, 
 things are humming. I 'm after those fellows with 
 a sharp stick all the while to keep them from 
 loafing on my house, and at the same time I 'm just 
 bubbling over with ideas about The Lone Hand 
 wish we could call it that ! that I want to talk up 
 with you." 
 
 " Well, come to breakfast," said Mrs. March cor- 
 dially. 
 
 " No ; the ideas will keep till you Ve secured 
 your lodge in this vast wilderness. Good-bye." 
 
 " You 're as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson," 
 she said, " to keep us in mind when you have so 
 much to occupy you." 
 
 " I wouldn't have anything to occupy me if I 
 hadn't kept you in mind, Mrs. March," said Ful- 
 kerson, going off upon as good a speech as he could 
 apparently hope to make. 
 
 "Why, Basil," said Mrs. March, when he was 
 gone, " he 's charming ! But now we mustn't lose 
 an instant. Let 's see where the places are." She 
 ran over the half-dozen agents' permits. "Capital 
 first-rate the very thing every one. Well, I 
 consider ourselves settled ! We can go back to the 
 children to-morrow if we like, though I rather think
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 53 
 
 I should like to stay over another day and get a 
 little rested for the final pulling up that's got to 
 come. But this simplifies everything enormously, 
 and Mr. Fulkerson is as thoughtful and as sweet as 
 he can be. I know you will get on well with him. 
 He has such a good heart. And his attitude toward 
 you, Basil, is beautiful always so respectful ; or not 
 that so much as appreciative. Yes, appreciative 
 that 's the word ; I must always keep that in mind." 
 
 " It 's quite important to do so," said March. 
 
 " Yes," she assented seriously, " and we must not 
 forget just what kind of flat we are going to look 
 for. The sine qua nons are an elevator and steam- 
 heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then 
 we must each have a room, and you must have your 
 study and I must have my parlour ; and the two girls 
 must each have a room. With the kitchen and 
 dining-room, how many does that make 1 " 
 
 "Ten." 
 
 "I thought eight. Well, no matter. You can 
 work in the parlour, and run into your bedroom when 
 anybody comes ; and I can sit' in mine, and the girls 
 must put up with one, if it 's large and sunny, though 
 I Ve always given them two at home. And the 
 kitchen must be sunny, so they can sit in it. And 
 the rooms must all have outside light. And the 
 rent must not be over eight hundred for the winter. 
 We only get a thousand for our whole house, and 
 we must save something out of that, so as to cover 
 the expenses of moving. Now, do you think you 
 can remember all that ? " 
 
 " Not the half of it," said March. " But you can ;
 
 54 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 or if you forget a third of it, I can come in with my 
 partial half, and more than make it up." 
 
 She had brought her bonnet and sack downstairs 
 with her, and was transferring them from the hat- 
 rack to her person while she talked. The friendly 
 door-boy let them into the street, and the clear 
 October evening air inspirited her so, that as she 
 tucked her hand under her husband's arm and began 
 to pull him along, she said, " If we find something 
 right away and we 're just as likely to get the right 
 flat soon as late ; it 's all a lottery we '11 go to the 
 theatre somewhere." 
 
 She had a moment's panic about having left the 
 agents' permits on the table, and after remembering 
 that she had put them into her little shopping-bag, 
 where she kept her money (each note crushed into 
 a round wad), and had left that on the hat-rack, 
 where it would certainly be stolen, she found it on 
 her wrist. She did not think that very funny, but 
 after a first impulse to inculpate her husband, she 
 let him laugh, while they stopped under a lamp, and 
 she held the permits half a yard away to read the 
 numbers on them. 
 
 " Where are your glasses, Isabel ? " 
 " On the mantel in our room, of course." 
 " Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs." 
 " I wouldn't get off second-hand jokes, Basil," she 
 said ; and " Why, here ! " she cried, whirling round 
 to the door before which they had halted, " this is 
 the very number. Well, I do believe it 's a sign ! " 
 One of those coloured men who soften the trade of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 55 
 
 janitor in many of the smaller apartment houses in 
 New York by the sweetness of their race, let the 
 Marches in, or, rather, welcomed them to the pos- 
 session of the premises by the bow with which he 
 acknowledged their permit. It was a large, old 
 mansion cut up into five or six dwellings, but it had 
 kept some traits of its former dignity, which pleased 
 people of their sympathetic tastes. The dark 
 mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design, gave a 
 rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide, and 
 paved with marble ; the carpeted stairs curved aloffc 
 through a generous space. 
 
 " There is no elevator ? " Mrs. March asked of the 
 janitor. 
 
 He answered, " No, ma'am ; only two flights up," 
 so winningly that she said 
 
 " Oh ! " in courteous apology, and whispered her 
 husband as she followed lightly up, " We '11 take it, 
 Basil, if it 's like the rest. " 
 
 " If it 's like him, you mean." 
 
 " I don't wonder they wanted to own them," she 
 hurriedly philosophised. " If I had such a creature, 
 nothing but death should part us, and I should no 
 more think of giving him his freedom \ " 
 
 "No; we couldn't afford it," returned her husband. 
 
 The apartment the janitor unlocked for them, and 
 lit up from those chandeliers and brackets of gilt 
 brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, and ten- 
 drils in which the early gas-fitter realised most of his 
 conceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness 
 than the dignity of the hall. But the rooms were 
 E
 
 56 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 large, and they grouped themselves in a reminiscence 
 of the time when they were part of a dwelling, that 
 had its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where 
 they were cut up into smaller spaces, it had been 
 done with the frankness with which a proud old 
 family of fallen fortunes practises its economies. 
 The rough pine floors showed a black border of tack- 
 heads where carpets had been lifted and put down 
 for generations ; the white paint was yellow with 
 age ; the apartment had light at the front and at the 
 back, and two or three rooms had glimpses of the 
 day through small windows let into their corners ; 
 another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to 
 heaven through a glass circle in its ceiling ; the rest 
 must darkle in perpetual twilight. Yet something 
 pleased in it all, and Mrs. March had gone far to 
 adapt the different rooms to the members of her 
 family, when she suddenly thought (and for her to 
 think was to say), " Why, but there 's no steam- 
 heat ! " 
 
 "No, ma'am," the janitor admitted, "But dere 's 
 grates in most o' de rooms, and dere 's furnace-heat 
 in de halls." 
 
 "That's true," she admitted, and having placed 
 her family in the apartments, it was bard to get 
 them out again. " Could we manage 1 " she referred 
 to her husband. 
 
 " Why, 7 shouldn't care for the steam-heat if 
 What is the rent 1 " he broke off to ask the janitor. 
 
 " Nine hundred, sir." 
 
 March concluded to his wife, "If it were furnished.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 57 
 
 " Why, of course ! What could I have been think- 
 ing of 1 We 're looking for a furnished flat," she 
 explained to the janitor, " and this was so pleasant 
 and home-like, that I never thought whether it was 
 furnished or not." 
 
 She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into 
 the joke and chuckled so amiably at her flattering 
 oversight on the way downstairs that she said, as 
 she pinched her husband's arm, " Now, if you don't 
 give him a quarter, I '11 never speak to you again, 
 Basil ! " 
 
 " I would have given half a dollar willingly to get, 
 you beyond his glamour," said March, when they 
 were safely on the pavement outside. " If it hadn't 
 "been for my strength of character, you 'd have taken 
 an unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, 
 at nine hundred a year, when you had just sworn 
 me to steam-heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight 
 hundred." 
 
 " Yes ! How could I have lost my head so com- 
 pletely 1 " she said, with a lenient amusement in her 
 aberration which she was not always able to feel in 
 her husband's. 
 
 " The next time a coloured janitor opens the door 
 to us, I '11 tell him the apartment doesn't suit at the 
 threshold. It 's the only way to manage you, Isabel." 
 
 " It 's true. I am in love with the whole race. I 
 never saw one of them that didn't have perfectly 
 angelic manners. I think we shall all be black in 
 heaven that is, black-souled. " 
 
 " That isn't the usual theory," said March. 
 3*
 
 58 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well, perhaps not," she assented. " Where are 
 we going now 1 Oh yes, to the Xenophon ! " 
 
 She pulled him gaily along again, and after they 
 had walked a block down and half a block over, 
 they stood before the apartment-house of that name, 
 which was cut on the gas lamps on either side of the 
 heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The 
 titter of an electric bell brought a large, fat Buttons, 
 with a stage effect of being dressed to look small, 
 who said he would call the janitor, and they waited 
 in the dimly splendid, copper-coloured interior, admir- 
 ing the whorls and waves into which the wall-paint 
 was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded 
 cap, like a continental porlier. When they said they 
 would like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment 
 he owned his inability to cope with the affair, and 
 said he must send for the Superintendent ; he was 
 either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and 
 would be there in a minute. The Buttons brought 
 him a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain 
 clothes almost before they had time to exchange a 
 frightened whisper in recognition of the fact that 
 there could be no doubt of the steam-heat and 
 elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they 
 mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried 
 to fceep their self-respect under the gaze of the 
 Superintendent, which they felt was classing and 
 assessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They 
 could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold 
 of Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, while the 
 Superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 59 
 
 called a private hall, and in the drawing-room and 
 the succession of chambers stretching rearward to 
 the kitchen. Everything had been done by the 
 architect to save space, and everything to waste it 
 by Mrs. Grosvenor Green. She had conformed to a 
 law for the necessity of turning round in each room, 
 and had folding-beds in the chambers ; but there her 
 subordination had ended, and wherever you might 
 have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that 
 you would knock it over if you did turn. The place 
 was rather pretty and even imposing at first glance, 
 and it took several joint ballots for March and his 
 wife to make sure that with the kitchen there were 
 only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere 
 from large rings on a brass rod ; every shelf and 
 dressing-case and mantel was littered with gim- 
 cracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were 
 curtained off, and behind these portieres swarmed 
 more gimcracks. The front of the upright piano 
 had what March called a short-skirted portiere on 
 it, and the top was covered with vases, with dragon 
 candlesticks, and with Jap fans, which also expanded 
 themselves bat-wise on the walls between the etch- 
 ings and the water-colours. The floors were covered 
 with filling, and then rugs, and then skins ; the 
 easy-chairs all had tidies, Armenian and Turkish 
 and Persian ; the lounges and sofas had embroidered 
 cushions hidden under tidies. The radiator was 
 concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this 
 some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a super- 
 abundance of clocks. China pugs guarded the
 
 60 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 hearth ; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of 
 either andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail 
 before them inside a high filigree fender ; on one 
 side was a coal-hod in repoussd brass, and on the 
 other a wrought-iron wood-basket. Some red Japan- 
 ese bird-kites were stuck about in the necks of 
 spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hung opened 
 beneath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade 
 of yellow silk. 
 
 March, when he had recovered his self-command 
 a little in the presence of the agglomeration, com- 
 forted himself by calling the bric-a-brac Jamescracks, 
 as if this was their full name. 
 
 The disrespect he was able to show the whole 
 apartment by means of this joke strengthened him 
 to say boldly to the Superintendent that it was 
 altogether too small ; then he asked carelessly what 
 the rent was. 
 
 " Two hundred and fifty." 
 
 The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other. 
 
 " Don't you think we could make it do 1 " she 
 asked him, and he could see that she had mentally 
 saved five hundred dollars as the difference between 
 the rent of their house and that of this flat. " It has 
 some very pretty features, and we could manage to 
 squeeze in, couldn't we ? " 
 
 " You won't find another furnished flat like it for 
 no two fifty a month in the whole city," the Superin- 
 tendent put in. 
 
 They exchanged glances again, and March said 
 carelessly, "It's too small."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 61 
 
 " There 's a vacant flat in the Herodotus for 
 eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydides 
 for fifteen," the Superintendent suggested, clicking 
 his keys together as they sank down in the elevator ; 
 " seven rooms and a bath." 
 
 "Thank you," said March, "we're looking for a 
 furnished flat." 
 
 They felt that the Superintendent parted from 
 them with repressed sarcasm. 
 
 " O Basil, do you think we really made him think 
 it was the smallness and not the dearness ? " 
 
 " No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt ; 
 and that's a great deal." 
 
 " Of course, I wouldn't have taken it, anyway, with 
 only six rooms, and so high up. But what prices ! 
 Now, we must be very circumspect about the next 
 place." 
 
 It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound 
 up in her apron, who received them there. Mrs. 
 March gave her a succinct but perfect statement of 
 their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, 
 or feigned to do so. She shook her head, and said 
 that her son would show them the flat. There was 
 a radiator visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel 
 tacitly compromised on steam-heat without an ele- 
 vator, as the flat was only one flight up. When the 
 son appeared from below with a small kerosene 
 hand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfur- 
 nished, but there was no stopping him till he had 
 shown it in all its impossibility. When they got 
 safely away from it and into the street March said,
 
 62 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well, have you had enough for to-night, Isabel 1 
 Shall we go to the theatre now ? " 
 
 "Not on any account. I want to see the whole 
 list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would be 
 the very thing for us." She laughed, but with a 
 certain bitterness. 
 
 " You '11 be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, 
 Isabel." 
 
 " Oh no ! " 
 
 The fourth address was a furnished flat without 
 a kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant. 
 The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth a 
 pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted 
 to take a family to board, and would give them a 
 private table at a rate which the Marches would 
 have thought low in Boston. 
 
 Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion 
 for their evident anxisty, and this pity naturally 
 soured into a sense of injury. " Well, I must say I 
 have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson's 
 judgment. Anything more utterly different from 
 what I told him we wanted I couldn't imagine. If 
 he doesn't manage any better about his business 
 than he has done about this, it will be a perfect 
 failure." 
 
 " Well, well, let 's hope he '11 be more circumspect 
 about that," her husband returned, with ironical 
 propitiation. " But I don't think it 's Fulkerson's 
 fault altogether. Perhaps it's the house-agents'. 
 They're a very illusory generation. There seems 
 to be something in the human habitation that cor-
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 63 
 
 rupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy 
 or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent 
 and tell him what kind of a house you want. He 
 has no such house, and he sends you to look at 
 something altogether different, upon the well-ascer- 
 tained principle that if you can't get what you want, 
 you will take what you can get. You don't sup- 
 pose the ' party ' that took our house in Boston was 
 looking for any such house ? He was looking for a 
 totally different kind of house in another part of the 
 town." 
 
 " I don't believe that ! " his wife broke in. 
 
 " Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous 
 rent you asked for it." 
 
 " We didn't get much more than half ; and, be- 
 sides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred." 
 
 " Oh, I 'm not blaming you, Isabel. I 'm only 
 analysing the house-agent, and exonerating Fulker- 
 son." 
 
 " Well, I don't believe he told them just what we 
 wanted ; and at any rate, I 'm done with agents. 
 To-morrow, I 'm going entirely by advertisements."
 
 VIII. 
 
 MRS. MARCH took the vertebrate with her to the 
 Vienna Coffee-house, where they went to breakfast 
 next morning. She made March buy her the 
 Herald and the fVorld, and she added to its spiny 
 convolutions from them. She read the new adver- 
 tisements aloud with ardour and with faith to believe 
 that the apartments described in them were every 
 one truthfully represented, and that any one of them 
 was richly responsive to their needs. "Elegant, 
 light, large, single, and outside flats " were offered 
 with " all improvements bath, ice-box, etc." for 
 $25 and $30 a month. The cheapness was amazing. 
 The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth, advertised 
 them for $40 and 860, "with steam-heat and eleva- 
 tor," rent free till November. Others, attractive 
 from their air of conscientious scruple, announced 
 " first-class flats; good order ; reasonable rents." The 
 Helena asked the reader if she had seen the " cabinet 
 finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings" of its 
 $50 flats ; the Asteroid affirmed that such apart- 
 ments, with " six light rooms and bath, porcelain 
 wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy," as it offered 
 for $75 were unapproached by competition. There
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 65 
 
 was a sameness in the jargon which tended to con- 
 fusion. Mrs. March got several flats on her list 
 which promised neither steam-heat nor elevators ; 
 she forgot herself so far as to include two or three 
 as remote from the down-town region of her choice 
 as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the 
 nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough 
 to sustain her buoyant hopes. 
 
 The waiter, who remembered them from year to 
 year, had put them at a window giving a pretty good 
 section of Broadway, and before they set out on 
 their search they had a moment of reminiscence. 
 They recalled the Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty 
 years ago, swelling and roaring with a tide of gaily 
 painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the 
 horse-cars have now banished from it. The grind of 
 their wheels and the clash of their harsh bells im- 
 perfectly fill the silence that the omnibuses have left, 
 and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of 
 former times. 
 
 They went out and stood for a moment before 
 Grace Church, and looked down the stately thorough- 
 fare, and found it no longer impressive, no longer 
 characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now 
 it is like any other street. You do not now take 
 your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it ; 
 the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow 
 of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved 
 palm and guided its little fearful boots over the 
 crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuses on 
 either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all
 
 66 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that certain processional, barbaric gaiety of the place 
 is gone. 
 
 " Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert," said 
 March, voicing their common feeling of the change. 
 
 They turned and went into the beautiful church, 
 and found themselves in time for the matin service. 
 Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in the 
 dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music 
 took them with solemn ecstasy ; the aerial, aspiring 
 Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They 
 came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle of the 
 street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, 
 which they confessed to each other with whimsical 
 consciousness. 
 
 " But no matter how consecrated we feel now," he 
 said, "we mustn't forget that we went into the 
 church for precisely the same reason that we went 
 to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast to gratify an 
 aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasure of travel 
 for a moment, to get back into the Europe of our 
 youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and 
 we 'd better own it." 
 
 " I don't know," she returned. " I think we re- 
 duce ourselves to the bare bones too much. I wish 
 we didn't always recognise the facts as we do. Some- 
 times I should like to blink them. I should like to 
 think I was devouter than I am, and younger and 
 prettier." 
 
 ' Better not ; you couldn't keep it up. Honesty 
 is the best policy even in such things." 
 
 " Xo ; I don't like it, Basil. I should rather wait
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 67 
 
 till the last day for some of my motives to come to 
 the top. I know they 're always mixed, but do let 
 me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes." 
 
 " Well, well, have it your own way, my dear. 
 But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable sur- 
 prises for myself at that time." 
 
 She would not consent. " I know I am a good deal 
 younger than I was. I feel quite in the mood of 
 that morning when we walked down Broadway on 
 our wedding journey. Don't you ? " 
 
 " Oh yes. But I know I 'm not younger ; I 'm 
 only prettier." 
 
 She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for 
 unconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in 
 which there was no arribre pensde of the east wind. 
 They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over - 
 to Washington Square, in the region of which they 
 now hoped to place themselves. The primo tenore 
 statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of 
 the place in the name of Latin progress, and they 
 met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they 
 strolled over the asphalte walks, under the thinning 
 shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They 
 met the familiar picturesque raggedness of southern 
 Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow 
 it existed for their appreciation, and that it found 
 adequate compensation for poverty in this. March 
 thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy 
 in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his 
 wife, and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous 
 shine on his boots, while their desultory comment
 
 68 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned 
 American respectability which keeps the north side 
 of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the 
 international shabbiness which has invaded the 
 southern border, and broken it up into lodging- 
 houses, shops, beer gardens, and studios. 
 
 They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on 
 the north side, and as soon as the little boot-black 
 could be bought off they went over to look at it. 
 The janitor met them at the door and examined 
 them. Then he said, as if still in doubt, "It has 
 ten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eight hundred 
 dollars." 
 
 "It wouldn't do, then," March replied, and left 
 him to divide the responsibility between the paucity 
 of the rooms and the enormity of the rent as he best 
 might. But their self-love had received a wound, 
 and they questioned each other what it was in their 
 appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so 
 much. 
 
 "Of course we don't look like New-Yorkers," 
 sighed Mrs. March, " and we 've walked through 
 the Square. That might be as if we had walked 
 along the Park Street mall in the Common before 
 we came out on Beacon. Do you suppose he could 
 have seen you getting, your boots blacked in that 
 way ? " 
 
 " It 's useless to ask," said March. " But I never 
 can recover from this blow." 
 
 " Oh pshaw ! You know you hate such things 
 as badly as I do. It was very impertinent of him."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 69 
 
 " Let us go back, and ^eraser I'infdme by paying 
 him a year's rent in advance and taking immediate 
 possession. Nothing else can soothe my wounded 
 feelings. You were not having your boots blacked : 
 why shouldn't he have supposed you were a New- 
 Yorker, and I a country cousin ? " 
 
 "They always know. Don't you remember Mrs. 
 Williams's going to a Fifth Avenue milliner in a 
 Worth dress, and the woman's asking her instantly 
 what hotel she should send her hat to 1 " 
 
 " Yes ; these things drive one to despair. I don't 
 wonder the bodies of so many genteel strangers are 
 found in the waters around New York. Shall we 
 try the south side, my dear 1 or had we better go 
 back to our rooms and rest a while 1 " 
 
 Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was con- 
 sulting one of its glittering ribs, and glancing up 
 from it at a house before which they stood. " Yes, 
 it 's the number ; but do they call this being ready 
 October 1st 1 ?" The little area in front of the base- 
 ment was heaped with a mixture of mortar, bricks, 
 laths, and shavings from the interior ; the brown- 
 stone steps to the front door were similarly 
 bestrewn ; the doorway showed the half-open rough 
 pine carpenter's hatch of an unfinished house ; the 
 sashless windows of every story showed the activity 
 of workmen within ; the clatter of hammers and 
 the hiss of saws came out to them from every open- 
 ing. 
 
 " They may call it October 1st," said March, "be- 
 cause it 's too late to contradict them. But they 'd 
 F
 
 70 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 better not call it December 1st in my presence ; I '11 
 let them say January 1st, at a pinch." 
 
 " AVe will go in and look at it anyway," said his 
 wife ; and he admired how, when she was once 
 within, she began provisionally to settle the family 
 in each of the several floors with the female instinct 
 for domiciliation which never failed her. She had 
 the help of the landlord, who was present to urge 
 forward the workmen apparently ; he lent a hopeful 
 fancy to the solution of all her questions. To get 
 her from under his influence March had to represent 
 that the place was damp from undried plastering, 
 and that if she stayed she would probably be down 
 with that New York pneumonia which visiting Bos- 
 tonians are always dying of. Once safely on the 
 pavement outside, she realised that the apartment 
 was not only unfinished, but unfurnished, and had 
 neither steam-heat nor elevator. " But I thought we 
 had better look at everything," she explained. 
 
 " Yes, but not take everything. If I hadn't pulled 
 you away from there by main force you 'd have not 
 only died of New York pneumonia on the spot, but 
 you 'd have had us all settled there before we knew 
 what we were about." 
 
 " Well, that 's what I can't help, Basil. It 's the 
 only way I can realise whether it will do for us. I 
 have to dramatise the whole thing." 
 
 She got a deal of pleasure as well as excitement 
 out of this, and he had to own that the process of 
 setting up house-keeping in so many different places 
 was not only entertaining, but tended, through as-
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 71 
 
 sociation with their first beginnings in house-keep- 
 ing, to restore the image of their early married 
 days, and to make them young again. 
 
 It went on all day, and continued far into the 
 night, until it was too late to go to the theatre, too 
 late to do anything but tumble into bed and simul- 
 taneously fall on sleep. They groaned over their 
 reiterated disappointments, but they could not deny 
 that the interest was unfailing, and that they got a 
 great deal of fun out of it all. Nothing could abate 
 Mrs. March's faith in her advertisements. One of 
 them sent her to a flat of ten rooms which promised 
 to be the solution of all their difficulties ; it proved 
 to be over a livery-stable, a liquor store, and a 
 milliner's shop, none of the first fashion. Another 
 led them far into old Greenwich Village to an 
 apartment-house, which she refused to enter be- 
 hind a small girl with a loaf of bread under one 
 arm and a quart can of milk under the other. 
 
 In their search they were obliged, as March com- 
 plained, to the acquisition of useless information in 
 a degree unequalled in their experience. They came 
 to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which 
 respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. 
 Flattering advertisements took them to numbers 
 of huge apartment-houses chiefly distinguishable 
 from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes 
 on their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at 
 any door where there were more than six bell-rat- 
 chets and speaking-tubes on either hand. Before 
 the middle of the afternoon she decided against
 
 72 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ratchets altogether, and confined herself to knobs, 
 neatly set in the door-trim. Her husband was still 
 sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere 
 you like in New York, and he would have paused at 
 some places where her quicker eye caught the fatal 
 sign of " Modes " in the ground-floor windows. She 
 found that there was an east and west line beyond 
 which they could not go if they wished to keep their 
 self-respect, and that within the region to which 
 they had restricted themselves there was a choice of 
 streets. At first all the New York streets looked to 
 them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive ; the general 
 infamy imparted itself in their casual impression to 
 streets in no wise guilty. But they began to notice 
 that some streets were quiet and clean, and, though 
 never so quiet and clean as Boston streets, that they 
 wore an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a 
 future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole 
 blocks of these down-town cross streets seemed to 
 have been redeemed from decay, and even in the 
 midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been 
 seized, painted a dull-red as to its brick-work, and 
 a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright 
 brass bell-pull and door knob and a large brass plate 
 for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with 
 an effect of purity and pride which removed its 
 shabby neighbourhood far from it. 
 
 Some of these houses were quite small, and 
 imaginably within their means ; but, as March said, 
 somebody seemed always to be living there himself, 
 and the fact that none of them were to rent kept
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 73 
 
 Mrs. March true to her ideal of a flat. Nothing 
 prevented its realisation so much as its difference 
 from the New York ideal of a flat, which was in- 
 flexibly seven rooms and a bath. One or two rooms 
 might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered 
 backward through increasing and then decreasing 
 darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen 
 at the rear. It might be the one or the other, but 
 it was always the seventh room with the bath ; or 
 if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was 
 so after having counted the bath as one. In this 
 case the janitor said you always counted the bath as 
 one. If the flats were advertised as having "all 
 light rooms," he explained that any room with a 
 window giving into the open air of a court or shaft 
 was counted a light room. 
 
 The Marches tried to make out why it was that 
 these flats were so much more repulsive than the 
 apartments which every one lived in abroad ; but 
 they could only do so upon the supposition that 
 in their European days they were too young, too 
 happy, too full of the future, to notice whether 
 rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or 
 little, high or low. " Now we 're imprisoned in 
 the present," he said, "and we have to make the 
 worst of it." 
 
 In their despair he had an inspiration, which she 
 declared worthy of him : it was to take two small 
 flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and live in 
 both. They tried this in a great many places ; but 
 they never could get two flats of the kind on the 
 VOL. I. 4
 
 74 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 same floor where there was steam-heat and an 
 elevator. At one place they almost did it. They 
 had resigned themselves to the humility of the 
 neighbourhood, to the prevalence of modistes and 
 livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New 
 York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter 
 of paper in the streets, to the faltering slats in the 
 surrounding window-shutters and the crumbled 
 brown-stone steps and sills, when it turned out that 
 one of the apartments had been taken between two 
 visits they made. Then the only combination left 
 open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right 
 and a third-floor flat to the left. 
 
 Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use 
 at the first opportunity. In the meantime there 
 were several flats which they thought they could 
 almost make do : notably one where they could get 
 an extra servant's room in the basement four flights 
 down, and another where they could get it in the 
 roof five flights up. At the first the janitor was 
 respectful and enthusiastic ; at the second he had an 
 effect of ironical pessimism. When they trembled 
 on the verge of taking his apartment, he pointed out 
 a spot in the kalsomining of the parlour ceiling, and 
 gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should 
 not agree to put in shape unless they took the apart- 
 ment for a term of years. The apartment was 
 unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they 
 wanted a furnished apartment, and made their escape. 
 This saved them in several other extremities ; but 
 short of extremity they could not keep their different
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 75 
 
 requirements in mind, and were always about to 
 decide without regard to some one of them. 
 
 They went to several places twice without intend- 
 ing : once to that old-fashioned house with the 
 pleasant coloured janitor, and wandered all over the 
 apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, 
 and then recognised the janitor and laughed ; and to 
 that house with the pathetic widow and the pretty 
 daughter who wished to take them to board. They 
 stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the 
 fact that the mother had taken the house that the 
 girl might have a home while she was in New York 
 studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by 
 taking boarders. Her daughter was at her class 
 now, the mother concluded ; and they encouraged 
 her to believe that it could only be a few days till 
 the rest of her scheme was realised. 
 
 " I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable 
 there," March suggested when they had got away. 
 " Now if we were truly humane we would modify 
 our desires to meet their needs and end this sicken- 
 ing search, wouldn't we ? " 
 
 " Yes, but we 're not truly humane," his wife 
 answered, "or at least not in that sense. You know 
 you hate boarding ; and if we went there I should 
 have them on my sympathies the whole time." 
 
 " I see. And then you would take it out of 
 me." 
 
 " Then I should take it out of you. And if you 
 are going to be so weak, Basil, and let every little 
 thing work upon you in that way, you 'd better not
 
 76 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 come to New York. You'll see enough misery 
 here." 
 
 "Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as 
 if I were a child that had its mind set on an unde- 
 sirable toy, Isabel." 
 
 " Ah, don't you suppose it 's because you are such 
 a child in some respects that I like you, dear ? " she 
 demanded, without relenting. 
 
 " But I don't find so much misery in New York. 
 I don't suppose there 's any more suffering here to 
 the population than there is in the country. And 
 they 're so gay about it all. I think the outward 
 aspect of the place and the hilarity of the sky and 
 air must get into the people's blood. The weather 
 is simply unapproachable ; and I don't care if it is 
 the ugliest place in the world, as you say. I sup- 
 pose it is. It shrieks and yells with ugliness here 
 and there, but it never loses its spirits. That 
 widow is from the country. When she 's been a 
 year in New York she '11 be as gay as gay as an L 
 road." He celebrated a satisfaction they both had 
 in the L roads. " They kill the streets and avenues, 
 but at least they partially hide them, and that is 
 some comfort ; and they do triumph over their 
 prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is 
 intoxicating. Those bends in the L that you get in 
 the corner of Washington Square, or just below the 
 Cooper Institute they 're the gayest things in the 
 world. Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incom- 
 parably picturesque ! And the whole city is so," 
 said March, "or else the L would never have got
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 77 
 
 built here. New York may be splendidly gay or 
 squalidly gay; but, prince or pauper, it's gay 
 always." 
 
 "Yes, gay is the word," she admitted, with a 
 sigh. " But frantic. I can't get used to it. They for- 
 get death, Basil ; they forget death in New York." 
 
 " Well, I don't know that I Ve ever found much 
 advantage in remembering it." 
 
 "Don't say such a thing, dearest." 
 
 He could see that she had got to the end of her 
 nervous strength for the present, and he proposed 
 that they should take the Elevated road as far as it 
 would carry them into the country, and shake off 
 their nightmare of flat-hunting for an hour or two ; 
 but her conscience would not let her. She con- 
 victed him of levity equal to that of the New- 
 Yorkers in proposing such a thing; and they 
 dragged through the day. She was too tired to 
 care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream 
 from which she woke herself with a cry that roused 
 him too. It was something about the children at 
 first, whom they had talked of wistfully before 
 falling asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing 
 with two square eyes and a series of sections grow- 
 ing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the 
 monstrous articulate was quite luminous again. 
 She shuddered at the vague description she was 
 able to give ; but he asked, " Did it offer to bite 
 you 1 " 
 
 "No. That was the most frightful thing about 
 it; it had no mouth."
 
 78 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 March laughed. " Why, my dear, it was nothing 
 but a harmless New York flat seven rooms and 
 a bath." 
 
 "I really believe it was," she consented, recog- 
 nising an architectural resemblance, and she fell 
 asleep again, and woke renewed for the work before 
 them.
 
 IX. 
 
 THEIR house-hunting no longer had novelty, but 
 it still had interest ; and they varied their- day by 
 taking a coupe", by renouncing advertisements, and 
 by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them 
 to consider the idea of furnished houses ; and Mrs. 
 March learned tolerance for Fulkerson by accepting 
 permits to visit flats and houses which had none of 
 the qualifications she desired in either, and were as 
 far beyond her means as they were out of the region 
 to which she had geographically restricted herself. 
 They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand 
 dollar apartments, and rejected them for one reason 
 or another which had nothing to do with the rent ; 
 the higher the rent was, the more critical they were 
 of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of 
 the richly decorated rooms. They never knew 
 whether they had deceived the janitor or not ; as 
 they came in a coupe", they hoped they had. 
 
 They drove accidentally through one street that 
 seemed gayer in the perspective than an L road. 
 The fire-escapes, with their light iron balconies and 
 ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts ; 
 the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed
 
 80 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 with children; women's neads seemed to show at- 
 every window. In the basements, over which nights 
 of high stone steps led to the tenements, were green- 
 grocers' shops abounding in cabbages, and provision 
 stores running chiefly to bacon and sausages, and 
 cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in pro- 
 portion to the small needs of a poor neighbourhood. 
 Ash barrels lined the sidewalks, and garbage heaps 
 filled the gutters; teams of all trades stood idly 
 about ; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through 
 the street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams 
 and shouts of the children and the scolding and 
 gossiping voices of the women ; the burly blue bulk 
 of a policeman defined itself at the corner ; a 
 drunkard zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. 
 It was not the abode of the extremest poverty, but 
 of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, trans- 
 mitting itself from generation to generation, and 
 establishing conditions of permanency to which 
 human life adjusts itself as it does to those of some 
 incurable disease, like leprosy. 
 
 The time had been when the Marches would have 
 taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they 
 glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses ; 
 when they would have contented themselves with 
 saying that it was as picturesque as a street in 
 Naples or Florence, and with wondering why nobody 
 came to paint it ; they would have thought they 
 were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the 
 artists for their failure to appreciate it, and going- 
 abroad for the picturesque when they had it here
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 81 
 
 under their noses. It was to the nose that the street 
 made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March 
 pulled up her window of the coupe". " Why does he 
 take us through such a disgusting street ? " she de- 
 manded, with an exasperation of which her husband 
 divined the origin. 
 
 " This driver may be a philanthropist in dis- 
 guise," he answered, with dreamy irony, " and may 
 want us to think about the people who are not 
 merely carried through this street in a coupe", but 
 have to spend their whole lives in it, winter and 
 summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except 
 in a hearse. I must say they don't seem to mind 
 it. I haven't seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New 
 York. They seem to have forgotten death a little 
 more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, 
 Isabel. And I wonder what they think of us, 
 making this gorgeous progress through their midst. 
 I suppose they think we 're rich, and hate us if 
 they hate rich people ; they don't look as if they 
 hated anybody. Should we be as patient as they 
 are with their discomfort ? I don't believe there 's 
 steam-heat or an elevator in the whole block. Seven 
 rooms and a bath would be more than the largest and, 
 genteelest family would know what to do with. They 
 wouldn't know what to do with the bath anyway." 
 
 His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart 
 from the satirical point it had for themselves. "You 
 ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work some of 
 these New York sights up for Every Other Week, 
 
 Basil ; you could do them very nicely." 
 4.*
 
 82 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Yes; I've thought of that. But don't let's 
 leave the personal ground. Doesn't it make you 
 feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you 
 see the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours 
 live in, and then think how particular you are about 
 locality and the number of bell-pulls 1 I don't see 
 even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors. ;> 
 He craned his neck out of the window for a better 
 look, and the children of discomfort cheered him, 
 out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. " I didn't 
 know I was so popular. Perhaps it 's a recognition 
 of my humane sentiments." 
 
 " Oh, it 's very easy to have humane sentiments, 
 and to satirise ourselves for wanting eight rooms 
 and a bath in a good neighbourhood, when we see 
 how these wretched creatures live," said his wife. 
 " But if we shared all we have with them, and then 
 settled down among them, what good would it do ? " 
 
 " Not the least in the world. It might help us 
 for the moment, but it wouldn't keep the wolf from 
 their doors for a week ; and then they would go on 
 just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good 
 terms with the wolf. The only way for them is to 
 keep up an unbroken intimacy with the wolf ; then 
 they can manage him somehow. I don't know how, 
 and I 'm afraid I don't want to. Wouldn't you like 
 to have this fellow drive us round among the halls 
 of pride somewhere for a little while 1 Fifth Avenue 
 or Madison, up-town 1 " 
 
 " No ; we 've no time to waste. I 've got a place 
 near Third Avenue, on a nice cross street, and I
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 83 
 
 want him to take us there." It proved that she had 
 several addresses near together, and it seemed best 
 to dismiss their coup6 and do the rest of their after- 
 noon's work on foot. It came to nothing ; she was 
 not humbled in the least by what she had seen in 
 the tenement-house street ; she yielded no point in 
 her ideal of a flat, and the flats persistently refused 
 to lend themselves to it. She lost all patience with 
 them. 
 
 " Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," 
 said her husband, when she denounced their stupid 
 inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian home. 
 " But I 'm not so sure that we are either. I 've 
 been thinking about that home business ever since 
 my sensibilities were dragged in a coup6 through 
 that tenement-house street. Of course no child born 
 and brought up in such a place as that could have 
 any conception of home. But that 's because those 
 poor people can't give character to their habitations. 
 They have to take what they can get. But people 
 like us that is, of our means do give character to 
 the average flat. It 's made to meet their tastes, or 
 their supposed tastes ; and so it 's made for social 
 show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in 
 a flat ! It 's a contradiction in terms ; the flat is 
 the negation of motherhood. The flat means society 
 life ; that is, the pretence of social life. It 's made 
 to give artificial people a society basis on a little 
 money too much money, of course, for what they 
 get. So the cost of the building is put into marble 
 halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don't
 
 84 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 object to the conveniences, but none of these flats 
 have a living-room. They have drawing-rooms to 
 foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms 
 and bedrooms ; but they have no room where the 
 family can all come together and feel the sweetness 
 of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holes 
 mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it 
 were not for the marble halls, and the decorations, 
 and the foolishly expensive finish, the houses could 
 be built round a court, and the flats could be shaped 
 something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleep- 
 ing closets only lit from the outside and the rest 
 of the floor thrown into two or three large cheerful 
 halls, where all the family life could go on, and 
 society could be transacted unpretentiously. Why, 
 those tenements are better and humaner than those 
 flats ! There the whole family lives in the kitchen, 
 and has its consciousness of being ; but the flat 
 abolishes the family consciousness. It's confine- 
 ment without coziness ; it 's cluttered without be- 
 ing snug. You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in 
 a flat ; you couldn't go down cellar to get cider. No : 
 the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo- 
 Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco- 
 American flat, not because it 's humble, but because 
 it's false." 
 
 "Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at 
 houses." 
 
 He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, 
 and he had not expected this concrete result. But 
 he said, " We will look at houses, then."
 
 X. 
 
 NOTHING mystifies a man more than a woman's 
 aberrations from some point at which he supposes 
 her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses, 
 without steam or elevator, March followed his wife 
 about with patient wonder. She rather liked the 
 worst of them best ; but she made him go down into 
 the cellars and look at the furnaces ; she exacted 
 from him a rigid inquest of the plumbing. She 
 followed him into one of the cellars by the fitful 
 glare of successively lighted matches, and they 
 enjoyed a moment in which the anomaly of their 
 presence there on that errand, so remote from all 
 the facts of their long-stablished life in Boston, 
 realised itself for them. 
 
 " Think how easily we might have been murdered 
 and nobody been any the wiser ! " she said when they 
 were comfortably out-doors again. 
 
 "Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of 
 emotional insanity, supposed to have been induced 
 by unavailing flat-hunting," he suggested. 
 
 She fell in with the notion. "I'm beginning to 
 feel crazy. But I don 't want you to lose your head, 
 Basil. And I don't want you to sentimentalise any 
 G
 
 86 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 of the things you see in New York. I think you 
 were disposed to do it in that street we drove through. 
 I don't believe there 's any real suffering not real 
 suffering among those people j that is, it would be 
 suffering from our point of view, but they Ve been 
 used to it all their lives, and they don't feel their 
 discomfort so much." 
 
 " Of course I understand that, and I don't propose 
 to sentimentalise them. I think when people get 
 used to a bad state of things they had better stick 
 to it ; in fact they don't usually like a better state 
 so well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind." 
 
 She laughed with him, and they walked along the 
 L-bestridden avenue, exhilarated by their escape 
 from murder and suicide in that cellar, toward the 
 nearest cross-town track, which they meant to take 
 home to their hotel. " Now to-night we will go to 
 the theatre," she said, "and get this whole house 
 business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for 
 a new start in the morning." Suddenly she clutched 
 his arm. " Why, did you see that man ? " and she 
 signed with her head toward a decently dressed 
 person who walked beside them, next the gutter, 
 stooping over as if to examine it, and half halting at 
 times. 
 
 "No. What?" 
 
 " Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker 
 from the pavement and cram it into his mouth and 
 eat it down as if he were famished. And look ! he 's 
 actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps ! " 
 
 This was what the decent-looking man with the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 87 
 
 hard hands and broken nails of a workman was 
 doing like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, 
 in the fascination of the sight, to the next corner, 
 where he turned down the side street still searching 
 the gutter. 
 
 They walked on a few paces. Then March said, 
 " I must go after him," and left his wife standing. 
 
 " Are you in want hungry 1 " he asked the 
 man. 
 
 The man said he could not speak English, 
 monsieur. 
 
 March asked his question in French. 
 
 The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, 
 " Mais, monsieur " 
 
 March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly 
 the man's face twisted up ; he caught the hand of 
 this alms-giver in both of his, and clung to it. 
 " Monsieur ! monsieur ! " he gasped, and the tears 
 rained down his face. 
 
 His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and 
 ashamed, as one is by such a chance, and got back 
 to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the 
 mystery of misery out of which he had emerged. 
 
 March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for 
 what had happened. " Of course we might live 
 here for years and not see another case like that ; 
 and of course there are twenty places where he 
 could have gone for help if he had known where to 
 find them." 
 
 "Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the 
 help so badly as that!" she answered. "That's
 
 88 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a place 
 where such things are possible, and we may as well 
 stop our house-hunting here at once." 
 
 " Yes 1 And what part of Christendom will you 
 live in ? Such things are possible everywhere in our 
 conditions." 
 
 " Then we must change the conditions " 
 
 *' Oh no ; we must go to the theatre and forget 
 them. We can stop at Brentano's for our tickets as 
 we pass through Union Square." 
 
 " I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am 
 going home to Boston to-night. You can stay and 
 find a flat," 
 
 He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, 
 and even of its selfishness ; but she said that her 
 mind was quite made up irrespective of what had 
 happened ; that she had been away from the 
 children long enough ; that she ought to be at home 
 to finish up the work of leaving it. The word 
 brought a sigh. " Ah, I don't know why we should 
 see nothing but sad and ugly things now. When 
 we were young " 
 
 / O 
 
 " Younger," he put in. " We 're still young." 
 " That 's what we pretend, but we know better. 
 But I was thinking how pretty and pleasant things 
 used to be turning up all the time on our travels in 
 the old days. Why, when we were in New York 
 here on our wedding journey the place didn't seem 
 half so dirty as it does now, and none of these dis- 
 mal things happened." 
 
 " It was a good deal dirtier," he answered ; "and_I
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 89 
 
 fancy worse in every way hungrier, raggeder, more 
 wretchedly housed. But that wasn't the period of 
 life for us to notice it. Don't you remember, 
 when we started to Niagara the last time, how 
 everybody seemed middle-aged and commonplace; 
 and when we got there there were no evident 
 brides ; nothing but elderly married people ] " 
 
 " At least they weren't starving," she rebelled. 
 
 " No, you don't starve in parlour cars and first- 
 class hotels ; but if you step out of them you run 
 your chance of seeing those who do, if you 're get- 
 ting on pretty well in the forties. If it 's the un- 
 happy who see unhappiness, think what misery must 
 be revealed to people who pass their lives in the 
 really squalid tenement-house streets I don't mean 
 picturesque avenues like that we passed through." 
 
 " But we are not unhappy," she protested, bring- 
 ing the talk back to the personal base again, as 
 women must to get any good out of talk. " We 're 
 really no unhappier than we were when we were 
 young." 
 
 " We 're more serious." 
 
 " Well, I hate it ; and I wish you wouldn't be so 
 serious, if that 's what it brings us to." 
 
 "I will be trivial from this on," said March. 
 " Shall we go to the Hole in the Ground to-night 1 " 
 
 "I am going to Boston." 
 
 " It 's much the same thing. How do you like that 
 for triviality 1 It 's a little blasphemous, I '11 allow." 
 
 " It 's very silly," she said. 
 
 At the hotel they found a letter from the agent
 
 90 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 who had sent them the permit to see Mrs. Gros- 
 venor Green's apartment. He wrote that she had 
 heard they were pleased with her apartment, and 
 that she thought she could make the terms to suit. 
 She had taken her passage for Europe, and was very 
 anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would 
 call that evening at seven. 
 
 " Mrs. Grosvenor Green ! " said Mrs. March. 
 " Which of the ten thousand flats is it, Basil 1 " 
 
 11 The gimcrackery," he answered. " In the 
 Xenophon, you know." 
 
 " Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall 
 not see her. Or yes I must I couldn't go away 
 without seeing what sort of creature could have 
 planned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect " 
 
 " Parachute," March suggested. 
 
 "No : anybody so light as that couldn't come down." 
 
 "Well, toy balloon." 
 
 " Toy balloon will do for the present," Mrs. March 
 admitted. " But I feel that naught but herself can 
 be her parallel for volatility." 
 
 When Mrs. Grosvenor Green's card came up they 
 both descended to the hotel parlour, which March 
 said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat ; 
 not that he knew of any such craft, but the decora- 
 tions were so Saracenic and the architecture so 
 Hudson Riverish. They found there on the grand 
 central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, 
 placidity, and plumpness set at defiance all their pre- 
 conceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor Green, so that Mrs. 
 March distinctly paused with her card in her hand
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 91 
 
 before venturing even tentatively to address her. 
 Then she was astonished at the low calm voice in 
 which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself, and slowly 
 proceeded to apologise for calling. It was not quite 
 true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but 
 she hoped soon to do so, and she confessed that in 
 the meantime she was anxious to let her flat. She 
 was a little worn out with the care of house-keeping 
 Mrs. March breathed, " Oh yes ! " in the sigh with 
 which ladies recognise one another's martyrdom 
 and Mr. Green had business abroad, and she was 
 going to pursue her art studies in Paris ; she drew 
 in Mr. Ilcomb's class now, but the instruction was 
 so much better in Paris ; and as the Superintendent 
 seemed to think the price was the only objection, 
 she had ventured to call. 
 
 " Then we didn't deceive him in the least," 
 thought Mrs. March, while she answered sweetly : 
 " No ; we were only afraid that it would be too 
 small for our family. We require a good many 
 rooms." She could not forego the opportunity of 
 saying, "My husband is coming to New York to 
 take charge of a literary periodical, and he will 
 have to have a room to write in," which made 
 Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look 
 sheepish. "But we did think the apartment very 
 charming (It icas architecturally charming," she pro- 
 tested to her conscience), "and we should have been 
 so glad if we could have got into it." She followed 
 this with some account of their house-hunting, amid 
 soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, who
 
 92 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 said that she had been through all that, and that if 
 she could have shown her apartment to them she 
 felt sure that she could have explained it so that 
 they would have seen its capabilities better. Mrs. 
 March assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that 
 if they found nothing exactly suitable she would be 
 glad to have them, look at it again ; and then Mrs. 
 March said that she was going back to Boston her- 
 self, but she was leaving Mr. March to continue the 
 search, and she had no doubt he would be only too 
 glad to see the apartment by daylight. " But if 
 you take it, Basil," she warned him, when they were 
 alone, " I shall simply renounce you. I wouldn't 
 live in that junk shop if you gave it to me. But 
 who would have thought she was that kind of look- 
 ing person ? Though of course I might have known 
 if I had stopped to think once. It 's because the 
 place doesn't express her at all that it 's so unlike 
 her. It couldn't be like anybody, or anything that 
 flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or swims 
 in the waters under the earth. I wonder where in 
 the world she 's from ; she 's no Xew- Yorker ; even 
 we can see that ; and she 's not quite a country 
 person either ; she seems like a person from some 
 large town, where she 's been an aesthetic authority. 
 And she can't find good enough art instruction in 
 New York, and has to go to Paris for it ! Well, it 's 
 pathetic, after all, Basil. I can't help feeling sorry 
 for a person who mistakes herself to that extent." 
 " I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a 
 person who mistakes herself to that extent. What
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 93 
 
 is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris while 
 she 's working her way into the Salon ? " 
 
 " Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil ; 
 that 's all I 've got to say to you. And yet I do like 
 some things about her." 
 
 "I like everything about her but her apartment," 
 said March. 
 
 " I like her going to be out of the country," said 
 his wife. " We shouldn't be overlooked. And the 
 place was prettily shaped, you can't deny it. And 
 there was an elevator and steam-heat. And the loca- 
 tion is very convenient. And there was a hall-boy 
 to bring up cards. The halls and stairs were kept 
 very clean and nice. But it wouldn't do. I could 
 put you a folding bed in the room where you wrote, 
 and we could even have one in the parlour " 
 
 " Behind a portiere 1 I couldn't stand any more 
 portieres ! " 
 
 "And we could squeeze the two girls into one 
 room, or perhaps only bring Margaret, and put out 
 the whole of the wash. Basil ! " she almost shrieked, 
 " it isn't to be thought of ! " 
 
 He retorted, " I 'm not thinking of it, my dear." 
 
 Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. 
 March's train, to find out what had become of them, 
 he said, and to see whether they had got anything 
 to live in yet. 
 
 " Not a thing," she said. " And I 'm just going 
 back to Boston, and leaving Mr. March here to do 
 anything he pleases about it. He has carte blanche." 
 
 "But freedom brings responsibility, you know,
 
 94 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Fulkerson, and it 's the same as if I 'd no choice. I 'm 
 staying behind because I 'm left, not because I expect 
 to do anything." 
 
 " Is that so ] " asked Fulkerson. " Well, we must 
 see what can be done. I supposed you would be all 
 settled by this time, or I should have humped myself 
 to find you something. None of those places I gave 
 you amount to anything ? " 
 
 " As much as forty thousand others we Ve looked 
 at," said Mrs. March. "Yes, one of them does 
 amount to something. It comes so near being what 
 we want that I 've given Mr. March particular in- 
 structions not to go near it." 
 
 She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her 
 flats, and at the end he said 
 
 " Well, well, we must look out for that. I '11 keep 
 an eye on him, Mrs. March, and see that he doesn't 
 do anything rash, and I won't leave him till he 's 
 found just the right thing. It exists, of course ; it 
 must in a city of eighteen hundred thousand people, 
 and the only question is where to find it. You leave 
 him to me, Mrs. March ; I '11 watch out for him." 
 
 Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the 
 station when he found they -\vere not driving, but 
 she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel door. 
 
 "He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is 
 perfectly charming. It 's very sweet to see how 
 really fond of you he is. But I didn't want him 
 stringing along up to Forty-second Street with us, 
 and spoiling our last moments together." 
 
 At Third Avenue they took the Elevated, for
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 95 
 
 which she confessed an infatuation. She declared it 
 the most ideal way of getting about in the world, 
 and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how 
 she used to say that nothing under the sun could 
 induce her to travel on it. She now said that the 
 night transit was even more interesting than the 
 day, and that the fleeting intimacy you formed with 
 people in second and third floor interiors, while all 
 the usual street life went on underneath, had a 
 domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that 
 was the last effect of good society with all its security 
 and exclusiveness. He said it was better than the 
 theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those 
 people through their windows : a family party of 
 work-folk at a late tea, some of the men in their 
 shirt sleeves ; a woman sewing by a lamp ; a mother 
 laying her child in its cradle ; a man with his head 
 fallen on his hands upon a table ; a girl and her 
 lover leaning over the window-sill together. What 
 suggestion ! what drama ! what infinite interest ! 
 At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a 
 minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the 
 branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up 
 and down the long stretch of the elevated to north 
 and south. The track that found and lost itself a 
 thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innu- 
 merable lights ; the moony sheen of the electrics 
 mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far 
 and near; the architectural shapes of houses and 
 churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from 
 all that was ignoble in them, and the coming and
 
 96 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 going of the trains marking the stations with vivider 
 or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam formed an 
 incomparable perspective. They often talked after- 
 ward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of 
 painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles ; and 
 they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron 
 over the cross street on which they ran to the depot ; 
 but for the present they were mostly inarticulate 
 before it. They had another moment of rich silence 
 when they paused in the gallery that leads from the 
 elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central 
 Depot and looked down upon the great night trains 
 lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights 
 that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of 
 the place. What forces, what fates, slept in these 
 bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north 
 and east and west through the night ! Now they 
 waited there like fabled monsters of Arab story ready 
 for the magician's touch, tractable, reckless, will-less 
 organised lifelessness full of a strange semblance 
 of life. 
 
 The Marches admired the impressive sight with a 
 thrill of patriotic pride in the fact that the whole 
 world perhaps could not afford just the like. Then 
 they hurried down to the ticket offices, and he got 
 her a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, a"nd went 
 with her to the car. They made the most of the 
 fact that her berth was in the very middle of the 
 car ; and she promised to write as soon as she reached 
 home. She promised also that having seen the 
 limitations of New York in respect to flats, she
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 97 
 
 would not be hard on him if he took something not 
 quite ideal Only he must remember that it was 
 not to be above Twentieth Street nor below Wash- 
 ington Square ; it must not be higher than the third 
 floor; it must have an elevator, steam-heat, hall- 
 boys, and a pleasant janitor. These were essentials ; 
 if he could not get them, then they must do without. 
 But he must get them. 
 VOL. L 5
 
 XL 
 
 MRS. MARCH was one of those wives who exact a 
 more rigid adherence to their ideals from their hus- 
 bands than from themselves. Early in their married 
 life she had taken charge of him in all matters which 
 she considered practical. She did not include the 
 business of bread-winning in these ; that was an 
 affair that might safely be left to his absent-minded, 
 dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with 
 him there. But in such things as rehanging the pic- 
 tures, deciding on a summer boarding-place, taking a 
 seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing seats at 
 the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she 
 was not at table, shutting the cat out at night, keep- 
 ing run of calls and invitations, and seeing if the fur- 
 nace was damped, he had failed her so often that she 
 felt she cou'd not leave him the slightest discretion 
 in regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judg- 
 ment in the matters cited and others like them con- 
 sisted with the greatest admiration of his mind and 
 respect for his character. She often said that if he 
 would only bring them to bear in such exigencies he 
 would be simply perfect ; but she had long given up 
 his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 99 
 
 an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to 
 abandon him to the native lawlessness of his tem- 
 perament. She expected him in this event to do as 
 he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with con- 
 siderable comfort in holding him accountable. He 
 learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly 
 from her disappointment with whatever he did he 
 waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and 
 began to extract what consolation lurks in the irre- 
 parable. She would almost admit at moments that 
 what he had done was a very good thing, but she 
 reserved the right to return in full force to her 
 original condemnation of it; and she accumulated 
 each act of independent volition in witness and 
 warning against him. Their mass oppressed but 
 never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong 
 thing when left to his own devices, and he did it 
 without any apparent recollection of his former mis- 
 deeds and their consequences. There was a good 
 deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy. 
 
 He now experienced a certain expansion, such as 
 husbands of his kind will imagine, on going back to 
 his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion from 
 the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea 
 of Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, which, in its 
 preposterous unsuitability, had a strange attraction. 
 He felt that he could take it with less risk than 
 anything else they had seen, but he said he would 
 look at all the other places in town first. He really 
 spent the greater part of the next day in hunting up 
 the owner of an apartment that had neither steam-
 
 100 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 heat nor an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and 
 trying to get him to take less than the agent asked. 
 By a curious psychical operation he was able, in the 
 transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate 
 desire for the apartment, while he held the Gros- 
 venor Green apartment in the background of his 
 mind as something that he could return to as alto- 
 gether more suitable. He conducted some simul- 
 taneous negotiation for a furnished house, which 
 enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor 
 Green apartment. Toward evening he went off at 
 a tangent far up-town, so as' to be able to tell his 
 wife how utterly preposterous the best there would 
 be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor 
 Green gimcrackery. It is hard to report the pro- 
 cesses of his sophistication ; perhaps this, again, 
 may best be left to the marital imagination. 
 
 He rang at the last of these up-town apartments 
 as it was falling dusk, and it was long before the 
 janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly, 
 and said if he looked at the flat now he would say 
 it was too dark, like all the rest. His reluctance 
 irritated March in proportion to his insincerity in 
 proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not 
 mean to take it under any circumstances ; that he 
 was going to use his inspection of it in dishonest 
 justification of his disobedience to his wife ; but he 
 put on an air of offended dignity. "If you don't 
 wish to show the apartment," he said, " I don't care 
 to see it." 
 
 The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 101 
 
 dreaded the stairs. He scratched a match on his 
 thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry for 
 him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his 
 waistcoat-pocket to give him at parting. At the 
 same time, he had to trump up an objection to the 
 flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as con- 
 taining ten rooms, and he found the number eked 
 out with the bath-room and two large closets. " It 's 
 light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you 
 make out ten rooms." 
 
 " There 's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no 
 proof. 
 
 March took his fingers off the quarter, and went 
 downstairs and out of the door without another 
 word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible, 
 to give the man anything after such insolence. He 
 reflected, with shame, that it was also cheaper to 
 punish than forgive him. 
 
 He returned to his hotel prepared for any 
 desperate measure, and convinced now that the 
 Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the 
 only thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, 
 the best thing in New York. 
 
 Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, 
 and it gave March the curious thrill with which a 
 man closes with temptation when he said : " Look 
 here ! Why don't you take that woman's flat in the 
 Xenophon ? She 's been at the agents again, and 
 they Ve been at me. She likes your look or Mrs. 
 March's and I guess you can have it at a pretty 
 heavy discount from the original price. I 'm author- 
 H
 
 102 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ised to say you can have it for one seventy-five a 
 month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you 
 to offer one fifty." 
 
 March shook his head, and dropped a mask of 
 virtuous rejection over his corrupt acquiescence. 
 " It 's too small for us we couldn't squeeze into it." 
 
 " Why, look here ! " Fulkerson persisted. " How 
 many rooms do you people want ? " 
 
 " I 've got to have a place to work " 
 
 " Of course ! And you Ve got to have it at the 
 Fifth Wheel office." 
 
 "I hadn't thought of that," March began. "I 
 suppose I could do my work at the office, as there 's 
 not much writing " 
 
 " Why, of course you can't do your work at home. 
 You just come round with me now, and look at that 
 flat again." 
 
 "No; I can't do it." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " I I Ve got to dine." 
 
 " All right," said Fulkerson. " Dine with me. I 
 want to take you round to a little Italian place that 
 I know." . 
 
 One may trace the successive steps of March's 
 descent in this simple matter with the same edifica- 
 tion that would attend the study of the self-delusions 
 and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The 
 process is probably not at all different, and to the 
 philosophical mind the kind of result is unimpor- 
 tant ; the process is everything. 
 
 Fulkerson led him down one block and half
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 103 
 
 across another to the steps of a small dwelling-house, 
 transformed, like many others, into a restaurant 
 of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural 
 change from the pattern of the lower middle-class 
 New York home. There were the corroded brown- 
 stone steps, the mean little front door, and the 
 cramped entry with its narrow stairs by which 
 ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed for 
 them on the second floor ; the parlours on the first 
 were set about with tables, where men smoked 
 cigarettes between the courses, and a single waiter 
 ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and 
 exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook be- 
 yond a slide in the back parlour. He rushed at the 
 new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth? before 
 them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst 
 stains with a napkin, and brought them, in their 
 order, the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the cheese- 
 strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast 
 fowl and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee 
 which form the dinner at such places. 
 
 " Ah, this is nice ! " said Fulkerson, after the 
 laying of the charitable napkin, and he began to 
 recognise acquaintances, some of whom he described 
 to March as young literary men and artists with 
 whom they should probably have to do ; others 
 were simply frequenters of the place, and were of 
 all nationalities and religions apparently at least, 
 several were Hebrews and Cubans. "You get a 
 pretty good slice of New York here," he said, " all 
 except the frosting on top. That you Avon't find
 
 104 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 much at Maroni's, though you will occasionally. I 
 don't mean the ladies ever, of course." The ladies 
 present seemed harmless and reputable looking 
 people enough, but certainly they were not of the 
 first fashion, and, except in a few instances, not 
 Americans. " It 's like cutting straight down 
 through a fruit-cake," Fulkerson went on, " or a 
 mince-pie, when you don't know who made the pie ; 
 you get a little of everything." He ordered a small 
 flask of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in 
 its pretty wicker jacket. March smiled upon it 
 with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed. 
 " Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos 
 here one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil j 
 that 's the kind of bottle they used to have it in at 
 the country drug-stores." 
 
 " Yes, I remember now ; but I M totally forgotten 
 it," said March. " How far back that goes ! Who 's 
 Dryfoos ? " 
 
 " Dryfoos ? " Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a 
 piece of the half-yard of French loaf which had been 
 supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of butter, 
 and fed it into himself. "Old Dryfoos ] Well, of 
 course ! I call him old, but he ain't so very. 
 About fifty, or along there." 
 
 " No," said March, " that isn't very old or not 
 so old as it used to be." 
 
 "Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, 
 anyway," said Fulkerson thoughtfully. " And I 've 
 been wondering just how I should tell you. Can't 
 always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 105 
 
 you really are ! Ever been out in the natural gas 
 c6uritry ? " 
 
 " No," said March. " I 've had a good deal of 
 curiosity about it, but I Ve never been able to get 
 away except in summer, and then we always pre- 
 ferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara 
 and back through Canada, the route we took on our 
 wedding journey. The children like it as much as 
 we do." 
 
 " Yes, yes," said Fulkerson. " Well, the natural 
 gas country is worth seeing. I don't mean the 
 Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio and 
 Indiana around Moffitt that 's the place in the 
 heart of the gas region that they Ve been booming 
 so. Yes, you ought to see that country. If you 
 haven't been West for a good many years, you 
 haven't got any idea how old the country looks. 
 You remember how the fields used to be all full of 
 stumps ? " 
 
 "I should think so." 
 
 " Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that 
 country out around Moffitt is just as smooth as a 
 checker-board, and looks as old as England. You 
 know how we used to burn the stumps out ; and 
 then somebody invented a stump-extracter, and we 
 pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they 
 just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they Ve 
 got a cellar dug and filled up with kindling ready 
 for house-keeping whenever you want it. Only 
 they haven't got any use for kindling in that country 
 all gas. I rode along on the cars through those 
 5*
 
 106 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 level black fields at corn-planting time, and every 
 once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece *of 
 ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, 
 and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing 
 all round it and not minding it any more than if it 
 was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either. 
 Well, they Ve always known about the gas out there ; 
 they say there are places in the woods where it 's 
 been burning ever since the country was settled. 
 
 " But when you come in sight of Moffitt my, oh 
 my ! Well, you come in smell of it about as soon. 
 That gas out there ain't odourless, like the Pittsburg 
 gas, and so it 's perfectly safe ; but the smell isn't 
 bad about as bad as the finest kind of benzine. 
 Well, the first thing that strikes you when you 
 come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a 
 good warm, growing rain, and the town 's come up 
 overnight That 's in the suburbs, the annexes, and 
 additions. But it ain't shabby no shanty-town 
 business ; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em 
 Queen Anne style, and all of 'cm looking as if they 
 had come to stay. And when you drive up from 
 the dep6t you think everybody 's moving. Every- 
 thing seems to be piled into the street ; old houses 
 made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You 
 know the kind of street Main Street always used to 
 be in our section half plank-road and turnpike, and 
 the rest mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries 
 strung along with false fronts a story higher than 
 the back, and here and there a decent building with 
 the gable end to the public; and a court-house and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 107 
 
 jail and two taverns and three or four churches. 
 Well, they 're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture 
 has struck it hard, and they Ve got a lot of new 
 buildings that needn't be ashamed of themselves 
 anywhere ; the new court-house is as big as St. 
 Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest 
 style of the art. You can't buy a lot on that street 
 for much less than you can buy a lot in New York 
 or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw 
 the place just when the boom was in its prime. I 
 went out there to work the newspapers in the 
 syndicate business, and I got one of their men to 
 write me a real bright, snappy account of the gas ; 
 and they just took me in their arms and showed me 
 everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was 
 beautiful, too ! To see a whole community stirred up 
 like that was just like a big boy, all hope and high 
 spirits, and no discount on the remotest future ; 
 nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time I 
 tell you it warmed your blood. Why, there were 
 some things about it that made you think what a 
 nice kind of world this would be if people ever took 
 hold together, instead of each fellow fighting it out 
 on his own hook, and devil take the hindmost. They 
 made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted 
 their town to grow they 'd got to keep their gas 
 public property. So they extended their corporation 
 line so as to take in pretty much the whole gas 
 region round there ; and then the city took posses- 
 sion of every well that was put down, and held it 
 for the common good. Anybody that 's a mind to
 
 108 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture 
 can have all the gas he wants free ; and for fifteen 
 dollars a year you can have all the gas you want to 
 heat and light your private house. The people hold 
 on to it for themselves, and, as I say, it 's a grand 
 sight to see a whole community hanging together 
 and working for the good of all, instead of splitting 
 up into as many different cut-throats as there are 
 able-bodied citizens. See that fellow *? " Fulkerson 
 broke off, and indicated with a twirl of his head a 
 short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the 
 door. " They say that fellow 's a Socialist. I think 
 it 's a shame they 're allowed to come here. If they 
 don't like the way we manage our affairs, let 'em 
 stay at home," Fulkerson continued. "They do a 
 lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths round here. 
 I believe in free speech and all that ; but I 'd like 
 to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw 
 each other to death. We don't want any of their 
 poison." 
 
 March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He 
 was watching, with a teasing sense of familiarity, a 
 tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who had just 
 come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon 
 among Germans, and yet March recognised him at 
 once as German. His long, soft beard and moustache 
 had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their 
 yellow in the gray to which they had turned. His 
 eyes were full, and his lips and chin shaped the beard 
 to the noble outline which shows in the beards the 
 Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 109 
 
 His carriage was erect and soldierly, and March 
 presently saw that he had lost his left hand. He 
 took his place at a table where the overworked 
 waiter found time to cut up his meat, and put 
 -everything in easy reach of his right hand. 
 
 " Well," Fulkerson resumed, " they took me round 
 everywhere in Moffitt, and showed me their big 
 wells lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hear 
 them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting 
 of locomotives. Why, when they let one of these 
 wells loose in a meadow that they 'd piped it into 
 temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from 
 the mouth of the pipe and blew it over half an acre 
 of ground. They say when they let one of their 
 big wells burn away all winter before they had 
 learned how to control it, that well kept up a little 
 summer all around it ; the grass stayed green, and 
 the flowers bloomed all through the winter. / don't 
 know whether it's so or not. But I can believe 
 anything of natural gas. My ! but it was beautiful 
 when they turned on the full force of that well and 
 shot a roman candle into the gas that 's the way 
 they light it and a plume of fire about twenty feet 
 wide and seventy-five feet high, all red and yellow 
 and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar 
 shook the ground under your feet ! You felt like 
 saying, 'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly con- 
 vinced. I believe in Moffitt.' We-e-e-ll! " drawled 
 Fulkerson, with a long breath, " that V where I met 
 old Dryfoos." 
 
 " Oh yes ! Dryfoos," said March. He observed
 
 110 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that the waiter had brought the old one-handed 
 German a towering glass of beer. 
 
 " Yes," Fulkerson laughed. " We Ve got round 
 to Dryfoos again. I thought I could cut a long 
 story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story 
 long. If you 're not in a hurry, though 
 
 " Not in the least. Go on as long as you like." 
 " I met him there in the office of a real-estate man 
 speculator, of course ; everybody was, in Moffitt ; 
 but a first-rate fellow, and public-spirited as all get- 
 out ; and when Dryfoos left he told me about him. 
 Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, 
 about three or four miles out of Moffitt, and he 'd 
 lived there pretty much all his life ; father was one 
 of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the 
 right stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses 
 in January, like those Pennsylvania Dutch. He 'd 
 got together the largest and handsomest farm any- 
 where around there ; and he was making money on 
 it, just like he was in some business somewhere ; 
 he was a very intelligent man ; he took the papers 
 and kept himself posted ; but he was awfully old- 
 fashioned in his ideas. He hung on to the doctrines 
 as well as the dollars of the dads ; it was a real 
 thing with him. Well, when the boom began to 
 come he hated it awfully, and he fought it. He 
 used to write communications to the weekly news- 
 paper in Moffitt they've got three dailies there 
 now and throw cold water on the boom. He 
 couldn't catch on no way. It made him sick to 
 hear the clack that went on about the gas the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. Ill 
 
 whole while, and that stirred up the neighbour- 
 hood and got into his family. Whenever he'd 
 hear of a man that had been offered a big price 
 for his land and was going to sell out and move 
 into town, he 'd go and labour with him and try to 
 talk him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen 
 or twenty thousand would last him to live on, and 
 shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and 
 try to make him believe it wouldn't be five years 
 before the Standard owned the whole region. 
 
 "Of course he couldn't do anything with them. 
 "When a man 's offered a big price for his farm, he 
 don't care whether it 's by a secret emissary from 
 the Standard Oil or not ; he 's going to sell and get 
 the better of the other fellow if he can. Dryfoos 
 couldn't keep the boom out of his own family even. 
 His wife was with him. She thought whatever he 
 said and did was just as right as if it had been 
 thundered down from Sinai. But the young folks 
 were sceptical, especially the girls that had been 
 away to school. The boy that had been kept at 
 home because he couldn't be spared from helping 
 his father manage the farm was more like him, but 
 they contrived to stir the boy up with the hot end 
 of the boom too. So when a fellow came along one 
 day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred thousand 
 for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He 'd V 
 liked to 'a' kept the offer to himself and not done 
 anything about it, but his vanity wouldn't let him 
 do that ; and when he let it out in his family the 
 girls outvoted him. They just made him sell.
 
 112 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty 
 acres that was off in one piece by itself, but the 
 three hundred that had the old brick house on it, 
 and the big barn that went, and Dryfoos bought 
 him a place in Moffitt and moved into town to live 
 on the interest of his money. Just what he had 
 scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. 
 Well, they say that at first he seemed like he 
 would go crazy. He hadn't anything to do. He 
 took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to 
 go and set in his office and ask him what he should 
 do. ' I hain't got any horses, I hain't got any cows, 
 I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens. I 
 hain't got anything to do from sun up to sundown.' 
 The fellow said the tears used to run down the old 
 fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been so busy him- 
 self he believed he should 'a' cried too. But most 
 o' people thought old Dryfoos was down in the 
 mouth because he hadn't asked more for his farm, 
 when he wanted to buy it back and found they held 
 it at a hundred and fifty thousand. People couldn't 
 believe he was just homesick and heartsick for the 
 old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't 
 asked more ; that 's human nature too. 
 
 " After a while something happened. That land- 
 agent used to tell Dryfoos to get out to Europe 
 with his money and see life a little, or go and live 
 in Washington, where he could be somebody ; but 
 Dryfoos wouldn't, and he kept listening to the talk 
 there, and all of a sudden he caught on. He came 
 into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 113 
 
 up the eighty acres he 'd kept into town lots ; and 
 he 'd got it all plotted out so well, and had so many 
 practical ideas about it, that the fellow was aston- 
 ished. He went right in with him, as far as 
 Dryfoos would let him, and glad of the chance ; 
 and they were working the thing for all it was 
 worth when I struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted 
 me to go out and see the Dryfoos & Hendry Addi- 
 tion guess he thought may be I 'd write it up ; and 
 he drove me out there himself. Well, it was funny 
 to see a town made : streets driven through ; two 
 rows of shade-trees, hard and soft, planted ; cellars 
 dug and houses put up regular Queen Anne style, 
 too, with stained glass all at once. Dryfoos apolo- 
 gised for the streets because they were hand-made ; 
 said they expected their street-making machine 
 Tuesday, and then they intended to push things." 
 
 Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on 
 March for a moment, and then went on : " He was 
 mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up 
 about my business as sharp as I ever was ques- 
 tioned ; seemed to kind of strike his fancy ; I guess 
 he wanted to find out if there was any money in it. 
 He was making money, hand over hand, then ; and 
 he never stopped speculating and improving, till 
 he 'd scraped together three or four hundred 
 thousand dollars ; they said a million, but they like 
 round numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million 
 would lay over it comfortably and leave a few 
 thousands to spare, probably. Then he came on 
 to New York."
 
 114 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side 
 of the porcelain cup that held the matches in the 
 centre of the table, and lit a cigarette, which he 
 began to smoke, throwing his head back with a 
 leisurely effect, as if he had got to the end of at least 
 as much of his story as he meant to tell without 
 prompting. 
 
 March asked him the desired question. "What 
 in the world for ? " 
 
 Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a 
 smile : " To spend his money, and get his daughters 
 into the old Knickerbocker society. May be he 
 thought they were all the same kind of Dutch." 
 
 " And has he succeeded ? " 
 
 " Well, they 're not social leaders yet. But it 's 
 only a question of time generation or two espe- 
 cially if time's money, and if Every Other Week is 
 the success it's bound to be." 
 
 " You don't mean to say, Fulkerson," said March, 
 with a half doubting, half-daunted laugh, "that he's 
 your Angel ? " 
 
 " That 's what I mean to say," returned Fulkerson. 
 <; I ran onto him in Broadway one day last summer. 
 If you ever saw anybody in your life, you 're sure to 
 meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later. That 's 
 the philosophy of the bunco business; country 
 people from the same neighbourhood are sure to run 
 up against each other the first time they come to 
 New York. I put out my hand, and I said, ' Isn't 
 this Mr. Dryfoos from Moffitt ? ' He didn't seem to 
 have any use for my hand j he let me keep it, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 115 
 
 he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck 
 straight out. Ever see Bernhardt in L'fitrangere 1 
 Well, the American husband is old Dryfoos all over ; 
 no moustache, and hay-coloured chin-whiskers cut 
 slanting from the corners of his mouth. He cocked 
 his little gray eyes at me, and says he, ' Yes, young 
 man. My name is' Dryfoos, and I 'm from Moffitt. 
 But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works, 
 illustrated ; and I don't want to taste no fine teas ; 
 but I know a policeman that does ; and if you 're 
 the son of my old friend Squire Strohfeldt, you 'cl 
 better get out.' ' Well, then,' said I, ' how would 
 you like to go into the newspaper syndicate busi- 
 ness 1 ' He gave another look at me, and then he 
 burst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and 
 he just froze to it. I never saw anybody so glad. 
 
 " Well, the long and the short of it was that I 
 asked him round here to Maroni's to dinner ; and 
 before we broke up for the night we had settled the 
 financial side of the plan that's brought you to New 
 York. I can see," said Fulkerson, who had kept his 
 eyes fast on March's face, " that you don't more than 
 half like the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to give you 
 more confidence in the thing than you ever had. 
 You needn't be afraid," he added, with some feeling, 
 " that I talked Dryfoos into the thing for my own 
 advantage." 
 
 "Oh, my dear Fulkerson !" March protested, all 
 the more fervently because he was really a little 
 guilty. 
 
 " Well, of course not ! I didn't mean you were.
 
 116 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 But I just happened to tell him what I wanted to 
 go into when I could see my way to it, and he caught 
 on of his own accord. The fact is," said Fulkerson, 
 " I guess I 'd better make a clean breast of it, now 
 I 'm at it. Dryfoos wanted to get something for 
 that boy of his to do. He's in railroads himself, 
 and he's in mines and other things, and he keeps 
 busy, and he can't bear to have his boy hanging 
 round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a 
 girl. I told him that the great object of a rich man 
 was to get his son into just that fix, but he couldn't 
 seem to see it, and the boy hated it himself. He 's 
 got a good head, and he wanted to study for the 
 ministry when they were all living together out on 
 the farm ; but his father had the old-fashioned ideas 
 about that. You know they used to think that any 
 sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher 
 out of ; but they wanted the good timber for busi- 
 ness ; and so the old man wouldn't let him. You '11 
 see the fellow ; you '11 like him ; he 's no fool, I can 
 tell you ; and he 's going to be our publisher, 
 nominally at first and actually when I ; ve taught 
 him the ropes a little."
 
 XII. 
 
 FULKERSON stopped and looked at March, whom 
 he saw lapsing into a serious silence. Doubtless he 
 divined his uneasiness with the facts that had been 
 given him to digest. He pulled out his watch and 
 glanced at it. " See here, how would you like to go 
 up to Forty-sixth Street with me, and drop in on 
 old Dryfoos ? Now 's your chance. He 's going 
 West to-morrow, and won't be back for a month or 
 so. They '11 all be glad to see you, and you '11 
 understand things better when you 've seen him and 
 his family. I can't explain." 
 
 March reflected a moment. Then he said, with a 
 wisdom that surprised him, for he would have liked 
 to yield to the impulse of his curiosity : " Perhaps 
 we 'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and 
 let things take the usual course. The Dryfoos 
 ladies will want to call on her as the last-comer, and 
 if I treated myself en garqon now, and paid the first 
 visit, it might complicate matters." 
 
 " Well, perhaps you 're right," said Fulkerson. 
 " I don't know much about these things, and I don't 
 believe Ma Dryfoos does either." He was on his 
 legs lighting another cigarette. "I suppose the
 
 118 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 girls are getting themselves up in etiquette, though. 
 Well, then, let 's have a look at the Every Other Week 
 building, and then, if you like your quarters there, 
 you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat." 
 
 March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes 
 had been roused by his decision in favour of good 
 social usage. " I don't think I shall take the flat/' 
 he said. 
 
 "Well, don't reject it without giving it another 
 look, anyway. Come on ! " 
 
 He helped March on with his light overcoat, and 
 the little stir they made for their departure caught 
 the notice of the old German ; he looked up from 
 his beer at them. March was more than ever 
 impressed with something familiar in his face. In 
 compensation for his prudence in regard to the 
 Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse. He stepped 
 across to where the old man sat, with his bald head 
 shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his fine 
 patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque 
 lights and shadows, and put out his hand to him. 
 
 " Lindau ! Isn't this Mr. Lindau ? " 
 
 The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with 
 mechanical politeness, and cautiously took March's 
 hand. " Yes, my name is Lindau," he said slowly, 
 while he scanned Mai'ch's face. Then he broke into 
 a long cry. " Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy ! my yong 
 
 friendt ! my my Idt is Passil Marge, not zo ? 
 
 Ah, ha, ha, ha ! How gladt I am to zee you ! Why, 
 I am gladt ! And you rememberdt me ? You 
 remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland 1 And
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 119 
 
 Indianapolis ? You still lif in Indianapolis 1 It 
 sheers my hardt to zee you. But you are lidtle oldt 
 too ? Tventy-five years makes a difference. Ah, I 
 am gladt ! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo 1 " 
 
 He looked anxiously into March's face, with a 
 gentle smile of mixed hope and doubt, and March 
 said : " As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guess 
 it 's you. And you remember the old times 1 You 
 were as much of a boy as I was, Lindau. Are you 
 living in New York 1 Do you recollect how you 
 tried to teach me to fence 1 I don't know how 
 to this day, Lindau. How good you were, and how 
 patient ! Do you remember how we used to sit up 
 in the little parlour back of your printing office, and 
 read Die Eiluber and Die Theilang der Erde and Die 
 Glocfce 1 And Mrs. Lindau 1 Is she with 
 
 "Deadt deadt long ago. Eight after I got 
 home from the war tventy years ago. But tell 
 me, you are married 1 Children 1 Yes ! Goodt ! 
 And how oldt are you now 1 " 
 
 " It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but 
 I Ve got a son nearly as old." 
 
 "Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you 
 lif ? " 
 
 "Well, I'm just coming to live in New York," 
 March said, looking over at Fulkerson, who had 
 been watching his interview with the perfunctory 
 smile of sympathy that people put on at the meet- 
 ing of old friends. " I want to introduce you to my 
 friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going into a 
 literary enterprise here."
 
 120 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Ah ! zo ? " said the old man, with polite interest. 
 He took Fulkerson's proffered hand, and they all 
 stood talking a few moments together. 
 
 Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his 
 watch, " Well, March, we 're keeping Mr. Lindau 
 from his dinner." 
 
 " Dinner ! " cried the old man. " Idt 's better 
 than breadt and meadt to see Mr. Marge ! " 
 
 " I must be going, anyway," said March. " But I 
 must see you again soon, Lindau. Where do you 
 live ? I want a long talk." 
 
 "And I. You will find me here at dinner-time," 
 said the old man. " It is the best place ;" and March 
 fancied him reluctant to give another address. 
 
 To cover his consciousness he answered gaily, 
 " Then, it 's (mf wiedersehen with us. Well ! " 
 
 "Also ! " The old man took his hand, and made 
 a mechanical movement with his mutilated arm, as 
 if he would have taken it in a double clasp. He 
 laughed at himself. "I w anted to gif you the 
 other handt too, but I gafe it to your gountry a 
 goodt while ago." 
 
 " To my country ? " asked March, with a sense of 
 pain, and yet lightly, as if it were a joke of the old 
 man's. " Your country too, Lindau ] " 
 
 The old man turned very grave, and said, almost 
 coldly, " What gountry hass a poor man got, Mr. 
 Marge ? " 
 
 " Well, you ought to have a share in the one you 
 helped to save for us rich men, Lindau," March re- 
 turned, still humouring the joke.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 121 
 
 The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as 
 he sat- down again. 
 
 " Seems to be a little soured," said Fulkerson, as 
 they went down the steps. He was one of those 
 Americans whose habitual conception of life is 
 unalloyed prosperity. When any experience or 
 observation of his went counter to it he suffered 
 something like physical pain. He eagerly shrugged 
 away the impression left upon his buoyancy by 
 Lindau, and added to March's continued silence, 
 " What did I tell you about meeting every man in 
 New York that you ever knew before 1 " 
 
 " I never expected to meet Lindau in the world 
 again," said March, more to himself than to Fulker- 
 son. " I had an impression that he had been killed 
 in the war. I almost wish he had been." 
 
 " Oh, hello, now ! " cried Fulkerson. 
 
 March laughed, but went on soberly. " He was a 
 man predestined to adversity, though. When I 
 first knew him out in Indianapolis he was starving 
 along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. It 
 was before the Germans had come over to the 
 Eepublicans generally, but Lindau was fighting the 
 anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis 
 in 1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin 
 in 1848. And yet he was always such a gentle soul ! 
 And so generous ! He taught me German for the 
 love of it ; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking 
 a cent from me ; he -seemed to get enough out of 
 my being young and enthusiastic, and out of 
 prophesying great things for me. I wonder what 
 VOL. I. 6
 
 122 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 the poor old fellow is doing here, with that one 
 hand of his ? " 
 
 "Not amassing a very handsome pittance, I 
 should say," said Fulkerson, getting back some of 
 his lightness. " There are lots of two-handed fellows 
 in New York that are not doing much better, I 
 guess. May be he gets some writing on the German 
 papers." 
 
 "I hope so. He's one of the most accomplished 
 men ! He used to be a splendid musician pianist 
 and knows eight or ten languages." 
 
 "Well, it's astonishing," said Fulkerson, "how 
 much lumber those Germans can carry around in 
 their heads all their lives, and never work it up into 
 anything. It 's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, 
 and let out the use of their learning to a few bright 
 Americans. We could make things hum, if we could 
 arrange 'em that way." 
 
 He talked on, unheeded by March, who went 
 along half-consciously tormented by his lightness in 
 the pensive memories the meeting with Lindau had 
 called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature 
 could come to ? What a homeless old age at that 
 meagre Italian table d'hote, with that tall glass of 
 beer for a half-hour's oblivion ! That shabby dress, 
 that pathetic mutilation ! He must have a pension, 
 twelve dollars a month, or eighteen, from a grateful 
 country. But what else did he eke out with 1 
 
 "Well, here we are," said . Fulkerson cheerily. 
 He ran up the steps before March, and opened the 
 carpenter's temporary valve in the door frame, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 123 
 
 led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of 
 unpainted wood- work and newly dried plaster ; their 
 feet slipped on shavings and grated on sand. He 
 scratched a match, and found a candle, and then 
 walked about up and down stairs, and lectured on 
 the advantages of the place. He had fitted up 
 bachelor apartments for himself in the house, and 
 said that he was going to have a flat to let on the 
 top floor. " I didn't offer it to you because I supposed 
 you 'd be too proud to live over your shop ; and it 's 
 too small, anyway ; only five rooms." 
 
 " Yes, that 's too small," said March, shirking the 
 other point. 
 
 "Well, then, here's the room I intend for your 
 office," said Fulkerson, showing him into a large back 
 parlour one flight up. " You '11 have it quiet from 
 the street noises here, and you can be at home or 
 not as you please. There '11 be a boy on the stairs 
 to find out. Now, you see, this makes the Grosvenor 
 Green flat practicable, if you want it." 
 
 March felt the forces of fate closing about him 
 and pushing him to a decision. He feebly fought 
 them off till he could have another look at the flat. 
 Then, baffled and subdued still more by the unex- 
 pected presence of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, 
 who was occupying it so as to be able to show it 
 effectively, he took it. He was aware more than 
 ever of its absurdities ; he knew that his wife would 
 never cease to hate it ; but he had suffered one of 
 those eclipses of the imagination to Avhich men of 
 his temperament are subject, and in which he could
 
 124 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 see no future for his desires. He felt a comfort in 
 irretrievably committing himself, and exchanging the 
 burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility. 
 
 " I didn't know," said Fulkerson, as they walked 
 back to his hotel together, " but you might fix it up 
 with that lone widow and her pretty daughter to 
 take part of their house here." He seemed to be 
 reminded of it by the fact of passing the house, and 
 March looked up at its dark front. He could not 
 have told exactly why he felt a pang of remorse at 
 the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for 
 having taken the Grosvenor Green flat than for not 
 having taken the widow's rooms. Still he could not 
 forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were 
 looking at them, and her disappointment when they 
 decided against them. He had toyed, in his after- 
 talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical 
 obligation they had to modify their plans so as to 
 meet the widow's want of just such a family as 
 theirs ; they had both said what a blessing it would 
 be to her, and what a pity they could not do it ; 
 but they had decided very distinctly that they 
 could not. Now it seemed to him that they might ; 
 and he asked himself whether he had not actually 
 departed as much from their ideal as if he had taken 
 board with the widow. Suddenly it seemed to him 
 that his wife asked him this too. 
 
 "I reckon," said Fulkerson, " that she could have 
 arranged to give you your meals in your rooms, and 
 it would have come to about the same thing as 
 house-keeping."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 125 
 
 " No sort of boarding can be the same as house- 
 keeping," said March. "I want my little girl to 
 have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole 
 family to have the moral effect of house-keeping. 
 It's demoralising to board, in every way; it isn't 
 a home, if anybody else takes the care of it off your 
 hands." 
 
 " Well, I suppose so," Fulkerson assented ; but 
 March's words had a hollow ring to himself, and in 
 his own mind he began to retaliate his dissatisfac- 
 tion upon Fulkerson. 
 
 He parted from him on the usual terms out- 
 wardly, but he felt obscurely abused by Fulkerson 
 in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son. He did 
 not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of 
 him in allowing him to commit himself to their en- 
 terprise without fully and frankly telling him who 
 and what his backer was ; he perceived that with 
 young Dryfoos as the publisher and Fulkerson as 
 the general director of the paper there might be 
 very little play for his own ideas of its conduct. 
 Perhaps it was the hurt to his vanity involved by 
 the recognition of this fact that made him forget how 
 little choice he really had in the matter, and how, 
 since he had not accepted the offer to edit the in- 
 surance paper, nothing remained for him but to 
 close with Fulkerson. In this moment of suspicion 
 and resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening 
 his decision in regard to the Grosvenor Green apart- 
 ment ; he now refused to consider it a decision, and 
 said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he
 
 126 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 would send Mrs. Green a note reversing it in the 
 morning. But he put it all off till morning with his 
 clothes, when he went to bed ; he put off even think- 
 ing what his wife would say ; he cast Fulkerson and 
 his constructive treachery out of his mind too, and 
 invited into it some pensive reveries of the past, 
 when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and 
 could take this path or that. In his middle life this 
 was not possible ; he must follow the path chosen 
 long ago, wherever it led. He was not master of 
 himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those 
 he loved ; if he could do what he liked, perhaps 
 he might renounce this whole New York enterprise, 
 and go off somewhere out of the reach of care ; but 
 he could not do what he liked, that was very clear. 
 In the pathos of this conviction he dwelt compassion- 
 ately upon the thought of poor old Liudau ; he 
 resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of 
 money more than he could spare, something that 
 he would feel the loss of in payment of the lessons 
 in German and fencing given so long ago. At the 
 usual rate for such lessons, his debt, with interest 
 for twenty odd years, would run very far into the 
 hundreds. Too far, he perceived, for his wife's 
 joyous approval ; he determined not to add the 
 interest ; or he believed that Lindau would refuse 
 the interest ; he put a fine speech in his mouth, 
 making him do so ; and after that he got Lindau 
 employment on Every Other Week, and took care of 
 him till he died. 
 
 Through all his melancholy and munificence he
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 127 
 
 was aware of sordid anxieties for having taken the 
 Grosvenor Green apartment. These began to as- 
 sume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to 
 become personal entities, from which he woke, with 
 little starts, to a realisation of their true nature, and 
 then suddenly fell fast asleep. 
 
 In the accomplishment of the events which his 
 reverie played with, there was much that retroac- 
 tively stamped it with prophecy, but much also 
 that was better than he forboded. He found that 
 with regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment he 
 had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any 
 sort of roof over her head again after the removal 
 from their old home, or for the alleviations that 
 grow up through mere custom. The practical work- 
 ings of the apartment were not so bad ; it had its 
 good points, and after the first sensation of oppres- 
 sion in it they began to feel the convenience of its 
 arrangement. They were at that time of life when 
 people first turn to their children's opinion with 
 deference, and, in the loss of keenness in their own 
 likes and dislikes, consult the young preferences 
 which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile 
 Mrs. March to the apartment that her children were 
 pleased with its novelty ; when this wore off for 
 them, she had herself begun to find it much more 
 easily manageable than a house. After she had put 
 away several barrels of gimcracks, and folded up 
 screens and rugs and skins, and carried them all off to 
 the little dark store-room which the flat developed, 
 she perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it
 
 128 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 unsuspected before. Then, when people began to 
 call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying that 
 it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all 
 responsibility for the upholstery and decoration. If 
 March was by, she always explained that it was 
 Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it off with 
 her callers as a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really 
 seemed to think it otherwise than pretty ; and this 
 again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because it 
 showed how inferior the New York taste was to the 
 Boston taste in such matters. 
 
 March submitted silently to his punishment, and 
 laughed with her before company at his own eccen- 
 tricity. She had been so preoccupied with the 
 adjustment of the family to its new quarters and 
 circumstances that the time passed for laying his 
 misgivings, if they were misgivings, about Fulkerson 
 before her, and when an occasion came for express- 
 ing them they had themselves passed in the anxieties 
 of getting forward the first number of Every Other 
 Week. He kept these from her too, and the biisiness 
 that brought them to New York had apparently 
 dropped into abeyance before the questions of 
 domestic economy that presented and absented 
 themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman 
 of good mind and in perfect sympathy with him, 
 "but he understood the limitations of her perspective ; 
 and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced 
 to intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own 
 were reduced to the right order and proportion. It 
 would have been folly to talk to her of Fulkerson's
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 129 
 
 % 
 
 conjecturable uncandour while she was in doubt 
 whether her cook would like the kitchen, or her two 
 servants would consent to room together ; and till it 
 was decided what school Tom should go to, and 
 whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, 
 the relation which March was to bear to the Dry- 
 fooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be dis- 
 cussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he 
 was aware that with her mind distracted by more 
 immediate interests he could not get from her that 
 judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied 
 upon so much. She would try, she would do her 
 best, but the result would be a view clouded and 
 discoloured by the effort she must make. 
 
 He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to 
 the details of the work before him. In this he found 
 not only escape, but reassurance, for it became more 
 and more apparent that whatever was nominally the 
 structure of the business, a man of his qualifications 
 and his instincts could not have an insignificant 
 place in it. He had also the consolation of liking 
 his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that 
 grew constantly firmer and closer. The joy of 
 knowing that he had not made a mistake was great. 
 In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed 
 to get back to the youth when he had indulged them 
 first ; and after half a lifetime passed in pursuits 
 alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene happi- 
 ness of being mated through his work to his early 
 love. From the outside the spectacle might have 
 had its pathos, and it is not easy to justify such an 
 6*
 
 130 A HAZARD OF XFAV FORTUNES. 
 
 
 
 experiment as he had made at his time of life, except 
 upon the ground where he rested from its con- 
 sideration the ground of necessity. 
 
 His work was more in his thoughts than himself, 
 however, and as the time for the publication of the 
 first number of his periodical came nearer, his cares 
 all centred upon it. Without fixing any date, 
 Fulkerson had announced it, and pushed his 
 announcements with the shameless vigour of a born 
 advertiser. He worked his interest with the press 
 to the utmost, and paragraphs of a variety that did 
 credit to his ingenuity were afloat everywhere. 
 Some of them were speciously unfavourable in tone ; 
 they criticised and even ridiculed the principles on 
 -which the new departure in literary journalism was 
 based. Others defended it ; others yet denied that 
 this rumoured principle was really the principle. 
 All contributed to make talk. All proceeded from 
 the same fertile invention. 
 
 March observed with a degree of mortification 
 that the talk was very little of it in the New York 
 pres ; there the references to the novel enterprise 
 were slight and cold. But Fulkerson said : " Don't 
 mind that, old man. It's the whole country that 
 makes or breaks a thing like this ; Xew York has 
 very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, 
 it would be different. New York does make or 
 break a play ; but it doesn't make or break a book ; 
 it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great 
 mass of the readers are outside of New York, and 
 the rural districts are what we have got to go for.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 131 
 
 They don't read much in New York ; they write, 
 and talk about what they Ve written. Don't you 
 worry." 
 
 The rumour of Fulkerson's connection with the 
 enterprise accompanied many of the paragraphs, and 
 he was able to stay March's thirst for employment 
 by turning over to him from day to day heaps of 
 the manuscripts which began to pour in from his 
 old syndicate writers, as well as from adventurous 
 volunteers all over the country. With these in 
 hand March began practically to plan the first 
 number, and to concrete a general scheme from the 
 material and the experience they furnished. They 
 had intended to issue the first number with the new 
 year, and if it had been an affair of literature alone, 
 it would have been very easy ; but it was the art 
 leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it. They 
 had not merely to deal with the question of specific 
 illustrations for this article or that, but to decide the 
 whole character of their illustrations, and first of all 
 to get a design for a cover which should both 
 ensnare the heedless and captivate the fastidious. 
 These things did not come properly within March's 
 province that had been clearly understood and 
 for a while Fulkerson tried to run the art leg him- 
 self. The phrase was again his, but it was simpler 
 to make the phrase than to run the leg. The diffi- 
 cult generation, at once stiff- backed and slippery, 
 with Avhich he had to do in this endeavour, reduced 
 even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and after 
 wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the 
 K
 
 132 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 artists himself, he determined to get an artist to 
 work them. But what artist ? It could not be a 
 man with fixed reputation and a following : he 
 would be too costly, and would have too many 
 enemies among his brethren, even if he would con- 
 sent to undertake the job. Fulkerson had a man in 
 mind, an artist too, who would have been the very 
 thing if he had been the thing at all. He had 
 talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach 
 round the whole situation, but, as Fulkerson said, 
 he was as many kinds of an ass as he was kinds of 
 an artist
 
 PART SECOND. 
 I. 
 
 THE evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's 
 reduced offer, and decided to take her apartment, 
 the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat with 
 her daughter in an upper room at the back of her 
 house. In the shaded glow of the drop-light she 
 was sewing, and the girl was drawing at the same 
 table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl 
 lifted her head and tilted it a little on one side so as 
 to get some desired effect of her work. 
 
 "It's a mercy the cold weather holds off," said 
 the mother. " We should have to light the furnace, 
 unless we wanted to scare everybody away with a 
 cold house ; and I don't know who would take care 
 of it, or what would become of us, every way." 
 
 " They seem to have been scared away from a 
 house that wasn't cold," said the girl. " Perhaps 
 they might like a cold one. But it 's too early for 
 cold yet. It's only just in the beginning of No- 
 vember." 
 
 " The Messenger says they 've had a sprinkling of 
 snow."
 
 134 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Oh yes, at St. Barnaby ! I don't know when 
 they don't have sprinklings of snow there. I'm 
 awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us." 
 
 The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the 
 contrast their experience opposes to the hopeful 
 recklessness of such talk as this. " We may have a 
 worse winter here," she said darkly. 
 
 " Then I couldn't stand it," said the girl, " and I 
 should go in for lighting out to Florida double- 
 quick." 
 
 " And how would you get to Florida 1 " demanded 
 her mother severely. 
 
 " Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vesti- 
 buled train, I suppose. What makes you so blue, 
 mamma 1 " The girl was all the time sketching away, 
 rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then 
 bending it over her work again without looking at 
 her mother. 
 
 " I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this 
 this hopefulness of yours." 
 
 " Why ? What harm does it do 1 " 
 
 " Harm ? " echoed the mother. 
 
 Pending the effort she must make in saying, the 
 girl cut in : " Yes, harm. You Ve kept your despair 
 dusted off and ready for use at an instant's notice 
 ever since we came, and what good has it done 1 
 I'm going to keep on hoping to the bitter end. 
 That 's what papa did." 
 
 It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had 
 done with all the consumptive's buoyancy. The 
 morning he died he told them that now he had
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 135 
 
 turned the point and was really going to get well. 
 The cheerfulness was not only in his disease, but 
 in his temperament. Its excess was always a little 
 against him in his church-work, and Mrs. Leighton. 
 was right enough in feeling that if it had not been 
 for the ballast of her instinctive despondency he 
 would have made shipwreck of such small chances 
 of prosperity as befell him in life. It was not from 
 him that his daughter got her talent, though he had 
 left her his temperament intact of his widow's legal 
 thirds. He was one of those men of whom the 
 country people say when he is gone that the woman 
 gets along better without him. Mrs. Leigliton had 
 long eked out their income by taking a summer 
 boarder or two, as a great favour, into her family ; 
 and when the greater need came, she frankly gave 
 up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them 
 in the country), and managed it for their comfort 
 from the small quarter of it in which she shut her- 
 self up with her daughter. 
 
 The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the 
 rounded period. The fact is, of course, that Alma 
 Leigliton was not shut up in any sense Avhatever. 
 She was the pervading light, if not force, of the 
 house. She Avas a good cook, and she managed the 
 kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while her 
 mother looked after the rest of the house-keeping. 
 But she was not systematic ; she had inspiration but 
 not discipline, and her mother mourned more over 
 the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the 
 Irish girl than she rejoiced in those when one of
 
 136 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Alma's great thoughts took form in a chicken-pie of 
 incomparable savour or in a matchless pudding. The 
 off-days came when her artistic nature was express- 
 ing itself in charcoal, for she drew to the admiration 
 of all among the lady boarders who could not draw. 
 The others had their reserves ; they readily conceded 
 that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed 
 instruction. On the other hand, they were not so 
 radical as to agree with the old painter who came 
 every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby 
 meadows. He contended that she needed to be a 
 man in order to amount to anything; but in this 
 theory he was opposed by an authority of his own 
 sex, whom the lady sketchers believed to speak with 
 more impartiality in a matter concerning them as 
 much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction 
 would do, and he was not only younger and 
 handsomer, but he was fresher from the schools 
 than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers 
 could see, painted in an obsolescent manner. His 
 name was Beaton Angus Beaton ; but he was not 
 Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of 
 Scots was. His father was a Scotchman, but Beaton 
 was born in Syracuse, New York, and it had taken 
 only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces 
 of native and ancestral manner in him. He wore 
 his black beard cut shorter than his moustache, and 
 a little pointed ; he stood with his shoulders well 
 thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person 
 when he talked about art, which would alone have 
 carried conviction even if he had not had a thick,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 137 
 
 dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile 
 grey eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, 
 staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of 
 epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the 
 ladies said that you always thought of him as 
 having spoken French after it was over, and accused 
 herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of 
 him. None of the ladies were afraid of him, though 
 they could not believe that he was really so de- 
 ferential to their work as he seemed ; and they 
 knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington's 
 work, that he was just acting from principle. 
 
 They may or may not have known the difference 
 with which he treated Alma's work ; but the girl 
 herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment 
 recognised her as a real sister in art. He told her 
 she ought to come to New York, and draw in the 
 League, or get into some painter's private class ; and 
 it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which 
 finally resulted in the hazardous experiment she and 
 her mother were now making. There were no 
 logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from 
 past success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future 
 success with boarders in New York. Of course the 
 outlay was much greater. The rent of the furnished 
 house they had taken was such that if they failed 
 their experiment would be little less than ruinous. 
 
 But they were not going to fail ; that was what 
 Alma contended, with a hardy courage that her 
 mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if it 
 did not deserve it. She was one of those people
 
 138 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 who believe that if you dread harm enough it is less 
 likely to happen. She acted on this superstition as 
 if it were a religion. 
 
 " If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, 
 Alma," she answered, " I don't know where we 
 should have been now." 
 
 " I suppose we should have been in St Barnaby," 
 said the girl. " And if it 's worse to be in Xew 
 York, you see what your despair's done, mamma. 
 But what 's the use 1 You meant well, and I don't 
 blame you. You can't expect even despair to come 
 out always just the way you want it. Perhaps 
 you 've used too much of it." The girl laughed, and 
 Mrs. Leighton laughed too. Like every one else, 
 she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are 
 apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal 
 character, with surfaces that caught the different 
 lights of circumstance and reflected them. Alma 
 got up and took a pose before the mirror, which she 
 then transferred to her sketch. The room was 
 pinned about with other sketches, which showed 
 with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded gas-light. 
 Alma held up the drawing. " How do you like it 1 '' 
 
 Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to 
 look at it. "You've got the man's face rather 
 weak." 
 
 "Yes, that's so. Either I see all the hidden 
 weakness that 's in men's natures, and bring it to 
 the surface in their figures, or else I put my own 
 weakness into them. And anyway, it's a draw- 
 back to their presenting a truly manly appearance. 

 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 139 
 
 As long as I have one of the miserable objects 
 before me, I can draw him ; but as soon as his 
 back 's turned I get to putting ladies into men's 
 clothes. I should think you 'd be scandalised, 
 mamma, if. you were a really feminine person. It 
 must be your despair that helps you to bear up. 
 But what 's the matter with the young lady in 
 young lady's clothes 1 Any dust on her 1 " 
 
 " What expressions ! " said Mrs. Leighton. 
 " Really, Alma, for a refined girl you are the most 
 unrefined ! " 
 
 " Go on about the girl in the picture ! " said 
 Alma, slightly knocking her mother on the shoulder, 
 as she stood over her. 
 
 " I don't see anything to her. What 's she doing 1" 
 
 " Oh, just being made love to, I suppose." 
 
 " She 's perfectly insipid ! " 
 
 " You 're awfully articulate, mamma ! Now, if 
 Mr. Wetmore was to criticise that picture he'd 
 draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it 
 through that, and tilt his head first on one side and 
 then on the other, and then look at you, as if you 
 were a figure in it, and then collapse a while, and 
 moan a little and gasp, ' Isn't your young lady a 
 
 little too too ' and then he 'd try to get the word 
 
 out of you, and groan and suffer some more ; and 
 you 'd say, ' She is, rather,' and that would give him 
 courage, and he 'd say, ' I don't mean that she 's so 
 
 very ' 'Of course not.' 'You understand?' 
 
 ' Perfectly. I see it myself, now.' ' Well then,' 
 and he 'd take your pencil and begin to draw ' I
 
 140 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 should give her a little more Ah 1 ' f Yes, I see 
 
 the difference.' ' You see the difference ? ' And 
 he 'd go off to some one else, and you 'd know that 
 you'd been doing the wishy-washiest thing in the 
 world, though he hadn't spoken a word of criticism, 
 and couldn't. But he wouldn't have noticed the 
 expression at all ; he 'd have shown you where your, 
 drawing was bad. He doesn't care for what he 
 calls the literature of a thing ; he says that will take 
 care of itself if the drawing's good. He doesn't 
 like my doing these chic things ; but I 'm going to 
 keep it up, for / think it 's the nearest Avay to 
 illustrating." 
 
 She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door. 
 
 "And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?" asked 
 her mother. 
 
 " No," said the girl, with her back still turned ; 
 and she added, " I believe he 's in New York ; Mr. 
 Wetmore 's seen him." 
 
 "It's a little strange he doesn't call." 
 
 " It would be if he were not an artist. But 
 artists never do anything like other people. He 
 was on his good behaviour while he was with' us, 
 and he 's a great deal more conventional than most 
 of them ; but even he can't keep it up. That 's what 
 makes me really think that women can never 
 amount to anything in art. They keep all their 
 appointments, and fulfil all their duties just as if 
 they didn't know anything about art. Well, most 
 of them don't. We 've got that new model to-day." 
 
 " What new model ? "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 141 
 
 " The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about 
 the old German ; he 's splendid. He 's got the most 
 beautiful head ; just like the old masters' things. 
 He used to be /Humphrey Williams's model for his 
 biblical pieces ; but since he 's dead, the old man 
 hardly gets anything to do. Mr. Wetmore says 
 there isn't anybody in the Bible that Williams 
 didn't paint him as. He 's the Law and the Prophets 
 in all his Old Testament pictures, and he 's Joseph, 
 Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees 
 in the New." 
 
 " It 's a good thing people don't know how artists 
 work, or some of the most sacred pictures would 
 have no influence," said Mrs. Leighton. 
 
 " Why, of course not ! " cried the girl. " And the 
 influence is the last thing a painter thinks of or 
 supposes he thinks of. What he knows he 's anxious 
 about is the drawing and the colour. But people 
 will never understand how simple artists are. When 
 I reflect what a complex and sophisticated being / 
 am, I in afraid I can never come to anything in art. 
 Or I should be if I hadn't genius." 
 
 " Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple ? " asked 
 Mrs. Leighton. 
 
 " Mr. Wetmore doesn't think he 's very much of 
 an artist. He thinks he talks too well. They 
 believe that if a man can express himself clearly he 
 can't paint." 
 
 " And what do you believe 1 " 
 
 " Oh, / can express myself, too." 
 
 The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion.
 
 142 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 After a while she said, " I presume he will call when 
 he gets settled." 
 
 The girl made no answer to this. " One of the 
 girls says that old model is an educated man. He 
 was in the war, and lost a hand. Doesn't it seem 
 a pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of 
 affected geese like us as a model? I declare it 
 makes me sick. And we shall keep him a week, 
 and pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his 
 grand old head, and then what will he do? The 
 last time he Avas regularly employed was when Mr. 
 Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre. Then 
 he wanted so many Arab sheiks and Christian elders 
 that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily employed for 
 six months. Now he has to pick up odd jobs where 
 he can." 
 
 " I suppose he has his pension," said Mrs. Leigh- 
 ton. 
 
 " No ; one of the girls " that was the way Alma 
 always described her fellow-students ' : says he has 
 no pension. He didn't apply for it for a long time, 
 and then there was a hitch about it, and it was some- 
 thinged vetoed, I believe she said." 
 
 ' Who vetoed it 1 " asked Mrs. Leighton, with 
 some curiosity about the process, which she held in 
 reserve. 
 
 " I don't know whoever vetoes things. I wonder 
 what Mr. Wetmore docs think of us his class. "Wo 
 must seem perfectly crazy. There isn't one of us 
 really knows what she 's doing it for. or what she 
 expects to happen when she 's done it. I suppose
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 143 
 
 every one thinks she has genius. I know the 
 Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you 
 have genius it isn't the least use. Everybody 's 
 puzzled to know what she does with her baby when 
 she 's at work whether she gives it soothing syrup. 
 I wonder how Mr. Wetmore can keep from laughing 
 in our faces. I know he does behind our backs." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton's mind wandered back to another 
 point. " Then if he says Mr. Beaton can't paint, I 
 presume he doesn't respect him very much." 
 
 "Oh, he never said he couldn't paint. But I 
 know he thinks so. He says he 's an excellent 
 critic." 
 
 "Alma," her mother said, with the effect of break- 
 ing off, " what do you suppose is the reason he hasn't 
 been near us ? " 
 
 " Why, I don't know, mamma, except that it 
 would have been natural for another person to come, 
 and he 's an artist at least, artist enough for that." 
 
 " That doesn't account for it altogether. He was 
 very nice at St. Barnaby, and seemed so interested 
 in you your work." 
 
 " Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby. That 
 rich Mrs. Horn couldn't contain her joy when she 
 heard we were coming to New York, but she hasn't 
 poured in upon us a great deal since we got here." 
 
 " But that 's different. She 's very fashionable, 
 and she 's taken up with her own set. But Mr. 
 Beaton 's one of our kind." 
 
 " Thank you. Papa wasn't quite a tombstone - 
 cutter, mamma."
 
 144 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " That makes it all the harder to bear. He can't 
 be ashamed of us. Perhaps he doesn't know where 
 we are." 
 
 " Do you wish to send him your card, mamma 1 " 
 The girl flushed and towered in scorn of the idea. 
 
 " Why, no, Alma," returned her mother. 
 
 "Well, then," said Alma. 
 
 But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled. She 
 had got her mind on Mr. Beaton, and she could not 
 detach it at once. Besides, she was one of those 
 women (they are commoner than the same sort of 
 men) whom it does not pain to take out their most 
 intimate thoughts and examine them in the light 
 of other people's opinions. " But I don't see how 
 he can behave so. He must know that " 
 
 " That ivhat, mamma ? " demanded the girl. 
 
 " That he influenced us a great deal in 
 coming " 
 
 " He didn't. If he dared to presume to think 
 such a thing " 
 
 " Now, Alma," said her mother with the clinging 
 persistence of such natures, " you know he did. 
 And it 's no use for you to pretend that we didn't 
 count upon him in in every way. You may not have 
 noticed his attentions, and I don't say you did, but 
 others certainly did ; and I must say that I didn't 
 expect he would drop us so." 
 
 " Drop us ! " cried Alma, in a fury. " Oh ! " 
 
 " Yes, drop us, Alma. He must know where we 
 are. Of course, Mr. Wetmore 's spoken to him about 
 you, and it 's a shame that he hasn't been near us.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 145 
 
 I should have thought common gratitude, common 
 decency, would have brought him after after all 
 we did for him." 
 
 " We did nothing for him nothing ! He paid his 
 board, and that ended it." 
 
 " No, it didn't, Alma. You know what he used 
 to say about its being like home, and all that; 
 and I must say that after his attentions to you, and 
 all the things you told me he said, I expected some- 
 thing very dif " 
 
 A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the 
 house, and as if the pull of the bell-wire had 
 twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang 
 up and grappled with her daughter in their common 
 terror. 
 
 They both glared at the clock and made sure that 
 it was five minutes after nine. Then they aban- 
 doned them some moments to the unrestricted play 
 of their apprehensions. 
 VOL. I 1
 
 IL 
 
 " WHY, Alma," whispered the mother, " who in 
 the world can it be at this time of night ? You 
 don't suppose he " 
 
 " Well, I 'm not going to the door anyhow, 
 mother, I don't care who it is; and of course he 
 wouldn't be such a goose as to come at this hour." 
 She put on a look of miserable trepidation, and 
 shrank back from the door, while the hum of the 
 bell died away in the hall. 
 
 " What shall we do 1 " asked Mrs. Leighton 
 helplessly. 
 
 " Let him go away whoever they are," said 
 Alma. 
 
 Another and more peremptory ring forbade them 
 refuge in this simple expedient. 
 
 " Oh dear ! what shall we do ? Perhaps it 's 
 a despatch." 
 
 The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a 
 rigid stare. " I shall not go," she said. A third 
 ring more insistent than the others followed, and 
 she said : " You go ahead, mamma, and I '11 come 
 behind to scream .if it 's anybody. We can look 
 through the side-lights at the door first."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 147 
 
 Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the 
 back chamber where they had been sitting, and 
 slowly descended the stairs. Alma came behind 
 and turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash 
 that made them both jump a little. The gas inside 
 rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the 
 threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timor- 
 ous peep through the scrims that it was a lady and 
 gentleman. Something in this distribution of sex 
 emboldened her ; she took her life in her hand, and 
 opened the door. 
 
 The lady spoke. " Does Mrs. Leighton live heah 1" 
 she said, in a rich, throaty voice ; and she feigned a 
 reference to the agent's permit she held in her hand. 
 
 "Yes," said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically 
 occupied the doorway, while Alma already quivered 
 behind her with impatience of her impoliteness. 
 
 " Oh," said the lady, who began to appear more 
 and more a young lady, " Ah didn't know but Ah 
 had mistaken the ho'se. Ah suppose it 's rather 
 late to see the Apawtments, and Ah most ask you 
 to pawdon us." She put this tentatively, with a 
 delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton as 
 the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence 
 of the situation in the glance she threw Alma over 
 her mother's shoulder. " Ah 'm afraid we most 
 have frightened you." 
 
 " Oh, not at all." said Alma ; and at the same 
 time her mother said, " Will you walk in, please ? " 
 
 The gentleman promptly removed his hat and 
 made the Leigh tons an inclusive bo\v. " You awe 
 L
 
 148 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble 
 we awe giving you." He was tall and severe-look- 
 ing, with a grey, trooperish moustache and iron- 
 grey hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-grey eyes. 
 His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-coloured, 
 with an effect of liveliness that did not all express 
 itself in her broad-vowelled, rather formal speech, 
 with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary 
 verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter. 
 
 "We awe from the Soath," she said, "and we 
 arrived this mawning, but we got this cyahd from 
 the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah 
 late." 
 
 "Not at all; it's only nine o'clock," said Mrs. 
 Leighton, in condonation. She looked up from the 
 card the young lady had given her, and explained, 
 " We haven't got in our servants yet, and we had to 
 answer the bell ourselves, and " 
 
 " You were frightened, of coase," said the young 
 lady caressingly. 
 
 The gentleman said they ought not to have come 
 so late, and he offered some formal apologies. 
 
 "We should have been just as much scared any 
 time after five o'clock," Alma said to the sympathetic 
 intelligence in the girl's face. 
 
 She laughed out. " Of coase ! Ah would have 
 my hawt in my moath all day long too, if Ah was 
 living in a big hoase alone." 
 
 A moment of stiffness followed ; Mrs. Leighton 
 would have liked to withdraw from the intimacy of 
 the situation, but she did not know how. It was
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 149 
 
 very well for these people to assume to be what they 
 pretended ; but, she reflected too late, she had no 
 proof of it except the agent's permit. They were 
 all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged 
 the awkward pause while she examined the permit. 
 " You are Mr. Woodburn 1 " she asked, in a way 
 that Alma felt implied he might not be. 
 
 " Yes, madam ; from Charlottesboag, Virginia," 
 he answered, with the slight umbrage a man shows 
 when the strange cashier turns his check over and 
 questions him before cashing it. 
 
 Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained 
 subordinate ; she examined the other girl's dress, 
 and decided in a superficial consciousness that she 
 had made her own bonnet. 
 
 " I shall be glad to show you my rooms," said 
 Mrs Leighton, with an irrelevant sigh. " You must 
 excuse their being not just as I should wish them. 
 We 're hardly settled yet." 
 
 " Don't speak of it, madam," said the gentleman, 
 " if you can overlook the trouble we awe giving you 
 at such an unseasonable houah." 
 
 " Ah 'm a hoase-keepah mahself," Miss Woodburn 
 joined in, " and Ah know ho' to accyoant fo' every- 
 thing." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton led the way upstairs, and the 
 young lady decided upon the large front room and 
 small side-room on the third story. She said she 
 could take the small one, and the other was so large 
 that her father could both sleep and work in it. 
 She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs. Leighton's
 
 150 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when 
 her father refused to have any bargaining, with a 
 haughty self-respect which he softened to deference 
 for Mrs. Leighton. His impulsiveness opened the 
 way for some confidences from her, and before the 
 affair was arranged she was enjoying in her quality 
 of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians' 
 reverent sympathy. They said they were Church 
 people themselves. 
 
 " Ah don't know what yo' mothah means by yo' 
 hoase not being in oddah," the young lady said to 
 Alma, as they went downstairs together. " Ah 'm 
 u great hoase-keepah mahself, and Ah mean what 
 Ah say." 
 
 They had all turned mechanically into the room 
 where the Leightons were sitting when the Wood- 
 burns rang. Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, 
 and he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while 
 his daughter bustled up to the sketches pinned 
 round the room, and questioned Alma about them. 
 
 " Ah suppose you awe going to be a great aw- 
 tust?" she said, in friendly banter, when Alma owned 
 to having done the things. " Ah Ve a great notion to 
 take a few lessons mahself. Who 's yo' teachah ? " 
 
 Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's 
 class, and Miss Woodburn said : " Well, it 's just 
 beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand. Ah suppose 
 it 's raght expensive, now ? Mali goodness ! we have 
 to cyoant the coast so much nowadays, it seems to 
 me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah 'd like to bah 
 something once without askin' the price."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 151 
 
 " Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, " I don't 
 believe Mr. Wetmore would ever know what the 
 price of his lessons was. He has to think, when 
 you ask him." 
 
 "Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Wood- 
 burn. "Perhaps Ah maght get the lessons for 
 nothing from him- Well, Ah believe in my soul 
 Ah '11 trah. Now ho' did you begin ? and ho' do 
 you expect to get anything oat of it 1 " She turned 
 on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of 
 fun and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact 
 that she had an early nineteenth-century face, 
 round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely sen- 
 sible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be 
 painted a good deal in miniature at that period ; a 
 tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at 
 the temples helped the effect ; a high comb would 
 have completed it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet 
 off. It was almost a Yankee country-girl type ; but 
 perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like 
 that, pure Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her 
 dull dark skin, slender in figure, slow in speech, 
 with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and the 
 oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt her- 
 self much more Southern in style than this bloom- 
 ing, bubbling, bustling Virginian. 
 
 "I don't know," she answered slowly. 
 
 " Going to take po'traits," suggested Miss Wood- 
 burn, " or just paint the ahdeal 1 " A demure bur- 
 lesque lurked in her tone. 
 
 "I suppose I don't expect to paint at all," said
 
 152 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Alma. "I 'm going to illustrate books if anybody 
 will let me." 
 
 " Ah should think they 'd just joamp at you," 
 said Miss Woodburn. "Ah '11 tell you what let 's do, 
 Miss Leighton : you make some pictures, and Ah '11 
 wrahte a book fo' them. Ah 've got to do some- 
 thing. Ah maght as well wrahte a book. You know 
 we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But 
 Ah don't mand it. I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' 
 the disgrace of bein' poo' if it wasn't fo' the incon- 
 venience." 
 
 " Yes, it 's inconvenient," said Alma ; " but you 
 forget it when you 're at work, don't you think ? " 
 
 " Mah, yes ! Perhaps that 's one reason why poo' 
 people have to woak so hawd to keep their mands 
 off their poverty." 
 
 The girls both tittered, and turned from talking 
 in a low tone with their backs toward their elders, 
 and faced them. 
 
 "Well, Madison," said Mr. Woodburn, "it is 
 time we should go. I bid you good night, madam," 
 he bowed to Mrs. Leighton. "Good night," he 
 bowed again to Alma. 
 
 His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, 
 but with a jolly cordiality of manner that deforma- 
 lised it. "We shall be roand raght soon in the 
 mawning, then," she threatened at the door. 
 
 "We shall be all ready for you," Alma called 
 after her down the steps. 
 
 " Well, Alma 1 " her mother asked, when the door 
 closed upon them.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 153 
 
 "She doesn't know any more about art" said 
 Alma, " than nothing at all. But she 's jolly and 
 good-hearted. She praised everything that was bad 
 in my sketches, and said she was going to take 
 lessons herself. When a person talks about taking 
 lessons, as if they could learn it, you know where 
 they belong artistically." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh. " I 
 wish I knew where they belonged financially. We 
 shall have to get in two girls at once. I shall have 
 to go out the first thing in the morning, and then 
 our troubles will begin." 
 
 "Well, didn't you want them to begin? I will 
 stay home and help you get ready. Our prosperity 
 couldn't begin without the troubles, if you mean 
 boarders, and boarders mean servants. I shall be 
 very glad to be afflicted with a cook for a while 
 myself." 
 
 " Yes ; but we don't know anything about these 
 people, or whether they will be able to pay us. Did 
 she talk as if they were well off ] " 
 
 " She talked as if they were poor ; poo' she called 
 it." 
 
 "Yes, how queerly she pronounced," said Mrs. 
 Leighton. " Well, I ought to have told them that I 
 required the first week in advance." 
 
 " Mamma ! If that 's the way you 're going to 
 act 
 
 "Oh, of course, I couldn't, after he wouldn't let 
 her bargain for the rooms. I didn't Iike4,hat." 
 
 " / did. And you can see that they were perfect 
 7*
 
 154 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ladies ; or at least one of them." Alma laughed at 
 herself, but her mother did not notice. 
 
 " Their being ladies won't help if they Ve got no 
 money. It '11 make it all the worse." 
 
 " Very well, then ; we have no money, either. 
 We 're a match for them any day there. We can 
 show them that two can play at that game,"
 
 III. 
 
 ANGUS BEATON'S studio looked at first glance like 
 many other painters' studios. A grey wall quad- 
 rangularly vaulted to a large north light ; casts of 
 feet, hands, faces hung to nails about ; prints, 
 sketches in oil and water-colour stuck here and 
 there lower down ; a rickety table, with paint and 
 palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed 
 comfortlessly on it ; an easel, with a strip of some 
 faded mediaeval silk trailing from it ; a lay figure 
 simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on 
 one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese 
 dress dropped before it ; dusty rugs and skins kick- 
 ing over the varnished floor ; canvases faced to the 
 mop-board ; an open trunk overflowing with cos- 
 tumes : these features one might notice anywhere. 
 But besides there was a bookcase with an unusual 
 number of books in it, arid there was an open 
 colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and 
 scutcheoned, with foreign periodicals French and 
 English littering its leaf, and some pages of manu- 
 script scattered among them. Above all, there was 
 a sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which 
 Beaton was modelling, with an eye fixed as simul-
 
 156 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 taneously as possible on the clay and on the head of 
 the old man who sat on the platform beside it. 
 
 Few men have been able to get through the 
 world with several gifts to advantage in all ; and 
 most men seem handicapped for the race if they 
 have more than one. But they are apparently 
 immensely interested as well as distracted by them. 
 When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, 
 up to a certain point, with any one who said litera- 
 ture was his proper expression ; but then, when he 
 was painting, up to a certain point, he would have 
 maintained against the world that he was a colourist 
 and supremely a colourist. At the certain point in 
 either art he was apt to break away in a frenzy of 
 disgust, and wreak himself upon some other. In 
 these moods he sometimes designed elevations of 
 buildings, very striking, very original, very chic, 
 very everything but habitable. It was in this way 
 that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he 
 had at first approached rather slightingly as a mere 
 decorative accessory of architecture. But it had 
 grown in his respect till he maintained that the ac- 
 cessory business ought to be all the other way : that 
 temples should be raised to enslmne statues, not 
 statues made to ornament temples ; that was putting 
 the cart before the horse with a vengeance. This 
 was when he had carried a plastic study so far that 
 the sculptors who saw it said that Beaton might 
 have been an architect, but would certainly never 
 be a sculptor. At the same time he did some 
 hurried, nervous things that had a popular charm,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 157 
 
 and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit 
 of another. Beaton justly despised the popular 
 charm in these, as well as in the paintings he sold 
 from time to time ; he said it was flat burglary to 
 have taken money for them, and he would have 
 been living almost wholly upon the bounty of the old 
 tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not been for 
 the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson 
 for ten dollars a week. 
 
 They were very well done, but he hated doing 
 them after the first two or three, and had to be 
 punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not 
 cease to prize them, and who never failed to punch 
 him up. Beaton being what he was, Fulkerson was 
 his creditor as well as patron ; and Fulkerson being 
 what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the 
 elusive, facile, adaptable, unpractical nature of 
 Beaton. He was very proud of his art-letters, as he 
 called them ; but then Fulkerson was proud of 
 everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact 
 that he had secured it gave it value ; he felt as if he 
 had written it himself. 
 
 One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton. 
 The day before he had rushed upon canvas the con- 
 ception of a picture which he said to himself was 
 glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) 
 was not bad. He had worked at it in a fury till 
 ^he light failed him, and he execrated the dying 
 -day. But he lit his lamp, and transferred the pro- 
 cess of his thinking from the canvas to the opening 
 of the syndicate letter which he knew Fulkerson
 
 158 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 would be coming for in the morning. He remained 
 talking so long after dinner in the same strain as he 
 had painted and written in that he could not finish 
 his letter that night. The next morning, while he was 
 making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him 
 a letter from his father enclosing a little cheque, and 
 begging him with tender, almost deferential, urgence 
 to come as lightly upon him as possible, for just now 
 his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of 
 shame into Beaton's eyes the fine smouldering, float- 
 ing eyes that many ladies admired, under the thick 
 bang and he said to himself that if he were half a 
 man he would go home and go to work cutting grave- 
 stones in his father's shop. But he would wait, at 
 least, to finish his picture ; and as a sop to his con- 
 science, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved to 
 finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough 
 money from Fulkerson to be able to send his father's 
 cheque back ; or if not that, then to return the sum of 
 it partly in Fulkerson's cheque. While he still teemed 
 with both of these good intentions the old man 
 frqm whom he was modelling his head of Judas 
 came, and Beaton saw that he must get through 
 with him before he finished either the picture or the 
 letter ; he would have to pay him for the time any- 
 way. He utilised the remorse with which he was 
 tingling to give his Judas an expression which he 
 found novel in the treatment of that character a 
 look of such touching, appealing self-abhorrence that 
 Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture ; 
 between the breathless moments when he worked in
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 159 
 
 dead silence for an effect that was trying to escape 
 him, he sang and whistled fragments of comic opera. 
 
 In one of the hushes there came a blow on the 
 outside of the door that made Beaton jump, and 
 swear with a modified profanity that merged itself 
 I'n apostrophic prayer. He knew it must be Fulker- 
 son, and after roaring, " Come in ! " he said to the 
 model, " That '11 do this morning, Lindau." 
 
 Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust, 
 and compared it by fleeting glances with the old 
 man as he got stiffly up, and suffered Beaton to help 
 him on with his thin shabby overcoat. 
 
 " Can you come to-morrow, Lindau ? " 
 
 "No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit 
 for the young lad ties." 
 
 " Oh ! " said Beaton. " Wetmore's class ? Is 
 Miss Leighton doing you ? " 
 
 " I don't know their namess," Lindau began, 
 when Fulkerson said 
 
 " Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau ? 
 I met you with Mr. March at Maroni's one night." 
 Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable hand. 
 
 " Oh yes ! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. 
 Vulkerzon. And Mr. Marge he don't zeem to 
 gome any more ? " 
 
 " Up to his eyes in work. Been moving on from 
 Boston and getting settled, and starting in on our 
 enterprise. Beaton here hasn't got a very flattering 
 likeness of you, hey ? Well, good morning," he said, 
 for Lindau appeared not to have heard him, and was 
 escaping with a bow through the door.
 
 160 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously 
 between his lips before he spoke. " You 've come 
 for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson ? It isn't done." 
 
 Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to 
 which he had mounted. " What you fretting about 
 that letter for ? I don't want your letter." 
 
 Beaton stopped biting his cigarette, and looked at 
 him. " Don't want my letter ? Oh, very good ! " 
 he bristled up. He took his cigarette from his lips, 
 and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then 
 looked at Fulkerson. 
 
 " No ; / don't want your letter ; I want you." 
 Beaton disdained to ask an explanation, but he 
 internally lowered his crest, while he continued to 
 look at Fulkerson without changing his defiant 
 countenance. This suited Fulkerson well enough, 
 and he went on with relish : " I 'm going out of the 
 syndicate business, old man, and I 'm on a new 
 thing." He put his leg over the back of a chair 
 and rested his foot on its seat, and with one hand 
 in his pocket, he laid the scheme of Every Other 
 Week before Beaton with the help of the other. The 
 artist went about the room, meanwhile, with an 
 effect of indifference which by no means offended 
 Fulkerson. He took some water into his mouth 
 from a tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over 
 the head of Judas, before swathing it in a dirty 
 cotton cloth ; he washed his brushes and set his 
 palette ; he put up on his easel the picture he had 
 blocked on the day before, and stared at it with a 
 gloomy face ; then he gathered the sheets of his
 
 I 
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 161 
 
 unfinished letter together and slid them into a 
 drawer of his writing-desk. By the time he had 
 finished and turned again to Fulkerson, Fulkerson 
 was saying : " I did think we could have the first 
 number out by New- Year's ; but it will take longer 
 than that a month longer ; but I 'm not sorry, for 
 the holidays kill everything ; and by February, or 
 the middle of February, people will get their breath 
 again, and begin to look round and ask what 's new. 
 Then we '11 reply in the language of Shakespeare and 
 Milton, Every Other Week ; and don't you forget it." 
 He took down his leg and asked, " Got a pipe of 
 'baccy anywhere ? " 
 
 Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a 
 Japanese vase of bronze on his mantel. "There's 
 yours," he said ; and Fulkerson said, " Thanks," and 
 filled the pipe, and sat down and began to smoke 
 tranquilly. 
 
 Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. 
 " And what do you want with me 1" 
 
 " You 1 Oh yes " Fulkerson humorously drama- 
 tised a return to himself from a pensive absence. 
 " Want you for the art department." 
 
 Beaton shook his head. " I 'm not your man, 
 Fulkerson," he said compassionately. " You want 
 a more practical hand; one that's in touch with 
 what 's going. I 'm getting further and further 
 away from this century and its claptrap. I don't 
 believe in your enterprise ; I don't respect it, and I 
 won't have anything to do with it. It would 
 choke me, that kind of thing."
 
 162 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " That 's all right," said Fulkerson. He esteemed 
 a man who was not going to let himself go cheap. 
 " Or if it isn't, we can make it. You and March 
 will pull together first-rate. I don't care how much 
 ideal you put into the thing ; the more the better. I 
 can look after the other end of the schooner myself." 
 
 " You don't understand me," said Beaton. " I 'm 
 not trying to get a rise out of you. I 'm in earnest. 
 "What you want is some man who can have patience 
 with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and 
 with genius turning mediocrity on his hands. I 
 haven't any luck with men ; I don't get on with 
 them; I'm not popular." Beaton recognised the 
 fact with the satisfaction which it somehow always 
 brings to human pride. 
 
 " So much the better ! " Fulkerson was ready for 
 him at this point. " I don't want you to work the 
 old established racket the reputations. When I 
 want them I '11 go to them with a pocketful of rocks 
 knock-down argument. But my idea is to deal 
 with the volunteer material. Look at the way the 
 periodicals are carried on now ! Names ! names ! 
 names ! In a country that 's just boiling over with 
 literary and artistic ability of every kind the new 
 fellows have no chance. The editors all engage their 
 material. I don't believe there are fifty volunteer 
 contributions printed in a year in all the New York 
 magazines. It 's all wrong ; it 's suicidal. Evefry 
 Other Week is going back to the good old anonymous 
 system, the only fair system. It 's worked well in 
 literature, and it will work well in art"
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 16$ 
 
 " It won't work well in art," said Beaton. " There 
 you have a totally different set of conditions. What 
 you '11 get by inviting volunteer illustrations will be 
 a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to 
 submit your literature for illustration ? It can't be 
 done. At any rate, J won't undertake to do it." 
 
 " We '11 get up a School of Illustration," said 
 Fulkerson, with cynical security. " You can read 
 the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can 
 make their sketches under your eye. They wouldn't 
 be much further out than most illustrations are if 
 they never knew what they were illustrating. You 
 might select from what comes in and make up a sort 
 of pictorial variations to the literature without any 
 particular reference to it. Well, I understand you 
 to accept ? " 
 
 " No, you don't." 
 
 " That is, to consent to help us with your advice 
 and criticism. That 's all I want. It won't commit 
 you to anything ; and you can be as anonymous as 
 anybody." At the door Fulkerson added : " By the 
 way, the new man the fellow that 's taken my old 
 syndicate business will want you to keep on ; but 
 I guess he 's going to try to beat you down on the 
 price of the letters. He's going in for retrench- 
 ment. I brought along a cheque for this one ; I 'm 
 to pay for that." He offered Beaton an envelope. 
 
 " I can't take it, Fulkerson. The letter 's paid for 
 already." Fulkerson stepped forward and laid the 
 envelope on the table among the tubes of paint. 
 
 "It isn't the letter merely. I thought you 
 M
 
 164 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 wouldn't object to a little advance on your Every 
 Other Week work till you kind of got started." 
 
 Beaton remained inflexible. " It can't be done, 
 Fulkerson. Don't I tell you I can't sell myself out 
 to a thing I don't believe in ? Can't you under- 
 stand that 1" 
 
 " Oh yes ; I can understand that first-rate. I 
 don't want to buy you ; I want to borrow you. It 's 
 all right. See 1 Come round when you can ; I 'd 
 like to introduce you to old March. That 's going 
 to be our address." He put a card on the table 
 beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go 
 without making him take the cheque back. He had 
 remembered his father's plea ; that unnerved him, 
 and he promised himself again to return his father's 
 poor little cheque and to work on that picture and 
 give it to Fulkerson for the cheque he had left and 
 for his back debts. He resolved to go to work on 
 the picture at once ; he had set his palette for it ; but 
 first he looked at Fulkerson's cheque. It was for 
 only fifty dollars, and the canny Scotch blood in 
 Beaton rebelled ; he could not let this picture go for 
 any such money ; he felt a little like a man whose 
 generosity has been trifled with. The conflict of 
 emotions broke him up, and he could not work.
 
 IV. 
 
 THE day wasted away in Beaton's hands ; at half- 
 past four o'clock he went out to tea at the house of 
 a lady who was At Home that afternoon from four 
 till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession 
 of one of those other selves, of which we each have 
 several about us, and was again the laconic, staccato, 
 rather worldlified young artist whose moments of 
 a controlled utterance and a certain distinction of 
 manner had commended him to Mrs. Horn's fancy 
 in the summer at St. Barnaby. 
 
 Mrs. Horn's rooms were large, and they never 
 seemed very full, though this perhaps was because 
 people were always so quiet. The ladies, who out- 
 numbered the men ten to one, as they always do at 
 a New York tea, were dressed in sympathy with 
 the low tone every one spoke in, and with the sub- 
 dued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to 
 the few objects, the dim pictures, the unexcited up- 
 holstery, of the rooms. One breathed free of bric-a 
 brae there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one 
 does on going into church after service has begun. 
 This might be a suggestion from the voiceless be 
 haviour of the man-servant who let you in, but it
 
 166 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 was also because Mrs. Horn's At Home was a cere- 
 mony, a decorum, and not festival. At far greater 
 houses there was more gaiety, at richer houses there 
 was more freedom ; the suppression at Mrs. Horn's 
 was a personal, not a social, effect ; it was an efflux 
 of her character, demure, silentious, vague, but very 
 correct. 
 
 Beaton easily found his way to her around the 
 grouped skirts and among the detached figures, and 
 received a pressure of welcome from the hand which 
 she momentarily relaxed from the teapot. She sat 
 behind a table put crosswise of a remote corner, and 
 offered tea to people whom a niece of hers received 
 provisionally or sped finally in the outer room. 
 They did not usually take tea, and when they did 
 they did not usually drink it; but Beaton was 
 feverishly glad of his cup ; he took rum and lemon 
 in it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn's side till the 
 next arrival should displace him : he talked in his 
 French manner. 
 
 "I have been hoping to see you," she said. "I 
 wanted to ask you about the Leightons. Did they 
 really come ? " 
 
 " I believe so. They are in town yes. I haven't 
 seen them." 
 
 " Then you don't know how they 're getting on 
 that pretty creature, with her cleverness, and poor 
 Mrs. Leighton 1 I was afraid they were venturing on 
 a rash experiment. Do you know where they are ? " 
 
 "In West Eleventh Street somewhere. Miss 
 Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore's class."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 167 
 
 " I must look them up. Do you know their 
 number 1 " 
 
 "Not at the moment. I can find out." 
 
 " Do," said Mrs. Horn. " What courage they 
 must have, to plunge into New York as they've 
 done ! I really didn't think they would. I wonder 
 if they Ve succeeded in getting anybody into their 
 house yet 1 " 
 
 " I don't know," said Beaton. 
 
 "I discouraged their coming all I could," she 
 sighed, "and I suppose you did too. But it's quite 
 useless trying to make people in a place like St. 
 Barnaby understand how it is in town." 
 
 "Yes," said Beaton. He stirred his tea, while 
 inwardly he tried to believe that he had really 
 discouraged the Leightons from coming to New 
 York. Perhaps the vexation of his failure made 
 him call Mrs. Horn in his heart a fraud. 
 
 "Yes," she went on. "It is very, very hard. 
 And when they won't understand, and rush on 
 their doom, you feel that they are going to hold you 
 respons " 
 
 Mrs. Horn's eyes wandered from Beaton; her 
 voice faltered in the faded interest of her remark, 
 and then rose with renewed vigour in greeting a 
 lady who came up and stretched her glove across 
 the teacups. 
 
 Beaton got himself away and out of the house 
 with a much briefer adieu to the niece than he had 
 meant to make. The patronising compassion of 
 Mrs. Horn for the Leicjhtons filled him with mdigrna-
 
 168 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 tion toward her, toward himself. There was no 
 reason why he should not have ignored them as he 
 had done ; but there was a feeling. It was his 
 nature to be careless, and he had been spoiled into 
 recklessness ; he neglected everybody, and only 
 remembered them when it suited his whim or his 
 convenience ; but he fiercely resented the inatten- 
 tion of others toward himself. He had no scruple 
 about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an 
 appointment ; he made promises without thinking 
 of their fulfilment, and not because he was a faith- 
 less person, but because he was imaginative, and 
 expected at the time to do what he said, but was 
 fickle, and so did not. As most of his shortcomings 
 were of a society sort, no great harm was done to 
 anybody else. He had contracted somewhat the 
 circle of his acquaintance by what some people 
 called his rudeness, but most people treated it as his 
 oddity, and were patient with it. One lady said 
 she valued his coming when he said he would come 
 because it had the charm of the unexpected. "Only 
 it shows that it isn't always the unexpected that 
 happens," she explained. 
 
 It did not occur to him that his behaviour was 
 immoral ; he did not realise that it was creating a 
 reputation if not a character for him. While we 
 are still young we do not realise that our actions 
 have this effect. It seems to us that people will 
 judge us from what we think and feel. Later we 
 find out that this is impossible ; perhaps we find it 
 out too late ; some of us never find it out at all.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 169 
 
 In spite of his shame about the Leightons Beaton 
 had no present intention of looking them up or 
 sending Mrs. Horn their address. As a matter of 
 fact, he never did send it ; but he happened to meet 
 Mr. Wetmore and his wife at the restaurant where 
 he dined, and he got it of the painter for himself. 
 He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was getting 
 on ; but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a 
 tacit text, on the futility of women generally going 
 in for art. " Even when they have talent they Ve 
 got too much against them. Where a girl doesn't 
 seem very strong, like Miss Leighton, no amount of 
 chic is going to help." 
 
 His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as 
 women always do. 
 
 " No, Dolly," he persisted ; " she 'd better be 
 home milking the cows and leading the horse to 
 water." 
 
 " Do you think she 'd better be up till two in the 
 morning at balls and going all day to receptions and 
 luncheons 1 " 
 
 " Oh, I guess it isn't a question of that, even if 
 she weren't drawing. You knew them at home," he 
 said to Beaton. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I remember. Her mother said you suggested 
 me. Well, the girl has some notion of it ; there 's 
 no doubt about that. But she's a woman. The 
 trouble with these talented girls is that they 're all 
 woman. If they weren't, there wouldn't be much 
 chance for the men, Beaton. But we Ve got Provi- 
 VOL. I. 8
 
 170 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 dence on our own side from the start. I 'm able to 
 watch all their inspirations with perfect composure. 
 I know just how soon it 's going to end in nervous 
 breakdown. Somebody ought to marry them all 
 and put them out of their misery." 
 
 " And what will you do with your students who 
 are married already 1 " his wife said. She felt that 
 she had let him go on long enough. 
 
 " Oh, they ought to get divorced." 
 
 " You ought to be ashamed to take their money if 
 that's what you think of them." 
 
 " My dear, I have a wife to support." 
 
 Beaton intervened with a question. " Do you 
 mean that Miss Leighton isn't standing it very well 1 " 
 
 " How do I know ? She isn't the kind that 
 bends ; she 's the kind that breaks." 
 
 After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, " Won't 
 you come home with us, Mr. Beaton ? " 
 
 " Thank you ; no. I have an engagement." 
 
 " I don't see why that should prevent you," said 
 Wetmore. " But you always were a punctilious cuss. 
 Well ! " 
 
 Beaton lingered over his cigar ; but no one else 
 whom he knew came in, and he yielded to the three- 
 fold impulse of conscience, of curiosity, of inclina- 
 tion, in going to call at the Leightons'. He asked 
 for the ladies, and the maid showed him into the 
 parlour, where he found Mrs. Leighton and Miss 
 Wood burn. 
 
 The widow met him with a welcome neatly 
 marked by resentment ; she meant him to feel that
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 171 
 
 his not coining sooner had been noticed. Miss 
 Woodburn bubbled and gurgled on, and did what 
 she could to mitigate his punishment, but she did 
 not feel authorised to stay it, till Mrs. Leighton, by 
 studied avoidance of her daughter's name, obliged 
 Beaton to ask for her. Then Miss Woodburn caught 
 up her work, and said, " Ah '11 go and tell her, Mrs. 
 Leighton." At the top of the stairs she found Alma, 
 and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not 
 been standing there. " Mali goodness, chald ! there 's 
 the handsomest young man asking for you down 
 there you evah saw. Ah told you' mothah Ah 
 would come up fo' you." 
 
 " What who is it t " 
 
 " Don't you know 1 But ho' could you 1 He 's 
 got the most beautiful eyes, and he wea's his hai' in 
 a bang, and he talks English like it was something 
 else, and his name 's Mr. Beaton." 
 
 " Did he ask for me ? " said Alma, with a 
 dreamy tone. She put her hand on the stairs rail, 
 and a little shiver ran over her. 
 
 " Didn't I tell you 1 Of coase he did ! And you 
 ought to go raght down if you want to save the poo' 
 fellah's lahfe ; you' mothah's just freezin' him to 
 death."
 
 V. 
 
 "SHE is;" cried Alma. "Tchk!" She flew down- 
 stairs, and flitted swiftly into the room, and fluttered 
 up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing hand-shake. 
 
 " How very kind of you to come and see us, Mr. 
 Beaton ! When did you come to New York ? Don't 
 you find it warm here ? We 've only just lighted 
 the furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too 
 early. Mamma does keep it so hot !" She rushed 
 about opening doors and shutting registers, and then 
 came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a 
 mask of radiant cordiality. " How have you been 
 since we saw you 1" 
 
 "Very well," said Beaton. "I hope you're well, 
 Miss Leighton ?" 
 
 " Oh, perfectly ! I think New York agrees with 
 us both wonderfully. I never knew such air. And 
 to think of our not having snow yet ! I should 
 think everybody would want to come here ! Why 
 don't you come, Mr. Beaton ? " 
 
 Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her. " I I 
 live in New York," he faltered. 
 
 " In New York city / " she exclaimed.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 173 
 
 " Surely, Alma," said her mother, " you remember 
 Mr. Beaton's telling us he lived in New York." 
 
 " But I thought you came from Rochester ; or 
 was it Syracuse 1 I always get those places mixed 
 up." 
 
 " Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse. 
 I Ve been in New York ever since I came home from 
 Paris," said Beaton, with the confusion of a man 
 who feels himself played upon by a woman. 
 
 " From Paris ! " Alma echoed, leaning forward, 
 with her smiling mask tight on. " Wasn't it 
 Munich, where you studied 1 " 
 
 " I was at Munich too. I met Wetmore there." 
 
 " Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore 1 " 
 
 " Why, Alma," her mother interposed again, " it 
 was Mr. Beaton who told you of Mr. Wetmore." 
 
 "Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. It was Mrs. 
 Horn ; she suggested Mr. Ilcomb. I remember now. 
 I can't thank you enough for having sent me to Mr. 
 Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn't he delightful? Oh 
 yes, I'm a perfect Wetmorian, I can assure you. 
 The whole class is the same way." 
 
 " I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner," 
 said Beaton, attempting the recovery of something 
 that he had lost through the girl's shining ease and 
 steely sprightliness. She seemed to him so smooth 
 and hard, with a repellent elasticity from which he 
 was flung off. " I hope you 're not working too 
 hard, Miss Leighton ? " 
 
 " Oh no ! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow 
 stronger on it. Do I look very much wasted away ? "
 
 174 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 She looked him full in the face, brilliantly smiling, 
 and intentionally beautiful. 
 
 " No," he said, with a slow sadness ; " I never 
 saw you looking better." 
 
 " Poor Mr. Beaton ! " she said, in recognition of 
 his doleful tune. " It seems to be quite a blow." 
 
 " Oh no " 
 
 " I remember all the good advice you used to give 
 me about not working too hard, and probably it's 
 that that 's saved my life that and the house-hunt- 
 ing. Has mamma told you of our adventures in get- 
 ting settled 1 Some time we must. It was such fun ! 
 And didn't you think we were fortunate to get such 
 a pretty house ? You must see both our parlours." 
 
 She jumped up, and her mother followed her with 
 a bewildered look as she ran into the back parlour 
 and flashed up the gas. 
 
 " Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to show you 
 the great feature of the house." She opened the low 
 windows that gave upon a glazed veranda stretching 
 across the end of the room. " Just think of this in 
 New York ! You can't see it very well at night, but 
 when the southern sun pours in here all the after- 
 noon " 
 
 " Yes, I can imagine it," he said. He glanced up 
 at the bird-cage hanging from the roof. " I suppose 
 Gypsy enjoys it." 
 
 " You remember Gypsy ? " she said ; and she 
 made a cooing, kissing little noise up at the bird, 
 who responded drowsily. " Poor old Gypsum ! 
 "Well, he shan't be disturbed. Yes, it's Gyp's de-
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 175 
 
 light, and Colonel Woodburn likes to write here in 
 the morning. Think of us having a real live author 
 in the house ! And Miss Woodburn : I ; m so glad 
 you Ve seen her ! They 're Southern people." 
 
 " Yes, that was obvious in her case." 
 
 " From her accent ? Isn't it fascinating ? I didn't 
 believe I could ever endure Southerners, but we 're 
 like one family with the Woodburns. I should 
 think you 'd want to paint Miss Woodburn. Don't 
 you think her colouring is delicious ? And such a 
 quaint kind of eighteenth-century type of beauty ! 
 But she's perfectly lovely every way, and every- 
 thing she says is so funny. The Southerners seem 
 to be such great talkers ; better than we are, don't 
 you think ? " 
 
 " I don't know," said Beaton, in pensive dis- 
 couragement. He was sensible of being manipu- 
 lated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from 
 the performer or to fathom her motives. His 
 pensiveness passed into gloom, and was degenerat- 
 ing into sulky resentment when he went away, 
 after several failures to get back to the old ground 
 he had held in relation to Alma. He retrieved 
 something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma 
 glittered upon him to the last with a keen impene- 
 trable candour, a childlike singleness of glance, 
 covering unfathomable reserve. 
 
 "Well, Alma," said her mother, when the door 
 had closed upon him. 
 
 " Well, mother." Then, after a moment, she said, 
 with a rush : " Did you think I was going to let him
 
 176 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 suppose we were piqued at his not coming? Did 
 you suppose I was going to let him patronise us, or 
 think that we were in the least dependent on his 
 favour or friendship ? " 
 
 Her mother did not attempt to answer her. She 
 merely said, " I shouldn't think he would come any 
 more." 
 
 " Well, we have got on so far without him ; per- 
 haps we can live through the rest of the winter." 
 
 " I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He was 
 quite stupefied. I could see that he didn't know 
 what to make of you." 
 
 " He 's not required to make anything of me," 
 said Alma. 
 
 " Do you think he really believed you had for- 
 gotten all those things ? " 
 
 " Impossible to say, mamma." 
 
 " Well, I don't think it was quite right, Alma." 
 
 " I '11 leave him to you the next time. Miss 
 Woodburn said you were freezing him to death 
 when I came down." 
 
 " That was quite* different. But there won't be 
 any next time, I 'm afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton. 
 
 Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. 
 He tried to read when he got to his room ; but 
 Alma's looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and 
 through the woof of the story like shuttles ; he 
 could not keep them out, and he fell asleep at last, 
 not because he forgot them, but because he forgave 
 them. He was able to say to himself that he had 
 been justly cut off from kindness which he knew
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 177 
 
 how to value in losing it. He did not expect ever 
 to right himself in Alma's esteem ; but he hoped 
 some day to let her know that he had understood. 
 It seemed to him that it would be a good thing 
 if she should find it out after his death. He ima- 
 gined her being touched by it under those circum- 
 stances. 
 8*
 
 VI. 
 
 IN the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had 
 done himself injustice. "When he uncovered his 
 Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that 
 the man who was capable of such work deserved the 
 punishment Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. 
 He still forgave her, but in the presence of a thing 
 like that he could not help respecting himself ; he 
 believed that if she could see it she would be sorry 
 that she had cut herself off from his acquaintance. 
 He carried this strain of conviction all through his 
 syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk 
 and finished, with an increasing security of his 
 opinions and a mounting severity in his judgments. 
 He retaliated upon the general condition of art 
 among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma 
 had. made him feel, and he folded up his manuscript 
 and put it in his pocket, almost healed of his humi- 
 liation. He had been able to escape from its sting 
 so entirely while he was writing that the notion of 
 making his life more and more literary commended 
 itself to him. As it was now evident that the 
 future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forget- 
 ting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlesslj
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 179 
 
 reasoned in favour of reconsidering his resolution 
 against Fulkerson's offer. One must call it reason- 
 ing, but it was rather that swift internal dramatisa- 
 tion which constantly goes on in persons of excitable 
 sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep 
 Beaton physically along toward the Every Other 
 Week office, and carried his mind with lightning 
 celerity on to a time when he should have given 
 that journal such quality and authority in matters 
 of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America 
 before. With the prosperity which he made attend 
 his work he changed the character of the enterprise, 
 and with Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave 
 the public an art journal of as high grade as Les 
 Lettres et les Arts, and very much that sort of thing. 
 All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma 
 Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her : they 
 were married in Grace Church, because Beaton had 
 once seen a marriage there, and had intended to 
 paint a picture of it some time. 
 
 Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his 
 responding with due dryness to Fulkerson's cheery 
 " Hello, old man ! " when he found himself in the 
 building fitted up for the Every Other Week office. 
 Fulkerson's room was back of the smaller one 
 occupied by the book-keeper ; they had been respec- 
 tively the reception-room and dining-room of the 
 little place in its dwelling-house days, and they had 
 been simply and tastefully treated in their trans- 
 formation into business purposes. The narrow old 
 trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and 
 N
 
 180 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 the quaintly ugly marble mantels. The architect 
 had said, Better let them stay : they expressed 
 epoch, if not character. 
 
 " Well, have you come round to go to work ? Just 
 hang up your coat on the floor anywhere," Fulkerson 
 went on. 
 
 " I Ve come to bring you that letter," said Beaton, 
 all the more haughtily because he found that 
 Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in 
 these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-look- 
 ing man, rather stout, and a little above the middle 
 height, with a full, close-cropped iron-grey beard, 
 seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted him- 
 self back, with his knees set against it ; and leaning 
 against the mantel there was a young man with a 
 singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness 
 qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His 
 large blue eyes were somewhat prominent ; and his 
 rather narrow face was drawn forward in a nose a 
 little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full 
 chin deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly 
 forward. 
 
 "Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. 
 Beaton," Fulkerson said, rolling his head in the 
 direction of the elder man ; and then nodding it 
 toward the younger, he said, " Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. 
 Beaton." Beaton shook hands with March, and 
 then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on 
 gaily : " We were just talking of you, Beaton 
 well, you know the old saying. Mr. March, as I 
 told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has charge
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 181 
 
 of the publishing department he's the counting- 
 room incarnate, the source of power, the fountain of 
 corruption, the element that prevents journalism 
 being the high and holy thing that it would be if 
 there were no money in it." Mr. Dryfoos turned 
 his large mild eyes upon Beaton, and laughed with 
 the uneasy concession which people make to a 
 character when they do not quite approve of the 
 character's language. " What Mr. March and I are 
 trying to do is to carry on this thing so that there 
 won't be any money in it or very little ; and we 're 
 planning to give the public a better article for the 
 price than it 's ever had before. Now here 's a 
 dummy we've had made up for Every Other Week, 
 and as we 've decided to adopt it, we would naturally 
 like your opinion of it, so 's to know what opinion 
 to have of you." He reached forward and pushed 
 toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the 
 ordinary duodecimo book; its ivory white pebbled 
 paper cover was prettily illustrated with a water- 
 coloured design irregularly washed over the greater 
 part of its surface : quite across the page at top, and 
 narrowing from right to left as it descended. In the 
 triangular space left blank the title of the periodical 
 and the publisher's imprint were tastefully lettered 
 so as to be partly covered by the background of 
 colour. 
 
 " It 's like some of those Tartarin books of Dau- 
 det's," said Beaton, looking at it with more interest 
 than he suffered to be seen. "But it's a book, not 
 a magazine." He opened its pages of thick mellow
 
 182 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 white paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages 
 experimentally printed in the type intended to be 
 used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn into 
 and over the text, for the sake of the effect. 
 
 " A Daniel a Daniel come to judgment ! Sit 
 down, Dan'el, and take it easy." Fulkerson pushed a 
 chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it. " You 're 
 right, Dan'el ; it 's a book, to all practical intents 
 and purposes. And what we propose to do with the 
 American public is to give it twenty-four books like 
 this a year a complete library for the absurd sum 
 of six dollars. We don't intend to sell 'em it 's no 
 name for the transaction but to give J em. And 
 what we want to get out of you beg, borrow, buy, 
 or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall 
 make the American public this princely present in 
 paper covers like this, or in some sort of flexible 
 boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say no 
 more about it. Now, Dan'el, come to judgment, as 
 our respected friend -Shylock remarked." 
 
 Beaton had got done looking at the dummy, and 
 he dropped it on the table before Fulkerson, who 
 pushed it away, apparently to free himself from 
 partiality. " I don't know anything about the 
 business side, and I can't tell about the effect of 
 either style on the sales ; but you '11 spoil the whole 
 character of the cover if you use anything thicker 
 than that thickish paper." 
 
 " All right ; very good ; first-rate. The ayes have 
 it. Paper it is. I don't mind telling you that we 
 had decided for that paper before you came in. Mr.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 183 
 
 March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just 
 the way you do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted 
 it, because he 's the counting-room incarnate, and 
 it's cheaper; and I wanted it, because I always like 
 to go with the majority. Now what do you think 
 of that little design itself ? " 
 
 " The sketch 1 " Beaton pulled the book toward 
 him again and looked at it again. " Rather decora- 
 tive. Drawing 's not remarkable. Graceful ; rather 
 nice." He pushed the book away again, and Fulker- 
 son pulled it to his side of the table. 
 
 " Well, that 's a piece of that amateur trash you 
 despise so much. I went to a painter I know by 
 the way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this 
 thing, but I told him I was ahead of him and I 
 got him to submit my idea to one of his class, and 
 that's the result. Well, now, there ain't anything 
 in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, 
 and we 're going to have a pretty cover for Every 
 Other Week every time. We 've cut loose from the 
 old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and 
 we've cut loose from the old two-column big page 
 magazine size ; we 're going to have a duodecimo 
 page, clear black print, and paper that'll make your 
 mouth water; and we're going to have a fresh 
 illustration for the cover of each number, and we 
 ain't a-going to give the public any rest at all. 
 Sometimes we're going to have a delicate little 
 landscape like this, and sometimes we're going to 
 have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the 
 law will allow."
 
 184 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 The young man leaning against the mantelpiece 
 blushed a sort of protest. 
 
 March smiled and said dryly, "Those are the 
 numbers that Mr. Fulkerson is going to edit himself." 
 
 "Exactly. And Mr. Beaton here is going to 
 supply the floating females, gracefully airing them- 
 selves against a sunset or something of that kind." 
 Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson 
 went on philosophically. "It's astonishing how 
 you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the pro- 
 ceedings ; you can paint things that your harshest 
 critic would be ashamed to describe accurately; 
 you're as free as the theatre. But that's neither 
 here nor there. What I'm after is the fact that 
 we 're going to have variety in our title-pages, and 
 we are going to have novelty in the illustrations of 
 the body of the book. March, here, if he had his 
 own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all." 
 
 "Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beaton," 
 March interposed, " but because I like them too much. 
 I find that I look at the pictures in an illustrated 
 article, but I don't read the article very much, and I 
 fancy that 's the case with most other people. You've 
 got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes 
 off the literature, if you don't take our minds off." 
 
 " Like the society beauties on the stage : people 
 go in for the beauty so much that they don't know 
 what the play is. But the box office gets there all 
 the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants." 
 Fulkerson looked up gaily at Mr. Dryfoos, who 
 smiled deprecatingly.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 185 
 
 "It was different," March went on, "when the 
 illustrations used to be bad. Then the text had 
 some chance." 
 
 "Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and 
 genius combined to storm the galleries," said Ful- 
 kerson. 
 
 " We can still make them bad enough," said 
 Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in his remark to March. 
 
 Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. " Well, 
 you needn't make 'em so bad as the old-style cuts ; 
 but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly re- 
 tiring. We Ve got hold of a process something like 
 that those French fellows gave Daudet thirty-five 
 thousand dollars to write a novel to use with ; kind 
 of thing that begins at one side, or one corner, and 
 spreads in a sort of dim religious style over the 
 print till you can't tell which is which. Then we Ve 
 got a notion that where the pictures don't behave 
 quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, 
 like a little casual remark, don't you know, or a 
 comment that has some connection, or may be none 
 at all, with what's going on in the story. Some- 
 thing like this." Fulkerson took away one knee 
 from the table long enough to open the drawer, and 
 pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beaton. 
 " That 's a Spanish book I happened to see at Bren- 
 tano's, and I froze to it on account of the pictures. 
 I guess they 're pretty good." 
 
 " Do you expect to get such drawings in this 
 country ? " asked Beaton, after a glance at the book. 
 " Such character such drama ? You won't"
 
 186 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ""Well, I'm not so sure," said Fulkerson, "come 
 to get our amateurs warmed up to the work. But- 
 what I want is to get the physical effect, so to speak 
 get that-sized picture into our page, and set the 
 fashion of it. I shouldn't care if the illustration 
 was sometimes confined to an initial letter and a 
 tail-piece." 
 
 " Couldn't be done here. We haven't the touch. 
 We 're good in some things, but this isn't in our 
 way," said Beaton stubbornly. " I can't think of a 
 man who could do it ; that is, amongst those that 
 would." 
 
 " Well, think of some woman, then," said Fulker- 
 son easily. "I've got a notion that the women 
 could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em 
 interested. There ain't anything so popular as. 
 female fiction ; why not try female art 1 " 
 
 " The females themselves have been supposed to 
 have been trying it for a good while," March sug- 
 gested ; and Mr. Dryf oos laughed nervously ; Beaton 
 remained solemnly silent. 
 
 "Yes, I know," Fulkerson assented. "But I 
 don't mean that kind exactly. What we want to 
 do is to work the ewig WeiUiche in this concern. 
 We want to make a magazine that will go for the 
 women's fancy every time. I don't mean with 
 recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip 
 about authors and society, but real high-tone litera- 
 ture that will show women triumphing in all the 
 stories, or else suffering tremendously. We 've got 
 to recognise that women form three-fourths of the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 1*87 
 
 reading public in this country, and go for their 
 tastes and ttyeir sensibilities and their sex-piety 
 along the whole line. They do like to think that 
 women can do things better than men ; and if we 
 can let it leak out and get around in the papers that 
 the managers of Every Other Week couldn't stir a peg 
 in the line of the illustration they wanted till they 
 got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it '11 make 
 the fortunes of the thing. See 1 " 
 
 He looked sunnily round at the other men, and 
 March said : " You ought to be in charge of a 
 Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It 's a disgrace 
 to be connected with you." 
 
 " It seems to me," said Beaton, " that you 'd better 
 get a God-gifted girl for your art editor." 
 
 Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched 
 him on the shoulder, with a compassionate smile. 
 "My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of 
 organisation. It takes a very masculine man for 
 that a man who combines the most subtle and 
 refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes 
 and the most ferruginous will power. Which his 
 name is Angus Beaton, and here he sets ! " 
 
 The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross 
 burlesque of flattery, and Beaton frowned sheepishly. 
 " I suppose you understand this man's style," he 
 growled toward March. 
 
 " They do, my son," said Fulkerson. " They 
 know that I cannot tell a lie." He pulled out his 
 watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet. 
 
 " It 's quarter of twelve, and I 've got an appoint-
 
 188 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ment. Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the 
 two books in his lax hands. " Take these along, 
 Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your 
 multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, 
 and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang 
 upon your decision." 
 
 " There 's no deciding to be done," said Beaton. 
 "You can't combine the two styles. They'd kill 
 each other." 
 
 " A Dan'el, a Dan'el come to judgment ! I knew 
 you could help us out ! Take 'em along, and tell us 
 which will go the furthest with the ewig Weibliche. 
 Dryfoos, I want a word with you." He led the way 
 into the front room, flirting an airy farewell to 
 Beaton with his hand as he went.
 
 VII. 
 
 MARCH and Beaton remained alone together for a 
 moment, and March said : " I hope you will think 
 it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. 
 Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course ; 
 but we really want to make a nice thing of the 
 magazine." He had that timidity of the elder in 
 the presence of the younger man which the younger, 
 preoccupied with his own timidity in the presence of 
 the elder, cannot imagine. Besides, March was aware 
 of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from 
 Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his 
 way toward sympathy with him. " We want to 
 make it good ; we want to make it high. Fulker- 
 son is right about aiming to please the women, bub 
 of course he caricatures the way of going about it." 
 
 For answer, Beaton flung out, " I can't go in for 
 a thing I don't understand the plan of." 
 
 March took it for granted that he had wounded 
 some exposed sensibility of Beaton's. He continued 
 still more deferentially : " Mr. Fulkerson's notion 
 I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndi- 
 cate experience is that we shall do best in fiction 
 to confine ourselves to short stories, and make each
 
 190 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 number complete in itself. He found that the most 
 successful things he could furnish his newspapers 
 were short stories ; we Americans are supposed to 
 excel in writing them ; and most people begin with 
 them in fiction ; and it 's Mr. Fulkerson's idea to 
 work unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks 
 he can not only get them easih', but can gradually 
 form a school of short-story writers. I can't say I 
 follow him altogether, but I respect his experience. 
 We shall not despise translations of short stories, 
 but otherwise the matter will all be original, and of 
 course it won't all be short stories. We shall use 
 sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic 
 studies, and bits of biography and history ; but all 
 very light, and always short enough to be completed 
 in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believes in pic- 
 tures, and most of the things would be capable of 
 illustration." 
 
 " I see," said Beaton. 
 
 " I don't know but this is the whole affair," said 
 March, beginning to stiffen a little at the young 
 man's reticence. 
 
 " I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble 
 to explain. Good morning." Beaton bowed him- 
 self off, without offering to shake hands. 
 
 Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer 
 office, and Mr. Dryfoos followed him. fi Well, what 
 do you think of our art editor ? " 
 
 " Is he our art editor ? " asked March. " I wasn't 
 quite certain when he left." 
 
 " Did he take the books ? "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 191 
 
 " Yes, he took the books." 
 
 " I guess he 's all right, then." Fulkerson added, 
 in concession to the umbrage he detected in March, 
 " Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in 
 the solar system, but he usually takes it out in per- 
 sonal conduct. When it comes to work, he's a 
 regular horse." 
 
 " He appears to have compromised for the present 
 by being a perfect mule," said March. 
 
 " Well, he 's in a transition state," Fulkerson 
 allowed. " He 's the man for us. He really under- 
 stands what we want. You '11 see ; he '11 catch on. 
 That lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of 
 time. He 's really a good fellow when you take him 
 off his guard ; and he 's full of ideas. He 's spread 
 out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he 's 
 pretty thin ; but come to gather him up into a lump, 
 there 's a good deal of substance to him. Yes, there 
 is. He 's a first-rate critic, and he 's a nice fellow 
 with the other artists. They laugh at his univer- 
 sality, but they all like him. He 's the best kind of 
 a teacher when he condescends to it ; and he 's just 
 the man to deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir, 
 he's a prize. Well, I must go now." 
 
 Fulkerson went out of the street door and then 
 came quickly back. "By-the-by, March, I saw that 
 old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton's room 
 yesterday." 
 
 " What old dynamiter of mine ? " 
 
 " That old one-handed Dutchman friend of your 
 youth the one we saw at Maroni's "
 
 192 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Oh Lindau ! " said March, with a vague pang 
 of self-reproach for having thought of Lindau so 
 little after the first flood of his tender feeling toward 
 him was past 
 
 " Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as 
 Judas Iscariot. Lindau makes a first-rate Judas, 
 and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if he 
 works the religious people right. But what I was 
 thinking of was this it struck me just as I was 
 going out of the door : Didn't you tell me Lindau 
 knew forty or fifty different languages 1 " 
 
 " Four or five, yes." 
 
 " Well, we won't quarrel about the number. The 
 question is, why not work him in the field of foreign 
 literature ? You can't go over all their reviews and 
 magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if 
 you could trust his nose. Would he know a good 
 thing?" 
 
 " I think he would," said March, on whom the 
 scope of Fulkerson's suggestion gradually opened. 
 "He used to have good taste, and he must know 
 the ground. Why, it 's a capital idea, Fulkerson ! 
 Lindau wrote very fair English, and he could trans- 
 late, with a little revision." 
 
 "And he would probably work cheap. Well, 
 hadn't you better see him about it ? I guess it '11 
 be quite a windfall for him." 
 
 " Yes, it will. I '11 look him up. Thank you for 
 the suggestion, Fulkerson." 
 
 " Oh, don't mention it ! /don't mind doing Every 
 Other Week a good, turn now and then when it comes
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 193 
 
 in my way." Fulkerson went out again, and this 
 time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos. 
 
 " Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home 
 when your sisters called the other day. She wished 
 me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular. 
 There was none on your mother's card." 
 
 " No, sir," said the young man, with a flush of 
 embarrassment that seemed habitual with him. 
 " She has no day. She 's at home almost every day 
 She hardly ever goes out." 
 
 " Might we come some evening ? " March asked. 
 " We should be very glad to do that, if she would 
 excuse the informality. Then I could come with 
 Mrs. March." 
 
 " Mother isn't very formal," said the young man. 
 " She would be very glad to see you." 
 
 "Then we'll come some night this week, if you 
 will let us. "When do you expect your father back ? " 
 
 "Not much before Christmas. He's trying to 
 settle up some things at Moffitt." 
 
 " And what do you think of our art editor ? " asked 
 March, with a smile, for the change of subject. 
 
 "Oh, I don' J know much about such things," said 
 the young man, with another of his embarrassed 
 flushes. " Mr. Tulkerson seems to feel sure that he 
 is the one for us." 
 
 " Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that / was the 
 one for you, too," said March; and he laughed. 
 " That 's what makes me doubt his infallibility. But 
 he couldn't do worse with Mr. Beaton." 
 
 Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if 
 VOL. I. 9
 
 194 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 unable or unwilling to cope with the difficulty of 
 making a polite protest against March's self-de- 
 preciation. He said after a moment: "It's new 
 business to all of us except Mr. Fulkerson. But I 
 think it will succeed. I think we can do some good 
 in it." 
 
 March asked rather absently, " Some good?" Then 
 he added : " Oh yes ; I think we can. What do 
 you mean by good ? Improve the public taste 1 
 Elevate the standard of literature 1 Give young 
 authors and artists a chance 1 " 
 
 This was the only good that had ever been in 
 March's mind, except the good that was to come in 
 a material way from his success, to himself and to 
 his family. 
 
 " I don't know," said the young man ; and he 
 looked down in a shamefaced fashion. He lifted his 
 , head and looked into March's face. " I suppose I 
 was thinking that some time we might help along. 
 If we were to have those sketches of yours about life 
 in every part of New York " 
 
 March's authorial vanity was tickled. " Fulkerson 
 has been talking to you about them ? He seemed 
 to think they would be a card. He believes that 
 there 's no subject so fascinating to the general 
 average of people throughout the country as life in 
 New York City ; and he liked my notion of doing 
 these things." March hoped that Dryfoos would 
 answer that Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic 
 about his notion ; but he did not need this stimulus, 
 and at any rate he went on without it. " The fact 
 is, it 's something that struck my fancy the moment
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 195 
 
 I came here ; I found myself intensely interested in 
 the place, and I began to make notes, consciously 
 and unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I can 
 get something quite attractive out of it. I don't in 
 the least know what it will be yet, except that it 
 will be very desultory ; and I couldn't at all say 
 when I can get at it. If we postpone the first 
 number till February I might get a little paper into 
 that. Yes, I think it might be a good thing for us," 
 March said, with modest self-appreciation. 
 
 " If you can make the comfortable people under- 
 stand how the uncomfortable people live, it will be 
 a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems 
 to me that the only trouble is that we don't know 
 one another well enough ; and that the first thing 
 is to do this." The young fellow spoke with the 
 seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided. 
 Whenever he laughed his face looked weak, even 
 silly. It seemed to be a sense of this that made 
 him hang his head or turn it away at such times. 
 
 " That 's true," said March, from the surface only. 
 " And then, those phases of low life are immensely 
 picturesque. Of course we must try to get the con- 
 trasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect. That 
 won't be so easy. You can't penetrate to the dinner- 
 party of a millionaire under the wing of a detective 
 as you could to a carouse in Mulberry Street, or to 
 his children's nursery with a philanthropist' as you 
 can to a street-boy's lodging-house." March laughed, 
 and again the young man turned his head away. 
 " Still, something can be done in that way by tact 
 
 and patience." 
 

 
 VIIL 
 
 THAT evening March went with his wife to return 
 the call of the Dryfoos ladies. On their way up- 
 town in the Elevated he told her of his talk with 
 young Dryfoos. " I confess I was a little ashamed 
 before him afterward for having looked at the matter 
 so entirely from the aesthetic point of view. But of 
 course, you know, if I went to work at those things 
 with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should 
 spoil them." 
 
 " Of course," said his wife. She had always heard 
 him say something of this kind about such things. 
 
 He went on : " But I suppose that 's just the 
 point that such a nature as young Dryfoos' can't get 
 hold of, or keep hold of. We 're a queer lot, down 
 there, Isabel perfect menagerie. If it hadn't been 
 that Fulkerson got us together, and really seems to 
 know what he did it for, I should say he was the 
 oddest stick among us. But when I think of my- 
 self and my own crankiness for the literary depart- 
 ment ; 'and young Dryfoos, who ought really to be 
 in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for pub- 
 lisher ; and that young Beaton, who probably hasn't 
 a moral fibre in his composition, for the art man, I
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 197 
 
 don't know but we could give Fulkerson odds and 
 still beat him in oddity." 
 
 His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of 
 renunciation, of monition. "Well, I'm glad you 
 can feel so light about it, Basil." 
 
 " Light ? I feel gay ! With Fulkerson at the 
 helm, I tell you the rocks and the lee shore had 
 better keep out of the way." He laughed with 
 pleasure in his metaphor. "Just when you think 
 Fulkerson has taken leave of his senses he says or 
 does something that shows he is on the most inti- 
 mate and inalienable terms with them all the time. 
 You know how I've been worrying over those 
 foreign periodicals, and trying to get some transla- 
 tion from them for the first number ? Well, Ful- 
 kerson has brought his centipedal mind to bear on 
 the subject, and he's suggested that old German 
 friend of mine I was telling you of the one I met 
 in the restaurant the friend of my youth." 
 
 " Do you think he could do it ? " asked Mrs. 
 March sceptically. 
 
 " He 's a perfect Babel of strange tongues ; and 
 he 's the very man for the work, and I was ashamed 
 I hadn't thought of him myself, for I suspect he 
 needs the work." 
 
 "Well, be careful how you get mixed up with 
 him, then, Basil," said his wife, who had the natural 
 misgiving concerning the friends of her husband's 
 youth that all wives have. "You know the Ger- 
 mans are so unscrupulously dependent. You don't 
 know anything about him now."
 
 198 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " I 'm not afraid of Lindau," said March. " He 
 was the best and kindest man I ever saw, the most 
 high-minded, the most generous. He lost a hand in 
 the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, 
 and that stump of his is character enough for me." 
 
 " Oh, you don't think I could have meant any- 
 thing against him ! " said Mrs. March, with the 
 tender fervour that every woman who lived in the 
 time of the war must feel for those who suffered in 
 it. " All that I meant was that I hoped you Avould 
 not get mixed up with him too much. You're so 
 apt to be carried away by your impulses." 
 
 " They didn't carry me very far away in the direc- 
 tion of poor old Lindau, I 'm ashamed to think," 
 said March. " I meant all sorts of fine things by 
 him after I met him ; and then I forgot him, and I 
 had to be reminded of him by Fulkerson." 
 
 She did not answer him, and he fell into a re- 
 morseful reverie, in which he rehabilitated Lindau 
 anew, and provided handsomely for his old age. He 
 got him buried with military honours, and had a shaft 
 raised over him, with a medallion likeness by Beaton 
 and an epitaph by himself, by the time they reached 
 Forty -second Street ; there was no time to write 
 Lindau's life, however briefly, before the train 
 stopped. 
 
 i They had to walk up four blocks and then half a 
 block across before they came to the indistinctive 
 brown-stone house where the Dryfooses lived. It 
 was larger than some in the same block, but the 
 next neighbourhood of a huge apartment-house
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 199 
 
 dwarfed it again. March thought he recognised the 
 very flat in which he had disciplined the surly 
 janitor, but he did not tell his wife; he made her 
 notice the transition character of the street, which 
 had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with 
 here and there a single dwelling dropped far down 
 beneath and beside them, to that jag-toothed effect 
 on the sky-line so often observable in such New 
 York streets. " I don't know exactly what the old 
 gentleman bought here for," he said, as they waited 
 on the steps after ringing, "unless he expects to 
 turn it into flats by-and-by. Otherwise, I don't 
 believe he '11 get his money back." 
 
 An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that 
 delayed him, said the ladies were at home, and let 
 the Marches in, and then carried their cards 
 upstairs. The drawing-room, where he said they 
 could sit down while he went on this errand, was 
 delicately decorated in white and gold, and fur- 
 nished with a sort of extravagant good taste ; there 
 was nothing to object to the satin furniture, -the 
 pale, soft, rich carpet, the pictures, and the bronze 
 and china bric-a-brac, except that their costliness 
 was too evident ; everything in the room meant 
 money too plainly, and too much of it. The 
 Marches recognised this in the hoarse whispers 
 which people cannot get their voices above when 
 they try to talk away the interval of waiting in such 
 circumstances ; they conjectured from what they 
 had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury 
 in nowise expressed ^ their civilisation. " Though
 
 200 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 when you come to that," said March, " I don't know 
 that Mrs. Green's gimcrackery expresses ours." 
 
 " Well, Basil, / didn't take the gimcrackery. That 
 was your " 
 
 The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested 
 Mrs. March in the well-merited punishment which 
 she never failed to inflict upon her husband when 
 the question of the gimcrackery they always called 
 it that came up. She rose at the entrance of 
 a bright-looking, pretty-looking, mature, youngish 
 lady, in black silk of a neutral implication, who put 
 out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery, 
 very lady-like accent, " Mrs. March ? " and then 
 added to both of them, while she shook hands with 
 March, and before they could get the name out of 
 their mouths, " No, not Miss Dryfoos ! Neither of 
 them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos. Mrs. MandeL The 
 ladies will be down in a moment Won't you 
 throw off your sacque, Mrs. March ? I 'm afraid it 's 
 rather warm here, coming from the outside." 
 
 " I will throw it back, if you '11 allow me," said 
 Mrs. March, with a sort of provisionally, as if, 
 pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel's 
 quality and authority, she did not feel herself 
 justified in going further. 
 
 But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. 
 Mandel seemed to know about her. " Oh, well, do ! " 
 she said, with a sort of recognition of the propriety 
 of her caution. " I hope you are feeling a little at 
 home in New York We heard so much of your 
 trouble in getting a flat, from Mr. Fulkerson."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 201 
 
 " Well, a true Bostonian doesn't give up quite so 
 soon," said Mrs. March. " But I will say New York 
 doesn't seem so far away, now we 're here." 
 
 " I 'm sure you '11 like it. Every one does." 
 Mrs. Mandel added to March, " It 's very sharp out, 
 isn't it ? " 
 
 " Rather sharp. But after our Boston winters I 
 don't know but I ought to repudiate the word." 
 
 " Ah, wait till you have been here through March !" 
 said Mrs. Mandel. She began with him, but skil- 
 fully transferred the close of her remark, and the 
 little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife. 
 
 " Yes," said Mrs. March, " or April, either. Talk 
 about our east winds ! " 
 
 " Oh, I 'm sure they can't be worse than our 
 winds,*' Mrs. Mandel returned caressingly. 
 
 "If we escape New York pneumonia," March 
 laughed, " it will only be to fall a prey to New York 
 malaria as soon as the frost is out of the ground." 
 
 " Oh, but you know," said Mrs. Mandel, " I think 
 our malaria has really been slandered a little. It 's 
 more a matter of drainage of plumbing. I don't 
 believe it would be possible for malaria to get into 
 this house, we 've had it gone over so thoroughly." 
 
 Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. 
 Mandel's position from this statement, " It 's certainly 
 the first duty." 
 
 " If Mrs. March could have had her way, we 
 should have had the drainage of our whole ward put 
 in order," said her husband, "before we ventured to 
 take a furnished apartment for the winter." 
 9*
 
 202 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for 
 permission to laugh at this, but at the same moment 
 both ladies became preoccupied with a second rust- 
 ling on the stairs. 
 
 Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and 
 Mrs. Mandel introduced, "Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March ; 
 and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March," she added, and 
 the girls shook hands in their several ways with the 
 Marches. 
 
 Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair 
 was intensely black. Her face, but for the slight 
 inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the small- 
 ness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken 
 her face, but gave it a curious effect of fierceness, of 
 challenge. She had a large black fan in her hand, 
 which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful 
 nervousness. Her sister was blonde, and had a profile 
 like her brother's ; but her chin was not so salient, 
 and the weak look of the mouth was not corrected 
 by the spirituality or the fervour of his eyes, though 
 hers were of the same mottled blue. She dropped 
 into the low seat beside Mrs. Mandel, and inter- 
 twined her fingers with those of the hand which 
 Mrs. Mandel let her have. She smiled upon the 
 Marches, while Miss Dryfoos watched them in- 
 tensely, with her eyes first on one and then on the 
 other, as if she did not mean to let any expression 
 of theirs escape her. 
 
 " My mother will be down in a minute," she said 
 to Mrs. March. 
 
 " I hope we 're not disturbing her. It is so good
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 203 
 
 of you to let us come in the evening," Mrs. March 
 replied. 
 
 " Oh, not at all," said the girl. " We receive in 
 the evening." 
 
 " When we do rece'ive," Miss Mela put in. " We 
 don't always get the chance to." She began a laugh, 
 which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel, 
 which no one could have seen to be reproving. 
 
 Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked 
 up defiantly at Mrs. March. " I suppose you have 
 hardly got settled. We were afraid we would dis- 
 turb you when we called." 
 
 " Oh no ! We were very sorry to miss your visit. 
 We are quite settled in our new quarters. Of course, 
 it's all very different from Boston." 
 
 " I hope it 's more of a sociable place there," Miss 
 Mela broke in again. " I never saw such an unsoci- 
 able place as New York. We Ve been in this house 
 three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed 
 three years any of the neighbours would call." 
 
 " I fancy proximity doesn't count for much in 
 New York," March suggested. 
 
 Mrs. Mandel said : " That's what I tell Miss Mela. 
 But she is a very social nature, and can't reconcile 
 herself to the fact." 
 
 " No* I can't," the girl pouted. " I think it was 
 twice as much fun in Moffitt. I wish I was there 
 now." 
 
 " Yes," said March, " I think there 's a great deal 
 more enjoyment in those smaller places. There 's 
 not so much going on in the way of public amuse-
 
 2(H A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ments, and so people make more of one another. 
 There are not so many concerts, theatres, operas " 
 
 " Oh, they 've got a spendid opera-house in Moffitt. 
 It 's just grand," said Miss Mela. 
 
 " Have you been to the opera here, this winter ? " 
 Mrs. March asked of the elder girl 
 
 She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and 
 detached her eyes from her with an effort. " What 
 did you say ? " she demanded, with an absent blunt- 
 ness. " Oh yes. Yes ! We went once. Father 
 took a box at the Metropolitan." 
 
 " Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I sup- 
 pose ? " said March. 
 
 " What ? " asked the girl. 
 
 " I don't think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of 
 Wagner's music," Mrs. Mandel said. "I believe 
 you are all great Wagnerites in Boston ? " 
 
 " I 'm a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel. I 
 suspect myself of preferring Verdi," March answered. 
 
 Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and 
 said, " I like Trovatore the best." 
 
 "It's an opera I never get tired of," said March, 
 and Mrs. March and Mrs. Mandel exchanged a smile 
 of compassion for his simplicity. He detected it, 
 and added, " But I dare say I shall come down with 
 the Wagner feyer in time. I've been exposed to 
 some malignant cases of it." 
 
 "That night we were there," said Miss Mela, 
 "they had to turn the gas down all through one 
 part of it, and the papers said the ladies were awful 
 mad because they couldn't show their diamonds. I
 
 L 
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 205 
 
 don't wonder, if they all had to pay as much for 
 their boxes as we did. We had to pay sixty dollars." 
 She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this 
 expense. 
 
 March said : " Well, I think I shall take my box 
 by the month, then. It must come cheaper, whole- 
 sale." 
 
 " Oh no, it don't," said the girl, glad to inform" 
 him. " The people that own their boxes, and that 
 had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars apiece 
 for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever 
 there 's a performance, whether they go or not." 
 " Then I should go every night," March said. 
 
 " Most of the ladies were low neck " 
 
 March interposed, " Well, I shouldn't go low neck" 
 The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at 
 his drolling. " Oh, I guess you love to train ! Us 
 girls wanted to go low neck, too ; but father said we 
 shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't 
 come to the front of the box once. Well, she didn't, 
 anyway. We might just as well 'a' gone low neck. 
 She stayed back the whole time, and when they had 
 that dance the ballet, you know she just shut her 
 eyes. Well, Conrad didn't like that part much, 
 either ; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened 
 it out right in the front of the box. We were about 
 the only ones there that went high neck. Conrad 
 had to wear a swallow-tail ; but father hadn't any, 
 and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You 
 couldn't see what he had on in the back o' the box, 
 anyway."
 
 206 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was 
 waving her fan more and more slowly up and down, 
 and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned 
 Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiat- 
 ing and perhaps sympathetic, with a flash that made 
 her start, and then ran her fierce eyes over March's 
 face. " Here comes mother," she said, with a sort 
 of breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, 
 and through the open door the Marches could see 
 the old lady on the stairs. 
 
 She paused half-way down, and turning, called 
 up : " Coonrod ! Coonrod ! You bring my shawl 
 down with you." 
 
 Her daughter Mela called out to her, " Now, 
 mother, Christine '11 give it to you for not sending 
 Mike." 
 
 "Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child," 
 the mother answered back. " He ain't never around 
 when he 's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like a 
 body couldn't git shet of him, nohow." 
 
 "Well, you ought to ring for him," cried Miss 
 Mela, enjoying the joke. 
 
 Her mother came in with a slow step ; her head 
 shook slightly as she looked about the room, perhaps 
 from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of palsy. 
 In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. 
 March confessed in the affection with which she 
 took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she was 
 introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she 
 put into the hope that she was well. 
 
 "I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied. "I
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 207 
 
 ain't never so well, nowadays. I tell fawther I 
 don't believe it agrees with me very well here ; but 
 he says 1 11 git used to it. He 's away now, out at 
 Moffitt," she said to March, and wavered on foot a 
 moment before she sank into a chair. She was a 
 tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her 
 grey hair had a memory of blondeness in it like 
 Lindau's, March noticed. She wore a simple silk 
 gown, of a Quakerly grey, and she held a handker- 
 chief folded square, as it had come from the laun- 
 dress. Something like the Sabbath quiet of a little 
 wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods ex- 
 pressed itself to him from her presence. 
 
 " Laws, mother ! " said Miss Mela ; " what you 
 got that old thing on for ? If I 'd 'a' known you 'd 
 V come down in that ! " 
 
 " Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her 
 mother. 
 
 Miss Mela explained to the Marches : " Mother 
 was raised among the Dunkards, and she thinks it 's 
 wicked to wear anything but a grey silk even for 
 dress up." 
 
 " You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I 
 reckon," the old woman said to Mrs. March. 
 " Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because 
 they don't never shave ; and they wash feet like 
 they do in the Testament. My uncle was one. He 
 raised me." 
 
 " I guess pretty much everybody 's a Beardy Man 
 nowadays, if he ain't a Dunkard ! " 
 
 Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally,
 
 208 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 but March was saying to his wife : " It 's a Pennsyl- 
 vania German sect, I believe something like the 
 Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy." 
 
 " Aren't they something like the Mennists 1 " 
 asked Mrs. MandeL 
 
 " They 're good people," said the old woman, 
 " and the world 'd be a heap better off if there 
 was more like 'em." 
 
 Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her 
 shoulders before he shook hands with the visitors. 
 " I am glad you found your way here," he said to 
 them. 
 
 Christine, who had been bending forward over 
 her fan, now lifted herself up with a sigh and leaned 
 back in her chair. 
 
 " I 'm sorry my father isn't here," said the young 
 man to Mrs. March. " He 's never met you yet ? " 
 
 " No ; and I should like to see him. We hear a 
 great deal about your father, you know, from Mr. 
 Fulkerson." 
 
 "Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. 
 Fulkerson says about people," Mela cried. "He's 
 the greatest person for carrying on when he gets 
 going / ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad 
 when him and mother get to talking about religion ; 
 she says she knows he don't care anything more 
 about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he 
 don't try it on much with father." 
 
 " Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor," her 
 mother interposed ; " but he 's always been a good 
 church-goin' man."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 209 
 
 " Not since we come to New York," retorted the 
 girl. 
 
 " He 's been all broke up since he come to New 
 York," said the old woman, with an aggrieved look. 
 
 Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. " Have you 
 heard any of our great New York preachers yet, 
 Mrs. March 1 " 
 
 " No, I haven't," Mrs. March admitted ; and she 
 tried to imply by her candid tone that she intended 
 to begin hearing them the very next Sunday. 
 
 "There are a great many things here," said 
 Conrad, "to take your thoughts off the preaching 
 that you hear in most of the churches. I think the 
 city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time." 
 
 " I don't know that I understand you," said March. 
 
 Mela answered for him. " Oh, Conrad has got a, 
 lot of notions that nobody can understand. You 
 ought to see the church he goes to when he does go. 
 I 'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself ; I 
 don't see a bit o' difference. He's the greatest 
 crony with one of their preachers ; he dresses just 
 like a priest, and he says he is a priest." She 
 laughed for enjoyment of the fact, and her brother 
 cast down his eyes. 
 
 Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the 
 personal tone which the talk was always assuming. 
 "Have you been to the fall exhibition 1" she asked 
 Christine ; and the girl drew herself up out of the 
 abstraction she seemed sunk in. 
 
 " The exhibition 1 " She looked at Mrs. Mandel. 
 
 "The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs.
 
 210 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Mandel explained. " Where I wanted you to go the 
 day you had your dress tried on." 
 
 " Xo ; we haven't been yet. Is it good ? " She 
 had turned to Mrs. March again. 
 
 " I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good 
 as the spring ones. But there are some good 
 pictures." 
 
 " I don't believe I care much about pictures," said 
 Christine. "I don't understand them." 
 
 " Ah, that 's no excuse for not caring about them," 
 said March lightly. " The painters themselves 
 don't, half the time." 
 
 The girl looked at him with that glance at once 
 defiant and appealing, insolent and anxious, which 
 he had noticed before, especially when she stole it 
 toward himself and his wife during her sister's 
 babble. In the light of Fulkerson's history of the 
 family, its origin and its ambition, he interpreted 
 it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an 
 ignorant will to override his opinion of anything 
 incongruous in themselves and their surroundings. 
 He said to himself that she was deathly proud too 
 proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of 
 anything that would put others under her feet. Her 
 eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife's social 
 quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, 
 the inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them 
 with much or little respect. He lost himself in 
 fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily sor- 
 did, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs 
 and disappointments before her. Her sister would
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 211 
 
 accept both with a lightness that would keep no 
 trace of either ; but in her they would sink lastingly 
 deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. 
 Dryfoos saying to him in her hoarse voice 
 
 " I think it 's a shame, some of the pictur's a body 
 sees in the winders. They say there 's a law aginst 
 them things ; and if there is, I don't understand 
 why the police don't take up them that paints 'em. 
 I hear tell, since I been here, that there 's women 
 that goes to have pictur's took from them that way by 
 men painters." The point seemed aimed at March, 
 as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, 
 and it fell with a silencing effect for the moment. 
 Nobody seemed willing to take it up, and Mrs. 
 Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity : " I 
 say they ought to be all tarred and feathered and 
 rode on a rail. They 'd be drummed out of town in 
 Moffitt." 
 
 Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh : " I should 
 think they would ! And they wouldn't anybody go 
 low neck to the opera-house there, either not low 
 neck the way they do here, anyway." 
 
 " And that pack of worthless hussies," her mother 
 resumed, " that come out on the stage, and begun to 
 kick " 
 
 " Laws, mother ! " the girl shouted, " I thought 
 you said you had your eyes shut ! " 
 
 All but these two simpler creatures were abashed 
 at the indecorum of suggesting in words the com- 
 mon-places of the theatre and of art. 
 
 " Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my 
 .f
 
 212 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 eyes. I don't know what they 're doin' in all their 
 churches, to let such things go on," said the old 
 woman. " It 's a sin and a shame, / think. Don't 
 you, Coonrod ? " 
 
 A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he 
 was about to deliver. 
 
 " If it 's going to be company, Coonrod," said his 
 mother, making an effort to rise, "I reckon I better 
 go upstairs." 
 
 "It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess," said Conrad. "He 
 thought he might come ; " and at the mention of 
 this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly back 
 in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful ten- 
 sion seemed to pass through the whole company. 
 Conrad went to the door himself (the serving-man 
 tentatively appeared some minutes later) and let in 
 Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person. 
 
 " Ah, how d' ye do, Conrad ? Brought our friend, 
 Mr. Beaton, with me," those within heard him say ; 
 and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats, they 
 saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square 
 and his arms akimbo.
 
 IX. 
 
 " AH ! hello ! hello ! " Fulkerson said, in recognition 
 of the Marches. " Regular gathering of the clans. 
 How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos ? How do you do, Mrs. 
 Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all 
 the folks ? How you wuz 1 " He shook hands 
 gaily all round, and took a chair next the old lady, 
 whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to 
 introduce Beaton. But he would not let the shadow 
 of Beaton's solemnity fall upon the company. He 
 began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match 
 rheumatisms with her, and he included all the 
 ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries. 
 "I've brought Mr. Beaton along to-night, and I 
 want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, 
 Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn't got any rheumatism to 
 speak of ; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he 's 
 a kind of an orphan, and we've just adopted him 
 down at the office. When you going to bring the 
 young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a cham- 
 pagne lunch ? I will have some hydro-Mela, and 
 Christine it, heigh 1 How 's that for a little starter ? 
 We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March, 
 and gave the young folks a few pointers about their
 
 214 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 studies. My goodness ! it does me good to see a 
 boy like that of yours ; business, from the word go ; 
 and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. 
 She 's a beauty, and I guess she 's good too. Well, 
 well, what a world it is ! Miss Christine, won't you 
 show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours 1 He 
 knows about such things, and I brought him here 
 to see it as much as anything. It 's an intaglio I 
 brought from the other side," he explained to Mrs. 
 March, " and I guess you '11 like to look at it. Tried 
 to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, 
 I sold it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine's 
 hand somehow ! Hold on ! Let him see it where 
 it belongs, first ! " 
 
 He arrested the girl in the motion she made to 
 take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of 
 showing her hand to the company with the ring on 
 it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words 
 about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically 
 as he stood with her under a gas jet, twisting his 
 elastic figure and bending his head over the ring. 
 
 " Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an 
 open travesty of her mother's habitual address, 
 " and how are you getting along ? Mrs. Mandel 
 hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly ? Well, 
 that 's right. You know you 'd be roaming all over 
 the pasture if she didn't." 
 
 The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, 
 and everybody took him on his own ground of 
 privileged character. He brought them all together 
 in their friendliness for himself, and before the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 215 
 
 evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to 
 have them served with coffee, and had made both 
 the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in 
 society, and that two young men had been devoted 
 to them. 
 
 " Oh, I think he 's just as lovely as he can live ! " 
 said Mela, as she stood a moment with her sister 
 on the scene of her triumph, where the others had 
 left them after the departure of their guests. 
 
 " Who 1 " asked Christine deeply. As she 
 glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a 
 softened fire. She had allowed Beaton to change 
 it himself from the finger where she had worn it to 
 the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. 
 She did not know whether it was right to let him, 
 but she was glad she had done it. 
 
 " Who ? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie ! Not 
 that old stuck-up Mr. Beaton of yours ! " 
 
 " He is proud," assented Christine, with a throb 
 of exultation. 
 
 Beaton and Fulkerson went to the elevated 
 station with the Marches ; but the painter said he was 
 going to Avalk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone. 
 
 " One way is enough for me," he explained. 
 " When I walk up, I don't walk down. By -by, my 
 son ! " He began talking about Beaton to the 
 Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. 
 " That fellow puzzles me. I don't know anybody 
 that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same 
 time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you 
 that way 1 " he asked of March.
 
 216 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes." 
 
 " And how is it with you, Mrs. March 1 " 
 
 " Oh, I want to flatter him up." 
 
 "No; really? Why? Hold on! I've got the 
 change." 
 
 Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket- 
 office window, and made them his guests, with the 
 inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down- 
 town. " Three ! " he said to the ticket-seller ; and 
 when he had walked them before him out on the 
 platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he 
 persisted in his inquiry, " Why ? " 
 
 "Why, because you always want to flatter con- 
 ceited people, don't you ? " Mrs. March answered, 
 with a laugh. 
 
 "Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think 
 Beaton is conceited 1 " 
 
 " Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 "I guess you're partly right," said Fulkerson, 
 with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that 
 they all laughed. 
 
 " An ideal ' busted ' ? " March suggested. 
 
 " No, not that, exactly," said Fulkerson. " But I had 
 a notion may be Beaton wasn't conceited all the time." 
 
 " Oh ! " Mrs. March exulted, " nobody could be 
 so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of 
 the time. He must have moments of the direst 
 modesty, when he 'd be quite flattery-proof." 
 
 " Yes, that 's what I mean. I guess that 's what 
 makes me want to kick him. He 's left compliments 
 on my hands that no decent man would."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 217 
 
 " Oh ! that 's tragical," said March. 
 
 " Mr. Fulkerson," Mrs. March began, with change 
 of subject in her voice, " who is Mrs. Mandel ? " 
 
 " Who 1 What do you think of her ? " he re- 
 joined. " I '11 tell you about her when we get in the 
 cars. Look at that thing ! Ain't it beautiful 1 " 
 
 They leaned over the track, and looked up at 
 the next station, where the train, just starting, 
 throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white 
 moonlight. 
 
 "The most beautiful thing in New York the 
 one always and certainly beautiful thing here," 
 said March; and his wife sighed, "Yes, yes." She 
 clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till 
 the train drew near, and then pulled him back in 
 a panic. 
 
 " Well, there ain't really much to tell about her," 
 Fulkerson resumed, when they were seated in the 
 car. " She 's an invention of mine." 
 
 " Of yours ? " cried Mrs. March. 
 
 " Of course ! " exclaimed her husband. 
 
 " Yes at least in her present capacity. She sent 
 me a story for the syndicate, back in July some 
 time, along about the time I first met old Dryfoos 
 here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I 
 thought I could explain better how I wanted it cut 
 in a call than I could in a letter. She gave a 
 Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found 
 her," said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, "a 
 perfect lady. She was living with an aunt over 
 there ; and she had seen better days, when she was 
 VOL. I. 10
 
 218 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don't mean to 
 say her husband was a bad fellow ; I guess he was 
 pretty good ; he was her music-teacher ; she met 
 him in Germany, and they got married there, and 
 got through her property before they came over 
 here. Well, she didn't strike me like a person that 
 could make much headway in literature. Her story 
 was well enough, but it hadn't much sand in it; 
 kind of well, academic, you know. I told her so, 
 and she understood, and cried a little ; but she did 
 the best she could with the thing, and I took it and 
 syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my mind, and 
 the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they 
 were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they 
 could find a house " Fulkerson broke off alto- 
 gether, and said, "I don't know as I know just how 
 the Dryfooses stnick you, Mrs. March 1 " 
 
 " Can't you imagine ? " she answered. Avith a 
 kindly smile. 
 
 "Yes; but I don't believe I could guess how they 
 would have struck you last summer when I first saw 
 them. My ! oh my ! there was the native earth for 
 you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you 
 ought to have seen her before she was broken to 
 harness. And Christine 1 Ever see that black 
 leopard they got up there in the Central Park ? 
 That was Christine. Well, I saw what they wanted. 
 They all saw it nobody is a fool in all directions, 
 and the Dryfooses are in their right senses a good 
 deal of the time. Well, to cut a long story short, I 
 got Mrs. Mandel to take 'em in hand the old lady
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 219 
 
 as well as the girls. She was a born lady, and 
 always lived like one till she saw Mandel ; and that 
 something academic that killed her for a writer was 
 just the very thing for them. She knows the world 
 well enough to know just how much polish they can 
 take on, and she don't try to put on a bit more. See ? " 
 
 " Yes, I can see," said Mrs. March. 
 
 " Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a 
 hospital-trained nurse ; and there ain't anything 
 readier on this planet. She runs the whole concern, 
 socially and economically, takes all the care of 
 house-keeping off the old lady's hands, and goes 
 round with the girls. By-the-by, I 'm going to take 
 my meals at your widow's, March, and Conrad's 
 going to have his lunch there. I 'in sick of brows- 
 ing about." 
 
 " Mr. March's widow 1 " said his wife, looking at 
 him with provisional severity. 
 
 " I have no widow, Isabel," he said, " and never 
 expect to have, till I leave you in the enjoyment of 
 my life insurance. I suppose Fulkerson means the 
 lady with the daughter, who wanted to take us 
 to board." 
 
 " Oh yes. How are they getting on, I do 
 wonder 1 " Mrs. March asked of Fulkerson. 
 
 " Well, they 've got one family to board ; but it 's 
 a small one. I guess they '11 pull through. They 
 didn't want to take any day boarders at first, the 
 widow said ; I guess they have had to come to it." 
 
 " Poor things ! " sighed Mrs. March. " I hope 
 they '11 go back to the country."
 
 220 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well, I don't know. When you 've once tasted 
 
 New York You wouldn't go back to Boston, 
 
 would you ? " 
 
 "Instantly." 
 
 Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.
 
 BEATON lit his pipe when he found himself in his 
 room, and sat down before the dull fire in his grate 
 to think. It struck him there was a dull fire in his 
 heart a great deal like it, and he worked out a 
 fanciful analogy with the coals, still alive, and the 
 ashes creeping over them, and the dead clay and 
 cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life and 
 of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for 
 having got him into that art department of his, for 
 having bought him up ; and he was bitter at fate 
 because he had been obliged to use the money to 
 pay some pressing debts, and had not been able to 
 return the check his father had sent him. He pitied 
 his poor old father ; he ached with compassion for 
 him ; and he set his teeth and snarled with con- 
 tempt through them for his own baseness. This 
 was the kind of world it was ; but he washed his 
 hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and 
 he reflected with pride that he had at least not in- 
 vented human nature ; he had not sunk so low as 
 that yet. The notion amused him ; he thought he 
 might get a Satanic epigram out of it some way. 
 But in the meantime that girl, that wild animal,
 
 222 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 she kept visibly, tangibly before him ; if he put out 
 his hand he might touch hers, he might pass his arm 
 round her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew there, 
 what an effect she would be with that look of hers, 
 and that beauty, all out of drawing ! They would 
 recognise the flame quality in her. He imagined a 
 joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, 
 whatever, from one of her native gas wells. He 
 began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at 
 his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a 
 level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an 
 empty sky, and a shape out of the flame that took 
 on a likeness, and floated detached from it. The 
 sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched 
 across it. Beaton laughed out. Pretty good to let 
 Fulkerson have that for the cover of his first number! 
 In black and red it would be effective ; it would 
 catch the eye from the news stands. He made a 
 motion to throw it on the fire, but held it back, and 
 slid it into the table drawer, and smoked on. He 
 saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open 
 drawer, which he had brought away from Fulker- 
 son's in the morning and slipped in there, and he 
 took it out and looked at it. He made some criticisms 
 in line with his pencil on it, correcting the drawing 
 here and there, and then he respected it a little 
 more, though he still smiled at the feminine quality 
 ' a young lady quality. 
 
 In spite of his experience the night he called upon 
 the Leightons, Beaton could not believe that Alma 
 no longer cared for him. She played at having
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 223 
 
 forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few 
 months before she had been very mindful of him. 
 He knew he had neglected them since they came to 
 New York, where he had led them to expect interest, 
 if not attention ; but he was used to neglecting 
 people, and he was somewhat less used to being 
 punished for it punished and forgiven. He felt 
 that Alma had punished him so thoroughly that she 
 ought to have been satisfied with her work and to 
 have forgiven him in her heart afterward. He bore 
 no resentment after the first tingling moments were 
 past ; he rather admired her for it ; and he would 
 have been ready to go back half an hour later, and 
 accept pardon, and be on the footing of last summer 
 again. ^Even now he debated with himself whether 
 it was too late to call ; but decidedly a quarter to ten 
 seemed late. The next day he determined never to 
 call upon the Leightons again ; but he had no reason 
 for this ; it merely came into a transitory scheme of 
 conduct, of retirement from the society of women 
 altogether ; and after dinner he went round to see 
 them. 
 
 He asked for the ladies, and they all three received 
 him, Alma not without a surprise that intimated itself 
 to him, and her mother with no appreciable relent- 
 ing; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which 
 she found easier to be voluble over than a book, 
 expressed in her welcome a neutrality both cordial 
 to Beaton and loyal to Alma. 
 
 " Is it snowing out-do's 1 " she asked briskly, after 
 the greetings were transacted. " Mah goodness ! "
 
 224 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 she said, in answer to his apparent surprise at the 
 question. " Ah mahght as well have stayed in the 
 Soath, for all the winter Ah have seen in New York 
 yet." ' 
 
 "We don't often have snow much before New- 
 Year's," said Beaton. 
 
 " Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern 
 winter," Mrs. Leighton explained. 
 
 "The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat 
 of the window and saw all the roofs covered with 
 snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght. 
 I was never so disappointed in mah lahfe," said Miss 
 Woodburn. 
 
 " If you '11 come to St. Barnaby next summer, you 
 shall have all the winter you want," said Alma. 
 
 " I can't let you slander St. Barnaby in that way," 
 said Beaton, with the air of wishing to be understood 
 as meaning more than he said. 
 
 " Yes ? " returned Alma coolly. " I didn't know 
 you were so fond of the climate." 
 
 " I never think of it as a climate. It 's a landscape. 
 It doesn't matter whether it's hot or cold." 
 
 "With the thermometer twenty below, you'd 
 find that it mattered," Alma persisted. 
 
 "You don't mean it goes doan to that in the 
 summah ? " Miss Woodburn interposed. 
 
 " Well, not before the Fourth of the July after," 
 Alma admitted. 
 
 "Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby 
 too, Mrs. Leighton ? " Beaton asked, with affected 
 desolation.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES 225 
 
 " I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer," 
 Mrs. Leigh ton conceded. 
 
 " And I should be glad to go now," said Beaton, 
 looking at Alma. He had the dummy of Every Other 
 Week in his hand, and he saw Alma's eyes wandering 
 toward it whenever he glanced at her. " I should 
 be glad to go anywhere to get out of a job I Ve 
 undertaken," he continued, to Mrs. Leighton. 
 "They're going to start some sort of a new 
 illustrated magazine, and they've got me in for 
 their art department. I 'm not fit for it ; I 'd like to 
 run away. Don't you want to advise me a little, 
 Mrs. Leighton ] You know how much I value your 
 taste, and I 'd like to have you look at the design 
 for the cover of the .first number : they 're going to 
 have a different one for every number. I don't 
 know whether you '11 agree with me, but I think 
 this is rather nice." 
 
 He faced the dummy round, and then laid it 
 on the table before Mrs. Leighton, pushing some 
 of her work aside to make room for it, and 
 standing over her while she bent forward to look 
 at it. 
 
 Alma kept her place, away from the table. 
 
 " Mah goodness ! Ho' exciting ! " said Miss 
 Woodburn. " May anybody look ? " 
 
 " Everybody," said Beaton. 
 
 " Well, isn't it perfectly chawming ! " Miss Wood- 
 burn exclaimed. " Come and look at this, Miss 
 Leighton," she called to Alma, who reluctantly 
 approached. 
 10*
 
 226 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " What lines are these 1 " Mrs. Leighton asked, 
 pointing to Beaton's pencil scratches. 
 
 "They're suggestions of modification," he re- 
 plied. 
 
 " I don't think they improve it much. What do 
 you think, Alma 1 " 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," said the girl, constraining 
 her voice to an effect of indifference, and glancing 
 carelessly down at the sketch. " The design might 
 be improved; but I don't think those suggestions 
 would do it." 
 
 "They 're mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon 
 her with a beautiful sad dreaminess that he knew 
 he could put into them ; he spoke with a dreamy 
 remoteness of tone : his wind-harp stop, Wetmore 
 called it. 
 
 " I supposed so," said Alma calmly. 
 
 " Oh, mah goodness ! " cried Miss Woodburn. 
 " Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah ? 
 Well, Ah 'm glad Ah 'm not an awtust unless I 
 could do all the talking." 
 
 "Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even 
 act one," and she laughed in Beaton's upturned face. 
 
 He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. "You're 
 quite right. The suggestions are stupid." 
 
 Alma turned to Miss Woodburn : " You hear ? 
 Even when we speak of our own work." 
 
 " Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it ! " 
 
 "And the design itself 1 ? " Beaton persisted. 
 
 " Oh, I 'm not an art editor," Alma answered, 
 with a laugh of exultant evasion.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 227 
 
 A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a 
 swarthy face, and iron-grey moustache and imperial 
 and goatee, entered the room. Beaton knew the 
 type ; he had been through Virginia sketching for 
 one of the illustrated papers, and he had seen such 
 men in Bichmond. Miss Woodburn hardly needed 
 to say, " May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, 
 Co'nel Woodburn, Mr. Beaton 1 " 
 
 The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn 
 said, in that soft, gentle, slow Southern voice with- 
 out our Northern contractions : " I am very glad to 
 meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance. 
 Do not move, madam," he said to Mrs. Leighton, 
 who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to 
 the chair beyond her; "I can find my way." He 
 bowed a bulk that did not lend itself readily to the 
 devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she had let 
 drop out of her lap in half rising. " Yo' worsteds, 
 madam." 
 
 " Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn ! " Alma shouted. 
 " You 're quite incorrigible. A spade is a spade ! " . 
 
 "But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young 
 lady," said the Colonel, with unabated gallantry ; 
 "and when yo' mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds. 
 But I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn : 
 our ladies my own mothah and sistahs had to 
 knit the socks we wore all we could get in the 
 woe." 
 
 "Yes, and aftah the woe," his daughter put in. 
 "The knitting has not stopped yet in some places. 
 Have you been much in the Soath, Mr. Beaton ? " 
 Q
 
 228 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Beaton explained just how much. 
 
 "Well, sir," said the Colonel, "then you have 
 seen a country making gigantic struggles to retrieve 
 its losses, sir. The south is advancing with enor- 
 mous strides, sir." 
 
 " Too fast for some of us to keep up," said Miss 
 Woodburn, in an audible aside. " The pace in 
 Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to 
 drop oat into a slow place like New York." 
 
 " The progress in the South is material now/' 
 said the Colonel ; " and those of us whose interests 
 are in another direction find ourselves isolated 
 isolated, sir. The intellectual centres are still in 
 the No'th, sir ; the great cities draw the mental 
 activity of the country to them, sir. Necessarily 
 New York is the metropolis." 
 
 " Oh, everything comes here," said Beaton, im- 
 patient of the elder's ponderosity. Another sort of 
 man would have sympathised with the Southerner's 
 willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to 
 speak of his plans and ideals. But the sort of man 
 that Beaton was could not do this ; he put up the 
 dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the 
 floor beside him, and tied it round with string while 
 Colonel Woodburn was talking. He got to his 
 feet with the words he spoke, and offered Mrs. 
 Leighton his hand. 
 
 " Must you go ? " she asked, in surprise. 
 
 " I am on my way to a reception," he said. She 
 had noticed that he was in evening dress ; and now 
 she felt the vague hurt that people invited nowhere
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 229 
 
 feel in the presence of those who are going some- 
 where. She did not feel it for herself, but for her 
 daughter ; and she knew Alma would not have let 
 her feel it if she could have prevented it. But Alma 
 had left the room for a moment, and she tacitly 
 indulged this sense of injury in her behalf. 
 
 " Please say good night to Miss Leigh ton for me," 
 Beaton continued. He bowed to Miss Woodburn, 
 " Good night, Miss Woodburn," and to her father 
 bluntly, "Goodnight." 
 
 " Good night, sir," said the Colonel, with a sort of 
 severe suavity. 
 
 " Oh, isn't he chawming ! " Miss Woodburn whis- 
 pered to Mrs. Leighton when Beaton left the room. 
 
 Alma spoke to him in the hall without. " You 
 knew that was my design Mr. Beaton. Why did 
 you bring it 1 " 
 
 " Why 1 " He looked at her in gloomy hesita- 
 tion. Then he said : "You know why. I wished 
 to talk it over with you, to serve you, please you, 
 get back your good opinion. But I 've done neither 
 the one nor the other ; I Ve made a mess of the 
 whole thing." 
 
 Alma interrupted him. " Has it been accepted ? " 
 
 "It will be accepted, if you will let it." 
 
 " Let it ? " she laughed. " I shall be delighted." 
 She saw him swayed a little toward her. " It 's a 
 matter of business, isn't it ? " 
 
 " Purely. Good night." 
 
 When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Wood- 
 burn was saying to Mrs. Leighton : " I do not contend
 
 230 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that it is impossible, madam, but it is very difficult 
 in a thoroughly commercialised society, like yours, 
 to have the feelings of a gentleman. How can a 
 business man, whose prosperity, whose earthly salva- 
 tion, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one 
 else, be delicate and chivalrous, or even honest ? If 
 we could have had time to perfect our system at the 
 South, to eliminate what was evil and develop what 
 was good in it, we should have had a perfect system. 
 But the virus of commercialism was in us too; it 
 forbade us to make the best of a divine institution, 
 and tempted us to make the worst. Now the curse 
 is on the whole country ; the dollar is the measure 
 of every value, the stamp of every success. What 
 does not sell is a failure ; and what sells succeeds." 
 
 "The hobby is oat, man deah," said Miss Wood- 
 burn, in an audible aside to Alma. 
 
 " Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn ? " 
 Alma asked. 
 
 " Surely not, my dear young lady." 
 
 "But he's been saying that awtusts are just as 
 greedy aboat money as anybody," said his daughter. 
 
 " The law of commercialism is on everything in a 
 commercial society," the Colonel explained, softening 
 the tone in which his convictions were presented. 
 "The final reward of art is money, and not the 
 pleasure of creating." 
 
 " Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat 
 in that, if othah people would let them pay their 
 bills in the pleasure of creating," his daughter teased. 
 
 "They are helpless, like all the rest," said her
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 231 
 
 father, with the same deference to her as to other 
 women. "I do not blame them." 
 
 " Oh, mah goodness ! Didn't you say, sir, that 
 Mr. Beaton had bad manners ? " 
 
 Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to 
 feel in reference to her. " Bad manners ? He has 
 no manners ! That is, when he 's himself. He has 
 pretty good ones when he 's somebody else." 
 
 Miss Woodburn began, " Oh, mah " and then 
 
 stopped herself. Alma's mother looked at her with 
 distressful question, but the girl seemed perfectly 
 cool and contented ; and she gave her mind pro- 
 visionally to a point suggested by Colonel Wood- 
 burn's talk. 
 
 " Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people 
 in slavery, to whip them and sell them. It never 
 did 'seem right tome," she added, in apology for 
 her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her 
 adversary. 
 
 "I quite agree with you, madam/' said the 
 Colonel. " Those were the abuses of the institution. 
 But if we had not been vitiated on the one hand and 
 threatened on the other by the spirit of com- 
 mercialism from the North and from Europe too 
 those abuses could have been eliminated, and the 
 institution developed in the direction of the mild 
 patriarchalism of the divine intention." The Colonel 
 hitched his chair, which figured a hobby careering 
 upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton, 
 and the girls approached their heads, and began to 
 whisper; they fell deferentially silent when the
 
 232 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Colonel paused in his argument, and went on again 
 when he went on. 
 
 At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, "And 
 have you heard from the publishers about your book 
 yet ? " 
 
 Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father 
 could answer : " The coase of commercialism is on 
 that too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah 
 it will pay." 
 
 " And they are right quite right," said the 
 Colonel. " There is no longer any other criterion ; 
 and even a work that attacks the system must be 
 submitted to the tests of the system." 
 
 "The system won't accept destruction on any 
 othah tomes," said Miss Woodburn demurely.
 
 XL 
 
 AT the reception, where two men in livery stood 
 aside to let him pass up the outside steps of the 
 house, and two more helped him off with his over- 
 coat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into 
 the drawing-room, the Syracuse stone-cutter's son 
 met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at once to 
 tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He 
 was in very good spirits, for so far as he could have 
 been elated or depressed by his parting with Alma 
 Leighton he had been elated ; she had not treated 
 his impudence with the contempt that he felt it 
 deserved ; she must still be fond of him ; and the 
 warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but 
 well-recognised law of the masculine being, disposed 
 him to be rather fond of Miss Vance. She was a 
 slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress flowed about 
 her with an accentuation of her long forms, and 
 redeemed them from censure by the very frankness 
 with which it confessed them; nobody could have 
 said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her pretty 
 little head, which she had an effect of choosing to 
 have little in the same spirit of judicious defiance, 
 had a good deal of reading in it ; she was proud to
 
 234 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 know literary and artistic fashions as well as society 
 fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior 
 distinction so obvious as Beaton's, and she listened 
 with sympathetic interest to his account of those 
 people. He gave their natural history reality by 
 drawing upon his own ; he reconstructed their 
 plebeian past from the experiences of his childhood 
 and his youth of the pre-Parisian period ; and he 
 had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance 
 of the world. 
 
 " What different kinds of people you meet ! " said 
 the girl at last, with an envious sigh. Her reading 
 had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if not 
 her knowledge ; the novels nowadays dealt so much 
 with very common people, and made them seem so 
 very much more worth while than the people one met. 
 
 She said something like this to Beaton. He 
 answered: "You can meet the people I'm talking 
 of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. 
 It 's what they came to New York for. I fancy it 's 
 the great ambition of their lives to be met." 
 
 "Oh yes," said Miss Vance fashionably, and 
 looked down ; then she looked up and said intel- 
 lectually : " Don't you think it 's a great pity ? 
 How much better for them to have stayed where 
 they were and what they were ! " 
 
 "Then you could never have had any chance of 
 meeting them," said Beaton. " I don't suppose you 
 intend to go out to the gas country 1 " 
 
 "No," said Miss Vance, amused. "Not that I 
 shouldn't like to go."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 235 
 
 " What a daring spirit ! You ought to be on the 
 staff of Every Other Week" said Beaton. 
 
 " The staff Every Other Week 1 What is it ? " 
 
 " The missing link ; the long-felt want of a tie 
 between the Arts and the Dollars." Beaton gave 
 her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of 
 the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new 
 enterprise. 
 
 Miss Vance understood too little about business 
 of any kind to know how it differed from other 
 enterprises of its sort. She thought it was de- 
 lightful ; she thought Beaton must be glad to be 
 part of it, though he had represented himself so 
 bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting upon 
 having him. "And is it a secret 1 ? Is it a thing 
 not to be spoken of 1 " 
 
 " Tut? altro ! Fulkerson will be enraptured to 
 have it spoken of in society. He would pay any 
 reasonable bill for the advertisement." 
 
 " What a delightful creature ! Tell him it shall 
 all be spent in charity." 
 
 "He would like that He would get two para- 
 graphs out of the fact, and your name would go into 
 the ' Literary Notes' of all the Newspapers." 
 
 " Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used ! " cried 
 the girl, half horrified into fancying the situa- 
 tion real. 
 
 "Then you'd better not say anything about 
 Every Other Week. Fulkerson is preternaturally 
 unscrupulous." 
 
 March began to think so too, at times. He was
 
 236 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 perpetually suggesting changes in the make-up of 
 the first number, with a view to its greater vividness 
 of effect. One day he came in and said : " This 
 thing isn't going to have any sort of get up and 
 howl about it, unless you have a paper in the first 
 number going for Bevans's novels. Better get 
 Maxwell to do it." 
 
 " Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels ? " 
 
 "So I do; but where the good of Every Other 
 Week is concerned I am a Roman father. The 
 popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is 
 the man to do it. There hasn't been a new maga- 
 zine started for the last three years that hasn't had 
 an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting 
 Bevans all to pieces. If people don't see it, they '11 
 think Every Other Week is some old thing." 
 
 March did not know whether Fulkerson was 
 joking or not. He suggested, " Perhaps they '11 
 think it 's an old thing if they do see it." 
 
 " Well, get somebody else, then ; or else get 
 Maxwell to write under an assumed name. Or 
 I forgot ! He '11 be anonymous under our system 
 anyway. Now there ain't a more popular racket 
 for us to work in that first number than a good, 
 swingeing attack on Bevans. People read his books 
 and quarrel over 'em, and the critics are all against 
 him, and a regular flaying, with salt and vinegar 
 rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who 
 like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. 
 / like Bevans's things, but, dad burn it ! when it 
 comes to that first number, I 'd offer up anybody."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 237 
 
 " What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulker- 
 son ! " said March, with a laugh. 
 
 Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous 
 about the attack on the novelist. " Say !" he called 
 out gaily, " what should you think of a paper 
 defending the late lamented system of slavery 1 " 
 
 " What do you mean, Fulkerson 1 " asked March, 
 with a puzzled smile. 
 
 Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and 
 pushed himself back, but kept his balance to the eye 
 by canting his hat sharply forward. "There's an 
 old cock over there at the widow's that 's written a 
 book to prove that slavery was and is the only solu- 
 tion of the labour problem. He's a Southerner." 
 
 " I should imagine," March assented. 
 
 " He 's got it on the brain that if the South could 
 have been let alone by the commercial spirit and the 
 pseudo-philanthropy of the North, it would have 
 worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition 
 for the labourer, in which he would have been 
 insured against want, and protected in all his 
 personal rights by the state. He read the introduc- 
 tion to me last night. I didn't catch on to all the 
 points his daughter 's an awfully pretty girl, and I 
 was carrying that fact in my mind all the time too, 
 you know but that 's about the gist of it." 
 
 " Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity ? " said 
 March. 
 
 " Exactly ! What a mighty catchy title, heigh ? 
 Look well on the title-page." 
 
 " Well written ? "
 
 238 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " I reckon so ; I don't know. The Colonel read 
 it mighty eloquently." 
 
 " It mightn't be such bad business," said March, 
 in a muse. " Could you get me a sight of it without 
 committing yourself 1 " 
 
 " If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another 
 publisher this morning. He just got it back 
 with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it travel- 
 ling." 
 
 " Well, try it. I 've a notion it might be a curious 
 thing." 
 
 " Look here, March," said Fulkerson, with the 
 effect of taking a fresh hold ; "I wish you could let 
 me have one of those New York things of yours for 
 the first number. After all, that 's going to be the 
 great card." 
 
 " I couldn't, Fulkerson ; I couldn't, really. I 
 want to philosophise the material, and I 'm too new 
 to it all yet. I don't want to do merely superficial 
 sketches." 
 
 " Of course ! Of course ! I understand that. 
 Well, I don't want to hurry you. Seen that old 
 fellow of yours yet ? I think we ought to have that 
 translation in the first number ; don't you ? We 
 want to give 'em a notion of what we 're going to do 
 in that line." 
 
 "Yes," said March; "and I was going out to look 
 up Lindau this morning. I Ve inquired at Maroni's, 
 and he hasn't been there for several days. I 've 
 some idea perhaps he 's sick. But they gave me his 
 address, and I 'm going to see."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 239 
 
 " Well, that 's right. We want the first number 
 to be the key-note in every way." 
 
 March shook his head. " You can't make it so. 
 The first number is bound to be a failure always, as 
 far as the representative character goes. It 's invari- 
 ably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the 
 things you 've seen started. They 're experimental, 
 almost amateurish, and necessarily so, not only be- 
 cause the men that are making them up are com- 
 paratively inexperienced like ourselves, but because 
 the material sent them to deal with is more or less 
 consciously tentative. People send their adventur- 
 ous things to a new periodical because the whole 
 thing is an adventure. I 've noticed that quality in 
 all the volunteer contributions ; it 's in the articles 
 that have been done to order even. No; I've 
 about made up my mind that if we can get one 
 good striking paper into the first number that will 
 take people's minds off the others, we shall be doing 
 all we can possibly hope for. I should like," Marcli 
 added, less seriously, " to make up three numbers 
 ahead, and publish the third one first." 
 
 Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on 
 the desk. " It 's a first-rate idea. Why not do it 1 " 
 
 March laughed. " Fulkerson, I don't believe 
 there 's any quackish thing you wouldn't do in this 
 cause. From time to time I 'm thoroughly ashamed 
 of being connected with such a charlatan." 
 
 Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. " Ah, 
 dad burn it ! To give that thing the right kind of 
 start I 'd walk up and down Broadway between two
 
 240 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 boards, with the title-page of Every Other JFeek 
 facsimiled on one and my name and address on 
 
 the " He jumped to his feet and shouted, 
 
 "March, I'll doit!" 
 
 " What ? " 
 
 11 1 '11 hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of 
 themselves, and I '11 have a lot of big facsimiles of 
 the title-page, and I '11 paint the town red ! " 
 
 March looked aghast at him. " Oh, come, now r 
 Fulkerson ! " 
 
 ' : I mean it. I was in London when a new man 
 had taken hold of the old Cornhill, and they were 
 trying to boom it, and they had a procession of 
 these mud-turtles that reached from Charing Cross 
 to Temple Bar. ' Cornhill Magazine. Sixpence. 
 Not a dull page in it.' I said to myself then that 
 it was the livest thing I ever saw. I respected the 
 man that did that thing from the bottom of my 
 heart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But it shows 
 what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best." 
 
 " You infamous mountebank ! " said March, with 
 great amusement at Fulkerson's access; "you call 
 that congeries of advertising instincts of yours the 
 human mind at its best ? Come, don't be so diffi- 
 dent, Fulkerson. Well, I 'm off to find Lindau, and 
 when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfoos will have you 
 under control. I don't suppose you '11 be quite sane 
 again till after the first number is out. Perhaps- 
 public opinion will sober you then." 
 
 " Confound it, March ! How do you think they 
 will take it ? I swear I 'm getting so nervous I don't
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 241 
 
 know half the time which end of me is up. I believe 
 if we don't get that thing out by the first of February 
 it '11 be the death of me." 
 
 " Couldn't wait till Washington's Birthday 1 I 
 was thinking it would give the day a kind of distinc- 
 tion, and strike the public imagination, if " 
 
 "No, I'll be dogged if I could!" Fulkerson 
 lapsed more and more into the parlance of his early 
 life in this season of strong excitement. " I believe 
 if Beaton lags any on the art-leg I '11 kill him." 
 
 "Well, / shouldn't mind your killing Beaton," 
 said March tranquilly, as he went out. 
 
 He went over .to Third Avenue and took the 
 Elevated down to Chatham Square. He found the 
 variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining 
 as ever. He rather preferred the east side to the west 
 side lines, because they offered more nationalities, 
 conditions, and characters to his inspection. They 
 draw not only from the uptown American region, 
 but from all the vast hive of populations swarming 
 between them and the East Kiver. He had found 
 that, according to the hour, American husbands 
 going to and from business, and American wives 
 going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth 
 Avenue road, and that the most picturesque admix- 
 ture to these familiar aspects of human nature were 
 the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American 
 Hebrews, who otherwise contributed to the effect of 
 well-clad comfort and citizen-self-satisfaction of the 
 crowd. Now and then he had found himself in a car 
 mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions 
 VOL. I. 11
 
 242 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 far up the line, where he had read how they are 
 worked and fed and housed like beasts ; and listening 
 to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had 
 occasion for pensive question within himself as to 
 what notion these poor animals formed of a free 
 republic from their experience of life under its con- 
 ditions ; and whether they found them practically 
 very different from those of the immemorial 
 brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine 
 under which they had been born. But, after all, 
 this was an infrequent effect, Ijowever massive, of 
 travel on the west side, whereas the east offered him 
 continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was 
 never quite so squalid. For short distances the 
 lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labour, must walk; 
 but March never entered a car without encountering 
 some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which 
 was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New 
 York is still popularly supposed to be in the control 
 of the Irish, but March noticed in these east side 
 travels of his what must strike every observer re- 
 turning to the city after a prolonged absence : the 
 numerical subordination of the dominant race. If 
 they do not out-vote them, the people of Germanic, 
 of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock out- 
 number the prepotent Celts; and March seldom 
 found his speculation centred upon one of these. 
 The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the 
 puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, 
 Poles, Czechs, Chinese ; the furtive glitter of Italians ; 
 the blonde dulness of Germans ; the cold quiet of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 243 
 
 Scandinavians fire under ice were aspects that he 
 identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion 
 for the personal histories he constructed, and for the 
 more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with 
 the future economy of our heterogeneous common- 
 wealth. It must be owned that he did not take 
 much trouble about this ; what these poor people 
 were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering ; 
 just where and how they lived ; who and what they 
 individually were these were the matters of his 
 waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the 
 train raced further into the gay ugliness the shape- 
 less, graceless, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery. 
 There were certain signs, certain facades, certain 
 audacities of the prevailing hideousness that always 
 amused him in that uproar to the eye which the 
 strident forms and colours made. He was interested 
 in the insolence with which the railway had drawn 
 its erasing line across the Corinthian front of an old 
 theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars, and flouting 
 its dishonoured pediment. The colossal effigies of the 
 fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of 
 cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets; the 
 survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at 
 their angles ; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorative- 
 ness of the stations in prospect or retrospect ; the 
 vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or 
 stretched apart according to the width of the 
 avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life 
 that dwelt, and bought and sold, and rejoiced or 
 sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around, below, 
 R
 
 244 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 above were features of the frantic panorama that 
 perpetually touched his sense of humour and moved 
 his sympathy. Accident and then exigency seemed 
 the forces at work to this extraordinary effect ; the 
 play of energies as free and planless as those that 
 force the forest from the soil to the sky ; and then 
 the fierce straggle for survival, with the stronger 
 life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, 
 the destruction, the decay of the weaker The 
 whole at moments seemed to him lawless, godless ; 
 the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in 
 the huge disorder, and the violent struggle to 
 subordinate the result to the greater good, pene- 
 trated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a 
 man who had always been too self-enwrapt to per- 
 ceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness 
 must always lead. 
 
 But there was still nothing definite, nothing better 
 than a vague discomfort, however poignant, in his 
 half recognition of such facts ; and he descended the 
 station stairs at Chatham Square, with a sense of 
 the neglected opportunities of painters in that 
 locality. He said to himself that if one of those 
 fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars, 
 trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot- 
 passengers going and coming to and from the crowded 
 pavements, under the web of the railroad tracks 
 overhead, and amidst the spectacular approach of 
 the streets that open into the square, he would have 
 it down in his sketch-book at once. He decided 
 simultaneously that his own local studies must be
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 245 
 
 illustrated, and that he must come with the artist 
 and show him just which bits to do, not knowing 
 that the two arts can never approach the same 
 material from the same point. He thought he 
 would particularly like his illustrator to render the 
 Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the shabby-genteel 
 ballad-seller of whom he stopped to ask his way 
 to the street where Lindau lived, and whom he 
 instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade, 
 the sufficient object of an entire study by himself. 
 He had his ballads strung singly upon a cord against 
 the house wall, and held down in piles on the pave- 
 ment with stones and blocks of wood. Their control 
 in this way intimated a volatility which was not 
 perceptible in their sentiment. They were mostly 
 tragical or doleful : some of them dealt with the 
 wrongs of the working-man ; others appealed to a 
 gay experience of the high seas; but vastly the 
 greater part to memories and associations of an 
 Irish origin ; some still uttered the poetry of planta- 
 tion life in the artless accents of the end-man. 
 Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that 
 yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, 
 to the ordinary American speech, it was to strike 
 directly for the affections, to celebrate the domestic 
 ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of 
 angel and martyr mothers, whose dissipated sons 
 deplored their sufferings too late. March thought 
 this not at all a bad thing in them ; he smiled in 
 patronage of their simple pathos ; he paid the 
 tribute of a laugh when the poet turned, as he some-
 
 246 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 times did, from his conception of angel and martyr 
 motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more 
 familiar phases of virtue and duty, with the retribu- 
 tive shingle or slipper in her hand. He bought a 
 pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which 
 the most successful book can never be, and enlisted 
 the ballad vendor so deeply in the effort to direct 
 him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way that he 
 neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his 
 absent-mindedness stung him to retort, " I 'm a-try- 
 ing to answer a gentleman a civil question ; that 's 
 where the absent-minded comes in." 
 
 It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure 
 with the Chinese dwellers in Mott Street, which 
 March had been advised to take first. They stood 
 about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two 
 and two along the dirty pavement, with their little 
 hands tucked into their sleeves across their breasts, 
 aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around 
 them, and scrutinising the scene with that cynical 
 sneer of faint surprise to which all aspects of our 
 civilisation seem to move their superiority. Their 
 numbers gave character to the street, and rendered 
 not them, but what was foreign to them, strange 
 there; so that March had a sense of missionary 
 quality in the old Catholic church, built long before 
 their incursion was dreamt of. It seemed to have 
 come to them there, and he fancied in the statued 
 saint that looked down from its fa9ade something 
 not so much tolerant as tolerated, something pro- 
 pitiatory, almost deprecative. It was a fancy, of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 247 
 
 course ; the street was sufficiently peopled with 
 Christian children, at any rate, swarming and 
 shrieking at their games ; and presently a Chris- 
 tian mother appeared, pushed along by two police- 
 men on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor over 
 the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curb- 
 stones. She lay with her face to the sky, sending 
 up an inarticulate lamentation ; but the indifference 
 of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her 
 case. She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children 
 left off their games, and ran gaily trooping after her; 
 even the young fellow and young girl exchanging 
 playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a 
 liquor store suspended their scuffle with a pleased 
 interest as she passed. March understood the un- 
 willingness of the poor to leave the worst conditions 
 in the city for comfort and plenty in the country 
 when he reflected upon this dramatic incident, one 
 of many no doubt which daily occur to entertain 
 them in such streets. A small town could rarely 
 offer anything comparable to it, and the country 
 never. He said that if life appeared so hopeless to 
 him as it must to the dwellers in that neighbour- 
 hood he should not himself be willing to quit its 
 distractions, its alleviations, for the vague promise 
 of unknown good in the distance somewhere. 
 
 But what charm could such a man as Lindau find 
 in such a place ? It could not be that he lived there 
 because he was too poor to live elsewhere : with 
 a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe 
 this as he looked round on the abounding evidences
 
 248 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 of misery, and guiltily remembered his neglect of 
 his old friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap 
 a lodging in some decenter part of the town ; and 
 in fact there was some amelioration of the prevailing 
 squalor in the quieter street which he turned into 
 from Mott. 
 
 A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened 
 the door for him when he pulled, with a shiver of 
 foreboding, the bell knob, from which a yard of 
 rusty crape dangled. But it was not Lindau who 
 was dead, for the woman said he was at home, and 
 sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights 
 of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the 
 top of the house, and when March obeyed the 
 German-English " Komm ! " that followed his knock, 
 he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre 
 breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the 
 table before the stove. The place was bare and 
 cold ; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a 
 convivial air. On the left from this kitchen was a 
 room with a bed in it, which seemed also to be a 
 cobbler's shop : on the right, through a door that 
 stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, 
 saying this time, " Hier 1 "
 
 XII. 
 
 MARCH pushed the door open into a room like 
 that on the left, but with a writing-desk instead of 
 a cobbler's bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat 
 propped up, with a coat over his shoulders and a 
 skull-cap on his head, reading a book, from which 
 he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his spectacles 
 at March. His hairy old breast showed through the 
 night-shirt, which gaped apart ; the stump of his 
 left arm lay upon the book to keep it open. 
 
 " Ah, my tear yo'ng friendt ! Passil ! Marge ! 
 Iss it you 1 " he called out joyously, the next 
 moment. 
 
 " Why, are you sick, Lindau 1 " March anxiously 
 scanned his face in taking his hand. 
 
 Lindau laughed. " No ; I 'm all righdt. Only a 
 lidtle lazy, and a lidtle eggonomigal. Idt's jeaper 
 to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire a-goin' 
 all the time. Don't wandt to gome too hardt on the 
 'bvafer Mann, you know : 
 
 " Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen." 
 
 You remember ? Heine ? You readt Heine still 1 
 Who is your favourite boet now, Passil ? You write 
 11*
 
 250 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 some boetry yourself yet 1 No 1 "Well, I am gladt 
 to zee you. Brush those baperss off of that jair. 
 Well, idt is goodt for zore eyess. How didt you 
 findt where I lif 1 " 
 
 " They told me at Maroni's," said March. He 
 tried to keep his eyes on Lindau's face, and not see 
 the discomfort of the room, but he was aware of 
 the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odour of stale 
 smoke, and the pipes and tobacco shreds mixed 
 with the books and manuscripts strewn over the leaf 
 of the writing-desk. He laid down on the mass the 
 pile of foreign magazines he had brought under his 
 arm. " They gave me another address first." 
 
 "Yes. I have chust gome here," said Lindau. 
 " Idt is not very cay, heigh 1 " 
 
 " It might be gayer," March admitted, with a 
 smile. " Still," he added soberly, " a good many 
 people seem to live in this part of the town. Appa- 
 rently they die here too, Lindau. There is crape on 
 your ojitside door. I didn't know but it was for you." 
 
 " Xodt this time," said Lindau, in the same 
 humour. " Berhaps some other time. We geep the 
 ondertakers bretty pusy down here." 
 
 "Well," said March, "undertakers must live, even 
 if the rest of us have to die to let them." Lindau 
 laughed, and March went on : " But I 'm glad it 
 isn't your funeral, Lindau. And you say you 're not 
 sick, and so I don't see why we shouldn't come to 
 business." 
 
 " Pusiness 1 " Lindau lifted his eyebrows. " You 
 gome on pusiness 1 "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 251 
 
 "And pleasure combined," said March, and he 
 went on to explain the service he desired at 
 Lindau's hands. 
 
 The old man listened with serious attention, and 
 with assenting nods that culminated in a spoken 
 expression of his willingness to undertake the trans- 
 lations. March waited with a sort of mechanical 
 expectation of his gratitude for the work put in his 
 way, but nothing of the kind came from Lindau, 
 and March was left to say, " Well, everything is 
 understood, then ; and I don't know that I need 
 add that if you ever want any little advance on the 
 work " 
 
 " I will ask you," said Lindau quietly, " and I 
 thank you for that. But I can wait ; I ton't needt 
 any money just at bresent." As if he saw some 
 appeal for greater frankness in March's eye, he went 
 on : "I tidn't gome here begause I was too boor to 
 lif anywhere else, and I ton't stay in pedt begause 
 I couldn't haf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it- 
 I 'm nodt zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to 
 Paris, i 'in a lidtle loaxurious, that is all. If I stay 
 in pedt it 's zo I can fling money away on some- 
 things else. Heigh 1 " 
 
 " But what are you living here for, Lindau ? " 
 March smiled at the irony lurking in Lindau's 
 words. 
 
 " Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle 
 too moch of an aristograt. I hadt a room oap in 
 Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs over on 
 the west side, and I foundt" Lindau's voice lost
 
 252 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 its jesting quality, and his face darkened " that I 
 was beginning to forget the boor ! " 
 
 " I should have thought," said March, with im- 
 partial interest, " that you might have seen poverty 
 enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to 
 remind you of its existence." 
 
 " Nodt like here," said Lindau. " Andt you must 
 zee it all the dtime zee it, hear it, smell it, dtaste 
 it or you forget it. That is what I gome here for. 
 I was begoming a ploated aristograt. I thought I 
 was nodt like these beople down here, when I gome 
 down once to look aroundt; I thought I must be 
 somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself 
 in time, and I gome here among my brothers the 
 beccars and the thiefs ! " A noise made itself heard 
 in the next room, as if the door were furtively 
 opened, and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands 
 clawing on a table. " Thiefs ! " Lindau repeated, 
 with a shout. "Lidtle thiefs, that gabture your 
 breakfast. Ah ! ha ! ha ! " A wild scurrying of 
 feet, joyous cries and tittering, and a slamming door 
 followed upon his explosion, and he resumed in the 
 silence: "Idtis the children cot pack from school. 
 They gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple. 
 Idt 's one of our lidtle chokes ; we onderstand each 
 other; that's all righdt. Once the goppler in the 
 other room there he used to chase 'em ; he couldn't 
 onderstand their lidtle tricks. Now dot goppler's 
 teadt, and he ton't chase 'em any more. He was a 
 Bohemian. Gindt of grazy, I cuess." 
 
 " Well, it 's a sociable existence," March suggested.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 253 
 
 "But perhaps if you Ijet them have the things 
 without stealing 
 
 " Oh no, no ! Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt. 
 They mostn't go and feel themselfs petter than 
 those boor millionairss that hadt to steal their 
 money." 
 
 March smiled indulgently at his old friend's vio- 
 lence. "Oh, there are fagots and fagots, you 
 know, Lindau ; perhaps not all the millionaires 
 are so guilty." 
 
 " Let us speak German," cried Lindau, in his own 
 tongue, pushing his book aside, and thrusting his 
 skull-cap back from his forehead. " How much 
 money can a man honestly earn without wronging 
 or oppressing some other man ? " 
 
 " Well, if you '11 let me answer in English," said 
 March, " I should say about five thousand dollars a 
 year. I name that figure because it 's my experience 
 that I never could earn more ; but the experience of 
 other men may be different, and if they tell me they 
 can earn ten, or twenty, or fifty thousand a year, 
 I'm not prepared to say they can't do it." 
 
 Lindau hardly waited for his answer. " Not the 
 most gifted man that ever lived, in the practice of 
 any art or science, and paid at the highest rate that 
 exceptional genius could justly demand from those 
 who have worked for their money, could ever earn a 
 million dollars. It is the landlords and the merchant 
 princes, the railroad kings and the coal barons (the 
 oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of 
 tyrants) it is these that make the millions, but no
 
 254 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 man earns them. What artist, what physician, what 
 scientist, what poet was ever a millionaire 1 " 
 
 "I can only think of the poet Rogers," said March, 
 amused by Lindau's tirade. " But he was as excep- 
 tional as the other Rogers, the martyr, who died 
 with warm feet." Lindau had apparently not under- 
 stood his joke, and he went on, with the American 
 ease of mind about everything : " But you must 
 allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don't do 
 so badly with their guilty gains. Some of them 
 give work to armies of poor people 
 
 Lindau furiously interrupted. " Yes, when they 
 have gathered their millions together from the 
 hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and 
 despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they 
 ' give work ' to the poor ! They give work ! They 
 allow their helpless brothers to earn enough to keep 
 life in them ! They give work ! Who is it gives toil, 
 and where will your rich men be when once the 
 poor shall refuse to give toil ? Why, you have come 
 to give me work ! " 
 
 March laughed outright. " Well, I 'm not a 
 millionaire, anyway, Lindau, and I hope you won't 
 make an example of me by refusing to give toil. I 
 dare say the millionaires deserve it, but I 'd rather 
 they wouldn't suffer in my person." 
 
 " No," returned the old man, mildly relaxing the 
 fierce glare he had bent upon March. "No man 
 deserves to suffer at the hands of another. I lose 
 myself when I think of the injustice in the world. 
 But I must not forget that I am like the worst of 
 them."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 255 
 
 " You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among 
 the rich awhile, when you're in danger of that," 
 suggested March. " At any rate," he added, by an 
 impulse which he knew he could not justify to his 
 wife, "I wish you 'd come some day and lunch with 
 their emissary. I 've been telling Mrs. March about 
 you, and I want her and the children to see you. 
 Come over with these things and report." He put 
 his hand on the magazines as he rose. 
 
 "I will come," said Lindau gently. 
 
 " Shall I give you your book ? " asked March. 
 
 " No ; I gidt oap bretty soon." 
 
 " And and can you dress yourself 1 " 
 
 " I vhistle, and one of those lidtle fellowss comess. 
 We haf to dake gare of one another in a blace like 
 this. Idt iss nodt like the worldt," said Lindau 
 gloomily 
 
 March thought he ought to cheer him up. " Oh, 
 it isn't such a bad world, Lindau ! After all, the 
 average of millionaires is small in it." He added, 
 " And I don't believe there 's an American living 
 that could look at that arm of yours and not wish 
 to lend you a hand for the one you gave us all." 
 March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice 
 trembled slightly in saying it. 
 
 Lindau smiled grimly. " You think zo 1 I 
 wouldn't moch like to drost 'em. I've driedt idt 
 too often." He began to speak German again 
 fiercely : " Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you 
 think I knowingly gave my hand to save this 
 oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy
 
 256 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine- 
 slave drivers and mill-serf owners 1 No ; I gave it 
 to the slave ; the slave ha ! ha ! ha ! whom I 
 helped to unshackle to the common liberty of 
 hunger and cold. And you think I would be the 
 beneficiary of such a state of things 1" 
 
 "I'm sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau," said 
 March ; "very sorry." He stopped with a look of 
 pain, and rose to go. Lindau suddenly broke into 
 a laugh and into English. 
 
 " Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me 
 goodt. My parg is worse than my pidte, I cuess. 
 I pring these things roundt bretty soon. Good-bye, 
 Passil, my tear poy. Auf iciedersehen / "
 
 XIII. 
 
 MARCH went away thinking of what Lindau had 
 said, but not for the impersonal significance of his 
 words so much as for the light they cast upon 
 Lindau himself. He thought the words violent 
 enough, but in connection with what he remembered 
 of the cheery, poetic, hopeful idealist, they were 
 even more curious than lamentable. In his own life 
 of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one 
 talk so before, but he had read something of the 
 kind now and then in blatant labour newspapers 
 which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at 
 a strikers' meeting he had heard rich people de- 
 nounced with the same frenzy. He had made his 
 own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, 
 and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he 
 had not taken the matter seriously. 
 
 He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he 
 wondered how he came to that way of thinking. 
 From his experience of himself he accounted for a 
 prevailing literary quality in it ; he decided it to be 
 from Lindau's reading and feeling rather than his 
 reflection. That was the notion he formed of some
 
 258 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 things he had met with in Euskin to much the same 
 effect; he regarded them with amusement as the 
 chimeras of a rhetorician run away with by his 
 phrases. 
 
 But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was 
 a conception of the droll irony of a situation in 
 which so fervid a hater of millionaires should be 
 working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a 
 man like Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had 
 got his money together out of every gambler's 
 chance in speculation, and all a schemer's thrift 
 from the error and need of others. The situation 
 was not more incongruous, however, than all the 
 rest of the Every Other Week affair. It seemed to 
 him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not 
 tended to its existence, and as time went on, and 
 the day drew near for the issue of the first number, 
 the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at 
 moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to 
 be rather a fantastic fiction of sleep. 
 
 Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to 
 a reality which March could not deny, at least in 
 their presence, and the first number was representa- 
 tive of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible 
 form. As a result, it was so respectable that 
 March began to respect these intentions, began 
 to respect himself for combining and embodying 
 them in the volume which appealed to him with 
 a novel fascination, when the first advance copy 
 was laid upon his desk. Every detail of it was 
 tiresomely familiar already, but the whole had a
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 259 
 
 fresh interest now. He now saw how extremely 
 fit and effective Miss Leighton's decorative design 
 for the cover was, printed in black and brick-red on 
 the delicate grey tone of the paper. It was at once 
 attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton with 
 quite all he merited in working it over to the actual 
 shape. The touch and the taste of the art editor 
 were present throughout the number. As Fulker- 
 son said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of 
 a humming-bird and the tenacity of a bull-dog to 
 the virtues of their illustrative process, and had 
 worked it for all it was worth. There were seven 
 papers in the number, and a poem on the last page 
 of the cover, and he had found some graphic com- 
 ment for each. It was a larger proportion than 
 would afterward be allowed, but for once in a way 
 it was allowed. Fulkerson said they could not expect 
 to get their money back on that first number anyway. 
 Seven of the illustrations were Beaton's ; two or three 
 he got from practised hands ; the rest were the 
 work of unknown people which he had suggested, 
 and then related and adapted with unfailing in- 
 genuity to the different papers. He handled the 
 illustrations with such sympathy as not to destroy 
 their individual quality, and that indefinable 
 charm which comes from good amateur work in 
 whatever art. He rescued them from their weak- 
 nesses and errors, while he left in them the evi- 
 dence of the pleasure with which a clever young 
 man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman had 
 
 done them. Inevitably from his manipulation, 
 
 S
 
 260 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 however, the art of the number acquired homo- 
 geneity, and there was nothing casual in its ap- 
 pearance. The result, March eagerly owned, was 
 better than the literary result, and he foresaw that 
 the number would be sold and praised chiefly for 
 its pictures. Yet he was not ashamed of the litera- 
 ture, and he indulged his admiration of it the more 
 freely because he had not only not written it, but 
 in a way had not edited it. To be sure, he had 
 chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily 
 put it all together for that number ; it had largely 
 put itself together, as every number of every 
 magazine does, and as it seems more and more to 
 do, in the experience of every editor. There had to 
 be, of course, a story, and then a sketch of travel. 
 There was a literary essay and a social essay ; there 
 was a dramatic trifle, very- gay, very light ; there 
 was a dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new 
 plays, the new books, the new fashions ; and then 
 there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian 
 realism, which the editor owed to Lindau's explora- 
 tion of the foreign periodicals left with him ; Lindau 
 was himself a romanticist of the Victor Hugo sort, 
 but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good 
 of its kind. The poem was a bit of society verse, 
 with a backward look into simpler and wholesomer 
 experiences. 
 
 Fulkerson was .extremely proud of the number; 
 but he said it was too good too good from every 
 point of view. The cover was too good, and the 
 paper was too good, and that device of rough edges,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 261 
 
 which got over the objection to uncut leaves while it 
 secured their aesthetic effect, was a thing that he 
 trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of 
 the highest genius. It had come from Beaton at 
 the last moment, as a compromise, when the problem, 
 of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and the 
 unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no 
 solution but suicide. Fulkerson was still morally 
 crawling round on his hands and knees, as he said, 
 in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet, though he had 
 his qualms, his questions ; and he declared that 
 Beaton was the most inspired ass since Balaam's. 
 " We 're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi- 
 apology to March ; " but we 're no such asses as 
 Beaton." He said that if the tasteful decorativeness 
 of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, 
 its literary excellence would give it the finishing 
 stroke. Perhaps that might be overlooked in the 
 impression of novelty which a first number would 
 give, but it must never happen again. He implored 
 March to promise that it should never happen again ; 
 he said their only hope was in the immediate 
 cheapening of the whole affair. It was bad enough 
 to gire the public too much quantity for their 
 money, but to throw in such quality as that was 
 simply ruinous; it must be stopped. These were 
 the expressions of his intimate moods ; every front 
 that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, 
 of devout exultation. His pride in the number 
 gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one 
 whom he could get to talk with him about it. He
 
 262 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 worked the personal kindliness of the press to the 
 utmost. He did not mind making himself ridiculous 
 or becoming a joke in the good cause, as he called it. 
 He joined in the applause when a humorist at the 
 club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulker- 
 son's introduction of the topic, and he went on talk- 
 ing that first number into the surviving spectators. 
 He stood treat upon all occasions, and he lunched 
 attaches of the press at all hours. He especially 
 befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of 
 other cities, for, as he explained to March, those 
 fellows could give him any amount of advertising 
 simply as literary gossip. Many of the fellows 
 were ladies who could not be so summarily asked 
 out to lunch, but Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to 
 every exigency, and he contrived somehow to 
 make each of these feel that she had been possessed 
 of exclusive information. There was a moment 
 when March. conjectured a willingness in Fulker- 
 son to work Mrs. March into the advertising depart- 
 ment, by means of a tea to these ladies and their 
 friends which she should administer in his apart- 
 ment, but he did not encourage Fulkerson to be 
 explicit, and the moment passed. Afterward, when 
 he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find 
 that she would not have minded doing it for Ful- 
 kerson, and he experienced another proof of the 
 bluntness of the feminine instincts in some direc- 
 tions, and of the personal favour which Fulkerson 
 seemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This alone 
 was enough to account for the willingness of these
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 263 
 
 correspondents to write about the first number, but 
 March accused him of sending it to their addresses 
 with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy. 
 
 Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said that 
 he would do that or anything else for the good 
 cause, short of marrying the whole circle of female 
 correspondents. 
 
 March Avas inclined to hope that if the first 
 number had been made too good for the country at 
 large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan 
 journalism would invite a compensating favour for 
 it in New York. But first Fulkerson and then the 
 event proved him wrong. In spite of the quality of 
 the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so 
 many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices 
 in the New York papers seemed grudging and pro- 
 visional to the ardour of the editor. A merit in the 
 work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it 
 for which March had trembled were ignored ; but 
 the critics astonished him by selecting for censure 
 points which he was either proud of or had never 
 noticed ; which being now brought to his notice 
 he still could not feel were faults. He owned to 
 Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, 
 he could have agreed with them, but that to say 
 thus and so was preposterous ; and that if the 
 advertising had not been adjusted with such generous 
 recognition of the claims of the different papers, 
 he should have known the counting-room was 
 at the bottom of it. As it was, he could only 
 attribute it to perversity or stupidity. It was
 
 264 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 certainly stupid to condemn a magazine novelty 
 like Every Other Week for being novel ; and to 
 augur that if it failed, it would fail through its 
 departure from the lines on which all the other 
 prosperous magazines had been built, was in the 
 last degree perverse, and it looked malicious. The 
 fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a 
 magazine ought to be for it and not against it, since 
 it would invade no other field ; it would prosper on 
 no ground but its own.
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE more March thought of the injustice of 
 the New York press (which had not, however, 
 attacked the literary quality of the number) the 
 more bitterly he resented it ; and his wife's indigna- 
 tion superheated his own. Every Other Week had 
 become a very personal affair with the whole family ; 
 the children shared their parents' disgust ; Bella 
 was outspoken in her denunciations of a venal press. 
 Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin ahead, and began 
 tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an establish- 
 ment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a 
 year. She shed some secret tears in anticipation 
 of the privations which this must involve ; but 
 when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the 
 night of the publication day, she nobly told him 
 that if the worst came to the worst she could only 
 have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should 
 not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible. 
 
 " Oh, hold on, hold on ! " he protested. " You 
 don't think we Ve made a failure, do you ? " 
 
 "Why, of course," she faltered, while March re- 
 mained gloomily silent. 
 
 " Well, I guess we '11 wait for the official count, , 
 VOL. I. 12
 
 266 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 first. Even New York hasn't gone against us, and 
 I guess there 's a majority coming down to Harlem 
 River that could sweep everything before it, anyway." 
 
 " What do you mean, Fulkerson 1 " March de- 
 manded sternly. 
 
 " Oh, nothing ! Only, the News Company has 
 ordered ten thousand now ; and you know we had 
 to give them the first twenty on commission." 
 
 " What do you mean 1 " March repeated ; his wife 
 held her breath. 
 
 "I mean that the first number is a booming 
 success already, and that it 's going to a hundred 
 thousand before it stops. That unanimity and 
 variety of censure in the morning papers, combined 
 with the attractiveness of the thing itself, has 
 cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favour 
 of the country press doesn't turn the tide against us, 
 our fortune's made." The Marches remained dumb. 
 " Why, look here ! Didn't I tell you those criticisms 
 would be the making of us, when they first began to 
 turn you blue this morning, March ? " 
 
 "He came home to lunch perfectly sick," said Mrs. 
 March ; " and I wouldn't let him go back again." 
 
 " Didn't I tell you so ? " Fulkerson persisted. 
 
 March could not remember that he had, or that 
 he had been anything but incoherently and hysteric- 
 ally jocose over the papers, but he said, " Yes, yes 
 I think so." 
 
 " I knew it from the start," said Fulkerson. " The 
 only other person who took those criticisms in the 
 right spirit was Mother Dryfoos I've just been
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 267 
 
 bolstering up the Dryfoos family. She had them, 
 fead to her by Mrs. Mandel, and she understood 
 them to be all the most flattering prophecies of 
 success. Well, I didn't read between the lines to 
 that extent, quite ; but I saw that they were going 
 
 1 to help us, if there was anything in us, more than 
 anything that could have been done. And there 
 was something in us ! I tell you, March, that seven- 
 shooting self-cocking donkey of a Beaton has given 
 us the greatest start ! He 's caught on like a mice. 
 He 's made the thing awfully cJiic ; it 's jimmy ; 
 there 's lots of dog about it. He 's managed that 
 process so that the illustrations look as expensive as 
 first-class wood-cuts, and they're cheaper than 
 chromos. He 's put style into the whole thing." 
 
 " Oh yes," said March with eager meekness, " it 's 
 Beaton that's done it." 
 
 Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March's 
 face. " Beaton has given us the start because his 
 work appeals to the eye. There 's no denying that 
 the pictures have sold this first number; but I 
 expect the literature of this first number to sell the 
 pictures of the second. I 've been reading it all over, 
 nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping; I 
 was anxious about it, and I tell you, old man, it's 
 good. Yes, sir ! I was afraid may be you had got it 
 too good, with that Boston refinement of yours ; but 
 I reckon you haven't. 1 11 risk it. I don't see how 
 you got so much variety into so few things, and all 
 of them palpitant, all of 'em on the keen jump with 
 
 ^actuality."
 
 268 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 The mixture of American slang with the jargon 
 of European criticism in Fulkerson's talk made March 
 smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it in her 
 exultation. " That is just what I say," she broke in. 
 " It 's perfectly wonderful. I never was anxious 
 about it a moment, except, as you say, Mr. Fulker- 
 son, I was afraid it might be too good.'' 
 
 They went on in an antiphony of praise till March 
 said, "Really, I don't see what's left me but to 
 strike for higher wages. I perceive that I'm 
 indispensable." 
 
 " Why, old man, you 're coming in on the diwy, 
 you know," said Fulkerson. 
 
 They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was 
 gone, Mrs. March asked her husband what a diwy 
 was. 
 
 " It 's a chicken before it 's hatched " 
 
 " No ! Truly 1 " 
 
 He explained, and she began to spend the diwy. 
 
 At Mrs. Leighton's Fulkerson gave Alma all the 
 honour of the success ; he told her mother that the 
 girl's design for the cover had sold every number, 
 and Mrs. Leighton believed him. 
 
 "Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the 
 glory," Miss Woodburn pouted. "Where am Ah 
 comin' in ? " 
 
 "You're coming in on the cover of the next 
 number," said Fulkerson. " We 're going to have 
 your face there ; Miss Leighton's going to sketch it 
 in." He said this reckless of the fact that he had 
 already shown them the design of the second
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 269 
 
 number which was Beaton's weird bit of gas-country 
 landscape. 
 
 "Ah don't see why you don't wrahte the fiction 
 for your magazine, Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl. 
 
 This served to remind Fulkerson of something. 
 He turned to her father. "I'll tell you what, 
 Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some 
 chapters of that book of yours. I 've been talking 
 to him about it." 
 
 " I do not think it would add to the popularity 
 of your periodical, sir," said the Colonel, with a 
 stately pleasure in being asked. "My views of a 
 civilisation based upon responsible slavery would 
 hardly be acceptable to your commercialised society." 
 
 "Well, not as a practical thing, of course," 
 Fulkerson admitted. "But as something retro- 
 spective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit. 
 There's so much going on now about social ques- 
 tions; I guess people would like to read it." 
 
 " I do not know that my work is intended to 
 amuse people," said the Colonel, with some state. 
 
 "Mah goodness! Ah only wish it was, then," 
 said his daughter; and she added: "Yes, Mr. 
 Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit 
 po'tions of his woak to yo' edito'. We want to have 
 some of the honaw. Perhaps we can say we helped 
 to stop yo' magazine, if we didn't help to stawt it." 
 
 They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson 
 said, " It '11 take a good deal more than that to stop 
 Every Other Week. The Colonel's whole book 
 couldn't do it." Then he looked unhappy, for
 
 270 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Colonel Woodburn did not seem to enjoy his re- 
 assuring words ; but Miss Woodburn came to his 
 rescue. " You maght illustrate it with the po'trait of 
 the awthor's daughtaw, if it's too late for the covah." 
 
 "Going to have that in every number, Miss 
 Woodburn," he cried. 
 
 " Oh, mah goodness ! " she said, with mock 
 humility. 
 
 Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, 
 unconsciously outlined against the lamp, as she sat 
 working by the table. " Just keep still a moment!" 
 
 She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began 
 to draw; Fulkerson tilted himself forward and 
 looked over her shoulder ; he smiled outwardly ; 
 inwardly he was divided between admiration of 
 Miss Woodburn's arch beauty and appreciation of 
 the skill which reproduced it ; at the same time 
 he was trying to remember whether March had 
 authorised him to go so far as to ask for a sight 
 of Colonel Woodburn's manuscript. He felt that 
 he had trenched upon March's province, and he 
 framed one apology to the editor for bringing him 
 the manuscript, and another to the author for 
 bringing it back 
 
 "Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photo- 
 graph ? " asked Miss Woodburn, " Can Ah toak ? * 
 
 "Talk all you want," said Alma, squinting her 
 eyes. " And you needn't be either adamantine, nor 
 yet wooden." 
 
 " Oh, ho' very good of you ! Well, if Ah can 
 toak go on, Mr. Fulkerson ! "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 271 
 
 " Me talk ? I can't breathe till this thing is 
 done ! " sighed Fulkerson ; at that point of his 
 mental ' drama the Colonel was behaving rustily 
 about the return of his manuscript, and he felt that 
 he was looking his last on Miss Woodburn's profile. 
 
 " Is she getting it raght ? " asked the girl. 
 
 " I don't know which is which," said Fulkerson. 
 
 " Oh, Ah hope Ah shall ! I don't want to go 
 round feelin' like a sheet of papah half the time." 
 
 " You could rattle on, just the same," suggested 
 Alma. 
 
 " Oh, now ! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson. 
 Do you call that any way to toak to people ? " 
 
 " You might know which you were by the 
 colour," Fulkerson began, and then he broke off 
 from the personal consideration with a business 
 inspiration, and smacked himself on the knee : " We 
 could print it in colour ! " 
 
 Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held 
 it with both hands in her lap, while she came round, 
 and looked critically at the sketch and the model 
 over her glasses. " It 's very good, Alma," she said. 
 
 Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side 
 of the table. " Of course, Mr. Fulkerson, you were 
 jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing a sketch of 
 my daughter." 
 
 "Why, I don't know If you object " 
 
 " I do, sir decidedly," said the Colonel. 
 
 " Then that settles it, of course," said Fulkerson. 
 " I only meant " 
 
 " Indeed it doesn't ! " cried the girl. " Who 's to
 
 272 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 know who it 's from ? Ah 'm jost set on havin* it 
 printed ! Ah 'm going to appear as the head of 
 Slavery in opposition to the head of Liberty." 
 
 " There '11 be a revolution inside of forty-eight 
 hours, and we '11 have the Colonel's system going 
 wherever a copy of Every Other Week circulates," 
 said Fulkerson. 
 
 "This sketch belongs to me," Alma interposed. 
 " I 'm not going to let it be printed." 
 
 " Oh, mah goodness ! " said Miss Woodburn, 
 laughing good-hum ouredly. " That 's becose you 
 were brought up to hate slavery." 
 
 " I should like Mr. Beaton to see it," said Mrs. 
 Leighton in a sort of absent tone. She added, to 
 Fulkerson : " I rather expected he might be in to- 
 night." 
 
 " Well, if he comes we '11 leave it to Beaton," 
 Fulkerson said, with relief in the solution, and an 
 anxious glance at the Colonel, across the table, to 
 see how he took that form of the joke. Miss 
 Woodburn intercepted his glance and laughed, and 
 Fulkerson laughed too, but rather forlornly. 
 
 Alma set her lips primly and turned her head 
 first on one side and then on the other to look at 
 the sketch. " I don't think we '11 leave it to Mr. 
 Beaton, even if he comes." 
 
 "We left the other design for the cover to 
 Beaton," Fulkerson insinuated. " I guess you 
 needn't be afraid of him." 
 
 " Is it a question of my being afraid ? " Alma 
 asked ; she seemed coolly intent on her drawing.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 273 
 
 "Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of 
 her," Miss Woodburn explained. 
 
 " It 's a question of his courage, then ? " said Alma. 
 
 "Well, I don't think there are many young ladies 
 that Beaton 's afraid of," said Fulkerson, giving him- 
 self the respite of this purely random remark, while 
 he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and 
 Colonel Woodburn for some light upon the tendency 
 of their daughters' words. 
 
 He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton's saying, 
 with a certain anxiety, "I don't know what you 
 mean, Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 " Well, you 're as much in the dark as I am my- 
 self, then," said Fulkerson. "I suppose I meant 
 that Beaton is rather a favourite, you know. 
 The women like him." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose 
 and left the room. 
 12*
 
 XV. 
 
 1 IN the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked 
 from one lady to the other with dismay. " I seem to 
 have put my foot in it, somehow," he suggested, and 
 Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter. 
 
 " Poo' Mr. Fulkerson ! Poo' Mr. Fulkerson ! 
 Papa thoat you wanted him to go." 
 
 " Wanted him to go ? " repeated Fulkerson. 
 
 " We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want 
 to get rid of papa." 
 
 "Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that 
 he didn't take much interest in Beaton, as a general 
 topic. But I don't know that I ever saw it drive 
 him out of the room before ! " 
 
 " Well, he isn't always so bad," said Miss Wood- 
 burn. " But it was a case of hate at first sight, and 
 it seems to be growin' on papa." 
 
 " Well, I can understand that," said Fulkerson. 
 " The impulse to destroy Beaton is something thafc 
 everybody has to struggle against at the start" 
 
 " I must say, Mr. Fulkerson," said Mrs. Leighton 
 in the tremor through which she nerved herself to 
 differ openly with any one she liked, "I never had 
 to struggle with anything of the kind, in regard to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 275 
 
 Mr. Beaton. He has always been most respectful 
 and and considerate, with me, whatever he has 
 been with others." 
 
 " Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton ! " Fulkerson 
 came back in a soothing tone. " But you see you 're 
 the rule that proves the exception. I was speaking 
 of the way men felt about Beaton. It 's different 
 with ladies ; I just said so." 
 
 "Is it always different ? " Alma asked, lifting her 
 head and her hand from her drawing, and staring at 
 it absently. 
 
 Fulkerson pushed his hands both through his 
 whiskers. " Look here ! Look here ! " he said. 
 " Won't somebody start some other subject ? We 
 haven't had the weather up yet, have we ? Or the 
 opera 1 What is the matter with a few remarks 
 about politics ? " 
 
 " Why I thoat you lahked to toak about the staff 
 of yo' magazine," said Miss Woodburn. 
 
 "Oh, I do!" said Fulkerson. " But not always 
 about the same member of it. He gets monotonous, 
 when he doesn't get complicated. I Ve just come 
 round from the Marches'," he added, to Mrs. Leighton. 
 
 " I suppose they Ve got thoroughly settled in 
 their apartment by this time." Mrs. Leighton said 
 something like this whenever the Marches were 
 mentioned. At the bottom of her heart she had not 
 forgiven them for not taking her rooms ; she had 
 liked their looks so much ; and she was always 
 hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied ; 
 she could not help wanting them punished a little. 
 T
 
 276 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Well, yes; as much as they ever will be," 
 Fulkerson answered. " The Boston style is pretty 
 different, you know; and the Marches are old- 
 fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in 
 much for bric-a-brac. They Ve put away nine or 
 ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they keep 
 finding new ones." 
 
 " Their landlady has just joined our class," said 
 Alma. " Isn't her name Green ? She happened to 
 see my copy of Every Other Week, and said she knew 
 the editor ; and told me." 
 
 " Well, it 's a little world," said Fulkerson. " You 
 seem to be touching elbows with everybody. Just 
 think of your having had our head translator for a 
 model." 
 
 " Ah think that your whole publication revolves 
 aroand the Leighton family," said Miss Woodburn. 
 
 "That's pretty much so," Fulkerson admitted. 
 " Anyhow, the publisher seems disposed to do so." 
 
 " Are you the publisher ? I thought it was Mr. 
 Dryfoos," said Alma. 
 
 "It is." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a dis- 
 comfort which he promptly confessed. "Missed 
 again." 
 
 The girls laughed, and he regained something of 
 his lost spirits, and smiled upon their gaiety, which 
 lasted beyond any apparent reason for it. 
 
 Miss Woodburn asked, "And is Mr. Dryfoos 
 senio' anything like ouah Mr. Dryfoos ] "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 277 
 
 "Not the least." 
 
 " But he 's jost as exemplary ? " 
 
 "Yes; in his way." 
 
 " Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of 
 puffection togethath, once." 
 
 "Why, look here ! I 've been thinking I 'd celebrate 
 a little, when the old gentleman gets back. Have a 
 little supper something of that kind. How would 
 you like to let me have your parlours for it, Mrs. 
 Leighton ? You ladies could stand on the stairs, 
 and have a peep at us, in the bunch." 
 
 " Oh, mah ! What a privilege ! And will Miss 
 Alma be there, with the othah contributors 1 Ah 
 shall jost expah of envy ! " 
 
 "She won't be there in person," said Fulkerson, 
 " but she '11 be represented by the head of the art 
 department." 
 
 " Mah goodness ! And who '11 the head of the 
 publishing department represent 1 " 
 
 " He can represent you," said Alma. 
 
 "Well, Ah want to be represented, someho'." 
 
 "We'll have the banquet the night before you 
 appear on the cover of our fourth number," said 
 Fulkerson. 
 
 "Ah thoat that was doubly fo'bidden," said Miss 
 Woodburn. " By the stern parent and the envious 
 awtust." 
 
 " We '11 get Beaton to get round them, somehow. 
 I guess we can trust him to manage that." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the 
 implication.
 
 278 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn't do him- 
 self justice," she began. 
 
 Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke. 
 " Well, may be he would rather temper justice with 
 mercy in a case like his." This made both the 
 younger ladies laugh. " I judge this is my chance 
 to get off with my life," he added, and he rose as he 
 spoke. " Mrs. Leighton, I am about the only man 
 of my sex who doesn't thirst for Beaton's blood 
 most of the time. But I know him and I don't. 
 He 's more kinds of a good fellow than people gener- 
 ally understand. He don't wear his heart upon his 
 sleeve not his ulster sleeve, anyway. You can 
 always count me on your side when it 's a question 
 of finding Beaton not guilty if he '11 leave the State." 
 
 Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising 
 to say good night to Fulkerson. He bent over on 
 his stick to look at it. "Well, it's beautiful," he 
 sighed, with unconscious sincerity. 
 
 Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty. 
 " Thanks to Miss Woodburn." 
 
 " Oh no ! All she had to do was simply to 
 stay put." 
 
 " Don't you think Ah might have improved it if 
 Ah had looked better ? " the girl asked gravely. 
 
 " Oh, you couldn't ! " said Fulkerson, and he went 
 off triumphant in their applause and their cries of 
 "Which? which?" 
 
 Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom 
 when at last she found herself alone with her 
 daughter. "I don't know what you are thinking
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 279 
 
 about, Alma Leightou. If you don't like Mr. 
 Beaton " 
 
 "I don't." 
 
 " You don't ? You know better than that. You 
 know that you did care for him." 
 
 " Oh ! that 's a very different thing. That 's a 
 thing that can be got over." 
 
 " Got over ! " repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast. 
 
 " Of course, it can ! Don't be romantic, mamma. 
 People get over dozens of such fancies. They even 
 marry for love two or three times." 
 
 " Never ! " cried her mother, doing her best to 
 feel shocked, and at last looking it. 
 
 Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. " You 
 can easily get over caring for people ; but you can't 
 get over liking them if you like them because they 
 are sweet and good. That's what lasts. I was a 
 simple goose, and he imposed upon me because he 
 was a sophisticated goose. Now the case is reversed.'* 
 
 " He does care for you, now. You can see it. 
 Why do you encourage him to come here 1 " 
 
 "I don't," said Alma. "I will tell him to keep 
 away if you like. But whether he comes or goes, it 
 will be the same." 
 
 " Not to him, Alma ! He is in love with you ! " 
 
 " He has never said so." 
 
 " And you would really let him say so, when you 
 intend to refuse him ? " 
 
 "I can't very well refuse him till he does say so." 
 
 This was undeniable. Mrs. Leighton could only 
 demand in an awful tone, " May I ask why if you
 
 280 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 cared for him ; and I know you care for him still 
 you will refuse him 1 " 
 
 Alma laughed. "Because because I'm wedded 
 to my Art, and I 'm not going to commit bigamy, 
 whatever I do." 
 
 " Alma ! " 
 
 " Well, then, because I don't like him that is, I 
 don't believe in him, and don't trust him. He's 
 fascinating, but he 's false and he 's fickle. He can't 
 help it, I dare say." 
 
 " And you are perfectly hard. Is it possible that 
 you were actually pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson 
 tease you about Mr. Dryfoos 1 " 
 
 " Oh, good night, now, mamma ! This is becom- 
 ing personal."
 
 PART THIRD. 
 I. 
 
 THE scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial 
 success of Every Other Week expanded in Fulkerson's 
 fancy into a series. Instead of the publishing and 
 editorial force, with certain of the more representa- 
 tive artists and authors sitting down to a modest 
 supper in Mrs. Leighton's parlours, he conceived of 
 a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal literary 
 and artistic people throughout the country as guests, 
 and an inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and 
 correspondents, from whom paragraphs, prophetic 
 and historic, would flow weeks before and after the 
 first of the series. He said the thing was a new de- 
 parture in magazines ; it amounted to something in 
 literature as radical as the American Revolution in 
 politics : it was the idea of self-government in the 
 arts; and it was this idea that had never yet been 
 fully developed in regard to it. That was what 
 must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the 
 speeches must be reported. Then it would go like 
 wildfire. He asked March whether he thought Mr. 
 Depew could be got to come ; Mark Twain, he was
 
 282 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES 
 
 sure would come; he was a literary man. They 
 ought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal and 
 the leading Protestant divines. His ambition 
 stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of 
 expense ; there he had to wait the return of the 
 elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still 
 delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed 
 that he was afraid he would stay there till his own 
 enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other plans. 
 
 Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall 
 under a superstitious subjection to another man ; but 
 March could not help seeing that in this possible 
 measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not 
 revere him, March decided, because it was not in 
 Fulkerson's nature to revere anything ; he could like 
 and dislike, but he could not respect. Apparently, 
 however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow ; and be- 
 sides the homage which those who have not pay 
 to those who have, Fulkerson rendered Dryfoos the 
 tribute of a feeling which March could only define as 
 a sort of bewilderment. As well as March could 
 make out, this feeling was evoked by the spectacle 
 of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond 
 of dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with 
 a keen sense of whatever was sordid and selfish in a 
 man on whom his career must have had its inevitable 
 effect. He liked to philosophise the case with March, 
 to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him 
 still somewhat in the sap, at Moffitt, and to study 
 the processes by which he imagined him to have 
 dried into the hardened speculator, without even the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 283 
 
 pretence to any advantage but his own in his ven- 
 tures. He was aware of painting the character too 
 vividly, and he warned March not to accept it 
 exactly in those tints, but to subdue them and shade 
 it for himself. He said that where his advantage 
 was not concerned, there was ever so much good 
 in Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had 
 grown inflexible, he had expanded in others to the 
 full measure of the vast scale on which he did busi- 
 ness. It had seemed a little odd to March that a 
 man should put money into such an enterprise as 
 Every Other Week and go off about other affairs, not 
 only without any sign of anxiety but without any 
 sort of interest. But Fulkerson said that was the 
 splendid side of Dryfoos. He had a courage, a 
 magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any 
 such uncertainty. He had faced the music once for 
 all, when he asked Fulkerson what the thing would 
 cost in the different degrees of potential failure ; and 
 then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson 
 and the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply 
 to go ahead and not bother him about it. Fulkerson 
 called that pretty tall for an old fellow who used to 
 bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his 
 mind. He alleged it as another proof of the versa- 
 tility of the American mind, and of the grandeur of 
 institutions and opportunities that let every man 
 grow to his full size, so that any man in America 
 could run the concern if necessary. He believed 
 that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's shoes, 
 and run the German Empire at ten days' notice, or
 
 284 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 about as long as it would take him to go from New 
 York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not know 
 anything about Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got 
 ready to show his hand. Fulkerson himself did not 
 pretend to say what the old man had been up to, 
 since he -went West. He was at Moffitt first, and 
 then he was at Chicago, and then he had gone out to 
 Denver to look after some mines he had out there, 
 and a railroad or two ; and now he was at Moffitt 
 again. He was supposed to be closing up his affairs 
 there, but nobody could say. 
 
 Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos 
 returned that he had not only not pulled out at 
 Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper 
 than ever. He was in a royal good-humour, Fulker- 
 son reported, and was going to drop into the office 
 on his way up from the street (March understood 
 Wall Street) that afternoon. He Avas tickled to 
 death with Every Other Week so far as it had gone, 
 and was anxious to pay his respects to the editor. 
 
 March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let 
 it flatter him, and prepared himself for a meeting 
 about which he could see that Fulkerson was only 
 less nervous than he had shown himself about the 
 public reception of the first number. It gave March 
 a disagreeable feeling of being owned and of being 
 about to be inspected by his proprietor ; but he fell 
 back upon such independence as he could find in the 
 thought of those two thousand dollars of income be- 
 yond the caprice of his owner, and maintained an 
 outward serenity.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 285 
 
 He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolu- 
 tion it had cost him to do so. It was not a question 
 of Dryfoos's physical presence : that was rather 
 effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of 
 moneyed indifference to convention in the grey 
 business suit of provincial cut, and the low, wide- 
 brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick 
 with an old-fashioned top of buck-horn worn smooth 
 and bright by the palm of his hand, which had not 
 lost its character in fat, and which had a history of 
 former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was 
 now as soft as March's, and must once have been 
 small even for a man of Mr. Dryfoos's stature ; he 
 was below the average size. But what struck March 
 was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious 
 of being a country person, and of being aware that 
 in their meeting he was to be tried by other tests 
 than those which would have availed him as a 
 shrewd speculator. He evidently had some curiosity 
 about March, as the first of his kind whom he had en- 
 countered ; some such curiosity as the country school 
 trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the 
 new schoolmaster. But the whole affair was of course 
 on a higher plane ; on one sid.e Dryfoos was much 
 more a man of the world than March was, and he 
 probably divined this at once, and rested himself 
 upon the fact in a measure. It seemed to be his 
 preference that his son should introduce them, for 
 he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly 
 made acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them. 
 
 Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his
 
 286 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 father made him stay. "I reckon Mr. March and 
 I haven't got anything so private to talk about that 
 we want to keep it from the other partners. Well, 
 Mr. March, are you getting used to New York yet 1 
 It takes a little time." 
 
 " Oh yes. But not so much time as most places. 
 Everybody belongs more or less in New York ; 
 nobody has to belong here altogether." 
 
 "Yes, that is so. You can try it, and go away 
 if you don't like it a good deal easier than you could 
 from a smaller place. Wouldn't make so much talk, 
 would it 1 " He glanced at March with a jocose 
 light in his shrewd eyes. " That is the way I feel 
 about it all the time : just visiting. Xow, it 
 wouldn't be that way in Boston, I reckon 1 " 
 
 " You couldn't keep on visiting there your whole 
 life," said March. 
 
 Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a 
 way that was at once simple and fierce. " Mr. 
 Fulkerson didn't hardly know as he could get you 
 to leave. I suppose you got used to it there. I 
 never been in your city." 
 
 "I had got used to it; but it was hardly my 
 city, except by marriage. My wife 's a Bostonian." 
 
 " She 's been a little homesick here, then," said 
 Dryfoos, with a smile of the same quality as his 
 laugh. 
 
 " Less than I expected," said March. " Of course 
 she was very much attached to our old home/' 
 
 " I guess my wife won't ever get used to New 
 York," said Dryfoos, and he drew in his lower lip
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 287 
 
 with a sharp sigh. " But my girls like it ; they 're 
 young. You never been out our way yet, Mr. 
 March ? Out West 1 " 
 
 "Well, only for the purpose of being born, and 
 brought up. I used to live in Crawfordsville, and 
 then Indianapolis." 
 
 "Indianapolis is bound to be a great place," said 
 Dryfoos. " I remember now, Mr. Fulkerson told me 
 you was from our State." He went on to brag of 
 the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to 
 be convinced. " You ought to see all that country. 
 It 's a great country." 
 
 " Oh yes," said March, " I understand that." He 
 expected the praise of the great West to lead up to 
 some comment on Every Other Week ; and there was 
 abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, 
 proofs of letter-press and illustrations, with advance 
 copies of the latest number strewn over his table. 
 
 But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking 
 at these things. He rolled his head about on his 
 shoulders to take in the character of the room, and 
 said to his son, " You didn't change the woodwork 
 .after all." 
 
 " No ; the architect thought we had better let it 
 be, unless we meant to change the whole place. He 
 liked its being old-fashioned." 
 
 "I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March," 
 the old man said, bringing his eyes to bear upon him 
 again after their tour of inspection. 
 
 " Too comfortable for a working-man," said March, 
 he thought that this remark must brine; them to
 
 288 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 some talk about his work, but the proprietor only 
 smiled again. 
 
 " I guess I shan't lose much on this house," he 
 returned, as if musing aloud. "This down-town 
 property is coming up. Business is getting in on all 
 these side streets. I thought I paid a pretty good 
 price for it, too." He went on to talk of real estate, 
 and March began to feel a certain resentment at his 
 continued avoidance of the only topic in which they 
 could really have a common interest. " You live 
 down this way somewhere, don't you 1 " the old man 
 concluded. 
 
 "Yes. I wished to be near my work." March 
 was vexed with himself for having recurred to it ; 
 but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared 
 his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for 
 him to bring it openly into the talk. At times he 
 seemed wary and masterful, and then March felt 
 that he was being examined and tested ; at others so 
 simple that March might well have fancied that he 
 needed encouragement, and desired it. He talked of 
 his wife and daughters in a way that invited March 
 to say friendly things of his family, which appeared 
 to give the old man first an undue pleasure, and 
 then a final distrust. At moments he turned, Avith 
 an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke 
 to him across March of matters which he was un- 
 acquainted with ; he did not seem aware that this 
 was rude, but the young man must have felt it so ; 
 he always brought the conversation back, and once 
 at some cost to himself when his father made it 
 personal.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 289 
 
 " I want to make a regular New York business 
 man out of that fellow," he said to March, pointing 
 at Conrad with, his stick. " You s'pose I 'm ever 
 going to do it ? " 
 
 "Well, I don't know," said March, trying to fall 
 in with the joke. "Do you mean nothing but a 
 business man ? " 
 
 The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning 
 he fancied in this, and said, " You think he would 
 be a little too much for me there ? Well, I Ve seen 
 enough of 'em to know it don't always take a large 
 pattern of a man to do a large business. But I want 
 him to get the business training, and then if he 
 wants to go into something else, he knows what the 
 world is, anyway. Heigh ? " 
 
 " Oh yes ! " March assented, with some compassion 
 for the young man reddening patiently under his 
 father's comment. 
 
 Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing. 
 " Now that boy wanted to be a preacher. W 7 hat 
 does a preacher know about the world he preaches 
 against, when he 's been brought up a preacher ? 
 He don't know so much as a bad little boy in his 
 Sunday-school ; he knows about as much as a gH. 
 I always told him, You be a man first, and then you 
 be a preacher, if you want to. Heigh ? " 
 
 " Precisely." March began to feel some compas- 
 sion for himself in being witness of the young fellow's 
 discomfort under his father's homily. 
 
 " When we first come to New York, I told him, 
 Now here 's your chance to see the world on a big 
 VOL. I. 13
 
 290 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 scale. You know already what work and saving 
 and steady habits and sense will bring a man to ; 
 you don't want to go round among the rich ; you 
 want to go among the poor, and see what laziness, 
 and drink, and dishonesty, and foolishness will bring 
 men to. And I guess he knows, about as well as 
 anybody ; and if he ever goes to preaching he '11 
 know what he's preaching about." The old man 
 smiled his fierce, simple smile, and in his sharp eyes 
 March fancied contempt of the ambition he had 
 balked in his son. The present scene must have 
 been one of many between them, ending in meek 
 submission on the part of the young man whom his 
 father perhaps without realising his cruelty treated as 
 a child. March took it hard that he should be made 
 to suffer in the presence of a co-ordinate power like 
 himself, and began to dislike the old man out of pro- 
 portion to his offence, which might have been mere 
 want of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment 
 before him. But evidently, whatever rebellion his 
 daughters had carried through against him, he had 
 kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken. 
 March did not choose to make any response, but to 
 let him continue, if he would, entirely upon his 
 own impulse.
 
 II. 
 
 A SILENCE followed, of rather painful length. It 
 was broken by the cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent 
 before him to herald Fulkerson's cheery person. 
 " Well, I suppose you 've got the glorious success of 
 Every Other Week down pretty cold in your talk by 
 this time. I should have been up sooner to join you, 
 but I was nipping a man for the last page of the 
 cover. I guess we '11 have to let the Muse have that 
 for an advertisement instead of a poem the next 
 time, March. Well, the old gentleman given you 
 boys your scolding 1 " The person of Fulkerson had 
 got into the room long before he reached this 
 question, and had planted itself astride a cliair. 
 Fulkerson looked over the chair back, now at March, 
 and now at the elder Dryfoos as he spoke. 
 
 March answered him. "I guess we must have 
 been waiting for you, Fulkerson. At any rate we 
 hadn't got to the scolding yet" 
 
 " Why, I didn't suppose Mr. Dryfoos could 'a' held 
 in so long. I understood he was awful mad at the 
 way the thing started off, and wanted to give you a 
 piece of his mind, when he got at you. I inferred 
 as much from a remark that he made." March and 
 U
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do when made the 
 subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation. 
 
 " I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet," said 
 the old man dryly. 
 
 "Well, then, I guess it's a good chance to give 
 Mr. Dryfoos an idea of what we Ve really done just 
 while we 're resting, as Artemus Ward says. Heigh, 
 March ? " 
 
 " I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson. I 
 think it belongs strictly to the advertising depart- 
 ment," said March. He now distinctly resented the 
 old man's failure to say anything to him of the 
 magazine ; he made his inference that it was from a 
 suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a recog- 
 nition of his share in the success, and he was deter- 
 mined to second no sort of appeal for it. 
 
 "The advertising department is the heart and 
 soul of every business," said Fulkerson hardily, 
 " and I like to keep my hand in with a little practice 
 on the trumpet in private. I don't believe Mr. Dry- 
 foos has got any idea of the extent of this thing. 
 He 's been out among those Rackensackens, where 
 we were all born, and he 's read the notices in their 
 seven by nine dailies, and he 's seen the thing selling on 
 the cars, and he thinks he appreciates what's been 
 done. But I should just like to take him round in 
 this little old metropolis awhile, and show him Every 
 Oilier Week on the centre tables of the millionaires 
 the Vanderbilts and the Astors and in the homes 
 of culture and refinement everywhere, and let 
 him judge for himself. It's the talk of the clubs
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 293 
 
 and the dinner-tables ; children cry for it ; it 's the 
 Castoria of literature, and the Pearline of art, the 
 Won't-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlightened 
 man, woman, and child in this vast city. I knew 
 we could capture the country ; but, my goodness ! 
 I didn't expect to have New York fall into our hands 
 at a blow. But that 's just exactly what New York 
 has done. Every Other Week supplies the long-felt 
 want that 's been grinding round in New York and 
 keeping it awake nights ever since the war. It's 
 the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals 
 of the past 
 
 " How much," asked Dryfoos, " do you expect to 
 get out of it the first year, if it keeps the start it 's 
 got?" 
 
 " Comes right down to business, every time ! " said 
 Fulkerson, referring the characteristic to March with 
 a delighted glance. " Well, sir, if everything works 
 right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs, 
 and it isn't a grasshopper year, I expect to clear 
 above all expenses something in the neighbourhood 
 of twenty-five thousand dollars." 
 
 " Humph ! And you are all going to work a year 
 editor, manager, publisher, artists, writers, printers, 
 and the rest of 'em to clear twenty-five thousand 
 dollars 1 I made that much in half a day in Moffitt 
 once. I see it made in half a minute in Wall Street, 
 sometimes." The old man presented this aspect of 
 the case with a good-natured contempt, which in- 
 cluded Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious 
 liking.
 
 294 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 His son suggested, " But when \ve make that 
 money here, no one loses it." 
 
 "Can you prove that?" His father turned 
 sharply upon him. " Whatever is won is lost. It '& 
 all a game ; it don't make any difference what you 
 bet on. Business is business, and a business man 
 takes his risks with his eyes open." 
 
 " Ah, but the glory ! " Fulkerson insinuated 
 with impudent persiflage. "I hadn't got to the 
 glory yet, because it 's hard to estimate it ; but put 
 the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add 
 it to the twenty-five thousand, and you 've got an 
 annual income from Every Other Week of dollars 
 enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, 
 from this office to the moon. I don't mention any 
 of the sister planets because I like to keep within 
 bounds." 
 
 Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in 
 Fulkerson's fooling, and said, " That 's what I like 
 about you, Mr. Fulkerson : you always keep within 
 bounds.", 
 
 "Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like 
 March here. More sunflower in my style of diffi- 
 dence ; but I am modest, I don't deny it," said Ful- 
 kerson. " And I do hate to have a thing overstated." 
 
 "And the glory you do really think there's 
 something in the glory that pays ? " 
 
 " Not a doubt of it ! I shouldn't care for the 
 paltry return in money," said Fulkerson, with a 
 burlesque of generous disdain, " if it wasn't for the 
 glory along with it."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 295 
 
 " And how should you feel about the glory, if 
 there was no money along with it ? " 
 
 " Well, sir, I 'm happy to say we haven't come to 
 that yet." 
 
 "Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a 
 sort of pathetic rancour, " would rather have the 
 glory alone. I believe he don't even care much for 
 your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over 
 Conrad's face and then March's, as if searching for a 
 trace there of something gone before which would 
 enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning. He 
 apparently resolved to launch himself upon con- 
 jecture. " Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels 
 about the things of this world, anyway. I should 
 like to take 'em on the plane of another sphere, too, 
 sometimes ; but I noticed a good while ago that this 
 was the world I was born into, and so I made up my 
 mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the 
 rest of the folks doing here below. And I can't see 
 but what Conrad runs the thing on business prin- 
 ciples in his department, and I guess you '11 find it so 
 if you look into it. I consider that we 're a whole 
 team and big dog under the wagon with you to draw 
 on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the 
 literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, 
 and me to do the heavy lying in the advertising part. 
 Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I 'most for- 
 got Beaton Hamlet Avith Hamlet left out." 
 
 Dryfoos looked across at his son. " "Wasn't that 
 the fellow's name that was there last night ? "
 
 296 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Yes," said Conrad. 
 
 The old man rose. " Well, I reckon I got to be 
 going. You ready to go up-town, Conrad 1 " 
 
 "Well, not quite yet, father." 
 
 The old man shook hands with March, and went 
 downstairs, followed by his son. 
 
 Fulkerson remained. 
 
 " He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to 
 compliment us all round, Fulkerson," said March, 
 with a smile not wholly of pleasure. 
 
 Fulkerson asked with as little joy, in the grin he 
 had on, "Didn't he say anything to you before I 
 came in ? " 
 
 " Not a word." 
 
 " Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed 
 Fulkerson, "but I guess he's been having a talk 
 with Conrad that 's soured on him. I reckon may be 
 he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled 
 to the glory of this world, and Conrad 's showed him- 
 self just as set against it as ever." 
 
 "It might have been that," March admitted pen- 
 sively. "I fancied something of the kind myself 
 from words the old man let drop." 
 
 Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said, 
 "That's it, then; and it's all right. Conrad '11 
 come round in time ; and all we 've got to do is to 
 have patience with the old man till he does. I 
 know he likes you." Fulkerson affirmed this only 
 interrogatively, and looked so anxiously to March 
 for corroboration that March laughed. 
 
 " He dissembled his love, "lie said; but afterward
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 297 
 
 in describing to his wife his interview with Mr. 
 Dryfoos he was less amused with this fact. 
 
 When she saw that he was a little cast down by 
 it, she began to encourage him. "He's just a 
 common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know 
 how to express himself. You may be perfectly sure 
 that he 's delighted with the success of the magazine, 
 and that he understands as well as you do that he 
 owes it all to you." 
 
 " Ah, I 'm not so sure. I don't believe a man 's 
 any better for having made money so easily and 
 rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he 's any 
 wiser. I don't know just the point he 's reached in 
 his evolution from grub to beetle, but I do know 
 that so far as it's gone the process must have in- 
 volved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. 
 I guess he 's come to despise a great many things 
 that he once respected, and that intellectual ability 
 is among them what we call intellectual ability. 
 He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an 
 atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don't see 
 why it shouldn't have reached his mental make-up. 
 He has sharpened, but he has narrowed ; his sagacity 
 has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, 
 his courage to ferocity. That 's the way I philoso- 
 phise a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not 
 very proud when I realise that such a man and his 
 experience are the ideal and ambition of most Ameri- 
 cans. I rather think they came pretty near being 
 mine, once." 
 
 " No, dear, they never did," his wife protested. 
 13*
 
 298 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Well, they're not likely to be, in the future. 
 The Dryfoos feature of Every Other Week is thoroughly 
 distasteful to me." 
 
 "Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do 
 with it, has he, beyond furnishing the money 1 " 
 
 "That's the impression that Fulkerson has 
 allowed us to get But the man that holds the purse 
 holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but 
 when he likes he can drive. If we don't like his 
 driving, then we can get down." 
 
 Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of 
 speech than in the personal aspects involved. " Then 
 you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived you ? " 
 
 " Oh no ! " said her husband, laughing. " But I 
 think he has deceived himself, perhaps." 
 
 "How 1 " she pursued. 
 
 "He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, 
 when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have 
 supposed he was not afraid of him when he was 
 very much so. His courage hadn't been put to 
 the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like pro- 
 ficiency on the fiddle, you know : you can't tell 
 whether youVe got it till you try." 
 
 " Nonsense ! Do you mean that he would ever 
 sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos 1 " 
 
 " I hope he may not be tempted. But I 'd rather 
 be taking the chances with Fulkerson alone, than 
 with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos 
 seems somehow to take the poetry and the pleasure 
 out of the thing." 
 
 Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 299 
 
 began, "Well, my dear, / never wanted to come to 
 New York " 
 
 " Neither did I," March promptly put in. 
 
 "But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm 
 not going to have you letting every little thing dis- 
 courage you. I don't see what there was in Mr. 
 Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety. He 's 
 just a common, stupid, inarticulate country person, 
 and he didn't know how to express himself, as I said 
 in the beginning, and that 's the reason he didn't say 
 anything." 
 
 " Well, I don't deny you 're right about it." 
 
 " It 's dreadful," His wife continued, " to be mixed 
 up with such a man and his family, but I don't be- 
 lieve he '11 ever meddle with your management, and 
 till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do 
 with him as possible, and go quietly on your own 
 way." 
 
 " Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March. 
 " I hope I shan't begin going stealthily." 
 
 " Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, " just let me 
 know when you 're tempted to do that. If ever you 
 sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or your 
 self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will 
 simply renounce you." 
 
 " In view of that I 'm rather glad the management 
 of Every Other Week involves tastes and not convic- 
 tions " said March.
 
 III. 
 
 THAT night Dryfoos was wakened from his after- 
 dinner nap by the sound of gay talk and nervous 
 giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was 
 Christine's, and the giggling, which was Mela's, were 
 intershot with the heavier tones of a man's voice ; 
 and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern lounge in 
 his library, trying to make out whether he knew the 
 voice. His wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, 
 with her eyes on his face, waiting for him to wake. 
 
 " Who is that out there 1 " he asked, without 
 opening his eyes. 
 
 "Indeed, indeed I don't know, Jacob," his wife 
 answered. " I reckon it 's just some visitor of the 
 girls." 
 
 "Was I snoring?" 
 
 "Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did 
 hate to have 'em wake you, and I was just goin' out 
 to shoo them. They've been playin' something, 
 and that made them laugh." 
 
 " I didn't know but I had snored," said the old 
 man, sitting up. 
 
 "No," said his wife. Then she asked wistfully, 
 " Was you out at the old place, Jacob 1 "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 301 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Did it look natural?" 
 
 " Yes ; mostly. They 're sinking the wells down 
 in the woods pasture." 
 
 " And the childern's graves 1 " 
 
 " They haven't touched that part. But I reckon 
 we got to have 'em moved to the cemetery. I bought 
 a lot." 
 
 The old woman began softly to weep. " It does 
 seem too hard that they can't be let to rest in peace, 
 pore little things. I wanted you and me to lay there 
 too, when our time come, Jacob. Just there, back 
 o' the beehives, and under them shoomakes my, I 
 can see the very place ! And I don't believe I '11 
 ever feel at home anywheres else. I woon't know 
 where I am when the trumpet sounds. I have to 
 think before I can tell where the east is in New. 
 York ; and what if I should git faced the wrong 
 way when I raise ? Jacob, I wonder you could sell 
 it ! " Her head shook, and the fire-light shone on 
 her tears, as she searched the folds of her dress for 
 her pocket. 
 
 A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, 
 and then the sound of chords struck on the piano. 
 
 " Hush ! Don't you cry 'Liz'beth ! " said Dryfoos. 
 " Here ; take my handkerchief. I 've got a nice lot 
 in the cemetery, and I 'm goin' to have a monument, 
 with two lambs on it like the one you always liked 
 so much. It ain't the fashion, any more, to have 
 family buryin'-grounds ; they're collectin' 'em into 
 the cemeteries, all round."
 
 302 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " I reckon I got to bear it," said his wife, muffling 
 her face in his handkerchief. " And I suppose the 
 Lord kin find me, wherever I am. But I always did 
 want to lay just there. You mind how we used to 
 go out and set there, after milkin', and watch the 
 sun go down, and talk about where their angels was, 
 and try to figger it out 1 " 
 
 " I remember, 'Liz'beth." 
 
 The man's voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch 
 of French song, insolent, mocking, salient ; and then 
 Christine's attempted the same strain, and another 
 cry of laughter from Mela followed. 
 
 " Well, I always did expect to lay there. But I 
 reckon it's all right It won't be a great while, 
 now, any way. Jacob, I don't believe I 'm agoin' to 
 live very long. I know it don't agree with me 
 here." 
 
 "Oh, I guess it does, 'Liz'beth. You're just a 
 little pulled down with the weather. It's coming 
 spring, and you feel it ; but the doctor says you 're 
 all right I stopped in, on the way up ; and he says 
 so." 
 
 "I reckon he don't know everything," the old 
 woman persisted. "I've been runnin' down ever 
 since we left Moffitt, and I didn't feel any too well 
 there, even. It 's a very strange thing, Jacob, that 
 the richer you git, the less you ain't able to stay 
 where you want to, dead or alive." 
 
 "It's for the children we do it," said Dryfoos. 
 " We got to give them their chance in the world." 
 
 " Oh, the world ! They ought to bear the yok
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 303 
 
 in their youth, like we done. I know it's what 
 Coonrod would like to do." 
 
 Dryfoos got upon his feet. "If Coonrod '11 mind 
 his own business, and do what I want him to, he '11 
 have yoke enough to bear." He moved from his 
 wife, without further effort to comfort her, and 
 pottered heavily out into the dining-room. Beyond 
 its obscurity stretched the glitter of the deep draw- 
 ing-room. His feet, in their broad, flat slippers, 
 made no sound on the dense carpet, and he came 
 unseen upon the little group there near the piano. 
 Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the 
 keys, and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with 
 a banjo in her lap, letting him take her hands and 
 put them in the right place on the instrument. Her 
 face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was 
 watching her with foolish, unselfish pleasure in her 
 bliss. 
 
 There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of 
 Dryfoos's traditions and perceptions, and if it had 
 been at home in the farm sitting-room, or even in 
 his parlour at Moffitt, he would not have minded a 
 young man's placing his daughter's hands on a banjo, 
 or even holding them there ; it would have seemed 
 a proper attention from him if he was courting her. 
 But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter 
 of a man who had made as much money as he had, 
 he did not know but it was a liberty. He felt the 
 angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so 
 many experiences of his changed life ; he wanted to 
 show his sense of it, if it was a liberty, but he did
 
 304 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 not know how, and he did not know that it was so. 
 Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in 
 Christine's happiness which Mela showed ; and he 
 would have gone back to the library, if he could, 
 without being discovered. 
 
 But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a 
 nonchalant nod to the young man, came forward. 
 " What you got there, Christine 1 " 
 
 " A banjo," said the girl, blushing in her father's 
 presence. 
 
 Mela gurgled. " Mr. Beaton is learnun' her the 
 first position." 
 
 Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in evening 
 dress, and his face, pointed with its brown beard, 
 showed extremely handsome above the expanse of 
 his broad white shirt-front. He gave back as non- 
 chalant a nod as he had got, and without further 
 greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine, "No, no. 
 You must keep your hand and arm so." He held 
 them in position. "There ! Now strike with your 
 right hand. See ? " 
 
 "I don't believe I can ever learn," said the girl, 
 with a fond upward look at him. 
 
 " Oh yes, you can," said Beaton. 
 
 They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of 
 protests which followed, and he said, half jocosely, 
 half suspiciously, "And is the banjo the fashion, 
 now ? " He remembered it as the emblem of low- 
 down show business, and associated it with end-men, 
 and blackened faces, and grotesque shirt collars. 
 
 " It 's all the rage," Mela shouted in answer for alL
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 305 
 
 "Everybody plays it. Mr. Beaton borrowed this 
 from a lady friend of his. " 
 
 " Humph ! Pity I got you a piano, then," said Dry- 
 foos. " A banjo would have been cheaper." 
 
 Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as 
 to seem reminded of the piano by his mentioning it. 
 He said to Mela, " Oh, won't you just strike those 
 chords 1 " and as Mela wheeled about and beat the 
 keys, he took the banjo from Christine and sat down 
 with it. " This way ! " He strummed it, and mur- 
 mured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from 
 the library, while he kept his beautiful eyes floating 
 on Christine's. "You try that, now; it's very 
 simple." 
 
 " Where is Mrs. Mandel ? " Dryfoos demanded, 
 trying to assert himself. 
 
 Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him 
 at first in the chatter they broke into over what 
 Beaton proposed. Then Mela said absently, "Oh, 
 she had to go out to see one of her friends that 's 
 sick," and she struck the piano keys. " Come ; try 
 it, Chris ! " 
 
 Dryfoos turned about unheeded, and went back to 
 the library. He would have liked to put Beaton out 
 of his house, and in his heart he burned against him 
 as a contumacious hand ; he would have liked to dis- 
 charge him from the art department of Every Other 
 Week at once. But he was aware of not having 
 treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the 
 young man had returned his behaviour in kind, with 
 an electrical response to his own feeling, had he any
 
 306 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 right to complain 1 After all, there was no harm in 
 his teaching Christine the banjo. 
 
 His wife still sat looking into the fire. " I can't 
 see," she said, "as we've got a bit more comfort of 
 our lives, Jacob, because we Ve got such piles and 
 piles of money. I wisht to gracious we was back on 
 the farm this minute. I wisht you had held out 
 ag'inst the childern about sellin' it ; 'twould 'a' bin 
 the best thing fur 'em, I say. I believe in my soul 
 they '11 git spoiled here in New York. I kin see a 
 change in 'em a'ready in the girls." 
 
 Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again. 
 "I can't see as Coonrod is much comfort, either. 
 Why ain't he here with his sisters ? What does all 
 that work of his on the East side amount to 1 It 
 seems as if he done it to cross me, as much as any- 
 thing." Dryfoos complained to his wife on the basis 
 of mere affectional habit, which in married life often 
 survives the sense of intellectual equality. He did 
 not expect her to reason with him, but there was 
 help in her listening, and though she could only 
 soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were 
 often wide of the purpose, he still went to her for 
 solace. " Here, I 've gone into this newspaper busi- 
 ness, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don't 
 seem any more satisfied than ever. I can see he 
 hain't got his heart in it." 
 
 " The pore boy tries ; I know he does, Jacob ; and 
 he wants to please you. But he give up a good deal 
 when he give up bein' a preacher ; I s'pose we ought 
 remember that."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 307 
 
 "A preacher!" sneered Dryfoos. "I reckon 
 bein' a preacher wouldn't satisfy him now. He had 
 the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he 
 would like to be a priest ; and he threw it up to me 
 that he never could be, because I 'd kept him from 
 studyin'." 
 
 "He don't mean a Catholic priest not a Roman 
 one, Jacob," the old woman explained wistfully. 
 " He 's told me all about it. They ain't the kind o' 
 Catholics we been used to ; some sort of 'Pisco- 
 palians ; and they do a heap o' good amongst the 
 poor folks over there. He says we ain't got any 
 idea how folks lives in them tenement-houses, hun- 
 derds of 'em in one house, and whole families in a 
 room ; and it burns in his heart to help 'em like 
 them Fathers, as he calls 'em, that gives their lives 
 to it He can't be a Father, he says, because he 
 can't git the eddication, now; but he can be a 
 Brother ; and I can't find a word to say ag'inst it, 
 when it gits to talkin', Jacob." 
 
 "I ain't saying anything against his priests, 
 'Liz'beth," said Dryfoos. " They 're all well enough 
 in their way ; they Ve given up their lives to it, and 
 it 's a matter of business with them, like any other. 
 But what I'm .talking about now is Coonrod. I 
 don't object to his doin' all the charity he wants to, 
 and the Lord knows I've never been stingy with 
 him about it. He might have all the money he 
 wants, to give round any way he pleases." 
 
 " That 's what I told him once, but he says money 
 ain't the thing or not the only thing you got to 
 X
 
 308 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 give to them poor folks. You got to give your time, 
 and your knowledge, and your love I don't know 
 what all you got to give yourself, if you expect to 
 help 'em. That 's what Coonrod says." 
 
 " "Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home," 
 said Dryfoos, sitting up, in his impatience. " And 
 he 'd better give himself to us a little to his old 
 father and mother. And his sisters. What 's he 
 doin' goin' off there, to his meetings, and I don't 
 know what all, an' leavin' them here alone ? " 
 
 " Why, ain't Mr. Beaton with 'em ? " asked the old 
 woman. " I thought I beared his voice." 
 
 " Mr. Beaton ! Of course, he is ! And who 's Mr. 
 Beaton, anyway?" 
 
 " W T hy, ain't he one of the men in Coonrod's 
 office ? I thought I beared " 
 
 " Yes, he is ! But who is he 1 What's he doing 
 round here ? Is he makin' up to Christine ? " 
 
 " I reckon he is. From Mely's talk, she 's about 
 crazy over the fellow. Don't you like him, Jacob 1 " 
 
 " I don't know him, or what he is. He hasn't got 
 any manners. Who brought him here 1 How 'd he 
 come to come, in the first place ? " 
 
 "Mr Fulkerson brung him, I believe," said the old 
 woman patiently. 
 
 " Fulkerson ! " Dryfoos snorted. " Where 's Mrs. 
 Mandel, I should like to know ? He brought her, 
 too. Does she go trapsein' off this way, every even- 
 ing?" 
 
 "No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o' 
 the time. I don't know how we could ever git along
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 309 
 
 without her, Jacob ; she seems to know just what to 
 do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin* 
 without her. I hope you ain't thinkin' o' turnin' her 
 off, Jacob 1 " 
 
 Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such 
 a question. " It 's all Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulker- 
 son. It seems to me that Fulkerson about runs this 
 family. He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought 
 that Beaton, and he brought that Boston fellow ! I 
 guess I give him a dose, though ; and I '11 learn 
 Fulkerson that he can't have everything his own way. 
 I don't want anybody to help me spend my money. 
 I made it, and I can manage it. I guess Mr. Fulker- 
 son can bear a little watching, now. He 's been 
 travelling pretty free, and he 's got the notion he 's 
 driving, may be. I 'm agoing to look after that book 
 a little myself." 
 
 " You '11 kill yourself, Jacob," said his wife, " tryin' 
 to do so many things. And what is it all fur 1 I 
 don't see as we 're better off, any, for all the money. 
 It 's just as much care as it used to be when we was 
 all there on the farm together. I wisht we could go 
 back, Ja " 
 
 " We can't go back ! " shouted the old man fiercely. 
 " There 's no farm any more to go back to. The 
 fields is full of gas wells and oil wells and hell holes 
 generally ; the house is tore down, and the barn 's 
 g oin' " 
 
 " The barn ! " gasped the old woman. " Oh, my ! " 
 
 " If I was to give all I 'm worth this minute, we 
 couldn't go back to the farm, any more than them
 
 310 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 girls in there could go back and be little children. I 
 don't say we 're any better off, for the money. I Ve 
 got more of it now than I ever had ; and there 's no 
 end to the luck ; it pours in. But I feel like I was 
 tied hand and foot. I don't know which way to 
 move ; I don't know what 's best to do about any- 
 thing. The money don't seem to buy anything but 
 more and more care and trouble. We got a big 
 house that we ain't at home in ; and we got a lot of 
 hired girls round under our feet that hinder and don't 
 help. Our children don't mind us, and we got no 
 friends or neighbours. But it had to be. I couldn't 
 help but sell the farm, and we can't go back to it, 
 for it ain't there. So don't you say anything more 
 about it, 'Liz'beth." 
 
 " Pore Jacob ! " said his wife. " Well, I woon't, 
 dear."
 
 IV. 
 
 IT was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; 
 and the fact heightened his pleasure in Christine's 
 liking for him. He was as sure of this as he was of 
 the other, though he was not so sure of any reason 
 for his pleasure in it. She had her charm ; the charm 
 of wildness to which a certain wildness in himself 
 responded ; and there were times when his fancy 
 contrived a common future for them, which would 
 have a prosperity forced from the old fellow's love of 
 the girl. Beaton liked the idea of this compulsion 
 better than he liked the idea of the money ; there 
 was something a little repulsive in that ; he imagined 
 himself rejecting it ; he almost wished he was 
 enough in love with the girl to marry her without 
 it ; that would be fine. He was taken with her in a 
 certain measure, in a certain way ; the question was 
 in what measure, in Avhat way. 
 
 It was partly to escape from this question that he 
 hurried down town, and decided to spend with the 
 Leightons the hour remaining on his hands before it 
 was time to go to the reception for which he was 
 dressed. It seemed to him important that he should 
 see Alma Leighton. After all, it was her charm that
 
 312 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be 
 final. He found himself very happy in his present 
 relations with her. She had dropped that barrier of 
 pretences and ironical surprise. It seemed to him 
 that they had gone back to the old ground of com- 
 mon artistic interest which he had found so pleasant 
 the summer before. Apparently she and her mother 
 had both forgiven his neglect of them in the first 
 months of their stay in New York ; he was sure that 
 Mrs. Leighton liked him as well as ever, and if there 
 was still something a little provisional in Alma's 
 manner at times, it was something that piqued more 
 than it discouraged; it made him curious, not 
 anxious. 
 
 He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when 
 he rang. He seemed to be amusing them both, and 
 they were both amused beyond the merit of so small 
 a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said, 
 " Introduce myself, Mr. Beaton : Mr. Fulkerson of 
 Every Other Week. Think I've met you at our 
 place." The girls laughed, and Alma explained that 
 her mother was not very well, and would be sorry 
 not to see him. Then she turned, as he felt, per- 
 versely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left 
 him to Miss Woodburn. 
 
 She finally recognised his disappointment: "Ah 
 don't often get a chance at you, Mr. Beaton, and 
 Ah 'm just goin' to toak yo' to death. Yo' have been 
 Soath yo'self, and yo' know ho' we do toak." 
 
 " I 've survived to say yes," Beaton admitted. 
 
 "Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo'
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 313 
 
 than you do in the No'th ? " the young lady depre- 
 cated. 
 
 " I don't know. I only know you can't talk too 
 much for me. I should like to hear you say Soath 
 and hoase and aboat for the rest of my life." 
 
 " That 's what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton. 
 Now Ah 'm goin' to be personal, too." Miss Wood- 
 burn flung out over her lap the square of cloth 
 she was embroidering, and asked him, "Don't you 
 think that 's beautiful 1 Now, as an awtust a great 
 awtust 1 " 
 
 " As a great awtust, yes," said Beaton, mimicking 
 her accent. " If I were less than great I might have 
 something to say about the arrangement of colours. 
 You 're as bold and original as Nature." 
 
 "Really 1 Oh, now, do tell me yo' favo'ite colo', 
 Mr. Beaton." 
 
 "My favourite colour? Bless my soul, why 
 should I prefer any ? Is blue good, or red wicked ? 
 Do people have favourite colours ? " Beaton found 
 himself suddenly interested. 
 
 " Of co'se they do," answered the girl. " Don't 
 awtusts 1 " 
 , " I never heard of one that had consciously." 
 
 " Is it possible 1 I supposed they all had. Now 
 mah favo'ite colo' is gawnet. Don't you think it 's a 
 pretty colo' ? " 
 
 " It depends upon how it 's used. Do you mean 
 in neckties 1 " Beaton stole a glance at the one 
 Fulkerson was wearing. 
 
 Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon 
 VOL. I 14
 
 314 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 her wrist. " Ah do think you gentlemen in the 
 Xo'th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies." 
 
 " Strange," said Beaton. "In the South Soath, 
 excuse me ! I made the observation that the ladie& 
 were ten times as lively as the gentlemen. What is 
 that you 're working 1 " 
 
 " This ? " Miss "\Voodburn gave it another flirt, 
 and looked at it with a glance of dawning recogni- 
 tion. " Oh, this is a table-covah. Wouldn't you 
 lahke to see where it 's to go 1 " 
 
 " Why, certainly." 
 
 " Well, if you '11 be raght good I 'U let yo' give me 
 some professional advass about putting something in 
 the co'ners or not, when you have seen it on the 
 table." 
 
 She rose and led the way into the other room. 
 Beaton knew she wanted to talk with him about 
 something else ; but he waited patiently to let her 
 play her comedy out. She spread the cover on the 
 table, and he advised her, as he saw she wished,, 
 against putting anything in the corners ; just run a 
 line of her stitch around the edge, he said. 
 
 "Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we 've been having 
 a regular faght aboat it," she commented. " But we 
 both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you ; Mr. Ful- 
 kerson said you 'd be sure to be raght. Ah 'm so glad 
 you took mah sahde. But he 's a great admahrer of 
 yours, Mr. Beaton," she concluded demurely, sug- 
 gestively. 
 
 " Is he 1 Well, I 'm a great admirer of Fulker- 
 son's," said Beaton, with a capricious willingness to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 315 
 
 humour her wish to talk about Fulkerson. " He 's a 
 capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite 
 an ideal of friendship, and an eye single to the main 
 chance all the time. He would advei'tise Every 
 Other Week on his family vault." 
 
 Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell 
 him what Beaton had said. 
 
 " Do. But he 's used to defamation from me, and 
 he '11 think you 're joking." 
 
 "Ah suppose," said Miss Woodburn, "that he's 
 quahte the tahpe of a New York business man." She 
 added, as if it followed logically, "He's so different 
 from what I thought a New York business man 
 would be." 
 
 " It 's your Virginia tradition to despise business," 
 said Beaton rudely. 
 
 Miss Woodburn laughed again. " Despahse it ? 
 Mah goodness ! we want to get into it, and ' woak it 
 fo' all it's wo'th,' as Mr. Fulkerson says. That 
 tradition is all past. You don't know what the 
 Soath is now. Ah suppose mah fathaw despahses 
 business, but he 's a tradition himself, as Ah 
 tell him." Beaton would have enjoyed joining the 
 young lady in anything she might be going to say in 
 derogation of her father, but he restrained himself, 
 and she went on more and more as if she wished to 
 account for her father's habitual hauteur with 
 Beaton, if not to excuse it. " Ah tell him he don't 
 iinderstand the rising generation. He was brought 
 up in the old school, and he thinks we J re all just 
 lahke he was when he was young, with all those
 
 316 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ahdeals of chivalry and family ; but mah goodness ! 
 it 's money that cyoants no'adays in the Soath, just 
 lahke it does everywhere else. Ah suppose, if we 
 could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw 
 thinks it could have been brought up to, when the 
 commercial spirit wouldn't let it alone, it would be 
 the best thing ; but we can't have it back, and Ah 
 tell him we had better have the commercial spirit, as 
 the next best thing." 
 
 Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty 
 and piety, to expose the difference of her own and 
 her father's ideals, but with what Beaton thought 
 less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than 
 to a knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel 
 of Every Other Week, and Mr. Fulkerson's relation to 
 the enterprise. "You most excuse my asking so 
 many questions, Mr. Beaton. You know it's all 
 mah doing that we awe heah in New York. Ah 
 just told mah fathaw that if he was evah goin' to do 
 anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come 
 No'th, and Ah made him come. Ah believe he 'd 
 have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe. And now 
 Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some 
 of his wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something 
 aboat the magazine. We awe a great deal excited 
 aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton," she 
 concluded, with a look that now transferred the 
 Interest from Fulkerson to Alma. She led the way 
 back to the room where they were sitting, and went 
 up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton's decision 
 about the table-cover.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 317 
 
 Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he 
 began to talk about the Dryfooses, as he sat down 
 on the piano stool. He said he had been giving 
 Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo ; he had borrowed 
 the banjo of Miss Vance. Then he struck the chord 
 he had been trying to teach Christine, and played 
 over the air he had sung. 
 
 " How do you like that ? " he asked, whirling 
 round. 
 
 " It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, some- 
 how," said Alma placidly. 
 
 Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano, 
 and gazed dreamily at her. " Your perceptions are 
 wonderful. It is disrespectful. I played it, up 
 there, because I felt disrespectful to them." 
 
 " Do you claim that as a merit ? " 
 
 " No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect 
 such people ?" 
 
 "You might respect yourself, then," said the girl. 
 " Or perhaps that wouldn't be so easy, either." 
 
 " No, it wouldn't. I like to have you say these 
 things to me," said Beaton impartially, 
 
 " Well, I like to say them," Alma returned. 
 
 " They do me good." 
 
 " Oh, I don't know that that was my motive." 
 
 "There is no one like you no one," said Beaton, 
 as if apostrophising her in her absence. " To come 
 from that house, with its assertions of money you 
 can hear it chink ; you can smell the foul old bank- 
 notes ; it stifles you into an atmosphere like this, 
 is like coming into another world."
 
 318 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Thank you," said Alma. "I'm glad there isn't 
 that unpleasant odour here ; but I wish there was a 
 little more of the chinking." 
 
 " No, no ! Don't say that ! " he implored. " I 
 like to think that there is one soul uncontaminated 
 by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid city." 
 
 "You mean two," said Alma, with modesty. "But 
 if you stifle at the Dryfooses', why do you go there ?" 
 
 " Why do I go 1 " he mused. " Don't you believe 
 in knowing all the natures, the types, you can ? 
 Those girls are a strange study : the young one is a 
 simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field ; 
 and the other a sort of sylvan life : fierce, flashing, 
 feline- 
 Alma burst out into a laugh. " What apt allitera- 
 tion ! And do they like being studied ? I should 
 think the sylvan life might scratch." 
 
 " No," said Beaton, with melancholy absence, " it 
 only purrs." 
 
 The girl felt a rising indignation. "Well, then, 
 Mr. Beaton; I should hope it would scratch, and 
 bite, too. I think you've no business to go about 
 studying people, as you do. It 's abominable." 
 
 " Go on," said the young man. "That Puritan con- 
 science of yours ! It appeals to the old Covenanter 
 strain in me likeavoice of pre-existence. Go on ' 
 
 " Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not 
 only abominable, but contemptible." 
 
 "You could be my guardian angel, Alma," said 
 the young man, making his eyes more and more 
 slumbrous and dreamy.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 319 
 
 " Stuff ! I hope I have a soul above buttons ! " 
 
 He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the 
 room. " Good night, Mr. Beaton," she said. 
 
 Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the 
 other room. " What ! You 're not going, Beaton 1 " 
 
 " Yes ; I 'm going to a reception. I stopped in on 
 my way." 
 
 " To kill time," Alma explained. 
 
 "Well," said Fulkerson gallantly, "this is the 
 last place I should like to do it. But I guess I'd 
 better be going too. It has sometimes occurred to 
 me that there is such a thing as staying too late. 
 But with Brother Beaton, here, just starting in for 
 an evening's amusement, it does seem a little early 
 yet. Can't you urge me to stay, somebody 1 " 
 
 The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said, 
 " Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion ! Ah 
 wish Ah was on mah way to a pawty. Ah feel 
 quahte envious." 
 
 "But he didn't say it to make you," Alma ex- 
 plained with meek softness. 
 
 "Well, we can't all be swells. Where is your 
 party, anyway, Beaton 1 " asked Fulkerson. " How 
 do you manage to get your invitations to those 
 things ? I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting 
 round pretty lively, heigh ? " 
 
 Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook 
 hands with Miss Woodburn, with the effect of 
 having already shaken hands with Alma, She stood 
 with hers clasped behind her.
 
 V. 
 
 BEATON went away with the smile on his face 
 which he had kept in listening to Fulkerson, and 
 carried it with him to the reception. He believed 
 that Alma was vexed with him for more personal 
 reasons than she had implied ; it flattered him that 
 she should have resented what he told her of the 
 Dryfooses. She had scolded him in their behalf 
 apparently; but really because he had made her 
 jealous by his interest, of whatever kind, in some 
 one else. What followed, had followed naturally. 
 Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not 
 have met his provisional love-making on any other 
 terms; and the reason why Beaton chiefly liked 
 Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton. 
 Even up in the country, when she was overawed by 
 his acquaintance, at first, she was not very deeply 
 overawed, and at times she was not overawed at alL 
 At such times she astonished him by taking his most 
 solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and even 
 burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same, 
 that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the 
 skill with which she punished his neglect when they 
 met in New York. He had really come very near
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 321 
 
 forgetting the Leightons ; the intangible obligations 
 of mutual kindness which hold some men so fast, 
 hung loosely upon him ; it would not have hurt him 
 to break from them altogether ; but when he recog- 
 nised them at last, he found that it strengthened 
 them indefinitely to have Alma ignore them so com- 
 pletely. If she had been sentimental, or softly 
 reproachful, that would have been the end ; he could 
 not have stood it ; he would have had to drop her. 
 But when she met him on his own ground, and 
 obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her 
 hands. Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of 
 that, and he said to himself that the girl had grown 
 immensely since she had come to New York ; nothing 
 seemed to have been lost upon her ; she must have 
 kept her eyes uncommonly wide open. He noticed 
 that especially in their talks over her work ; she had 
 profited by everything she had seen and heard ; she 
 had all of Wetmore's ideas pat ; it amused Beaton 
 to see how she seized every useful word that he 
 dropped, too, and turned him to technical account 
 whenever she could. He liked that ; she had a great 
 deal of talent ; there was no question of that ; if she 
 were a man there could be no question of her future. 
 He began to construct a future for her ; it included 
 provision for himself too ; it was a common future, 
 in which their lives and work were united. 
 
 He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he 
 met Margaret Vance at the reception. 
 
 The house was one where people might chat a 
 long time together without publicly committing 
 14*
 
 322 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 themselves to an interest in each other except such 
 as grew out of each other's ideas. Miss Vance was 
 there because she united in her catholic sympathies 
 or ambitions the objects of the fashionable people 
 and of the aesthetic people who met there on common 
 ground. It was almost the only house in New York 
 where this happened often, and it did not happen 
 very often there. It was a literary house, primarily, 
 with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it 
 were mostly authors and artists ; Wetmore, who 
 was always trying to fit everything with a phrase, 
 said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. 
 There was great ease there, and simplicity ; and if 
 there was not distinction, it was not for want of 
 distinguished people, but because there seems to be 
 some solvent in New York life that reduces all men 
 to a common level, that touches everybody with its 
 potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply 
 underlying nobody. The effect for some tempera- 
 ments, for consciousness, for egotism, is admirable ; 
 for curiosity, for hero-worship, it is rather baffling. 
 It is the spirit of the street transferred to the draw- 
 ing-room ; indiscriminating, levelling, but doubtless 
 finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity 
 of the place, if not consenting to the grandeur of 
 reputations or presences. 
 
 Beaton now denied that this house represented a 
 salon at all, in the old sense ; and he held that the 
 salon was impossible, even undesirable, with us, 
 when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he 
 said that this turmoil of coming and going, this
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 323 
 
 bubble and babble, this cackling and hissing of con- 
 versation was not the expression of any such civilisa- 
 tion as had created the salon. Here, he owned, were 
 the elements of intellectual delightfulness, but he 
 said their assemblage in such quantity alone denied 
 the salon; there was too much of a good thing. 
 The French word implied a long evening of general 
 talk among the guests, crowned with a little chicken 
 at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was tea, with 
 milk or with lemon baths of it and claret cup for 
 the hardier spirits throughout the evening. It was 
 very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the little 
 chicken not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the 
 salon descended from above, out of the great world, 
 and included the aesthetic world in it. But our 
 great world the rich people, were stupid, with no 
 wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious 
 about authors and artists. Beaton fancied himself 
 speaking impartially, and so he allowed himself to 
 speak bitterly ; he said that in no other city in the 
 world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so 
 little a part of society. 
 
 " It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said 
 Margaret ; and she spoke impartially, too. " I 
 don't believe that the literary men and the artists 
 would like a salon that descended to them. Madame 
 Geoffrin, you know, was very plebeian ; her husband 
 was a business man of some sort." 
 
 "He would have been a howling swell in New 
 York," said Beaton, still impartially. 
 
 Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll 
 Y
 
 324 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 of bread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in 
 the other. Large and fat, and clean shaven, he 
 looked like a monk in evening dress. 
 
 " We were talking about salons," said Margaret. 
 
 " Why don't you open a saloon yourself 1 " asked 
 Wetmore, breathing thickly from the anxiety of 
 getting through the crowd without spilling his tea. 
 
 " Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon 1 " said the 
 girl, with a laugh. " What a good story ! That 
 idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any 
 of the arts because she was socially and traditionally 
 the material of them ! We can never reach that 
 height of nonchalance in this country." 
 
 " Not if we tried seriously 1 " suggested the painter. 
 *' I 've an idea that if the Americans ever gave their 
 minds to that sort of thing, they could take the 
 palm or the cake, as Beaton here would say just 
 as they do in everything else. When we do have 
 an aristocracy, it will be an .aristocracy that will go 
 ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why 
 don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly 
 for an ancestry, and a lower middle class, and an 
 hereditary legislature, and all the rest ? We Ve got 
 liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. 
 We 're all right as far as we Ve gone, and we Ve got 
 the money to go any length." 
 
 " Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the 
 girl, with a smiling glance round at him. 
 
 " Ah ! " said Wetmore, stirring his tea, " has 
 Beaton got a natural-gas man 1 " 
 
 "My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 325 
 
 Wetmore's question, " doesn't know how to live in, 
 his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste feeling. 
 I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. 
 They say one of the young ladies does that she 
 never saw such an unsociable place as New York ; 
 nobody calls." 
 
 " That 's good ! " said Wetmore. " I suppose 
 they 're all ready for company too : good cook, furni- 
 ture, servants, carriages 1 " 
 
 " Galore," said Beaton. 
 
 " Well, that 's too bad. There 's a chance for you, 
 Miss Vance. Doesn't your philanthropy embrace the 
 socially destitute as well as the financially ? Just 
 think of a family like that, without a friend, in a 
 great city ! I should think common charity had a 
 duty there not to mention the uncommon." 
 
 He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a 
 glance of ironical deference. She had a repute for 
 good works which was out of proportion io the 
 works, as it always is, but she was really active in 
 that way, under the vague obligation, which we now 
 all feel, to be helpful. She was of the church which 
 seems to have found a reversion to the imposing 
 ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of 
 Christian brotherhood. 
 
 "Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton," Margaret 
 answered, and Beaton felt obscurely nattered by her 
 reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses. 
 
 He explained to Wetmore, " They have me because 
 they partly own me. Dryf oos is Fulkerson's financial 
 backer in Every Other Week."
 
 326 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Is that so ? "Well, that 's interesting too. Aren't 
 you rather astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a 
 pretty thing Beaton is making of that magazine of 
 his?" 
 
 " Oh," said Margaret, " it 's so very nice, every 
 way ; it makes you feel as if you did have a country, 
 after all. It 's as chic that detestable little word ! 
 as those new French books." 
 
 " Beaton modelled it on them. But you mustn't 
 suppose he does everything about Every Other Week ; 
 he 'd like you to. Beaton, you haven't come up to 
 that cover of your first number, since. That was the 
 design of one of my pupils, Miss Vance a little girl 
 that Beaton discovered down in New Hampshire last 
 summer." 
 
 " Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her, Mr. 
 Wetmore 1 " 
 
 " She seems to have more love of it and knack for 
 it than any one of her sex I Ve seen yet. It really 
 looks like a case of art for art's sake, at times. But 
 you can't tell. They 're liable to get married at any 
 moment, you know. Look here, Beaton, when your 
 natural-gas man gets to the picture-buying stage in 
 his development, just remember your old friends, 
 will you 1 You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows 
 have their regular stages. They never know what 
 to do with their money, but they find out that 
 people buy pictures, at one point. They shut your 
 things up in their houses where nobody comes ; and 
 after a while they overeat themselves they don't 
 know what else to do and die of apoplexy, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 327 
 
 leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see 
 the light. It 's slow, but it 's pretty sure. Well, I 
 see Beaton isn't going to move on, as he ought to do ; 
 and so I must. He always ^tas an unconventional 
 creature." 
 
 Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and 
 he outstayed several other people who came up to 
 speak to Miss Vance. She was interested in every- 
 body, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, 
 artistic, clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked 
 the sort of court with which they recognised her 
 fashion as well as her cleverness ; it was very 
 pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were 
 one of themselves, and socially as if she was not 
 habitually the same, but a sort of guest in Bohemia, 
 a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather 
 than Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distin- 
 guished stranger. The flattery of it touched her 
 fancy, and not her vanity ; she had very little vanity. 
 Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal ; it 
 was not so much that she liked him as she liked 
 being the object of his admiration. She was a girl 
 of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than 
 sentimental. In fact she was an intellectual person, 
 whom qualities of the heart saved from being dis- 
 agreeable, as they saved her on the other hand from 
 being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness. She 
 had read a great many books, and had ideas about 
 them, quite courageous and original ideas ; she knew 
 about pictures she had been in Wetmore 's class; 
 she was fond of music; she was willing to under-
 
 328 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 stand even politics ; in Boston she might have been 
 agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious; 
 she was very accomplished, and perhaps it was her 
 goodness that prevented her feeling what was not 
 best in Beaton. 
 
 " Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one 
 of the comers and goers left her alone with him 
 again, " that those young ladies would like me to 
 call on them 1 " 
 
 " Those young ladies ? " Beaton echoed. " Miss 
 Leigh ton and " 
 
 t{ No ; I have been there with my aunt's cards 
 already." 
 
 "Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; 
 he admired the pluck and pride with which Alma 
 had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him, 
 and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which 
 must have been difficult. 
 
 " I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really 
 barbarous, if nobody goes near them. We do all 
 kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in some 
 ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless 
 they know how to make their way among us." 
 
 " The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to 
 make their way among you," said Beaton, with a 
 sort of dreamy absence in his tone. 
 
 Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of 
 reasoning in her mind, rather than any conclusions 
 she had reached. "We defend ourselves by trying 
 to believe that they must have friends of their own, 
 or that they would think us patronising, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 329 
 
 wouldn't like being made the objects of social 
 charity ; but they needn't really suppose anything of 
 the kind." 
 
 "I don't imagine they would," said Beaton. "I 
 think they 'd be only too happy to have you come. 
 But you wouldn't know what to do with each other, 
 indeed, Miss Vance." 
 
 " Perhaps we shall like each other," said the girl 
 "bravely, " and then we shall know. What church 
 are they of ? " 
 
 " I don't believe they 're of any," said Beaton. 
 u The mother was brought up a Dunkard." 
 
 " A Dunkard ? " 
 
 Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, 
 with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation 
 of Christ's ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot- 
 washing; he made something picturesque of that. 
 "The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and 
 simple. I suppose the young ladies go to church, 
 but I don't know where. They haven't tried to con- 
 vert me." 
 
 " I '11 tell them not to despair after I 've con- 
 verted them" said Miss Vance. "Will you let me 
 use you as a point d'appui, Mr. Beaton ? " 
 
 " Any way you like. If you 're really going to see 
 them, perhaps I 'd better make a confession. I left 
 your banjo with them, after I got it put in order." 
 
 " How very nice ! Then we have a common in- 
 terest already." 
 
 "Do you mean the banjo, or 1 " 
 
 " The banjo, decidedly. Which of them plays 1 "
 
 330 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Neither. But the eldest heard that the banjo 
 was ' all the rage,' as the youngest says. Perhaps you 
 can persuade them that good works are the rage too." 
 
 Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret 
 would go to see the Dryfooses ; he did so few of the 
 things he proposed that he went upon the theory 
 that others must be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel 
 amusement in figuring the possible encounter between 
 Margaret Vance, with her intellectual elegance, her 
 eager sympathies and generous ideals, and those 
 girls with their rude past, their false and distorted 
 perspective, their sordid and hungry selfishness, and 
 their faith in the omnipotence of their father's 
 wealth wounded by their experience of its present 
 social impotence. At the bottom of his heart he 
 sympathised with them rather than with her ; he 
 was more like them. 
 
 People had ceased coming, and some of them were 
 going. Miss Vance said she must go too, and she 
 was about to rise, when the host came up with 
 March ; Beaton turned away. 
 
 " Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the 
 editor of Every Other Week. You oughtn't to be 
 restricted to the art department. We literary fellows 
 think that arm of the service gets too much of the 
 glory nowadays." His banter was for Beaton, but 
 he was already beyond ear-shot, and the host went 
 on : " Mr. March can talk with you about your 
 favourite Boston. He 's just turned his back on it." 
 
 "Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance. "I can't 
 imagine anybody voluntarily leaving Boston."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 331 
 
 "I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, 
 committing March to her. " He came to New York 
 because he couldn't help it like the rest of us. I 
 never know whether that's a compliment to New 
 York or not." 
 
 They talked Boston a little while, without finding 
 that they had common acquaintance there ; Miss 
 Vance must have concluded that society was much 
 larger in Boston than she had supposed from her 
 visits there, or else that March did not know many 
 people in it. But she was not a girl to care much 
 for the inferences that might be drawn from such 
 conclusions ; she rather prided herself upon despising 
 them ; and she gave herself to the pleasure of being 
 talked to as if she were of March's own age. In the 
 glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he 
 talked his best, and tried to amuse her with his jokes, 
 which he had 'the art of tingeing with a little serious- 
 ness on one side. He made her laugh; and he flat- 
 tered her by making her think ; in her turn she 
 charmed him so much by enjoying what he said that 
 he began to brag of his wife, as a good husband 
 always does when another woman charms him ; and 
 she asked, Oh, was Mrs. March there ; and would he 
 introduce her ? 
 
 She asked Mrs. March for her address, and 
 whether she had a day; and she said she would 
 come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March 
 could not be so enthusiastic about her as March 
 was, but as they walked home together they talked 
 the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and
 
 332 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 her amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very 
 unspoiled for a person who must have been so much 
 spoiled. They tried to analyse her charm, and they 
 succeeded in formulating it as a combination of 
 intellectual fashionableness and worldly innocence. 
 " I think," said Mrs. March, " that city girls, brought 
 up as she must have been, are often the most 
 innocent of all. They never imagine the wickedness 
 of the world, and if they marry happily they go 
 through life as innocent as children. Everything 
 combines to keep them so ; the very hollowness of 
 society shields them. They are the loveliest of the 
 human race. But perhaps the rest have to pay too 
 much for them." 
 
 " For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," 
 said March, "we couldn't pay too much." 
 
 A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air 
 at the street- crossing in front of them. A girl's 
 voice called out, " Run, run, Jen ! The copper is 
 after you." A woman's figure rushed stumbling 
 across the way and into the shadow of the houses, 
 pursued by a burly policeman. 
 
 " Ah, but if that 's part of the price ? " 
 
 They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their 
 talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh. 
 " Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we left 
 yonder really belong to the same system of things ? 
 How impossible each makes the other seem ! " 
 
 END OF VOL. I.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES 
 
 VOL. IL
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 PART THIRD. 
 
 VI. 
 
 MRS. HORN believed in the world and in society 
 and its unwritten constitution devoutly, and she 
 tolerated her niece's benevolent activities as she toler- 
 ated her aesthetic sympathies because these things, 
 however oddly, were tolerated even encouraged by 
 society; and they gave Margaret a charm. They 
 made her originality interesting. Mrs. Horn did 
 not intend that they should ever go so far as to 
 make her troublesome ; and it was with a sense of 
 this abeyant authority of her aunt's that the girl 
 asked her approval of her proposed call upon the 
 Dryfooses. She explained as well as she could the 
 social destitution of these opulent people, and she 
 had of course to name Beaton as the source of her 
 knowledge concerning them. 
 
 "Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them ?" 
 
 " No ; he rather discouraged it." 
 
 " And why do you think you ought to go in this 
 VOL. II. 1
 
 2 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 particular instance ? New York is full of people 
 who don't know anybody." 
 
 Margaret laughed. " I suppose it 's like any 
 other charity : you reach the cases you know of. 
 The others you say you can't help, and you try to 
 ignore them." 
 
 " It 's very romantic," said Mrs. Horn. " I hope 
 you've counted the cost; all the possible conse- 
 quences." 
 
 Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their 
 common experience with the Leightons, whom, to 
 give their common conscience peace, she had called 
 upon with her aunt's cards and excuses, and an 
 invitation for her Thursdays, somewhat too late to 
 make the visit seem a welcome to New York. She 
 was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in 
 her quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all 
 the comfort which vicarious penance brings. She 
 did not perhaps consider sufficiently her niece's 
 guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not 
 with her at St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she 
 passed there, and never saw the Leightons till she 
 went to call upon them. She never complained : 
 the strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in 
 us all, and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in 
 our shoes, gave her patience with the snub which 
 the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now 
 she said with this in mind, " Nothing seems simpler 
 than to get rid of people if you don't want them. 
 You merely have to let them alone." 
 
 'It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said 
 Mrs. Horn.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 6 
 
 " Or having them let you alone," said Margaret ; 
 for neither Mrs. Leighton nor Alma had ever come 
 to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's 
 Thursdays. 
 
 "Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn 
 courageously consented. "And all that I ask you, 
 Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to know 
 these people." 
 
 " I don't," said the girl seriously, " in the usual 
 way." 
 
 "Then the question is whether you do in the 
 unusual way. They will build a great deal upon 
 you," said Mrs. Horn, realising how much the 
 Leightons must have built upon her, and how much 
 out of proportion to her desert they must now dis- 
 like her ; for she seemed to have had them on her 
 mind from the time they came, and had always 
 meant to recognise any reasonable claim they had 
 upon her. 
 
 " It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, 
 " that you never can act unselfishly in society affairs. 
 If I wished to go and see those girls just to do them 
 a pleasure, and perhaps because if they 're strange 
 and lonely, I might do them good, even it would 
 be impossible." 
 
 " Quite," said her aunt. " Such a thing would be 
 Quixotic. Society doesn't rest upon any such basis. 
 It can't ; it would go to pieces, if people acted from 
 unselfish motives." 
 
 " Then it 's a painted savage ! " said the girl. 
 " All its favours are really bargains. Its gifts are 
 for gifts back again."
 
 4 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no 
 more sense of wrong in the fact than the political 
 economist has in the fact that wages are the measure 
 of necessity and not of merit. ' You get what you 
 pay for. It's a matter of business." She satisfied 
 herself with this formula, which she did not invent, 
 as fully as if it were a reason ; but she did not dis- 
 like her niece's revolt against it. That was part of 
 Margaret's originality, which pleased her aunt in pro- 
 portion to her own conventionality ; she was really 
 a timid person, and she liked the show of courage 
 which Margaret's magnanimity often reflected upon 
 her. She had through her a repute, with people who 
 did not know her well, for intellectual and moral 
 qualities ; she was supposed to be literary and charit- 
 able ; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really 
 fell short of their possession. She thought that she 
 set bounds to the girl's originality because she recog- 
 nised them. Margaret understood this better than 
 her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her 
 about going to see the Dryfooses out of deference, 
 and with no expectation of luminous instruction. 
 She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew 
 what she might and might not do, so that she was 
 rather a by-law. She was the kind of girl that might 
 have fancies for artists and poets, but might end by 
 marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast 
 lump of moneyed and fashionable life with her cul- 
 ture, generosity, and good-will. The intellectual 
 interests were first with her, but she might be equal 
 to sacrificing them ; she had the best heart, but she
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 5 
 
 might know how to harden it ; if she was eccentric, 
 her social orbit was defined ; comets themselves 
 traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every 
 one else, a congei'ies of contradictions and inconsist- 
 encies, but obedient to the general expectation of 
 what a girl of her position must and must not finally 
 be. Provisionally, she was very much what she 
 liked to be. 
 
 Z
 
 VII. 
 
 MARGARET VANCE tried to give herself some reason 
 for going to call upon the Dryfooses, but she could 
 find none better than the wish to do a kind thing. 
 This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she 
 examined it, and she even admitted a little curiosity 
 as a harmless element in her motive, without being 
 very well satisfied with it. She tried to add a slight 
 sense of social duty, and then she decided to have 
 no motive at all, but simply to pay her visit as she 
 would to any other eligible strangers she saw fit to 
 call upon. She perceived that she must be very 
 careful not to let them see that any other impulse 
 had governed her ; she determined, if possible, to let 
 them patronise her ; to be very modest and sincere 
 and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. 
 This was easy, compared with the choice of a man- 
 ner that should convey to them the fact that she 
 was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish 
 serving-man had acknowledged that the ladies were 
 at home, and had taken her card to them, she sat 
 waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her study 
 of its appointments, with their impersonal costliness, 
 gave her no suggestion how to proceed; the two
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. T 
 
 sisters were upon her before she had really decided, 
 and she rose to meet them with the conviction that 
 she was going to play a part for want of some chosen 
 means of not doing so. She found herself, before 
 she knew it, making her banjo a property in the 
 little comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the 
 fact that Miss Dryfoos was taking it up ; she had 
 herself been so much interested by it. Anything, 
 she said, was a relief from the piano ; and then, 
 between the guitar and the banjo, one must really 
 choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote one's 
 whole natural life to the violin. Of course, there 
 was the mandolin ; but Margaret asked if they did 
 not feel that the bit of shell you struck it with inter- 
 posed a distance between you and the real soul of 
 the instrument ; and then it did have such a faint, 
 mosquitoy little tone ! She made much of the ques- 
 tion, which they left her to debate alone while they 
 gazed solemnly at her till she characterised the tone 
 of the mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, 
 coarse laugh. 
 
 "Well, that's just what it does sound like," she 
 explained defiantly to her sister. "I always feel 
 like it was going to settle somewhere, and I want to 
 hit myself a slap before it begins to bite. I don't 
 see what ever brought such a thing into fashion." 
 
 Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully 
 seconded, and she asked, after gathering herself to- 
 gether, " And you are both learning the banjo ? " 
 
 " My, no ! " said Mela, " I Ve gone through enough 
 with the piano. Christine is learning it."
 
 8 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " I 'm so glad you are making my banjo useful at 
 the outset, Miss Dryfoos." Both girls stared at her, 
 but found it hard to cope with the fact that this was 
 the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them. 
 "Mr. Beaton mentioned that he had left it here. 
 I hope you '11 keep it as long as you find it useful." 
 
 At this amiable speech even Christine could not 
 help thanking her. " Of course," she said, " I expect 
 to get another, right off. Mr. Beaton is going to 
 choose it for me." 
 
 "You are very fortunate. If you haven't a 
 teacher yet I should so like to recommend mine." 
 
 Mela broke out in her laugh again. " Oh, I guess 
 Christine's pretty well suited with the one she's 
 got," she said, with insinuation. Her sister gave her 
 a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her 
 to explain. 
 
 " Then that 's much better," she said. " I have a 
 kind of superstition in such matters ; I don't like to 
 make a second choice. In a shop I like to take the 
 first thing of the kind I 'm looking for, and even if I 
 choose further I come back to the original." 
 
 " How funny ! " said Mela. " Well, now, I 'm just 
 the other way. I always take the last thing, after 
 I 've picked over all the rest. My luck always seems 
 to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, 
 she 's more like you. I believe she could walk right 
 up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing she 
 wants every time." 
 
 " I 'm like father," said Christine, softened a little 
 by the celebration of her peculiarity. " He says the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 9 
 
 reason so many people don't get what they want is 
 that they don't want it bad enough. Now, when I 
 want a thing, it seems to me that I want it all 
 through." 
 
 "Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela. 
 " That 's the way he done when he got that eighty- 
 acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he sold 
 the farm, and that 's got some of the best gas wells on 
 it now that there is anywhere." She addressed the 
 explanation to her sister, to the exclusion of Mar- 
 garet, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face 
 and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the 
 conversation. Mela rewarded her amiability by say- 
 ing to her finally, " You never been in the natural- 
 gas country, have you ? " 
 
 " Oh no ! And I should so much like to see 
 it ! " said Margaret, with a fervour that was partly 
 voluntary. 
 
 " Would you 1 Well, we 're kind of sick of it, but 
 I suppose it would strike a stranger." 
 
 "/never got tired of looking at the big wells when 
 they lit them up," said Christine. " It seems as if 
 the world was on fire." 
 
 " Yes, and when you see the surface-gas ournun' 
 down in the woods, like it used to by our spring- 
 house so still, and never spreadun' any, just like a 
 bed of some kind of wild-flowers when you ketch 
 sight of it a piece off." 
 
 They began to tell of the wonders of their strange 
 land in an antiphony of reminiscences and descrip- 
 tions ; they unconsciously imputed a merit to them- 
 1*
 
 10 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 selves from the number and violence of the wells on 
 their father's property ; they bragged of the high 
 civilisation of Moffitt, which they compared to its 
 advantage with that of New York. They became 
 excited by Margaret's interest in natural gas, and 
 forgot to be suspicious and envious. 
 
 She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should 
 like to see it all ! " Then she made a little pause 
 and added, " I 'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are 
 over ; she never has them after Lent, but we 're to 
 have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert 
 which a musical friend is going to give with some 
 other artists. There won't be any banjos, I 'm 
 afraid, but there '11 be some very good singing, and 
 my aunt would be so glad if you could come with 
 your mother." 
 
 She put down her aunt's card on the table near 
 her, while Mela gurgled, as if it were the best joke, 
 " Oh, my ! Mother never goes anywhere ; you 
 couldn't get her out for love or money." But she 
 was herself overwhelmed with a simple joy at Mar- 
 garet's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous way, 
 like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came 
 closer to Margaret and seemed about to fawn physi- 
 cally upon her. 
 
 " Ain't she just as lovely as she can live ? " 
 she demanded of her sister when Margaret was 
 gone. 
 
 "I don't know," said Christine. "I guess she 
 wanted to know who Mr. Beaton had been lending 
 her banjo to." <
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 11 
 
 " Pshaw ! Do you suppose she 's in love with 
 him 1 " asked Mela, and then she broke into her 
 hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. " Well, 
 don't eat me, Christine ! I wonder who she is, any- 
 way 1 I'm. goun' to git it out of Mr. Beaton the 
 next time he calls. I guess she 's somebody. Mrs. 
 Mandel can tell. I wish that old friend of hers 
 would hurry up and git well or something. But I 
 guess we appeared about as well as she did. I could 
 see she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it 's 
 gittun' around a little about father; and when it 
 does I don't believe we shall want for callers. Say, 
 are you goun' 1 To that concert of theirs ? " 
 
 "I don't know. Not till I know who they are 
 first." 
 
 " Well, we Ve got to hump ourselves if we 're 
 goun' to find out before Tuesday." 
 
 As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her 
 that most incredible of the miracles, which, neverthe- 
 less, any one may make his experience. She felt 
 kindly to these girls because she had tried to make 
 , them happy, and she hoped that in the interest she 
 had shown there had been none of the poison of 
 flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she 
 ran in such an attempt to do good. If she had 
 escaped this effect she was willing to leave the rest 
 with Providence.
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's tradi- 
 tions would naturally form of girls like Christine and 
 Mela Dryfoos would be that they were abashed in 
 the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and 
 that they must receive the advance she had made 
 them with a certain grateful humility. However 
 they received it, she had made it upon principle, 
 from a romantic conception of duty ; but this was 
 the way she imagined they would receive it, because 
 she thought that she would have done so if she had 
 been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was 
 in arguing their attitude from her own temperament, 
 and endowing them, for the purposes of argument, 
 with her perspective. They had not the means, intel- 
 lectual or moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had 
 remained at home on the farm where they were born, 
 Christine would have groAvn up that embodiment of 
 impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the 
 narrowest spheres, and Mela would always have been 
 a good-natured simpleton ; but they would never 
 have doubted their equality with the wisest and the 
 finest. As it was, they had not learned enough at 
 school to doubt it, and the splendour of their father's
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 13 
 
 success in making money had blinded them for ever 
 to any possible difference against them. They had 
 no question of themselves in the social abeyance to 
 which they had been left in New York. They had 
 been surprised, mystified; it was not what they 
 had expected ; there must be some mistake. They 
 were the victims of an accident, which would be re- 
 paired as soon as the fact of their father's wealth had 
 got around. They had been steadfast in their faith, 
 through all their disappointment, that they were not 
 only better than most people by virtue of his money, 
 but as good as any ; and they took Margaret's visit, 
 so far as they investigated its motive, for a sign that 
 at last it was beginning to get around ; of course, a 
 thing could not get around in New York so quick as 
 it could in a small place. They were confirmed in 
 their belief by the sensation of Mrs. Mandel when 
 she returned to duty that afternoon, and they con- 
 sulted her about going to Mrs. Horn's musicale. If 
 she had felt any doubt at the name for there were 
 Horns and Horns the address on the card put the 
 matter beyond question ; and she tried to make her 
 charges understand what a precious chance had be- 
 fallen them. She did not succeed ; they had not the 
 premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression ; 
 and she undid her work in part by the effort to 
 explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was independent 
 of money ; that though she was positively rich, she 
 was comparatively poor. Christine inferred that 
 Miss Vance had called because she wished to be the 
 first to get in with them since it had begun to get
 
 14 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 around. This view commended itself to Mela too, 
 but without warping her from her opinion that Miss 
 Vance was all the same too sweet for anything. She 
 had not so vivid a consciousness of her father's 
 money as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps 
 all the more confidently upon its power. She was 
 far from thinking meanly of any one who thought 
 highly of her for it ; that seemed so natural a result 
 as to be amiable, even admirable; she was willing 
 that any such person should get all the good there 
 was in such an attitude toward her. 
 
 They discussed the matter that night at dinner 
 before their father and mother, who mostly sat silent 
 at their meals; the father frowning absently over 
 his plate, with his head close to it, and making play 
 into his mouth with the back of his knife (he had 
 got so far toward the use of his fork as to despise 
 those who still ate from the edge of their knives), 
 and the mother partly missing hers at times in the 
 nervous tremor that shook her face from side to side. 
 
 After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble 
 and of Christine's high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of 
 assertion and denial in the field which her sister's 
 voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old 
 man's consciousness, and he perceived that they were 
 talking with Mrs. Mandel about it, and that his wife 
 was from time to time offering an irrelevant and 
 mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and 
 silently took her view of the affair some time before 
 he made any sign of having listened. There had 
 been a time in his life when other things besides his
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 15 
 
 money seemed admirable to him. He had once 
 respected himself for the hard-headed, practical 
 common-sense which first gave him standing among 
 his country neighbours ; which made him supervisor, 
 school trustee, justice of the peace, county commis- 
 sioner, secretary of the Moffitt County Agricultural 
 Society. In those days he had served the public 
 with disinterested zeal and proud ability ; he used 
 to write to the Lake Shore Farmer on agricultural 
 topics ; he took part in opposing, through the 
 Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's 
 money ; on the question of selling a local canal to 
 the railroad company, which killed that fine old State 
 work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he 
 might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented 
 himself with defeating the Moffitt member who had 
 voted for the job. If he opposed some measures for 
 the general good, like high-schools and school 
 libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his 
 intense individualism, and suspected all expense of 
 being spendthrift. He believed in good district 
 schools, and he had a fondness, crude but genuine, 
 for some kinds of reading history, and forensics of 
 an elementary sort. 
 
 With his good head for figures he doubted doctors 
 and despised preachers ; he thought lawyers were all 
 rascals, but he respected them for their ability ; he 
 was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intel- 
 lectual encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often 
 attended a sitting of the fall term of court, when 
 he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
 
 16 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good hus- 
 band. As a good father, he was rather severe with 
 his children, and used to whip them, especially the 
 gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till 
 the twins died. After that he never struck any of 
 them ; and from the sight of a blow dealt a horse he 
 turned as if sick. It was a long time before he 
 lifted himself up from his sorrow, and then the will 
 of the man seemed to have been breached through his 
 affections. He let the girls do as they pleased the 
 twins had been girls ; he let them go away to school, 
 and got them a piano. It was they who made him 
 sell the farm. If Conrad had only had their spirit 
 he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he 
 resented the want of support he might have found in 
 a less yielding spirit than his son's. 
 
 His moral decay began with his perception of the 
 opportunity of making money quickly and abun- 
 dantly, which offered itself to him after he sold hi& 
 farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in 
 which he tasted the last bitter of homesickness, the 
 utter misery of idleness and listlessness. When he 
 broke down and cried for the hard-working, whole- 
 some life he had lost, he was near the end of this 
 season of despair, but he was also near the end of 
 what was best in himself. He devolved upon a 
 meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizen- 
 ship, which had been his chief moral experience : the 
 money he had already made without effort and 
 without merit bred its unholy self-love in him; he 
 began to honour money, especially money that had
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 17 
 
 "been Avon suddenly and in large sums ; for money 
 that had been earned, painfully, slowly, and in little 
 amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The 
 poison of that ambition to go somewhere and be 
 somebody which the local speculators had instilled 
 Into him began to work in the vanity which had 
 succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect ; he re- 
 jected Europe as the proper field for his expansion ; 
 lie rejected Washington ; he preferred New York, 
 whither the men who have made money and do not 
 yet know that money has made them, all instinctively 
 turn. He came where he could watch his money 
 "breed more money, and bring greater increase of its 
 kind in an hour of luck than the toil of hundreds of 
 men could earn in a year. He called it speculation, 
 stocks, the street ; and his pride, his faith in himself, 
 mounted with his luck. He expected, when he had 
 sated his greed, to begin to spend, and he had formu- 
 lated an intention to build a great house, to add 
 another to the palaces of the country-bred million- 
 aires who have come to adorn the great city. In the 
 meantime he made little account of the things that 
 occupied his children, except to fret at the ungrateful 
 indifference of his son to the interests that could alone 
 make a man of him. He did not know whether his 
 daughters were in society or not ; with people coming 
 and going in the house he would have supposed they 
 must be so, no matter who the people were ; in some 
 vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs. 
 Mandel, at so much a year. He never met a superior 
 himself, except now and then a man of twenty or
 
 18 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 thirty millions to his one or two, and then he felt 
 his soul creep within him, without a sense of social 
 inferiority ; it was a question of financial inferiority ; 
 and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself and crawled, 
 it was with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck. 
 Other men said these many-millioned millionaires 
 were smart, and got their money by sharp practices 
 to which lesser men could not attain ; but Dryfoos 
 believed that he could compass the same ends, by the 
 same means, with the same chances ; he respected 
 their money, not them. 
 
 When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters 
 talking of that person, whoever she was, that Mrs. 
 Mandel seemed to think had honoured his girls by 
 coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as 
 much as his pride was galled. 
 
 " Well, anyway," said Mela, " I don't care whether 
 Christine's goun' or not ; / am. And you got to go 
 with me, Mrs. Mandel." 
 
 "Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. 
 Mandel, with her unfailing dignity and politeness. 
 " I haven't been asked, you know." 
 
 " Then what are we goun' to do 1 " demanded 
 Mela, almost crossly. She was physically too amiable, 
 she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite cross. 
 "She might 'a' knowed well known we couldn't 
 'a' come alone, in New York. I don't see why we 
 couldn't. I don't call it much of an invitation." 
 " I suppose she thought you could come with your 
 mother," Mrs. Mandel suggested. 
 
 " She didn't say anything about mother. Did she,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 19 
 
 Christine 1 Or, yes, she did, too. And I told her 
 she couldn't git mother out. Don't you remember?" 
 
 " I didn't pay much attention," said Christine. "I 
 wasn't certain we wanted to go." 
 
 " I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we 
 cared much," said Mela, half reproachful, half proud 
 of this attitude of Christine. " Well, I don't see but 
 what we got to stay at home." She laughed at this 
 lame conclusion of the matter. 
 
 " Perhaps Mr. Conrad you could very properly 
 
 take him without an express invitation " Mrs. 
 
 Mandel began. 
 
 Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. "I I 
 don't think I could go that evening " 
 
 "What's the reason?" his father broke in harshly. 
 "You 're not such a sheep that you 're afraid to go 
 into company with your sisters ? Or are you too 
 good to go with them ? " 
 
 " If it 's to be anything like that night when them 
 hussies come out and danced that way," said Mrs. 
 Dryfoos, " I don't blame Coonrod for not wantun* to 
 go. I never saw the beat of it." 
 
 Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her 
 mother. "Well, I wish Miss Vance could V heard 
 that ! Why, mother, did you think it was like the 
 ballet ? " 
 
 " Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old 
 woman. " I didn't know what it was like. I hain't 
 never been to one, and you can't be too keerf ul where 
 you go, in a place like New York" 
 
 " What 's the reason you can't go ? " Dryfoos
 
 20 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ignored the passage between his wife and daughter in 
 making this demand of his son, with a sour face. 
 
 " I have an engagement that night it 's one of 
 our meetings " 
 
 " I reckon you can let your meeting go for one 
 night," said Dryf oos. " It can't be so important as 
 all that, that you must disappoint your sisters." 
 
 "I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures. 
 They depend so much upon the meetings " 
 
 " I reckon they can stand it for one night," said 
 the old man. He added, " The poor ye have with 
 you always." 
 
 " That 's so, Coonrod," said his mother. "It 's the 
 Saviour's own words." 
 
 " Yes, mother. But they 're not meant just as 
 father used them." 
 
 " How do you know how they were meant 1 Or 
 how I used them ? " cried the father. " Now you 
 just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday 
 night. They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't 
 go with them." 
 
 " Pshaw ! " said Mela. " We don't want to take 
 Conrad away from his meetun', do we, Chris 1 " 
 
 " I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine 
 voice. " They could get along without him for one 
 night, as father says." 
 
 " Well, I 'm not agoun' to take him," said Mela, 
 " Now, Mrs. Mandel, just think out some other way. 
 Say ! What 's the reason we couldn't get somebody 
 else to take us just as well ? Ain't that rulable ?" 
 
 " It would be allowable "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 21 
 
 " Allowable, I mean" Mela corrected herself. 
 
 "But it might look a little significant, unless it 
 was some old family friend." 
 
 " Well, let 's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us. He 's 
 the oldest family friend we got." 
 
 " I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine 
 serenely. 
 
 " Why, I 'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, 
 " Mr. Fulkerson is a very good young man, and very 
 nice appearun'." 
 
 Mela shouted, " He 's ten times as pleasant as that 
 old Mr. Beaton of Christine's ! " 
 
 Christine made no effort to break the constraint 
 that fell upon the table at this sally, but her father 
 said, " Christine is right, Mela. It wouldn't do for 
 you to go with any other young man. Conrad will 
 go with you." 
 
 " I 'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Chris- 
 tine. 
 
 " Well, settle that among yourselves. But if you 
 want to go, your brother will go with you." 
 
 " Of course, Coonrod '11 go, if his sisters wants 
 him to," the old woman pleaded. " I reckon it ain't 
 agoun' to be anything very bad ; and if it is, Coon- 
 rod, why you can just git right up and come out." 
 
 " It will be all right, mother. And I will go, of 
 course." 
 
 "There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod. 
 Now, fawther ! " This appeal was to make the old 
 man say something in recognition of Conrad's sacri- 
 fice. 
 
 2A
 
 22 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " You '11 always find," he said, " that it 's those of 
 your own household that have the first claim on 
 you." 
 
 " That 's so, Coonrod", urged his mother. " It 's 
 Bible truth. Your fawther ain't a perfesser, but he 
 always read his Bible. Search the Scriptures. 
 That 's what it means." 
 
 " Laws !" cried Mely, " a body can see, easy 
 enough from mother, where Conrad's wantun' to be 
 a preacher comes from. I should V thought she 'd 
 'a' wanted to been one herself." 
 
 " Let your women keep silence in the churches," 
 said the old woman solemnly. 
 
 " There you go again, mother ! I guess if you 
 was to say that to some of the lady ministers nowa- 
 days, you 'd git yourself into trouble." Mela looked 
 round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.
 
 IX. 
 
 THE Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale 
 in spite of Mrs. Mandel's advice. Christine made 
 the delay, both because she wished to show Miss 
 Vance that she was not anxious, and because she 
 had some vague notion of the distinction of arriving 
 late at any sort of entertainment. Mrs. Mandel 
 insisted upon the difference between this musicale 
 and an ordinary reception ; but Christine rather 
 fancied disturbing a company that had got seated, 
 and perhaps making people rise and stand, while 
 she found her way to her place, as she had seen 
 them do for a tardy comer at the theatre. 
 
 Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or 
 feelings always, followed her with the servile 
 admiration she had for all that Christine did ; and 
 she took on trust as somehow successful the result 
 of Christine's obstinacy, when they were allowed 
 to stand against the wall at the back of the room 
 through the whole of the long piece begun just 
 before they came in. There had been no one to 
 receive them ; a few people, in the rear rows of 
 chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at 
 them, and then looked away again. Mela had her
 
 24 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 misgivings ; but at the end of the piece Miss Vance 
 came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that 
 she had her eyes on them all the time, and that 
 Christine must have been right. Christine said 
 nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did 
 not make any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to 
 expect none. She glanced with a sort of surprise at 
 Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did 
 not know whether she liked their bringing him, till 
 she shook hands with him, and said, " Oh, I am 
 very glad indeed ! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met) 
 before." Without explaining where or when, she 
 led them to her aunt and presented them, and then 
 said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of 
 yours," and quickly seated them next the Marches. 
 Mela liked that well enough; she thought she 
 might have some joking with Mr. March, for all his 
 wife was so stiff; but the look which Christine 
 wore seemed to forbid, provisionally at least, any 
 such recreation. On her part, Christine was cool 
 with the Marches. It went through her mind that 
 they must have told Miss Vance they knew her; 
 and perhaps they had boasted of her intimacy. 
 She relaxed a little toward them when she saw 
 Beaton leaning against the wall at the end of the 
 row next Mrs. March. Then she conjectured that 
 he might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance 
 with the Marches, and she bent forward and nodded 
 to Mrs. March across Conrad, Mela, and Mr. March. 
 She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her 
 father's, but she was willing to take them at their
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 25 
 
 apparent social valuation for the time. She leaned 
 back in her chair, and did not look up at Beaton 
 after the first furtive glance, though she felt his 
 eyes on her. 
 
 The music began again almost at once, before 
 Mela had time to make Conrad tell her where Miss 
 Vance had met him before. She would not have 
 minded interrupting the music ; but every one else 
 seemed so attentive, even Christine that she had 
 not the courage. 
 
 The concert went on to an end without realising 
 for. her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to 
 find in society. She was not exacting, but it seemed 
 to her there were very few young men, and when 
 the music was over, and their opportunity came to 
 be sociable, they were not very sociable. They 
 were not introduced, for one thing ; but it appeared 
 to Mela that they might have got introduced, if 
 they had any sense ; she saw them looking at her, 
 and she was glad she had dressed so much ; she was 
 dressed more than any other lady there, and either 
 because she was the most dressed of any person 
 there, or because it had got around who her father 
 was, she felt that she had made an impression on the 
 young men. In her satisfaction with this, and from 
 her good nature, she was contented to be served 
 with her refreshments after the concert by Mr. 
 March, and to remain joking with him. She was at 
 her ease ; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest 
 laugh ; she accused him, to the admiration of those 
 near, of getting her into a perfect gale. It appeared 
 VOL. II. 2
 
 26 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate 
 to the rather subdued people about her what a good 
 time really was, so that they could have it if they 
 wanted it. Her joy was crowned when March 
 modestly professed himself unworthy to monopolise 
 her, and explained how selfish he felt in talking to a 
 young lady when there were so many young men 
 dying to do so. 
 
 " Oh, pshaw dyun', yes ! " cried Mela, tasting the 
 irony. " I guess I see them ! " 
 
 He asked if he might really introduce a friend 
 of his to her, and she said, Well, yes, if he thought 
 he could live to get to her ; and March brought up 
 a man whom he thought very young and Mela 
 thought very old. He was a contributor to Every 
 Other Week, and so March knew him ; he believed 
 himself a student of human nature in behalf of 
 literature, and he now set about studying Mela. 
 He tempted her to express her opinion on all points, 
 and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and 
 humorous vigour of her ideas that she was delighted 
 with him. She asked him if he was a New-Yorker 
 by birth ; and she told him she pitied him, when he 
 said he had never been West. She professed her- 
 self perfectly sick of New York, and urged him to 
 go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a real live town. 
 He wondered if it would do to put her into literature 
 just as she was, with all her slang and brag, but he 
 decided that he would have to subdue her a great 
 deal : he did not see how he could reconcile the facts 
 of her conversation with the facts of her appearance :
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 27 
 
 her beauty, her splendour of dress, her apparent 
 right to be where she was. These things perplexed 
 him; he was afraid the great American novel, if 
 true, must be incredible. Mela said he ought to 
 hear her sister go on about New York when they 
 first came ; but she reckoned that Christine was 
 getting so she could put up with it a little better, 
 now. She looked significantly across the room to 
 the place where Christine was now talking with 
 Beaton ; and the student of human nature asked, 
 Was she here ? and, Would she introduce him ? 
 Mela said she would, the first chance she got ; and 
 she added, They would be much pleased to have 
 him call. She felt herself to be having a beautiful 
 time, and she got directly upon such intimate terms 
 with the student of human nature that she laughed 
 with him about some peculiarities of his, such as his 
 going so far about to ask things he wanted to know 
 from her ; she said she never did believe in beating 
 about the bush much. She had noticed the same 
 thing in Miss Vance when she came to call that 
 day ; and when the young man owned that he came 
 rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's house, she asked 
 him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, any- 
 way, and where did he suppose she had met her 
 brother ? The student of human nature could not 
 say as to this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it 
 safest to treat of the non-society side of her char- 
 acter, her activity in charity, her special devotion to 
 the work among the poor on the East Side, which 
 she personally engaged in.
 
 28 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Oh, that 's where Conrad goes, too ! " Mela inter- 
 rupted. "I'll bet anything that's where she met 
 him. I wisht I could tell Christine ! But I suppose 
 she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her 
 now" 
 
 The student of human nature said politely, " Oh, 
 shall I take you to her ? " 
 
 Mela answered, " I guess you better not ! " with 
 a laugh so significant that he could not help his 
 inferences concerning both Christine's absorption in 
 the person she was talking with, and the habitual 
 violence of her temper. He made note of how Mela 
 helplessly spoke of all her family by their names, as 
 if he were already intimate with them ; he fancied 
 that if he could get that in skilfully, it would be a 
 valuable colour in his study ; the English lord whom 
 she should astonish with it, began to form himself 
 out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to 
 whirl on a definite orbit in American society. But 
 he was puzzled to decide whether Mela's willingness 
 to take him into her confidence on short notice was 
 typical or personal : the trait of a daughter of the 
 natural-gas millionaire, or a foible of her own. 
 
 Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of 
 the evening that was left after the concert. He was 
 very grave, and took the tone of a fatherly friend ; 
 he spoke guardedly of the people present, and mode- 
 rated the severity of some of Christine's judgments 
 of their looks and costumes. He did this out of 
 a sort of unreasoned allegiance to Margaret, whom 
 he was in the mood of wishing to please by being
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 29 
 
 very kind and good, as she always was. He had 
 the sense also of atoning by this behaviour for some 
 reckless things he had said before that to Christine ; 
 he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave 
 her the feeling of being held in check. 
 
 She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret 
 in talk with her brother, " I don't think Miss Vance 
 is so very pretty, do you ? " 
 
 " I never think whether she 's pretty or not," 
 said Beaton, with dreamy affectation. " She is 
 merely perfect. Does she know your brother ? " 
 
 " So she says. I didn't suppose Conrad ever went 
 anywhere, except to tenement-houses." 
 
 "It might have been there," Beaton suggested. 
 " She goes among friendless people everywhere." 
 
 "May be that's the reason she came to see us I" 
 said Christine. 
 
 Beaton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, 
 and felt the wish to say, " Yes, it was exactly that," 
 but he only allowed himself to deny the possibility 
 of any such motive in that case. He added, " I am 
 so glad you know her, Miss Dryfoos. I never met 
 Miss Vance without feeling myself better and truer, 
 somehow ; or the wish to be so." 
 
 "And you think we might be improved too?" 
 Christine retorted. "Well, I must say you're not 
 very flattering, Mr. Beaton, anyway." 
 
 Beaton would have liked to answer her ac- 
 cording to her cattishness, with a good clawing 
 sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride ; 
 but he was being good, and he could not change all
 
 30 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 at once. Besides, the girl's attitude under the 
 social honour done her interested him. He was sure 
 she had never been in such good company before, 
 but he could see that she was not in the least 
 affected by the experience. He had told her who 
 this person and that was; and he saw she had 
 understood that the names were of consequence; 
 but she seemed to feel her equality with them all. 
 Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savage 
 stoicism in which Beaton hid his own consciousness 
 of social inferiority ; but having won his way in the 
 world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he 
 did not conceive the simple fact in her case. 
 Christine was self-possessed because she felt that a 
 knowledge of her father's fortune had got around, 
 and she had the peace which money gives to 
 ignorance ; but Beaton attributed her poise to 
 indifference to social values. This, while he in- 
 wardly sneered at it, .avenged him upon his own 
 too keen sense of them, and, together with his 
 temporary allegiance to Margaret's goodness, kept 
 him from retaliating Christine's vulgarity. He said, 
 "I don't see how that could be," and left the 
 question of flattery to settle itself. 
 
 The people began to go away, following each other 
 up to take leave of Mrs. Horn. Christine watched 
 them with unconcern, and either because she would 
 not be governed by the general movement, or be- 
 cause she liked being with Beaton, gave no sign 
 of going. Mela was still talking to the student of 
 human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 31 
 
 amidst the unimaginable confidences she was making 
 him about herself, her family, the staff of Every 
 Other Week, Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they 
 had all led before she came to them. He was not a 
 blind devotee of art for art's sake, and though he 
 felt that if one could portray Mela just as she was 
 she would be the richest possible material, he was 
 rather ashamed to know some of the things she told 
 him ; and he kept looking anxiously about for a 
 chance of escape. The company had reduced itself to 
 the Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn's 
 who had the right to linger, when Margaret crossed 
 the room with Conrad to Christine and Beaton. 
 
 " I 'm so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not 
 quite a stranger to you all when I ventured to call, 
 the other day. Your brother and I are rather old ac- 
 quaintances, though I never knew who he was before. 
 I don't know just how to say we met where he is 
 valued so much. I suppose I mustn't try to say how 
 much," she added with a look of deep regard at him. 
 
 Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight 
 over his breast, while his sister received Margaret's 
 confession with the suspicion which was her first 
 feeling in regard to any new thing. What she 
 concluded was that this girl was trying to get in 
 with them, for reasons of her own. She said : 
 " Yes ; it 's the first / ever heard of his knowing 
 you. He 's so much taken up with his meetings, he 
 didn't want to come to-night." 
 
 Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, 
 without apparent resentment of the awkwardness or
 
 32 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ungraciousness, whichever she found it, " I don't 
 wonder ! You become so absorbed in such work 
 that you think nothing else is worth while. But 
 I 'm glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you ; I 'm so 
 glad you could all come ; I knew you would enjoy 
 the music. Do sit down 
 
 " No," said Christine bluntly ; " we must be going. 
 Mela ! " she called out, " come ! " 
 
 The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, 
 but Christine advanced upon them undismayed, and 
 took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her. " Well, 
 I must bid you good night." 
 
 " Oh, good night," murmured the elder lady. " So 
 very kind of you to come." 
 
 " I Ve had the best kind of a time," said Mela 
 cordially. " I hain't laughed so much, I don't know 
 when." 
 
 " Oh, I 'm glad you enjoyed it," said Mrs. Horn 
 in the same polite murmur she had used with 
 Christine ; but she said nothing to either sister 
 about any future meeting. 
 
 They were apparently not troubled. Mela said 
 over her shoulder to the student of human nature, 
 " The next time I see you I '11 give it to you for 
 what you said about Moffitt." 
 
 Margaret made some entreating paces after them, 
 but she did not succeed in covering the retreat of 
 the sisters against critical conjecture. She could 
 only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, " I 
 hope we can get our friends to play for us some night. 
 I know it isn't any real help, but such things take
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 33 
 
 the poor creatures out of themselves for the time 
 being, don't you think ? " 
 
 " Oh yes," he answered. " They 're good in that 
 way." He turned back hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, 
 and said, with a blush, " I thank you for a happy 
 evening." 
 
 " Oh, I am very glad," she replied in her murmur. 
 
 One of the old friends of the house arched her 
 eyebrows in saying good night, and offered the two 
 young men remaining seats home in her carriage. 
 Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from 
 asking the student of human nature, till she had got 
 him into her carriage, "What is Moffitt, and what 
 did you say about it 1 " 
 
 "Now you see, Margaret," said Mrs. Horn, with 
 bated triumph, when the people were all gone. 
 
 "Yes, I see," the girl consented. "From one 
 point of view, of course it 's been a failure. I don't 
 think we've given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure, but 
 perhaps nobody could. And at least we've given 
 her the opportunity of enjoying herself." 
 
 "Such people," said Mrs Horn philosophically, 
 "people with their money must of course be re- 
 ceived sooner or later. You can't keep them out. 
 Only, I believe I would rather let some one else 
 begin with them. The Leightons didn't come 1 " 
 
 " I sent them cards. I couldn't call again." 
 
 Mrs. Horn sighed a little. "I suppose Mr. 
 Dryfoos is one of your fellow-philanthropists ? " 
 
 "He's one of the workers," said Margaret "I 
 2*
 
 34 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 met him several times at the Hall, but I only knew 
 his first name. I think he 's a great friend of Father 
 Benedict; he seems devoted to the work. Don't 
 you think he looks good ? " 
 
 " Very," said Mrs. Horn, with a colour of censure 
 in her assent. "The younger girl seemed more 
 amiable than her sister. But what manners ! " 
 
 " Dreadful ! " said Margaret, with knit brows, and 
 a pursed mouth of humorous suffering. "But she 
 appeared to feel very much at home." 
 
 "Oh, as to that, neither of them was much 
 abashed. Do you suppose Mr. Beaton gave the 
 other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers ? 
 I don't imagine that black and lace is her own 
 invention. She seems to have some sort of strange 
 fascination for him." 
 
 "She's very picturesque," Margaret explained. 
 "And artists see points in people that the rest of 
 us don't." 
 
 " Could it be her money ? " Mrs. Horn insinuated. 
 " He must be very poor. " 
 
 "But he isn't base," retorted the girl with a 
 generous indignation that made her aunt smile. 
 
 " Oh no ; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it 
 doesn't follow that he would object to her being rich." 
 
 " It would with a man like Mr. Beaton ! " 
 
 " You are an idealist, Margaret. I suppose your 
 Mr. March has some disinterested motive in paying 
 court to Miss Mela Pamela, I suppose, is her name. 
 He talked to her longer than her literature would 
 have lasted."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 35 
 
 "He seems a very kind person," said Margaret. 
 
 " And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary ? " 
 
 "I don't know anything about that. But that 
 wouldn't make any difference with him." 
 
 Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security ; but she 
 was not displeased by the nobleness which it came 
 from. She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and 
 was really not distressed by any good that was in 
 her. 
 
 The Marches walked home, both because it was 
 not far, and because they must spare in carriage hire 
 at any rate. As soon as they were out of the house, 
 she applied a point of conscience to him. 
 
 "I don't see how you could talk to that girl so 
 long, Basil, and make her laugh so." 
 
 " Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I 
 thought of Kendricks." 
 
 " Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he 's pleasant to 
 her because he thinks it's to his interest. If she 
 had no relation to Every Other Week, he wouldn't 
 waste his time on her." 
 
 " Isabel," March complained, " I wish you wouldn't 
 think of me in he, him, and his : I never personalise 
 you in my thoughts : you remain always a vague 
 unindividualised essence, not quite without form and 
 void, but nounless and pronounless. I call that a 
 much more beautiful mental attitude toward the 
 object of one's affections. But if you must he and 
 him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you 'd have 
 more kindly thoughts of me."
 
 36 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Do you deny that it 's true, Basil ? " 
 
 " Do you believe that it 's true, Isabel 1 " 
 
 "' No matter. But could you excuse it if it were ? " 
 
 *' Ah, I see you 'd have been capable of it in my 
 place, and you're ashamed." 
 
 " Yes," sighed the wife, " I 'm afraid that I should. 
 But tell me that you wouldn't, Basil ! " 
 
 " I can tell you that I wasn't. But I suppose that 
 in a real exigency, I could truckle to the proprietary 
 Dryfooses as well as you." 
 
 " Oh no ; you mustn't, dear ! I 'm a woman, and 
 I 'm dreadfully afraid. But you must always be a 
 man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos. 
 Promise me that you '11 never yield the least point 
 to him in a matter of right and wrong ! " 
 
 " Not, if he 's right and I 'm wrong 1 " 
 
 " Don't trifle, dear ! You know what I mean. 
 Will you promise ? " 
 
 " I '11 promise to submit the point to you, and let 
 you do the yielding. As for me, I shall be adamant. 
 Nothing I like better." 
 
 "They're dreadful, even that poor, good young 
 fellow, who's so different from all the rest; he's 
 awful, too, because you feel that he 's a martyr to 
 them." 
 
 "And I never did like martyrs a great deal," 
 March interposed. 
 
 "I wonder how they came to be there," Mrs. 
 March pursued, unmindful of his joke. 
 
 "That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling 
 Miss Mela about us. She asked, and I explained
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 37 
 
 as well as I could; and then she told me that 
 Miss Vance had corne to call on them and invited 
 them; and first they didn't know how they could 
 come till they thought of making Conrad bring 
 them. But she didn't say why Miss Vance called 
 on them. Mr. Dryfoos doesn't employ her on Every 
 Other Week. But I suppose she has her own vile 
 little motive." 
 
 " It can't he their money ; it can't be ! " sighed 
 Mrs. March. 
 
 "Well, I don't know. We all respect money." 
 
 " Yes, but Miss Vance's position is so secure. She 
 needn't pay court to those stupid, vulgar people." 
 
 " Well, let 's console ourselves with the belief that 
 she would, if she needed. Such people as the 
 Dryfooses are the raw material of good society. It 
 made up of refined or meritorious people 
 professors and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, 
 and their families. All the fashionable people there 
 to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or 
 two ago. I dare say the material works up faster 
 now, and in a season or two you won't know the 
 Dryfooses from the other plutocrats. They will 
 a little better than they do now; they'll see a 
 difference, but nothing radical, nothing painful. 
 People who get up in the world by service to others 
 through letters, or art, or science may have 
 their modest little misgivings as to their social value, 
 but people that rise by money especially if their 
 gains are sudden never have. And that 's the kind 
 of people that form our nobility ; there 's no use 
 2B
 
 38 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 pretending that we haven't a nobility; we might 
 as well pretend we haven't first-class cars in the 
 presence of a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had 
 no more doubt of their right to be there than if 
 they had been duchesses : we thought it was very 
 nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they 
 didn't ; they weren't afraid, or the least embarrassed ; 
 they were perfectly natural like born aristocrats. 
 And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that 
 now owns the country ever sees fit to take on 
 the outward signs of an aristocracy titles, and 
 arms, and ancestors it won't falter from any 
 inherent question of its worth. Money prizes and 
 honours itself, and if there is anything it hasn't got, 
 it believes it can buy it." 
 
 " Well, Basil," said his wife, " I hope you won't 
 get infected with Lindau's ideas of rich people. 
 Some of them are very good and kind." 
 
 " Who denies that ? Not even Lindau himself. 
 It's all right. And the great thing is that the 
 evening's enjoyment is over. I 've got my society 
 smile off, and I 'm radiantly happy. Go on with 
 your little pessimistic diatribes, Isabel; you can't 
 spoil my pleasure." 
 
 " I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine 
 drove home together, "that she was as jealous as 
 she could be, all the time you was talkun' to Mr. 
 Beaton. She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, 
 but she kep' her eye on you pretty close, I can tell 
 you. I bet she just got us there to see how him
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 39 
 
 and you would act together. And I reckon she 
 was satisfied. He 's dead gone on you, Chris." 
 
 Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the 
 flatteries with which Mela plied her in the hope of 
 some return in kind, and not at all because she felt 
 spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished 
 her ill. " Who was that fellow with you so long ? " 
 asked Christine. "I suppose you turned yourself 
 inside out to him, like you always do." 
 
 Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. 
 " It 's a lie ! I didn't tell him a single thing." 
 
 Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because 
 he did not wish to hear his sisters' talk of the even- 
 ing, and because there was a tumult in his spirit 
 which he wished to let have its way. In his life 
 with its single purpose, defeated by stronger wills 
 than his own, and now struggling partially to fulfil 
 itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of 
 women had entered scarcely more than in that of 
 a child. His ideals were of a virginal vagueness ; 
 faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at times, 
 but almost passionlessly ; and the sensation that he 
 now indulged was a kind of worship, ardent, but 
 reverent and exalted. The brutal experiences of the 
 world make us forget that there are such natures in 
 it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly 
 earth as well as down from the high heaven. In the 
 heart of this man well on toward thirty there had 
 never been left the stain of a base thought ; not that, 
 suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but
 
 40 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that he had not entertained them, or in anywise 
 made them his. In a Catholic age and country, he 
 would have been one of those monks who are 
 sainted after death for the angelic purity of their 
 lives, and whose names are invoked by believers 
 in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As 
 he now walked along thinking, with a lover's beati- 
 fied smile on his face, of how Margaret Vance had 
 spoken and looked, he dramatised scenes in which 
 he approved himself to her by acts of goodness and 
 unselfishness, and died to please her for the sake of 
 others. He made her praise him for them, to his 
 face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his 
 death, when he could not. All the time he was 
 poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance, her 
 style ; they seemed to intoxicate him ; some tones 
 of her voice thrilled through his nerves, and some 
 looks turned his brain with a delicious, swooning 
 sense of her beauty ; her refinement bewildered him. 
 But all this did not admit the idea of possession, 
 even of aspiration. At the most his worship only 
 set her beyond the love of other men as far as 
 beyond his own.
 
 PAET FOURTH. 
 
 I. 
 
 NOT long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dry- 
 foos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration 
 of the success of Every Other Week. Dryfoos had 
 never meddled in any manner with the conduct of 
 the periodical; but Fulkerson easily saw that he 
 was proud of his relation to it, and he proceeded 
 upon the theory that he would be willing to have 
 this relation known. On the days when he had 
 been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop in at the 
 office on Eleventh Street, on his way uptown, and 
 listen to Fulkerson's talk. He was on good enough 
 terms with March, who revised his first impressions 
 of the man, but they had not much to say to each 
 other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was 
 even a little afraid of him, as of a piece of mechanism 
 he had acquired, but did not quite understand ; he 
 left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt 
 bragged of it sufficiently. The old man seemed to 
 have as little to say to his son ; he shut himself up 
 with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the man-
 
 42 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk 
 about Every Other Week ; for Fulkerson never talked 
 of anything else if he could help it, and was always 
 bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed. 
 
 The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called 
 from his door, "March, I say, come down here a 
 minute, will you? Conrad, I want you, too." 
 
 The editor and the publisher found the manager 
 and the proprietor seated on opposite sides of the 
 table. " It 's about those funeral baked meats, you 
 know," Fulkerson explained, " and I was trying to 
 give Mr. Dryfoos some idea of what we wanted to 
 do. That is, what I wanted to do," he continued, 
 turning from March to Dryfoos. " March, here, is 
 opposed to it, of course. He 'd like to publish Every 
 Other Week on the sly; keep it out of the papers, 
 and off the news-stands ; he 's a modest Boston 
 petunia, and he shrinks from publicity ; but I am 
 not that kind of herb myself, and I want all the 
 publicity we can get beg, borrow, or steal for 
 this thing. I say that you can't work the sacred 
 rites of hospitality in a better cause, and what I 
 propose is a little dinner for the purpose of recognis- 
 ing the hit we 've made with this thing. My idea 
 was to strike you for the necessary funds, and do 
 the thing on a handsome scale. The term little 
 dinner is a mere figure of speech. A little dinner 
 wouldn't make a big talk, and what we want is the 
 big talk, at present, if we don't lay up a cent. My 
 notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when 
 everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 43 
 
 send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and 
 explanatory, and along about the first of May we 
 should sit down about a hundred strong, the most 
 distinguished people in the country, and solemnise 
 our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I might 
 expand and I might expound, but that's the sum 
 and substance of it." 
 
 Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over 
 the faces of his three listeners, one after the other. 
 March was a little surprised when Dryfoos turned 
 to him, but that reference of the question seemed to 
 give Fulkerson particular pleasure : " What do you 
 think, Mr. March 1 " 
 
 The editor leaned back in his chair. "I don't 
 pretend to have Mr. Fulkerson's genius for advertis- 
 ing ; but it seems to me a little early yet. . We 
 might celebrate later when we 've got more to cele- 
 brate. At present we 're a pleasing novelty, rather 
 than a fixed fact." 
 
 " Ah, you don't get the idea ! " said Fulkerson. 
 " What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the 
 fact." 
 
 " Am I going to come in anywhere ? " the old 
 man interrupted. 
 
 " You 're going to come in at the head of the pro- 
 cession ! We are going to strike everything that is 
 imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul 
 with you and your history and your fancy for going 
 in for this thing. I can start you in a paragraph 
 that will travel through all the newspapers, from 
 Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We
 
 44 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 have had all sorts of rich men backing up literary 
 enterprises, but the natural-gas man in literature is 
 a new thing, and the combination of your pic- 
 turesque past and your aesthetic present is some- 
 thing that will knock out the sympathies of the 
 American public the first round. I feel," said 
 Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, 
 " that Every Other Week is at a disadvantage before 
 the public as long as it 's supposed to be my enter- 
 prise, my idea. As far as I 'm known at all, I 'm 
 known simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in 
 the press believes that I Ve got the money to run 
 the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency 
 must attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on 
 the press will work up that impression, sooner or 
 later, if we don't give them something else to work 
 up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the 
 correspondents that you're in it, with your untold 
 millions that in fact it was your idea from the 
 start, that you originated it to give full play to 
 the humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, Avho 's 
 always had these theories of co-operation, and 
 longed to realise them for the benefit of our strug- 
 gling young Avriters and artists " 
 
 March had listened with growing amusement to 
 the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson's 
 self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to 
 how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous 
 proposition, when Conrad broke out, "Mr. Fulker- 
 son, I could not allow you to do that. It would not 
 be true ; I did not wish to be here ; and and what I
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 45 
 
 think what I wish to do that is something I will 
 not let any one put me in a false position about. 
 No ! " The blood rushed into the young man's 
 gentle face, and he met his father's glance with 
 'defiance. 
 
 Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without 
 speaking, and Fulkerson said caressingly, "Why, 
 of course, Coonrod ! I know how you feel, and I 
 shouldn't let anything of that sort go out uncontra- 
 dicted afterwards. But there isn't anything in these 
 times that would give us better standing with the 
 public than some hint of the way you feel about 
 such things. The public expects to be interested, 
 and nothing would interest it more than to be told 
 that the success of Every Other Week sprang from the 
 first application of the principle of Live and let Live 
 to a literary enterprise. It would look particularly 
 well, coming from you and your father, but if you 
 object, Ave can leave that part out ; though if you 
 approve of the principle I don't see why you need 
 object. The main thing is to let the public know 
 that it owes this thing to the liberal and enlightened 
 spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country, 
 and that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed 
 in the hands of his son. I should get a little cut 
 made from a photograph of your father, and supply 
 it gratis with the paragraphs." 
 
 "I guess," said the old man, "we will get along 
 without the cut." 
 
 Fulkerson laughed. " Well, well ! Have it your 
 own way. But the sight of your face in the patent
 
 46 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 outsides of the country press, would be worth half a 
 dozen subscribers in every school district through- 
 out the length and breadth of this fair land." 
 
 " There was a fellow," Dryfoos explained in an 
 aside to March, "that was getting up a history of 
 MofFett, and he asked me to let him put a steel 
 engraving of me in. He said a good many promi- 
 nent citizens were going to have theirs in, and his 
 price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him I 
 couldn't let mine go for less than two hundred, and 
 when he said he could give me a splendid plate for 
 that money, I said I should want it cash. You 
 never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it 
 through him that I expected him to pay the two 
 hundred." 
 
 Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the 
 joke. " Well, sir, I guess Every Other IPeek will pay 
 you that much. But if you won't sell at any price, 
 all right ; we must try to worry along without the 
 light of your countenance on the posters, but we got 
 to have it for the banquet." 
 
 " I don't seem to feel very hungry, yet," said the 
 old man drily. 
 
 " Oh, I'appetit vient en mangeant, as our French 
 friends say. You'll be hungry enough when you 
 see the preliminary Little Neck clam. It 's too late 
 for oysters." 
 
 " Doesn't that fact seem to point to a postpone- 
 ment till they get back, sometime in October," 
 March suggested. 
 
 " No, no ! " said Fulkerson, " you don't catch on
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, 47 
 
 to the business end of this thing, my friends. You 're 
 proceeding on something like the old exploded idea 
 that the demand creates the supply, when every- 
 body knows, if he 's watched the course of modern 
 events, that it 's just as apt to be the other way. I 
 contend that we Ve got a real substantial success to 
 celebrate now ; but even if we hadn't, the celebra- 
 tion would do more than anything else to create the 
 success, if we got it properly before the public. 
 People will say, Those fellows are not fools ; they 
 wouldn't go and rejoice over their magazine unless 
 they had got a big thing in it. And the state of 
 feeling we. should produce in the public mind would 
 make a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur 
 for E. 0. W. Heigh ? " 
 
 He looked sunnily from one to the other in suc- 
 cession. The elder Dryfoos said, with his chin on 
 the top of his stick, "I reckon those Little Neck 
 clams will keep." 
 
 "Well, just as -you say," Fulkerson cheerfully 
 assented. " I understand you to agree to the 
 general principle of a little dinner ? " 
 
 " The smaller the better," said the old man. 
 
 "Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of 
 that seems to cover the case, even if we vary the 
 plan a little. I had thought of a reception, may be, 
 that would include the lady contributors and artists, 
 and the Avives and daughters of the other contribu- 
 tors. That would give us the chance to ring in a 
 lot of society correspondents and get the thing 
 written up in first-class shape. By the way ! " cried
 
 48 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Fulkerson, slapping himself on the leg, "why not 
 have the dinner and the reception both ? " 
 
 " I don't understand," said Dryfoos. 
 
 " Why, have a select little dinner for ten or 
 twenty choice spirits of the male persuasion, and 
 then about ten o'clock, throw open your palatial 
 drawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, 
 salads, and ices. It is the very thing ! Come ! " 
 
 " What do you think of it, Mr. March ? " asked 
 Dryfoos, on whose social inexperience Fulkerson's 
 words projected no very intelligible image, and who 
 perhaps hoped for some more light. 
 
 "It's a beautiful vision," said March, "and if it 
 will take more time to realise it I think I approve. 
 I approve of anything that will delay Mr. Fulker- 
 son's advertising orgie." 
 
 " Then," Fulkerson pursued, " we could have the 
 pleasure of Miss Christine and Miss Mela's company ; 
 and may be Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in 
 the course of the evening. There's no hurry, as 
 Mr. March suggests, if we can give the thing this 
 shape. I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my 
 honourable colleague." 
 
 March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he 
 was ashamed of Fulkerson for proposing to make 
 use of Dryfoos and his house in that way. He 
 fancied something appealing in the look that the 
 old man turned on him, and something indignant 
 in Conrad's flush ; but probably this was only his 
 fancy. He reflected that neither of them coiild feel 
 it as people of more worldly knowledge would, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 49 
 
 he consoled himself with the fact that Fulkerson 
 was really not such a charlatan as he seemed. But 
 it went through his mind that this was a strange 
 end for all Dryfoos's money -making to come to ; and 
 he philosophically accepted the fact of his own 
 humble fortunes when he reflected how little his 
 money could buy for such a man. It was an 
 "honourable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in 
 Every Other Week ; it might be far more creditably 
 spent on such an enterprise than on horses, or wines, 
 or women, the usual resources of the brute rich ; and 
 if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way 
 than in stocks. He kept a smiling face turned to 
 Dryfoos while these irreverent considerations occu- 
 pied him, and hardened his heart against father and 
 son and their possible emotions. 
 
 The old man rose to put an end to the interview. 
 He only repeated, " I guess those clams will keep 
 till fall." 
 
 But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the 
 progress he had made ; and when he joined March 
 for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was 
 able to detach his mind from the subject, as if 
 content to leave it. 
 
 " This is about the best part of the year in New 
 York," he said. In some of the areas the grass had 
 sprouted, and the tender young foliage had loosened 
 itself from the buds on a sidewalk tree here and 
 there ; the soft air was full of spring, and the deli- 
 cate sky, far aloof, had the look it never wears at 
 any other season. " It ain't a time of year to* com- 
 VOL. II. 3
 
 50 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 plain much of, anywhere; but I don't want any- 
 thing better than the month of May in New York. 
 Farther South it 's too hot, and I 've been in Boston 
 in May when that east wind of yours made every 
 nerve in my body get up and howl. I reckon the 
 weather has a good deal to do with the local 
 temperament. The reason a New York man takes 
 life so easily with all his rush is that his climate 
 don't worry him. But a Boston man must be 
 rasped the whole while by the edge in his. air. 
 That accounts for his sharpness ; and when he 's 
 lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays, 
 he gets to thinking that Providence has some par- 
 ticular use for him, or he wouldn't have survived, 
 and that makes him conceited. See ? " 
 
 " I see," said March. " But I don't know how 
 you're going to work that idea into an advertise- 
 ment, exactly." 
 
 " Oh, pshaw, now, March ! You don't think I 've 
 got that on the brain all the time 1 " 
 
 " You were gradually leading up to Every Other 
 Week, somehow." 
 
 " No, sir ; I wasn't. I was just thinking what a 
 different creature a Massachusetts man was from a 
 Virginian. And yet I suppose they 're both as pure 
 English stock as you'll get anywhere in America. 
 March, I think Colonel Woodburn's paper is going 
 to make a hit." 
 
 " You 've got there ! When it knocks down the 
 sale about one-half, I shall know it 's made a hit." 
 
 "I'm not afraid," said Fulkerson. "That thing
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 51 
 
 is going to attract attention. It's well written 
 you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there 
 and it 's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and 
 it 's going to shake them up tremendously to have 
 serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the 
 only solution of the labour problem. You see in 
 the first place he goes for their sympathies by the 
 way he portrays the actual relations of capital and 
 labour ; he shows how things have got to go from 
 bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old 
 hobby, and proves that if slavery had not been 
 interfered with, it would have perfected itself in the 
 interest of humanity. He makes a pretty strong 
 plea for it." 
 
 March threw back his head and laughed. " He 's 
 converted you ! I swear, Fulkerson, if we had 
 accepted and paid for an article advocating canni- 
 balism as the only resource for getting rid of the 
 superfluous poor, you 'd begin to believe in it." 
 
 Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and 
 only said, "I wish you could meet the colonel in the 
 privacy of the domestic circle, March. You 'd like 
 him. He 's a splendid old fellow ; regular type. 
 Talk about spring ! You ought to see the widow's 
 little back yard these days. You know that glass 
 gallery just beyond the dining-room 1 Those girls 
 have got the pot-plants out of that, and a lot more, 
 and they've turned the edges of that back yard, 
 along the fence, into a regular bower ; they Ve got 
 sweet peas planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall 
 be in a blaze of glory about the beginning of June.
 
 52 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Fun to see 'em work in the garden, and the bird 
 bossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree. 
 Have to keep the middle of the yard for the clothes- 
 line, but six days in the week it's a lawn, and I 
 go over it with a mower myself. March, there ain't 
 anything like a home, is there 1 Dear little cot of 
 your own, heigh ? I tell you, March, when I get to 
 pushing that mower round, and the colonel is smok- 
 ing his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are 
 pottering over the flowers, one of these soft evenings 
 after dinner, I feel like a human being. Yes, I do. 
 I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals 
 .at the widow's. For eight dollars a week I get good 
 board, refined society, and all the advantages of a 
 Christian home. By the way, you've never had 
 much talk with Miss Woodburn, have you, March ? " 
 
 " Not so much as with Miss Woodburn's father." 
 
 "Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation. 
 I must draw his fire, sometime, when you and 
 Mrs. March are around, and get you a chance with 
 Miss "\Voodburn." 
 
 " I should like that better, I believe," said March. 
 
 " Well, I shouldn't wonder if you did. Curious, 
 but Miss Woodburn isn't at all your idea of a 
 Southern girl. She 's got lots of go ; she 's never 
 idle a minute ; she keeps the old gentleman in first- 
 class shape, and she don't believe a bit in the slavery 
 solution of the labour problem ; says she 's glad it 's 
 gone, and if it 's anything like the effects of it, she 's 
 glad it went before her time. No, sir, she 's as full 
 of snap as the liveliest kind of a Northern girl
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 53 
 
 None of that sunny Southern languor you read 
 about." 
 
 "I suppose the typical Southerner, like the 
 typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find," said 
 March. " But perhaps Miss Woodburn represents 
 the new South. The modern conditions must be 
 producing a modern type." 
 
 " Well, that 's what she and the colonel both say. 
 They say there ain't anything left of that Walter 
 Scott dignity and chivalry in the rising generation ; 
 takes too much time. You ought to see her sketch 
 the old-school, high-and-mighty manners, as they sur- 
 vive among some of the antiques in Charlottesburg. 
 If that thing could be put upon the stage it would 
 be a killing success. Makes the old gentleman laugh 
 in spite of himself. But he 's as proud of her as 
 Punch, anyway. Why don't you and Mrs. March 
 come round oftener ? Look here ! How would it 
 do to have a little excursion, somewhere, after the 
 spring fairly gets in its work ? " 
 
 "Reporters present ? " 
 
 " No, no ! Nothing of that kind ; perfectly sin- 
 cere and disinterested enjoyment." 
 
 " Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around : 
 'Buy Every Other Week, 1 'Look out for the next 
 number of Every Oilier Week,' 'Every Other Week at 
 all the news-stands.' Well, I '11 talk it over with 
 Mrs. March. I suppose there 's no great hurry." 
 
 March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which 
 he had left Fulkerson at the widow's door, and sha 
 
 said he must be in love. 
 
 2C
 
 54 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " "Why, of course ! I wonder I didn't think of that. 
 But Fulkerson is such an impartial admirer of the 
 whole sex that you can't think of his liking one 
 more than another. I don't know that he showed 
 any unjust partiality, though, in his talk of 'those 
 girls,' as he called them. And I always rather 
 fancied that Mrs. Mandel he's done so much for 
 her, you know ; and she is such a well-balanced, well- 
 preserved person, and so lady-like and correct : 
 
 "Fulkerson had the word for her: academic. 
 She 's everything that instruction and discipline can 
 make of a woman ; but I shouldn't think they could 
 make enough of her to be in love with." 
 
 "Well, I don't know. The academic has its 
 charm. There are moods in which I could imagine 
 myself in love with an academic person. That 
 regularity of line ; that reasoned strictness of 
 contour ; that neatness of pose ; that slightly con- 
 ventional but harmonious grouping of the emotions 
 and morals you can see how it would have its 
 charm, the Wedgwood in human nature 1 I wonder 
 where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her willow." 
 
 " I should think she might have use for them in 
 that family, poor thing ! " said Mrs. March. 
 
 " Ah, that reminds me," said her husband, " that 
 we had another talk with the old gentleman, this 
 afternoon, about Fulkerson's literary, artistic, and 
 advertising orgie, and it 's postponed till October." 
 
 " The later the better, I should think," said Mrs. 
 March, who did not really think about it at all, but 
 whom the date fixed for it caused to think of the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 55 
 
 intervening time. " We have got to consider what 
 we will do about the summer, before long, Basil." 
 
 " Oh, not yet, not yet," he pleaded, with that 
 man's willingness to abide in the present, which is 
 so trying to a woman. " It 's only the end of April." 
 
 " It will be the end of June before we know. 
 And these people wanting the Boston house another 
 year complicates it. We can't spend the summer 
 there, as Ave planned." 
 
 " They oughtn't to have offered us an increased 
 rent ; they have taken an advantage of us. " 
 
 " I don't know that it matters," said Mrs. March. 
 " I had decided not to go there." 
 
 " Had you 1 This is a surprise." 
 
 " Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it 
 happens." 
 
 " True ; I keep the world fresh, that way." 
 
 " It wouldn't have been any change to go from 
 one city to another for the summer. We might as 
 well have stayed in New York." 
 
 " Yes, I wish we had stayed," said March, idly 
 humouring a conception of the accomplished fact. 
 " Mrs. Green would have let us have the gim- 
 crackery very cheap for the summer months ; and 
 we could have made all sorts of nice little excursions 
 and trips off, and been twice as well as if we had 
 spent the summer away." 
 
 " Nonsense ! You know we couldn't spend the 
 summer in New York." 
 
 " I know I could." 
 
 "What stuff 1 You couldn't manage."
 
 56 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Oh yes, I could. I could take my meals at 
 Fulkerson's widow's ; or at Maroni's, with poor old 
 Lindau : he 's got to dining there again. Or, I could 
 keep house, and he could dine with me here." 
 
 There was a teasing look in March's eyes, and he 
 broke into a laugh, at the firmness with which his 
 wife said, " I think if there is to be any house-keep- 
 ing, I will stay, too ; and help to look after it. I 
 would try not intrude upon you and your guest." 
 
 " Oh, we should be only too glad to have you join 
 us," said March, playing with fire. 
 
 " Very well, then, I wish you would take him off 
 to Maroni's, the next time he comes to dine here ! " 
 cried his wife. 
 
 The experiment of making March's old friend free 
 of his house had not given her all the pleasure that 
 so kind a thing ought to have afforded so good a 
 woman. She received Lindau at first with robust 
 benevolence, and the high resolve not to let any of 
 his little peculiarities alienate her from a sense of 
 his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not only 
 as a man who had been so generously fond of her 
 husband in his youth, but a hero who had suffered 
 for her country. Her theory was that his mutilation 
 must not be ignored, but must be kept in mind as 
 a monument of his sacrifice, and she fortified Bella 
 with this conception, so that the child bravely sat 
 next his maimed arm at table and helped him to 
 dishes he could not reach, and cut up his meat for 
 him. As for Mrs. March herself, the thought of his 
 mutilation made her a little faint; she was not
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 57 
 
 without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a 
 sort of oppression. She did not like his drinking so 
 much of March's beer, either ; it was no harm, but 
 it was somehow unworthy, out of character with a 
 hero of the war. But what she really could not 
 reconcile herself to was the violence of Lindau's 
 sentiments concerning the whole political and social 
 fabric. She did not feel sure that he should be 
 allowed to say such things before the children, who 
 had been nurtured in the faith of Bunker Hill and 
 Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all 
 possible progress in human rights. As a woman 
 she was naturally an aristocrat, but as an American 
 she was theoretically a democrat ; and it astounded, 
 it alarmed her, to hear American democracy 
 denounced as a shuffling evasion. She had never 
 cared much for the United States Senate, but she 
 doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at 
 as a rich man's club. It shocked her to be told that 
 the rich and poor were not equal before the law in a 
 country where justice must be paid for at every step 
 in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to 
 war in his own person, and a rich man might hire 
 some one to go in his. Mrs. March felt that this 
 rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed 
 him from sympathy, and retroactively undid his past 
 suffering for the country : she had always particu- 
 larly valued that provision of the law, because in 
 forecasting all the possible mischances that might 
 befall her own son, she had been comforted by the 
 thought that if there ever was another war, and Tom 
 3*
 
 58 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 were drafted, his father could buy him a substitute. 
 Compared with such blasphemy as this, Lindau's 
 declaration that there was not equality of opportunity 
 in America, and that fully one-half the people were 
 debarred their right to the pursuit of happiness by 
 the hopeless conditions of their lives, was flattering 
 praise. She could not listen to such things in silence, 
 though, and it did not help matters when Lindau 
 met her arguments with facts and reasons which she 
 felt she was merely not sufficiently instructed to 
 combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to urge. 
 "I am afraid for the effect on the children," she said 
 to her husband. " Such perfectly distorted ideas 
 Tom will be ruined by them." 
 
 " Oh, let Tom find out Avhere they 're false," 
 said March. "It will be good exercise for his 
 faculties of research. At any rate, those things are 
 getting said nowadays ; he '11 have to hear them 
 sooner or later." 
 
 " Had he better hear them at home ? " demanded 
 his wife. 
 
 "Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, 
 Isabel," he teased, " perhaps it 's the best place. But 
 don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear. He says him- 
 self that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know." 
 
 "Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed. 
 In a moment of rash good feeling, or perhaps an 
 exalted conception of duty, she had herself proposed 
 that Lindau should come every week and read 
 German with Tom ; and it had become a question 
 first how they could get him to take pay for it, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 59 
 
 then how they could get him to stop it. Mrs. March 
 never ceased to wonder at herself for having brought 
 this about, for she had warned her husband against 
 making any engagement with Lindau which would 
 bring him regularly to the house : the Germans 
 stuck so, and were so unscrupulously dependent. 
 Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the 
 duty of hospitality, and it was always she who made 
 the old man stay to their Sunday evening tea when 
 he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and 
 Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean shirt 
 with which he observed the day ; Lindau's linen 
 was not to be trusted during the week. She now 
 concluded a season of mournful reflection by saying, 
 "He will get you into trouble, somehow, Basil." 
 
 "Well, I don't know how, exactly. I regard 
 Lindau as a political economist of an unusual type ; 
 but I shall not let him array me against the consti- 
 tuted authorities. Short of that, I think I am safe." 
 
 "Well, be careful, Basil; be careful. You know 
 you are so rash." 
 
 " I suppose I may continue to pity him ? He is 
 such a poor, lonely old fellow. Are you really sorry 
 he 's come into our lives; my dear ? " 
 
 "Xo, no; not that. I feel as you do about it; 
 but. I wish I felt easier about him sure, that is, 
 that we 're not doing wrong to let him keep on talk- 
 ing so." . 
 
 " I suspect we couldn't help it," March returned 
 lightly. " It 's one of what Lindau calls his 'brincibles' 
 to say what he thinks."
 
 II. 
 
 THE Marches had no longer the gross appetite for 
 novelty which urges youth to a surfeit of strange 
 scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with 
 all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible 
 delight. But there is no doubt that the chief 
 pleasure of their life in New York Avas from its 
 quality of foreignness : the flavour of olives, which, 
 once tasted, can never be forgotten. The olives 
 may not be of the first excellence ; they may be a 
 little stale, and small and poor, to begin with, but 
 they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them. 
 The sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth 
 Avenue and in the region of Jefferson Market and 
 on the soft exposures south of Washington Square, 
 were none the less acceptable because they were of 
 the commonest Italian variety. 
 
 The Marches spent a good deal of time and money 
 in a grocery of that nationality, where they found 
 all the patriotic comestibles and potables, and re- 
 newed, their faded Italian with the friendly family 
 in charge. Italian table-wholes formed the adventure 
 of the week, on the day when Mrs. March let her 
 domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 61 
 
 with her husband and children ; and they became 
 adept in the restaurants where they were served, 
 and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner. 
 The perfect decorum of these places, and their im- 
 munity from offence in any, emboldened the Marches 
 to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where red 
 pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and 
 where once they chanced upon a night of ollapodrida, 
 with such appeals to March's memory of a boyish 
 ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and 
 then pensive over its cabbage and carrots, peas and 
 bacon. For a rare combination of international 
 motives they prized most the table-d'hote of a French 
 lady, who had taken a Spanish husband in a second 
 marriage, and had a Cuban negro for her cook, with 
 a cross-eyed Alsatian for waiter, and a slim young 
 South American for cashier. March held that some- 
 thing of the catholic character of these relations 
 expressed itself in the generous and tolerant variety 
 of the dinner, which was singularly abundant for 
 fifty cents, without wine. At one very neat French 
 place he got a dinner at the same price with wine, 
 but it was not so abundant ; and March inquired 
 in fruitless speculation why the table-d'Mte of the 
 Italians, a notoriously frugal and abstemious people, 
 should be usually more than you wanted at seventy- 
 five cents and a dollar, and that of the French rather 
 less for half a dollar. He could not see that the 
 frequenters were greatly different at the different 
 places; they were mostly Americans, of subdued 
 manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes, with
 
 62 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 here and there a table full of foreigners. There was 
 no noise and not much smoking anywhere ; March 
 liked going to that neat French place because there 
 Madame sat enthroned and high behind a comptoir at 
 one side of the room, and everybody saluted her in 
 going out. It was there that a gentle-looking 
 young couple used to dine, in whom the Marches 
 became effectlessly interested, because they thought 
 they looked like that when they were } r oung. The 
 wife had an aesthetic dress, and defined her pretty 
 head by Avearing her back-hair pulled up very tight 
 under her bonnet; the husband had dreamy eyes 
 set wide apart under a pure forehead. " They are 
 artists, Aiigust, I think," March suggested to the 
 waiter, when he had vainly asked about them. 
 " Oh, hartis, cedenly," August consented ; but 
 Heaven knows whether they were, or what they 
 were : March never learned. 
 
 This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and- 
 go qualit} 7 in their New York sojourn, this almost 
 loss of individuality at times, after the intense 
 identification of their Boston life, was a relief, though 
 Mrs. March had her misgivings, and questioned 
 whether it were not perhaps too relaxing to the 
 moral fibre. March refused to explore his con- 
 science ; he allowed that it might be so ; but he 
 said he liked now and then to feel his personality in 
 that state of solution. They went and sat a good 
 deal in the softening evenings among the infants 
 and dotards of Latin extraction in Washington 
 Square, safe from all who ever knew them, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. Dd 
 
 enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the 
 foliage of the trees and flattered out of sight the 
 churchwarden's gothic of the University Building. 
 The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in their 
 weary mothers' or little sisters' arms ; but they did 
 not disturb the dotards, who slept, some with their 
 heads fallen forward, and some with their heads 
 fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those 
 with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to 
 confront the public. The small Italian children 
 raced up and down the asphalte paths, playing 
 American games of tag and hide-and-whoop ; larger 
 boys passed ball, in training for potential champion- 
 ships. The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled 
 fitfully about where they should spend the summer, 
 like sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights 
 began to show distinctly among the leaves, and they 
 looked round and found the infants and dotards 
 gone and the benches filled with lovers. That was 
 the signal for the Marches to go home. He said that 
 the spectacle of so much courtship as the eye might 
 take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppres- 
 sive, but the thought that at the same hour the same 
 thing was going on all over the country, wherever 
 two young fools could get together, was more than 
 he could bear ; he did not deny that it was natural, 
 and, in a measure, authorised, but he declared that 
 it was hackneyed ; and the fact that it must go on 
 for ever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired. 
 
 At home, generally, they found that the children 
 had not missed them, and were perfectly safe. It
 
 64 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 was one of the advantages of a flat that they could 
 leave the children there whenever they liked with- 
 out anxiety. They liked better staying there than 
 wandering about in the evening with their parents, 
 whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, 
 and their pleasures insipid. They studied, or read, 
 or looked out of the window at the street sights ; 
 and their mother always came back to them with a 
 pang for their lonesomeness. Bella knew some little 
 girls in the house, but in a ceremonious way ; Tom 
 had formed no friendships among the boys at school 
 such as he had left in Boston ; as nearly as he could 
 explain, the New York fellows carried canes at an 
 age when they would have had them broken for 
 them by the other boys at Boston : and they were 
 both sissy ish and fast. It was probably prejudice ; 
 he never could say exactly what their demerits were, 
 and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick 
 as they pretended, though they answered inquirers, 
 the one that New York was a hole, and the other 
 that it was horrid, and that all they lived for was to 
 get back to Boston. In the meantime they were 
 thrown much upon each other for society, which 
 March said was well for both of them ; he did not 
 mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense 
 of a common wrong ; it made them better com- 
 rades, and it was providing them with amusing 
 reminiscences for the future. They really en- 
 joyed Bohemianising in that harmless way : though 
 Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he was 
 very punctilious about his sister, and went round
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 65 
 
 from his own school every day to fetch her home 
 from hers. The whole family went to the theatre a 
 good deal, and enjoyed themselves together in their 
 desultory explorations of the city. 
 
 They lived near Greenwich Village, and March 
 liked strolling through its quaintness toAvard the 
 water-side on a Sunday, when a hereditary Sabbata- 
 rianism kept his wife at home ; he made her observe 
 that it even kept her at home from church. He 
 found a lingering quality of pure Americanism in 
 the region, and he said the very bells called to wor- 
 ship in a nasal tone. He liked the streets of small 
 brick houses, with here and there one painted red, 
 and the mortar lines picked out in white, and with 
 now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars 
 and a bowed transom. The rear of the tenement- 
 houses showed him the picturesqueness of clothes- 
 lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence ; and the 
 new apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line 
 with their towering stories, implied a life as alien to 
 the American manner as anything in continental 
 Europe. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues 
 prevailed in Greenwich Village, but no longer 
 German or even Irish tongues or faces. The eyes 
 and ear-rings of Italians twinkled in and out of the 
 alleyways and basements, and they seemed to 
 abound even in the streets, where long ranks of 
 trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curb- 
 stones suggested the presence of a race of sturdier 
 strength than theirs. March liked the swarthy, 
 strange visages ; he found nothing menacing for
 
 66 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 the future in them ; for wickedness he had to satisfy 
 himself as he could with the sneering, insolent, 
 clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the 
 b'hoy type, now almost as extinct in Xew York as 
 the dodo or the volunteer fireman. When he had 
 found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups 
 of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he 
 experienced a sufficient excitement in the recent 
 arrival of a French steamer, whose sheds were 
 thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a 
 tacit inquiry into the emotions of the passengers, 
 fresh from the cleanliness of Paris, and now driving 
 up through the filth of those streets. 
 
 Some of the streets were filthier than others ; 
 there was at least a choice ; there were boxes and 
 barrels of kitchen offal on all the sidewalks, but not 
 everywhere manure-heaps, and in some places the 
 stench was mixed with the more savoury smell of 
 cooking. One Sunday morning, before the winter 
 was quite gone, the sight of the frozen refuse melt- 
 ing in heaps, and particularly the loathsome edges 
 of the rotting ice near the gutters, with the strata 
 of waste-paper and straw litter, and egg-shells and 
 orange-peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps, made 
 him unhappy. He gave a whimsical shrug for the 
 squalor of the neighbouring houses, and said to him- 
 self rather than the boy who was with him : " It 's 
 curious, isn't it, how fond the poor people are of 
 these unpleasant thoroughfares ? You always find 
 them living in the worst streets." 
 
 " The burden of all the wrong in the world comes
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 67 
 
 on the poor," said the boy. " Every sort of fraud 
 and swindling hurts them the worst. The city 
 wastes the money it 's paid to clean the streets with, 
 and the poor have to suffer, for they can't afford to 
 pay twice, like the rich." 
 
 March stopped short. " Hallo, Tom ! Is that 
 your wisdom ? " 
 
 " It 's what Mr. Lindau says," answered the boy 
 doggedly, as if not pleased to have his ideas mocked 
 at, even if they Avere second-hand. 
 
 " And you didn't tell him that the poor lived in 
 dirty streets because they liked them, and were too- 
 lazy and worthless to have them cleaned ? " 
 
 " No ; I didn't." 
 
 " I 'm surprised. What do you think of Lindau, 
 generally speaking, Tom ? " 
 
 " Well, sir, I don't like the way he talks about 
 some things. I don't suppose this country is per- 
 fect, but I think it 's about the best there is, and it 
 don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the 
 time." 
 
 " Sound, my son," said March, putting his hand 
 on the boy's shoulder and beginning to walk on. 
 " Well ? " 
 
 " Well, then, he says that it isn't the public frauds 
 only that the poor have to pay for, but they have to 
 pay for all the vices of the rich ; that when a specu- 
 lator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm 
 suspends, or hard times come, it's the poor who 
 have to give up necessaries where the rich give up 
 luxuries."
 
 68 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well, well ! And then ?" 
 
 "Well, then I think the crank comes in, in 
 Mr. Lindau. He says there 's no need of failures 
 or frauds or hard times. It's ridiculous. There 
 always have been and there always will be. But 
 if you tell him that, it seems to make him perfectly 
 furious." 
 
 March repeated the substance of this talk to his 
 wife. " I 'm glad to know that Tom can see through 
 such ravings. He has lots of good common-sense." 
 
 It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and 
 they were sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring 
 the wide old double houses at the lower end ; at one 
 corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled 
 elbows that a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top 
 of a garden wall for its convenience in looking into 
 the street, he said. The line of these comfortable 
 dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken 
 by the facades of shops ; and March professed him- 
 self vulgarised by a want of style in the people they 
 met in their walk to Twenty-third Street. 
 
 " Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, 
 Isabel," he demanded. " I pine for the society of 
 my peers." 
 
 He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife 
 get on the roof with him. "Think of our doing 
 such a thing in Boston ! " she sighed, with a little 
 shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recogni- 
 tion and comment. 
 
 "You wouldn't be afraid to do it in London or 
 Paris?"
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 69 
 
 "No; we should be strangers there just as we 
 are in New York. I wonder how long one could be 
 a stranger here." 
 
 " Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The 
 place is really vast, so much larger than it used to 
 seem, and so heterogeneous." 
 
 When they got down very far uptown, and began 
 to walk back by Madison Avenue, they found 
 themselves in a different population from that they 
 dwelt among ; not heterogeneous at all ; very homo- 
 geneous, and almost purely American ; the only 
 qualification was American Hebrew. Such a well- 
 dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured 
 down the broad sidewalks before the handsome,, 
 stupid houses that March could easily pretend he 
 had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still 
 he expressed his doubts whether this Sunday after- 
 noon parade, which seemed to be a thing of custom, 
 represented the best form among the young people 
 of that region ; he wished he knew ; he blamed 
 himself for becoming of- a fastidious conjecture ; he 
 could not deny the fashion and the richness and the 
 indigeneity of the spectacle ; the promenaders looked 
 New Yorky ; they were the sort of people whom 
 you would know for New Yorkers elsewhere, so 
 well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. 
 Their silk hats shone, and their boots ; their f rocka 
 had the right distension behind, and their bonnets; 
 perfect poise and distinction. 
 
 The Marches talked of these and other facts of 
 
 their appearance, and curiously questioned whether 
 2 D
 
 70 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 this were the best that a great material civilisation 
 could come to; it looked a little dull. The men's 
 faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked 
 dull; the women's were pretty and knowing, and 
 yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression 
 of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with 
 unlimited money, and no ideals that money could 
 not realise ; fashion and comfort were all that they 
 desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes 
 showily, that decorates and that tells ; the culture, 
 say, of plays and operas, rather than books. 
 
 Perhaps the observers did the promenaders in- 
 justice; they might not have been as common- 
 minded as they looked. "But/' March said, "I 
 understand now why the poor people don't come up 
 here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable 
 quarter of the town ; they would be bored to death. 
 On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street 
 myself." 
 
 In other walks the Marches tried to find some of 
 the streets they had wandered through the first day 
 of their wedding journey in New York, so long ago. 
 They could not make sure of them ; but once they 
 ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of 
 that, though not in its old aspect. They recalled 
 the hot morning, when they sauntered over the 
 trodden weed that covered the sickly grass-plots 
 there, and sentimentalised the sweltering paupers 
 who had crept out of the squalid tenements about 
 for a breath of air after a sleepless night. Now the 
 paupers were gone, and where the old mansions
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 71 
 
 that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered 
 aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many- 
 storied brick-work for which architecture has yet 
 no proper form and aesthetics no name. The trees 
 and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew 
 briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that 
 came up over the water ; and in the well-paved alleys 
 the ghosts of eighteenth- century fashion might have 
 met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged 
 stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered con- 
 dition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal 
 lady on Bedloe's Island, with her lifted torch, and 
 still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations 
 of the Elevated road. It is an outlook of unrivalled 
 beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes with 
 the innumerable stacks and sails of commerce, to the 
 hills beyond, where the moving forest of masts halts 
 at the shore, and roots itself in the groves of the 
 many-villaged uplands. The Marches paid the 
 charming prospect a willing duty, and rejoiced in it 
 as generously as if it had been their own. Perhaps 
 it was, they decided. He said people owned more 
 things in common than they were apt to think ; and 
 they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the 
 excellent management of Castle Garden, which they 
 penetrated for a moment's glimpse of the huge 
 rotunda, where the emigrants first set foot on our 
 continent. It warmed their hearts, so easily moved 
 to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the 
 nation took of these humble guests ; they found it 
 even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling
 
 72 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance 
 waiting there to meet them. No one appeared 
 troubled or anxious ; the officials had a conscien- 
 tious civility ; the government seemed to manage 
 their welcome as well as a private company or cor- 
 poration could have done. In fact, it was after the 
 simple strangers had left the government care that 
 March feared their woes might begin ; and he would 
 have liked the government to follow each of them 
 to his home, wherever he meant to fix it within our 
 borders. He made note of the looks of the licensed 
 runners and touters waiting for the immigrants out- 
 side the government premises ; he intended to work 
 them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch, but 
 they remained mere material in his memorandum- 
 book, together with some quaint old houses on the 
 Sixth Avenue road, which he had noticed on the way 
 down. On the way up, these were superseded in 
 his regard by some hip-roof structures on the 
 Ninth Avenue, which he thought more Dutch- 
 looking. The perspectives of the cross-streets to- 
 ward the river were very lively, with their turmoil 
 of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot- 
 passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of 
 shipping, and final gleams of dancing water. At a 
 very noisy corner, clangorous with some sort of iron- 
 working, he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet 
 sarcasm of an inn that called itself the Homelike 
 Hotel, and he speculated at fantastic length on the 
 gentle associations of one who should have passed 
 his youth under its roof.
 
 III. 
 
 FIRST and last, the Marches did a good deal of 
 travel on the Elevated roads, which, he said, gave 
 you such glimpses of material aspects in the city as 
 some violent invasion of others' lives might afford 
 in human nature. Once, when the impulse of 
 adventure was very strong in them, they went quite 
 the length of the West side lines, and saw the city 
 pushing its way by irregular advances into the 
 country. Some spaces, probably held by the owners 
 for that rise in value which the industry of others 
 providentially gives to the land of the wise and 
 good, it left vacant comparatively far down the road, 
 and built up others at remoter points. It was a 
 world of lofty apartment-houses beyond the Park, 
 springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of 
 invaded rusticity between, and here and there an 
 old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines 
 with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city 
 foundations. But wherever it went or wherever it 
 paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp ; and the 
 adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and 
 Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third 
 Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops and 
 VOL. II. 4
 
 74 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 shoppers. The butchers' shops and milliners' shops 
 on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as 
 at One Hundredth Street. 
 
 The adventurers were not often so adventurous. 
 Tliev recognised that in their willingness to let 
 
 / o o ^ 
 
 their fancy range for them, and to let speculation do 
 the work of inquiry, they were no longer young. 
 Their point of view was singularly unchanged, and 
 their impressions of New York remained the same 
 that they had been fifteen years before : huge, noisy, 
 ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed 
 then. The main difference was that they saw it 
 more now as a life, and then they only regarded it 
 as a spectacle ; and March could not release himself 
 from a sense of complicity with it, no matter what 
 whimsical, or alien, or critical attitude he took. A 
 sense of the striving and the suffering deeply 
 possessed him ; and this grew the more intense as 
 he gained some knowledge of the forces at work 
 forces of pity, of destruction, of perdition, of sal- 
 vation. He wandered about on Sunday not only 
 through the streets, but into this tabernacle and 
 that, as the spirit moved him, and listened to those 
 who dealt with Christianity as a system of economics 
 as well as a religion. He could not get his wife to 
 go with him ; she listened to his report of what he 
 heard, and trembled ; it all seemed fantastic and 
 menacing. She lamented the literary peace, the 
 intellectual refinement of the life they had left 
 behind them ; and he owned it was very pretty, but 
 he said it was not life it was death-in-life. She
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 75 
 
 liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self- 
 denunciation, but she asked him, " Which of your 
 prophets are you going to follow?" and he answered, 
 "All all! And a fresh one every Sunday." And 
 so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with 
 some sadness at heart, and with a dim consciousness 
 that they had got their laugh out of too many things 
 in life. 
 
 What really occupied and compassed his activities, 
 in spite of his strenuous reveries of work beyond it, 
 was his editorship. On its social side it had not 
 fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's 
 radiant sketch of its duties and relations had caused 
 him to form of it. Most of the contributions came 
 from a distance ; even the articles written in New 
 York reached him through the post, and so far from 
 having his valuable time, as they called it, consumed 
 in interviews with his collaborators, he rarely saw 
 any of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to 
 fence him from importunate visitors, led a life of 
 luxurious disoccupation, and whistled almost unin- 
 terruptedly. When any one came, March found 
 himself embarrassed and a little anxious. The 
 visitors were usually young men, terribly respectful, 
 but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions 
 chasmally different from his ; and he felt in their 
 presence something like an anachronism, something 
 like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathies 
 on them, to get at what they were really thinking and 
 feeling, and it was some time before he could under- 
 stand that they were not really thinking and feeling
 
 T6 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 anything of their own concerning their art, but were 
 necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced 
 men, mere acceptants of older men's thoughts and 
 feelings, whether they were tremendously conserva- 
 tive, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as 
 others were. Certain of them called themselves 
 realists, certain romanticists ; but none of them 
 seemed to know what realism was, or what romanti- 
 cism ; they apparently supposed the difference a 
 difference of material. March had imagined himself 
 taking home to lunch or dinner the aspirants for 
 editorial favour whom he liked, whether he liked 
 their work or not ; but this was not an easy matter. 
 Those who were at all interesting seemed to have 
 engagements and preoccupations ; after two or three 
 experiments with the bashfuller sort those who 
 had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in 
 their hands, in the good old literary tradition he 
 wondered whether he was otherwise like them when 
 he was young like them. He could not flatter himself 
 that he was not ; and yet he had a hope that the 
 world had grown worse since his time, which his 
 wife encouraged. 
 
 Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitali- 
 ties which she had at first imagined essential to the 
 literary prosperity of Every Other Week ; her family 
 sufficed her ; she would willingly have seen no one 
 out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'Jtote 
 dinner, or the audiences at the theatres. March's 
 devotion to his work made him reluctant to delegate 
 it to any one ; and as the summer advanced, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 77 
 
 the question of where to go grew more vexed, he 
 showed a man's base willingness to shirk it for him- 
 self by not going anywhere. He asked his wife why 
 she did not go somewhere with the children, and he 
 joined her in a search for non-malarial regions on 
 the map when she consented to entertain this notion. 
 But when it came to the point she would not go; 
 he offered to go with her then, and then she would 
 not let him. She said she knew he would be 
 anxious about his work ; he protested that he could 
 take it with him to any distance within a few hours, 
 but she would not be persuaded. She would rather 
 he stayed; the effect would be better with Mr. 
 Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they 
 could all get off a week or two to the sea-shore near 
 Boston the only real sea-shore in August. The 
 excursions were practically confined to a single day 
 at Coney Island ; and once they got as far as Boston 
 on the way to the sea-shore near Boston ; that is, 
 Mrs. March and the children went ; an editorial exi- 
 gency kept March at the last moment. The Boston 
 streets seemed very queer and clean and empty to 
 the children, and the buildings little ; in the horse- 
 cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother 
 with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very 
 guilty. She knew that this was merely the Puri- 
 tan mask, the cast of a dead civilisation, which 
 people of very amiable and tolerant minds were 
 doomed to wear, and she sighed to think that less 
 than a year of the heterogeneous gaiety of New 
 York should have made her afraid of it. The sky
 
 78 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 seemed cold and grey; the east wind, which she had 
 always thought so delicious in summer, cut her to 
 the heart. She took her children up to the South End, 
 and in the pretty square where they used to live 
 they stood before their alienated home, and looked 
 up at its close-shuttered windows. The tenants 
 must have been away, but Mrs. March had not the 
 courage to ring and make sure, though she had 
 always promised herself that she would go all over 
 the house when she came back, and see how they 
 had used it ; she could pretend a desire for some- 
 thing she wished to take away. She knew she 
 could not bear it now ; and the children did not 
 seem eager. She did not push on to the seaside ; 
 it would be forlorn there without their father ; she 
 was glad to go back to him in the immense, friendly 
 homelessness of New York, and hold him answer- 
 able for the change, in her heart or her mind, which 
 made its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consola- 
 tion. 
 
 She found that he had been giving the cook a 
 holiday, and dining about hither and thither with 
 Fulkerson. Once he had dined with him at the 
 widow's (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and 
 then had spent the evening there, and smoked with 
 Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the gallery 
 overlooking the back yard. They were all spending 
 the summer in New York. The widow had got so 
 good an offer for her house at St. Barnaby for the 
 summer that she could not refuse it ; and the 
 "\Voodburns found New York a watering-place of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 79 
 
 exemplary coolness after the burning Augusts and 
 Septembers of Charlottesburg. 
 
 " You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir," 
 the colonel explained, " till you come to the 
 September heat, that sometimes runs well into 
 October ; and then you begin to lose your temper, 
 sir. It 's never quite so hot as it is in New York 
 at times, but it's hot longer, sir." He alleged, as 
 if something of the sort were necessary, the example 
 of a famous South-western editor who spent all his 
 summers in a New York hotel as the most luxurious 
 retreat on the continent, consulting the weather 
 forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the 
 mountains or the sea, and then hurrying back at the 
 promise of cooler weather. The colonel had not 
 found it necessary to do this yet ; and he had been 
 reluctant to leave town, where he was working up 
 a branch of the inquiry which had so long occupied 
 him, in the libraries, and studying the great problem 
 of labour and poverty as it continually presented 
 itself to him in the streets. He said that he talked 
 with all sorts of people, whom he found monstrously 
 civil, if you took them in the right way ; and he 
 went everywhere in the city without fear and 
 apparently without danger. March could not find 
 out that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of 
 want which he visited, or had proposed their enslave- 
 ment to the inmates as a short and simple solution 
 of the great question of their lives ; he appeared to 
 have contented himself with the collection of facts 
 for the persuasion of the cultivated classes. It
 
 80 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 seemed to March a confirmation of this impression 
 that the colonel should address his deductions from 
 these facts so unsparingly to him ; he listened with 
 a respectful patience, for which Fulkerson after- 
 ward personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it was 
 not often the colonel found such a good listener; 
 generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who 
 thought his ideas were shocking, but honoured him 
 for holding them so conscientiously. Fulkerson was 
 glad that March, as the literary department, had 
 treated the old gentleman so well, because there was 
 an open feud between him and the art department. 
 Beaton was outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say ; 
 though as for that, the old colonel seemed quite able 
 to take care of himself, and gave Beaton an un- 
 qualified contempt in return for his unmannerlmess. 
 The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so ; 
 she admired Beaton as much as she respected the 
 colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, 
 rather more than Miss Leighton did ; he asked 
 March if he had noticed them together. March had 
 noticed them, but without any very definite im- 
 pression except that Beaton seemed to give the 
 whole evening to the girl. Afterward he recollected 
 that he had fancied her rather harassed by his 
 devotion, and it was this point that he wished to 
 present for his wife's opinion. 
 
 " Girls often put on that air, she said. " It 's one 
 of their ways of teasing. But then, if the man was 
 really very much in love, and she was only enough in 
 love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 81 
 
 seem troubled. It would be a very serious question. 
 Girls often don't know what to do in such a case." 
 
 "Yes," said March, "I've often been glad that I 
 was not a girl, on that account. But I guess that 
 on general principles Beaton is not more in love 
 than she is. I couldn't imagine that young man 
 being more in love with anybody, unless it was 
 himself. He might be more in love with himself 
 than any one else was." 
 
 " Well, he doesn't interest me a great deal, and I 
 can't say Miss Leighton does either. I think she 
 can take care of herself. She has herself very well 
 in hand." 
 
 "Why so censorious?" pleaded March. "I 
 don't defend her for having herself in hand; but 
 is it a fault 1 " 
 
 Mrs. March did not say. She asked, " And how 
 does Mr. Fulkerson's affair get on ? " 
 
 "His affair 1 ? You really think it is one? Well, 
 I 've fancied so myself, and I 've had an idea of 
 some time asking him ; Fulkerson strikes one as 
 truly domesticable, conjugable at heart ; but I Ve 
 waited for him to speak." 
 
 " I should think so." 
 
 " Yes. He 's never opened on the subject yet. 
 Do you know, I think Fulkerson has his moments 
 of delicacy." 
 
 " Moments ! He 's all delicacy in regard to 
 women." 
 
 " Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to 
 rouse his advertising instincts." 
 4*
 
 IV. 
 
 THE Dryfoos family stayed in town till August 
 Then the father went West again to look after his 
 interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to 
 one of the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson said 
 that he had never seen anything like Saratoga for 
 fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her 
 own young ladyhood this was so for at least some 
 weeks of the year. She had been too far withdrawn 
 from fashion since her marriage to know whether it 
 was still so or not. In this, as in so many other 
 matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon 
 Fulkerson, in spite of Dryfoos's angry determination 
 that he should not run the family, and in spite of 
 Christine's doubt of his omniscience ; if he did not 
 know everything, she was aware that he knew more 
 than herself. She thought that they had a right to 
 have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least go 
 up and engage their rooms beforehand ; but Fulker 
 son did not offer to do either, and she did not quite 
 see her way to commanding his services. The 
 young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses 
 with them ; they sat in the park of tall, slim trees 
 which the hotel's quadrangle enclosed, and listened
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 83 
 
 to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza 
 in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the 
 street, or in the vast parlours by night, where all 
 the other ladies were, and they felt that they were 
 of the best there. But they knew nobody, and Mrs. 
 Mandel was so particular that Mela was prevented 
 from continuing the acquaintance even of the few 
 young men who danced with her at the Saturday- 
 night hops. They drove about, but they went to 
 places without knowing why, except that the carriage 
 man took them, and they had all the privileges of a 
 proud exclusivism without desiring them. Once a 
 motherly matron seemed to perceive their isolation, 
 and made overtures to them, but then desisted, as 
 if repelled by Christine's suspicion, or by Mela's too 
 instant and hilarious good-fellowship, which ex- 
 pressed itself in hoarse laughter and in a flow of talk 
 full of topical and syntactical freedom. From time 
 to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. 
 Fulkersori was only there they would have a good 
 time ; she wondered what they were all doing in 
 New York, where she wished herself ; she rallied 
 her sister about Beaton, and asked her why she did 
 not write and tell him to come up there. 
 
 Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to 
 follow them. Some banter had passed between 
 them to this effect ; he said he should take them in 
 on his way home to Syracuse. Christine would not 
 have hesitated to write to him and remind him of 
 his promise; but she had learned to distrust her 
 literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the
 
 84 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 spelling in a scrap of writing which dropped out of 
 her music-book one night. She believed that he 
 would not have laughed if he had known it was 
 hers ; but she felt that she could hide better the 
 deficiencies which were not committed to paper; 
 she could manage with him in talking ; she was too 
 ignorant of her ignorance to recognise the mistakes 
 she made then. Through her own passion she 
 perceived that she had some kind of fascination for 
 him ; she was graceful, and she thought it must be 
 that ; she did not understand that there was a kind 
 of beauty in her small, irregular features that 
 piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in 
 her black eyes beyond her intelligence and inten- 
 tion. Once he sketched her as they sat together, 
 and flattered the portrait without getting what he 
 wanted in it ; he said he must try her some time in 
 colour ; and he said things which, when she made 
 Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired 
 her more than anybody else. He came fitfully, but 
 he came often, and she rested content in a girl's in- 
 definiteness concerning the affair ; if her thought 
 went beyond love-making to marriage, she believed 
 that she could have him if she wanted him. Her 
 father's money counted in this; she divined that 
 Beaton was poor ; but that made no difference ; she 
 would have enough for both ; the money would 
 have counted as an irresistible attraction if there 
 had been no other. 
 
 The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong 
 looks of restless dislike with which Dryfoos regarded
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 85 
 
 it ; but now when Beaton did not come to Saratoga 
 it necessarily dropped, and Christine's content with 
 it. She bore the trial as long as she could; she 
 used pride and resentment against it; but at last 
 she could not bear it, and with Mela's help she 
 wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in 
 New York, and playfully boasting of Saratoga. It 
 seemed to them both that it was a very bright 
 letter, and would be sure to bring him ; they would 
 have had no scruple about sending it but for the 
 doubt they had whether they had got some of the 
 words right. Mela offered to bet Christine anything 
 she dared that they were right, and she said, Send 
 it anyway ; it was no difference if they were wrong. 
 But Christine could not endure to think of that 
 laugh of Beaton's, and there remained only Mrs. 
 Mandel as authority on the spelling. Christine 
 dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela 
 said she knew she would not interfere, and she 
 undertook to get round her. Mrs. Mandel pro- 
 nounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; 
 she forbade them to send the letter; and Mela 
 failed to get round her, though she threatened, if 
 Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the 
 wrong words, that she would send the letter as it 
 was; then Mrs. Mandel said that if Mr. Beaton 
 appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take 
 them both home. When Mela reported this re- 
 sult, Christine accused her of having mismanaged 
 the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and 
 they called each other names. Christine declared
 
 86 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 that she would not stay in Saratoga, and that if 
 Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her 
 she should go alone. They returned the first week 
 in September ; but by that time Beaton had gone to 
 see his people in Syracuse. 
 
 Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his 
 mother after his father went West. He had already 
 taken such a vacation as he had been willing to 
 allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm 
 near the city, where the fathers with whom he 
 worked among the poor on the East side in the 
 winter had sent some of their wards for the 
 summer. It was not possible to keep his recrea- 
 tion a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a 
 pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad 
 must have teaching farm work among those paupers 
 and potential reprobates. He invented details of 
 his experience among them, and March could not 
 always help joining in the laugh at Conrad's 
 humourless helplessness under Fulkerson's bur- 
 lesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in 
 such dissipation. 
 
 They had time for a great deal of joking at the 
 office during the season of leisure which penetrates 
 in August to the very heart of business, and they 
 all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater 
 friendliness than before. Fulkerson had not had so 
 long to do with the advertising side of human nature 
 without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great 
 depth, perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole 
 point of view ; he made light of Beaton's solemnity,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 87 
 
 as he made light of Conrad's 'humanity. The art 
 editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humour 
 than the publisher, and was an easy prey in the 
 manager's hands ; but when he had been led on by 
 Fulkerson's flatteries to make some betrayal of ego- 
 tism, he brooded over it till he had thought how to 
 revenge himself in elaborate insult. For Beaton's 
 talent Fulkerson never lost his admiration ; but his 
 joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of 
 being the sole source of the magazine's prosperity. 
 No bait of this sort was too obvious for Beaton to 
 swallow ; he could be caught with it as often as Ful- 
 kerson chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious 
 as to the motives of people in saying things. With 
 March he got on no better than at first. He seemed 
 to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the 
 literary department on the art department, and he 
 met it now and then with anticipative reprisal. 
 After these rebuffs, the editor delivered him over 
 to the manager, who could turn Beaton's contrary- 
 mindedness to account by asking the reverse of 
 what he really wanted done. This was what 
 Fulkerson said ; the fact was that he did get 
 on with Beaton; and March contented himself 
 with musing upon the contradictions of a charac- 
 ter at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and 
 so sullen, so conscious and so simple. 
 
 After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the 
 editor ceased to feel the disagreeable fact of the old 
 man's mastery of the financial situation. None 
 of the chances which might have made it painful
 
 S8 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 occurred ; the control of the whole affair remained 
 in Fulkerson's hands ; before he went West again, 
 Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office, as if, 
 having once worn off the novelty of the sense of 
 owning a literary periodical, he was no longer in- 
 terested in it. 
 
 Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, 
 which he did not do without coming to take a 
 formal leave of the editor at his office. He seemed 
 willing to leave March with a better impression 
 than he had hitherto troubled himself to make ; he 
 even said some civil things about the magazine, as 
 if its success pleased him ; and he spoke openly to 
 March of his hope that his son would finally become 
 interested in it to the exclusion of the hopes and 
 purposes which divided them. It seemed to March 
 that in the old man's warped and toughened heart 
 he perceived a disappointed love for his son greater 
 than for his other children ; but this might have 
 been fancy. Lindau came in with some copy while 
 Dryfoos was there, and March introduced them. 
 When Lindau went out, March explained to Dryfoos 
 that he had lost his hand in the war ; and he told 
 him something of Lindau's career as he had known 
 it. Dryfoos appeared greatly pleased that Every 
 Other Week was giving Lindau work. He said that 
 he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the 
 war, and had paid money to fill up the Moffitt 
 County quota under the later calls for troops. He 
 had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined 
 the Anti-Nebraska party in '55, and he had voted
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 89 
 
 for Fremont and for every Republican President 
 since then. 
 
 At his own house March saw more of Lindau 
 than of any other contributor, but the old man 
 seemed to think that he must transact all his busi- 
 ness with March at his place of business. The 
 transaction had some peculiarities which perhaps 
 made this necessary. Lindau always expected to 
 receive his money when he brought his copy, as an 
 acknowledgment of the immediate right of the 
 labourer to his hire ; and he would not take it in a 
 cheque because he did not approve of banks, and 
 regarded the whole system of banking as the capi- 
 talistic manipulation of the people's money. He 
 would receive his pay only from March's hand, 
 because he wished to be understood as working for 
 him, and honestly earning money honestly earned ; 
 and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at 
 letting the old man share the increase of capital won 
 by such speculation as Dryfoos's, but he shook off 
 the feeling. As the summer advanced, and the 
 artists and classes that employed Lindau as a model 
 left town one after another, he gave largely of his 
 increasing leisure to the people in the office of Every 
 Other Week. It was pleasant for March to see the 
 respect with which Conrad Dryfoos always used 
 him, for the sake of his wound and his grey beard. 
 There was something delicate and fine in it, and 
 there was nothing unkindly on Fulkerson's part in 
 the hostilities which usually passed between him 
 and Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverently at
 
 90 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 times too, but it was not in him to keep that up, 
 especially when Lindau appeared with more beer 
 aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage 
 ship-shape. On these occasions Fulkerson always 
 tried to start him on the theme of the unduly rich ; 
 he made himself the champion of monopolies, and 
 enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon 
 him as a slave of capital ; he said that it did him 
 good. 
 
 One day, with the usual show of writhing under 
 Lindau's scorn, he said, " Well, I understand that 
 although you despise me now, Lindau 
 
 " I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his 
 nostrils swelling and his eyes naming with excite- 
 ment, "I bity you." 
 
 " Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the 
 end," said Fulkerson. " What I understand is that 
 you pity me now as the slave of capital, but you 
 would pity me a great deal more if I was the master 
 of it." 
 
 " How you mean ? " 
 
 " If I was rich." 
 
 " That would tebendt," said Lindau, trying to 
 control himself. "If you hat inheritedt your 
 money, you might pe innocent ; but if you hat mate 
 it, efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to 
 ask how you mate it, and if you hat mate moch, 
 he would know " 
 
 " Hold on ; hold on, now, Lindau ! Ain't that 
 rather un-American doctrine 1 We're all brought 
 up, ain't we, to honour the man that made his
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 91 
 
 money, and look down or try to look down ; some- 
 times it 's difficult on the fellow that his father left 
 it to ? " 
 
 The old man rose and struck his breast. "On- 
 Amerigan ! " he roared, and, as he Avent on, his 
 accent grew more and more uncertain. " What iss 
 Amerigan 1 Dere iss no Ameriga any more ! You 
 start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery 
 man de righdt to life, liperty, and de bursuit of 
 habbiness. And where haf you entedt? No man 
 that vorks vith his handts among you hass the 
 liperty to bursue his habbiness. He iss the slafe of 
 some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, 
 dat crindts him down to the least he can lif on, and 
 that rops him of the marchin of his earnings that he 
 might pe habby on. Oh, you Amerigans, you haf 
 cot it down goldt, as you say ! You ton't puy foters; 
 you puy lechislatures and goncressmen ; you puy 
 gourts; you puy gombetitors; you pay infentors 
 not to infent ; you atfertise, and the gounting-room 
 sees dat de etitorial-room toesn't tink." 
 
 " Yes, we Ve got a little arrangement of that sort 
 with March here," said Fulkerson. 
 
 " Oh, I am sawry," said the old man contritely, 
 " I meant noting bersonaL I ton't tink we are all 
 cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there are 
 goodt men. But gabidal " his passion rose again 
 " where you find gabidal, millions of money that a 
 man hass cot togeder in fife, ten, tventy years, you 
 findt the smell of tears and ploodt ! Dat iss what I 
 say. And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when
 
 92 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 you meet a rich man whether you meet an honest 
 man." 
 
 " "Well," said Fulkerson, " I wish I was a subject 
 of suspicion with you, Lindau. By the way," he 
 added, " I understand that you think capital was at 
 the bottom of the veto of that pension of yours." 
 
 "What bension? What feto ? " The old man 
 flamed up again. " No bension of mine was efer 
 fetoedt. I renounce my bension, begause I would 
 sgorn to dake money from a gofernment that I ton't 
 peliefe in any more. Where you hear that story ? " 
 
 "Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson, rather 
 embarrassed. "It's common talk." 
 
 " It 's a gommon lie, then ! When the time 
 gome dat dis iss a free gountry again, then I dalfe a 
 bension again for my woundts ; but I would sdarfe 
 before I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat is 
 bought oap by monobolies, and ron by drusts and 
 gompanies, and railroadts andt oil gompanies. 
 
 " Look out, Lindau," said Fulkerson. " You bite 
 yourself mit dat dog some day." But when the 
 old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation, 
 whirled out of the place, he added : " I guess I went 
 a little too far that time. I touched him on a sore 
 place ; I didn't mean to ; I heard some talk about 
 his pension being vetoed from Miss Leighton." He 
 addressed these exculpations to March's grave face, 
 and to the pitying deprecation in the eyes of Conrad 
 Dryfoos, whom Lindau's roaring wrath had sum- 
 moned to the door. "But I'll make it all right 
 with him the next time he comes. I didn't know
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 93 
 
 he was loaded, or I wouldn't have monkeyed with 
 him." 
 
 " Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to 
 talking in that way," said March. " I hate to hear 
 him. He 's as good an American as any of us ; and 
 it 's only because he has too high an ideal of us " 
 
 " Oh, go on ! Eub it in rub it in ! " cried Ful- 
 kerson, clutching his hair in suffering, which was 
 not altogether burlesque. " How did I know he 
 had renounced his ' bension ' 1 Why didn't you 
 tell me 1 " 
 
 " I didn't know it myself. I only knew that he 
 had none, and I didn't ask, for I had a notion that 
 it might be a painful subject." 
 
 Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. " "Well, 
 he 's a noble old fellow ; pity he drinks." March 
 would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out : " Dog 
 on it ! I '11 make it up to the old fool the next time 
 he comes. I don't like that dynamite talk of his ; 
 but any man that 's given his hand to the country has 
 got mine in his grip for good. Why, March ! You 
 don't suppose I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?" 
 
 " Why, of course not, Fulkerson." 
 
 But they could not get away from a certain 
 ruefulness for that time, and in the evening Fulker- 
 son came round to March's to say that he had got 
 Lindau's address from Conrad, and had looked 
 him up at his lodgings. 
 
 " Well, there isn't so much bric-a-brac there, quite, 
 as Mrs. Green left you ; but I 've made it all right 
 with Lindau, as far as I 'm concerned. I told him I
 
 94 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 didn't know when I spoke that way, and I honoured 
 him for sticking to his { brincibles ' ; / don't believe 
 in his brincibles ; and we wept on each other's necks 
 al least, he did. Dogged if he didn't kiss me 
 before I knew what he was up to. He said I was 
 his chenerous yong friendt, and he begged my 
 barton if he had said anything to wound me. I tell 
 you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats 
 enough round in that old barracks where he lives to 
 fit out a first-class case of delirium tremens. What 
 does he stay there for ? He 's not obliged to ? " 
 
 Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected 
 Fulkerson as deliciously comical ; but after that he 
 confined his pleasantries at the office to Beaton and 
 Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest of 
 the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up. 
 
 It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as 
 well. Perhaps he missed the occasions Fulkerson 
 used to give him of bursting out against the mil- 
 lionaires ; and he could not well go on denouncing as 
 the slafe of gabidal a man who had behaved to him 
 as Fulkerson had done, though Fulkerson's servile 
 relations to capital had been in nowise changed by 
 his nople gonduct. 
 
 Their relations continued to Avear this irksome 
 character of mutual forbearance ; and when Dry- 
 foos returned in October and Fulkerson revived the 
 question of that dinner in celebration of the success 
 of Every Other Week, he carried his complaisance to 
 an extreme that alarmed March for the consequences.
 
 V. 
 
 " You see," Fulkerson explained, " I find that the 
 old man has got an idea of his own about that 
 banquet, and I guess there 's some sense in it. He 
 wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we 
 can talk the thing up first half a dozen of us ; and 
 he wants to give us the dinner at his house. Well, 
 that J s no harm. I don't believe the old man ever 
 gave a dinner, and he 'd like to show off a little ; 
 there 's a good deal of human nature in the old man, 
 after all. He thought of you, of course, and Colonel 
 "Woodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the 
 table ; and Conrad ; and I suggested Kendricks : 
 he 's such a nice little chap ; and the old man him- 
 self brought up the idea of Lindau. He said you 
 told him something about him, and he asked why 
 couldn't we have him, too; and I jumped at it." 
 
 " Have Lindau to dinner 1 " asked March. 
 
 " Certainly ; why not 1 Father Dryfoos has a 
 notion of paying the old fellow a compliment for 
 what he done for the country. There won't be any 
 trouble about it. You can sit alongside of him, and 
 cut up his meat for him, and help him to things " 
 
 " Yes, but it won't do, Fulkerson ! I don't be-
 
 96 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 lieve Lindau ever had on a dress-coat in his life, 
 and I don't believe his 'brincibles' would let him 
 wear one." 
 
 "Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of 
 that. He's as high-principled as old Pan-Electric 
 himself, when it comes to a dress-coat," said Ful- 
 kerson. " We 're all going to go in business dress ; 
 the old man stipulated for that." 
 
 "It isn't the dress-coat alone," March resumed. 
 " Lindau and Dryfoos wouldn't get on. You know 
 they 're opposite poles in everything. You mustn't 
 do it. Dryfoos will be sure to say something to 
 outrage Lindau's ' brincibles,' and there '11 be an ex- 
 plosion. It's all well enough for Dryfoos to feel 
 grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honour him 
 does him credit ; but to have Lindau to dinner 
 isn't the way. At the best, the old fellow would 
 be very unhappy in such a house ; he would have a 
 bad conscience ; and I should be sorry to have him 
 feel that he 'd been recreant to his ' brincibles ' ; 
 they 're about all he 's got, and whatever we think 
 of them, we're bound to respect his fidelity to 
 them." March warmed toward Lindau in taking 
 this view of him. "I should feel ashamed if I 
 didn't protest against his being put in a false posi- 
 tion. After all, he 's my old friend, and I shouldn't 
 like to have him do himself injustice if he is a 
 crank." 
 
 " Of course," said Fulkerson, with some trouble in 
 his face. "I appreciate your feeling. But there 
 ain't any danger," he added buoyantly. " Anyhow,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 97 
 
 you spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the 
 chicken when he swallowed him in a fresh egg. 
 I 've asked Lindau, and he 's accepted with blayzure; 
 that 's what he says." 
 
 March made no other comment than a shrug. 
 
 "You'll see," Fulkerson continued, "it'll go off 
 all right. I '11 engage to make it, and I won't hold 
 anybody else responsible." 
 
 Jn the course of his married life March had 
 learned not to censure the irretrievable; but this 
 was just what his wife had not learned ; and she 
 poured out so much astonishment at what Fulker- 
 son had done, and so much disapproval, that March 
 began to palliate the situation a little. 
 
 "After all, it isn't a question of life and death; 
 and, if it were, I don't see how it's to be helped 
 now." 
 
 " Oh, it 's not to be helped now. But I am sur- 
 prised at Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 "Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being 
 merely human, too." 
 
 Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of 
 her favourite. " Well, I 'm glad there are not to be 
 ladies." 
 
 "I don't know. Dryfoos thought of having 
 ladies, but it seems your infallible Fulkerson over- 
 ruled him. Their presence might have kept Lindau 
 and our host in bounds." 
 
 It had become part of the Marches' conjugal joke 
 for him to pretend that she could allow nothing 
 wrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a 
 VOL. II. 5
 
 98 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 mocking air of having expected it when she said : 
 " Well, then, if Mr. Fulkerson says he will see that 
 it all comes out right, I suppose you must trust his 
 tact. I wouldn't trust yours, Basil. The first wrong 
 step was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked to help 
 on the magazine." 
 
 " Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson that took 
 the step, or at least suggested it. I 'm happy to say 
 /had totally forgotten my early friend." 
 
 Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a 
 moment. Then she said : " Oh, pshaw ! You 
 know well enough he did it to please you." 
 
 " I 'm very glad he didn't do it to please you t 
 Isabel," said her husband, with affected seriousness. 
 "Though perhaps he did." 
 
 He began to look at the humorous aspect of the 
 affair, which it certainly had, and to comment on 
 the singular incongruities which Every Other Week 
 was destined to involve at every moment of its 
 career. " I wonder if I 'm mistaken in supposing 
 that no other periodical was ever like it. Perhaps 
 all periodicals are like it. But I don't believe 
 there 's another publication in New York that could 
 bring together, in honour of itself, a fraternity and 
 equality crank like poor old Lindau, and a belated 
 sociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent 
 speculator like old Dryfoos, and a humanitarian 
 dreamer like young Dryfoos, and a sentimentalist 
 like me, and a nondescript like Beaton, and a pure 
 advertising essence like Fulkerson, and a society 
 spirit like Kendricks. If we could only allow on
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 99 
 
 another to talk uninterruptedly all the time, the 
 dinner would be the greatest success in the world, 
 and we should come home full of the highest mutual 
 respect. But I suspect we can't manage that even 
 your infallible Fulkerson couldn't work it and I 'm 
 afraid that there'll be some listening that'll spoil 
 the pleasure of the time." 
 
 March was so well pleased with this view of the 
 case that he suggested the idea involved to Fulker- 
 son. Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to laugh 
 at another man's joke, but he laughed a little rue- 
 fully, and he seemed worn with more than one kind 
 of care in the interval that passed between the 
 present time and the night of the dinner. 
 
 Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for 
 advice concerning the scope and nature of the 
 dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and 
 contested points of obvious propriety with per- 
 tinacious stupidity. Fulkerson said that when it 
 came to the point he would rather have had the 
 thing, as he called it, at Delmonico's or some other 
 restaurant ; but when he found that Dryfoos's pride 
 was bound up in having it at his own house, he gave 
 way to him. Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook 
 to prepare the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him 
 that this would not do; he must have it from a 
 caterer. Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at 
 table, but Fulkerson convinced him that this would 
 be incongruous at a man's dinner. It was decided 
 that the dinner should be sent in from Frescobaldi's, 
 and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with 
 2F
 
 100 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 the caterer. He insisted upon having everything 
 explained to him, and the reason for having it, and 
 not something else in its place; and he treated 
 Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league 
 to impose upon him. There were moments when 
 Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness 
 cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and 
 caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's 
 nature beneath ; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was 
 walking rough-shod over him in the security of an 
 American who had known how to make his money, 
 and must know how to spend it ; but he got him 
 safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of 
 sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned 
 to leave him. 
 
 It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with 
 Fulkerson that Lindau did not come about after 
 accepting the invitation to dinner, until he appeared 
 at Dryfoos's house, prompt to the hour. There was, 
 to be sure, nothing to bring him ; but Fulkerson 
 was uneasily aware that Dryfoos expected to meet 
 him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbid 
 acknowledgment of the honour done him. Dryfoos, 
 he could see, thought he was doing all his invited 
 guests a favour ; and while he stood in a certain awe 
 of them as people of much greater social experience 
 than himself, regarded them with a kind of con- 
 tempt, as people who were going to have a better 
 dinner at his house than they could ever afford to 
 have at their own. He had finally not spared ex- 
 pense upon it; after pushing Frescobaldi to tho
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 101 
 
 point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions 
 at the first interview, he had gone to him a second 
 time alone, and told him not to let the money stand 
 between him and anything he would like to do. In 
 the absence of Frescobaldi's fellow-conspirator he 
 restored himself in the caterer's esteem by adding 
 whatever he suggested ; and Fulkerson, after trem- 
 bling for the old man's niggardliness, was now afraid 
 of a fantastic profusion in the feast. Dryfoos had 
 reduced the scale of the banquet as regarded the 
 number of guests, but a confusing remembrance of 
 what Fulkerson had wished to do remained with 
 him in part, and up to the day of the dinner he 
 dropped in at Frescobaldi's and ordered more dishes 
 and more of them. He impressed the Italian as an 
 American original of a novel kind ; and when he 
 asked Fulkerson how Dryfoos had made his money, 
 and learned that it was primarily in natural gas, he 
 made note of some of his eccentric tastes as pecu- 
 liarities that were to be caressed in any future 
 natural-gas millionaire who might fall into his 
 hands. He did not begrudge the time he had to 
 give in explaining to Dryfoos the relation of the 
 different wines to the different dishes; Dryfoos 
 was apt to substitute a costlier wine where he 
 could for a cheaper one, and he gave Frescobaldi 
 carte blanche for the decoration of the table with 
 pieces of artistic confectionery. Among these the 
 caterer designed one for a surprise to his patron 
 and a delicate recognition of the source of his 
 wealth, which he found Dryfoos very willing to
 
 102 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 talk about, when he intimated that he knew what 
 it was. 
 
 Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, 
 and he found ready acceptance of his politeness from 
 Kendricks, who rightly regarded the dinner as a 
 part of the Every Other Week business, and was too 
 sweet and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seem very 
 glad to come. March was a matter of course ; but 
 in Colonel Woodburn Fulkerson encountered a re- 
 luctance which embarrassed him the more because 
 he was conscious of having, for motives of his own, 
 rather strained a point in suggesting the colonel to 
 Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation. There had 
 been only one of the colonel's articles printed as 
 yet, and though it had made a sensation in its way, 
 and started the talk about that number, still it did 
 not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or 
 even entitle him to recognition as a regular con- 
 tributor. Fulkerson felt so sure of pleasing him 
 with Dryfoos's message that he delivered it in full 
 family council at the widow's. His daughter re- 
 ceived it with all the enthusiasm that Fulkerson had 
 hoped for, but the colonel said stiffly, " I have not 
 the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos." Miss Wood- 
 burn appeared ready to fall upon him at this, but 
 controlled herself, as if aware that filial authority 
 had its limits, and pressed her lips together without 
 saying anything. 
 
 ' Yes, I know," Fulkerson admitted. " But it 
 isn't a usual case. Mr. Dryfoos don't go in much 
 for the conventionalities; I reckon he don't know
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 103 
 
 much about 'em, come to boil it down; and he 
 hoped" here Fulkerson felt the necessity of in- 
 venting a little " that you would excuse any want 
 of ceremony ; it 's to be such an informal affair, any- 
 way ; we 're all going in business dress, and there 
 ain't going to be any ladies. He 'd have come 
 himself to ask you, but he 's a kind of a bashful old 
 fellow. It 's all right, Colonel Woodburn." 
 
 " I take it that it is, sir," said the colonel cour- 
 teously, but with unabated state, " coming from you. 
 But in these matters we have no right to burden 
 our friends with our decisions." 
 
 " Of course, of course," said Fulkerson, feeling 
 that he had been delicately told to mind his own 
 business. 
 
 " I understand," the colonel went on, " the relation 
 that Mr. Dryfoos bears to the periodical in which 
 you have done me the hono' to print my papah, but 
 this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely 
 business connection, and of eating the salt of a man 
 whom you do not definitely know to be a gentle- 
 man." 
 
 " Mah goodness ! " his daughter broke in. "If 
 you bah your own salt with his money " 
 
 "It is supposed that I earn his money before I 
 buy my salt with it," returned her father severely. 
 " And in these times, when money is got in heaps, 
 through the natural decay of our nefarious com- 
 mercialism, it behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous 
 that the hospitality offered him is not the profusion 
 of a thief with his booty. I don't say that Mr.
 
 104 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Dryfoos's good-fortune is not honest. I simply say 
 that I know nothing about it, and that I should 
 prefer to know something before I sat down at his 
 board." 
 
 " You 're all right, colonel," said Fulkerson, " and 
 so is Mr. Dryfoos. I give you my word that there 
 are no flies on his personal integrity, if that's what 
 you mean. He 's hard, and he 'd push an advantage, 
 but I don't believe he would take an unfair one. 
 He 's speculated and made money every time, but I 
 never heard of his wrecking a railroad or belonging 
 to any swindling company or any grinding monopoly. 
 He does chance it in stocks, but he 's always played 
 on the square, if you call stocks gambling." 
 
 " May I think this over till morning 1 " asked the 
 colonel. 
 
 " Oh, certainly, certainly," said Fulkerson eagerly. 
 "I don't know as there's any hurry." 
 
 Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to 
 him before he went : " He '11 come. And Ah 'm so 
 much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson. Ah jost know it 's 
 all you' doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak 
 to some new people, and get away from us evahlastin' 
 women for once." 
 
 " I don't see why any one should want to do that," 
 said Fulkerson, with grateful gallantry. "But I '11 
 be dogged," he said to March when he told him 
 about this odd experience, " if I ever expected to 
 find Colonel Woodburn on old Lindau's ground. 
 He did come round handsomely this morning at 
 breakfast and apologised for taking time to think
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 105 
 
 the invitation over before he accepted. ' You under- 
 stand,' he says, ' that if it had been to the table of 
 some friend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos 
 your friend Mr. March, for instance it would have 
 been sufficient to know that he was your friend. 
 But in these days it is a duty that a gentleman 
 owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know 
 a rich man or not. The chances of making money 
 disreputably are so great that the chances are against 
 a man who has made money if he 's made a great 
 deal of it.'" 
 
 March listened with a face of ironical insinuation. 
 " That was very good ; and he seems to have had a 
 good deal of confidence in your patience and in your 
 sense of his importance to the occasion " 
 
 " No, no," Fulkerson protested, " there 's none of 
 that kind of thing about the colonel. I told him to 
 take time to think it over ; he 's the simplest-hearted 
 old fellow in the world." 
 
 "I should say so. After all, he didn't give any 
 reason he had for accepting. But perhaps the young 
 lady had the reason." 
 
 " Pshaw, March ! " said Fulkerson. 
 5*
 
 VI. 
 
 So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the 
 dinner might as well have been given at Frescobaldi's 
 rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs. Dryfoos 
 was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she 
 sat before an autumnal fire, shaking her head and 
 talking to herself at times, with the foreboding of 
 evil which old women like her make part of their 
 religion. The girls stood just out of sight at the 
 head of the stairs, and disputed which guest it was 
 at each arrival ; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room 
 to write letters, after beseeching them not to stand 
 there. When Kendricks came, Christine gave Mela 
 a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking shriek ; 
 for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at 
 Mrs. Horn's, in the absence of any other admirer, 
 they based a superstition of his interest in her; 
 when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but 
 awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine 
 involuntarily struck her. 
 
 Frescobaldi's men were in possession everywhere : 
 they had turned the cook out of her kitchen and the 
 waitress out of her pantry ; the reluctant Irishman 
 at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 107 
 
 who spoke French with the guests, and said, " Bien, 
 Monsieur" and " Toute suite" and " Mercif " to all, 
 as he took their hats and coats, and effused a hospi- 
 tality that needed no language but the gleam of his 
 eyes and teeth and the play of his eloquent hands. 
 From his professional dress-coat, lustrous with the 
 grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties, 
 they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger 
 Dryfoos in the drawing-room, which assumed infor- 
 mality for the affair, but did not put their wearers 
 wholly at their ease. The father's coat was of black 
 broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned ; the skirts 
 were long, and the sleeves came down to his knuckles ; 
 he shook hands with his guests, and the same dry- 
 ness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he 
 huskily asked each to take a chair. Conrad's coat 
 was of modern texture and cut, and was buttoned 
 about him as if it concealed a bad conscience 
 within its lapels; he met March with his entreat- 
 ing smile, and he seemed no more capable of 
 coping with the situation than his father. They 
 both waited for Fulkerson, who went about and did 
 his best to keep life in the party during the half- 
 hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. 
 Beaton stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be 
 approached on the right basis before yielding an 
 inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting 
 the moment when he could sally out on his hobby, 
 kept himself intrenched within the dignity of a 
 gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old 
 Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine
 
 108 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 head up, and his empty sleeve dangling over his 
 wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a new 
 coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was 
 glad to see Dryfoos make up to him and begin to 
 talk with him, as if he wished to show him particular 
 respect, though it might have been because he was 
 less afraid of him than of the others. He heard 
 Lindau saying, " Boat, the name is Choarman ? " 
 and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania 
 Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh 
 of relief, to fall into talk with Kendricks, who was 
 always pleasant ; he was willing to talk about some- 
 thing besides himself, and had no opinions that he 
 was not ready to hold in abeyance for the time being 
 out of kindness to others. In that group of impas- 
 sioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and 
 comfort with his harmless dilettante intention of 
 some day writing a novel, and his belief that he was 
 meantime collecting material for it. 
 
 Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole 
 company, was mainly engaged in keeping Colonel 
 Woodburn thawed out. He took Kendricks away 
 from March and presented him to the Colonel as a 
 person Avho, like himself, was looking into social con- 
 ditions; he put one hand on Kendricks' shoulder, 
 and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering 
 joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, 
 and then left them. March heard Kendricks pro- 
 test in vain, and the colonel say gravely : " I do not 
 wonder, sir, that these things interest you. They 
 constitute a problem which society must solve or
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 109 
 
 which will dissolve society," and he knew from that 
 formula, which the colonel had once used with him, 
 that he was laying out a road, for the exhibition of 
 the hobby's paces later. 
 
 Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned 
 toward Conrad Dryfoos, and said, " If we don't get 
 this thing going pretty soon, it'll be the death of 
 me," and "just then Frescobakli's butler came in and 
 announced to Dryfoos that dinner was served. The 
 old man looked toward Fulkerson with a troubled 
 glance, as if lie did not know what to do ; he made 
 a gesture to touch Lindau's elbow. Fulkerson called 
 out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn, Mr. Dryfoos," as 
 if Dryfoos were looking for him ; and he set the 
 example of what he was to do by taking Lindau's 
 arm himself. "Mr. Lindau is going to sit at my 
 end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not 
 upon the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in 
 at once." He contrived to get Dryfoos and the 
 colonel before him, and he let March follow with 
 Kendricks. Conrad came last with Beaton, who 
 had been turning over the music at the piano, and 
 chafing inwardly at the whole affair. At the table 
 Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos's right, 
 and March on his left. March sat on Fulkerson's 
 right, with Lindau next him ; and the young men 
 occupied the other seats. 
 
 " Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Ful- 
 kerson, " so you can begin to put Apollinaris in his 
 champagne-glass at the right moment ; you know his 
 little weakness of old; sorry to say it 's grown on him,"
 
 110 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Ful- 
 kerson's wish to start the gaiety, and Lindau patted 
 him on the shoulder. " I know hiss veakness. If 
 he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes 
 efen hiss enemy, as Shakespeare galled it." 
 
 " Ah, but Shakespeare couldn't have been thinking 
 of champagne," said Kendricks. 
 
 "I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed 
 with lofty courtesy, " champagne could hardly have 
 been known in his day." 
 
 " I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger 
 man deferentially. " He seemed to think that sack 
 and sugar might be a fault ; but he didn't mention 
 champagne." 
 
 " Perhaps he felt there was no question about 
 that," suggested Beaton, who then felt that he had 
 not done himself justice in the sally. 
 
 " I wonder just when champagne did come in," 
 said March. 
 
 " I know when it ought to come in," said Fulker- 
 son. " Before the soup ! " 
 
 They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of 
 drinking champagne out of tumblers every day, as 
 men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily ; he did 
 not quite understand the allusions, though he knew 
 what Shakespeare was, well enough ; Conrad's face 
 expressed a gentle deprecation of joking on such a 
 subject, but he said nothing. 
 
 The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The 
 young men tossed the ball back and forth; they 
 made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. \ll 
 
 they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed 
 Colonel Woodburn's tongue ; he became very com- 
 panionable with the young fellows ; with the feeling 
 that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, 
 he praised Scott and Addison as the only authors fit 
 to form the minds of gentlemen. 
 
 Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the 
 name of Flaubert as a master of style. " Style, you 
 know," he added, "is the man." 
 
 "Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the 
 colonel assented ; he wondered who Flaubert was. 
 
 Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he 
 said these were the masters. He recited some lurid 
 verses from Baudelaire ; Lindau pronounced them a 
 disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from 
 Victor Hugo on Louis Napoleon, with his heavy 
 German accent, and then he quoted Schiller. " Ach, 
 boat that iss peaudifool ! Not zo 1 " he demanded 
 of March. 
 
 " Yes, beautiful ; but, of course, you know I think 
 there 's nobody like Heine ! " 
 
 Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, 
 showing a want of teeth under his moustache. He 
 put his hand on March's back. " This poy he wass 
 a poy den wass so gracy to pekin reading Heine that 
 he gommence with the tictionary bevore he knows 
 any crammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort togeder." 
 
 " He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, 
 Lindau 1 " asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the old 
 man's accent, with an impudent wink that made 
 Lindau himself laugh. " Back in the dark ages, I
 
 112 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 mean, there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did 
 you old codgers meet there, anyway 1 " Fulkerson 
 saw the restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely 
 literary course the talk had taken ; he had intended 
 it to lead up that way to business, to Every Other 
 Week ; but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too 
 far out, and he wished to get it on the personal 
 ground, where everybody is at home. 
 
 " Ledt me zee," mused Lindau. " AVass it in 
 fifty-nine or zixty, Passil 1 Idt wass a year or dwo 
 pefore the war proke oudt, anyway." 
 
 " Those were exciting times," said Dryfoos, making 
 his first entry into the general talk. " I went down 
 to Indianapolis with the first company from our 
 place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in every- 
 where. They had a song 
 
 " Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble, 
 For we 're bound for the land of Canaan. " 
 
 The fellows locked arms and went singin' it up and 
 down four or five abreast in the moonlight ; crowded 
 everybody else off the sidewalk. " 
 
 " I rememper, I rememper," said Lindau, nodding 
 his head slowly up and down. "A coodt many off 
 them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan, 
 Mr. Dryfoos ? " 
 
 " You 're right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was 
 worth it the country we 've got now. Here, young 
 man ! " He caught the arm of the waiter who was 
 going round with the champagne bottle. " Fill up 
 Mr. Lindau's glass, there. I want to drink the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 113 
 
 health of those old times with him. Here 's to your 
 empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it ! No 
 offence to you, Colonel Woodburn," said Dryfoos, 
 turning to him before he drank. 
 
 " Not at all, sir, not at all," said the colonel. " I 
 will drink with you, if you will permit me." 
 
 " We '11 all drink standing," cried Fulkeroon. 
 " Help March to get up, somebody ! Fill high the 
 bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod ! Now, 
 then, hurrah for Lindau ! " 
 
 They cheered, and hammered on the table with 
 the butts of their knife-handles. Lindau remained 
 seated. The tears came into his eyes ; he said, " I 
 thank you, chendlemen," and hiccoughed. 
 
 ' I 'd V went into the Avar myself," said Dryfoos, 
 " but I was raisin' a family of young children, and I 
 didn't see how I could leave my farm. But I helped 
 to fill up the quota at every call, and when the 
 volunteering stopped I went round with the sub- 
 scription , paper myself ; and we offered as good 
 bounties as any in the State. My substitute was 
 killed in one of the last skirmishes in fact, after 
 Lee's surrender and I 've took care of his family, 
 more or less, ever since." 
 
 " By the Avay, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort 
 of an idea AA^ould it be to have a good war-story 
 might be a serial in the magazine 1 The war has 
 never fully panned .out in fiction yet. It was used 
 a good deal just after it was over, and then it was 
 dropped. I think it 's time to take it up again. I 
 believe it would be a card."
 
 114 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 It was running in March's mind that Dryfoos had 
 an old rankling shame in his heart for not having 
 gone into the war, and that he had often made that 
 explanation of his course without having ever been 
 satisfied with it. He felt sorry for him ; the fact 
 seemed pathetic ; it suggested a dormant nobleness 
 in the man. 
 
 Beaton was saying to Fulkerson, " You might get 
 a series of sketches by substitutes; the substitutes 
 haven't been much heard from in the war literature. 
 How would ' The Autobiography of a Substitute ' 
 do ? You might follow him up to the moment he 
 was killed in the other man's place, and inquire 
 whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero 
 when he was only hired in the place of one. Might 
 call it ' The Career of a Deputy Hero.'" 
 
 " I fancy," said March, " that there was a great 
 deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the 
 war as well as in those who kept out of it. We 
 canonised all that died or suffered in it, but some of 
 them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, 
 like men in other vocations." He found himself 
 saying this in Dryfoos's behalf ; the old man looked 
 at him gratefully at first, he thought, and then sus- 
 piciously. 
 
 Lindau turned his head toward him and said : 
 " You are righdt, Passil ; you are righdt. I haf 
 zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions 
 of human paseness chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. 
 I haf zeen men in the face off death itself gofferned 
 by motif es as low as as pusiness motif es."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 115 
 
 "Well," said Fulkerson, "it would be a grand 
 thing for Every Other Week if we could get some of 
 those ideas worked up into a series. It would make 
 a lot of talk." 
 
 Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, "I 
 think, Major Lindau " 
 
 " High brifate ; prefet gorporal," the old man in- 
 terrupted, in rejection of the title. 
 
 Kendricks laughed and said, with a glance of 
 appreciation at Lindau, " Brevet corporal is good." 
 
 Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed 
 over the joke. " I think Mr. Lindau is right. Such 
 exhibitions were common to both sides, though if 
 you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think 
 they were less frequent on ours. We were fighting 
 more immediately for existence ; we were fewer than 
 you were, and we knew it ; we felt more intensely 
 that if each were not for all, then none was for any." 
 
 The colonel's words made their impression. Dry- 
 foos said with authority, "That is so." 
 
 " Colonel Woodburn," Fulkerson called out, " if 
 you '11 work up those ideas into a short paper say 
 three thousand words I '11 engage to make March 
 take it." 
 
 The colonel went on without replying : " But Mr. 
 Lindau is right in characterising some of the motives 
 that led men to the cannon's mouth as no higher 
 than business motives, and his comparison is the 
 most forcible that he could have used. I was very 
 much struck by it" 
 
 The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle 
 2G
 
 116 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 with so firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodge 
 him. The dinner went on from course to course 
 with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Ful- 
 kerson tried to bring the talk back to Every Other 
 Week. But perhaps because that was only the 
 ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, 
 which was to bring a number of men together 
 under Dryfoos's roof, and make them the wit- 
 nesses of his splendour, make them feel the power 
 of his wealth, Fulkerson's attempts failed. The 
 colonel showed how commercialism was the poison 
 at the heart of our national life ; how we began as a 
 simple, agricultural people, who had fled to these 
 shores with the instinct, divinely implanted, of build- 
 ing a State such as the sun never shone upon before ; 
 how we had conquered the wilderness and the 
 savage ; how we had flung off, in our struggle with 
 the mother-country, the trammels of tradition and 
 precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to 
 the practice of the arts of peace ; how the spirit of 
 commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us, and 
 the infernal impulse of competition had embroiled 
 us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing 
 the worst passions of our nature, and teaching us to 
 trick and betray and destroy one another in the 
 strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted 
 itself, and we found competition gone and the whole 
 economic problem in the hands of monopolies the 
 Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the 
 Rubber Trust, and what not. And now what was 
 the next thing ? Affairs could not remain as they
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 117 
 
 were ; it was impossible ; and what was the next 
 thing 1 
 
 The company listened for the main part silently. 
 Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism as 
 the colonel seemed to hold it ; he conceived of it as 
 something like the dry-goods business on a vast 
 scale, and he knew he had never been in that. He 
 did not like to hear competition called infernal ; he 
 had always supposed it was something sacred ; but 
 he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the 
 Standard Oil Company; it was all true; the Stan- 
 dard Oil had squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him 
 sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of 
 oil so low in that region that he lost money on every 
 barrel he pumped. 
 
 All the rest listened silently, except Lindau ; at 
 every point the colonel made against the present 
 condition of things he said more and more fiercely, 
 " You are righdt, you are righdt." His eyes glowed, 
 his hand played with his knife-hilt. When the 
 colonel demanded, " And what is the next thing ? " 
 he threw himself forward, and repeated, " Yes, sir ! 
 What is the next thing ] " 
 
 " Natural gas, by thunder ! " shouted Fulkerson. 
 
 One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's 
 posture to lean over him and put down in the 
 middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It 
 expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and 
 a touch of nature had been added in the flame of 
 brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in 
 the centre of the base, and represented the gas in
 
 118 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson 
 burst into a roar of laughter with the words that 
 recognised Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos. 
 Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while 
 he explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as he 
 had already explained it to Frescobaldi. In the 
 midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer 
 himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, 
 smiling with an artist's anxiety for the effect of his 
 masterpiece. 
 
 " Come in, come in, Frescobaldi ! We want to 
 congratulate you," Fulkerson called to him. " Here, 
 gentlemen ! Here 's Frescobaldi's health." 
 
 They all drank ; and Frescobaldi, smiling bril- 
 liantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right 
 and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos, " You 
 are please ; no 1 You like ? " 
 
 " First-rate, first-rate ! " said the old man j but 
 when the Italian had bowed himself out and his 
 guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly 
 to Fulkerson, " I reckon they didn't have to torpedo 
 that well, or the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice 
 and clean." 
 
 " Yes," Fulkerson answered, " and that ain't quite 
 the style that little wiggly-waggly blue flame 
 that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of 
 it. This might do for weak-gas ; " and he went on 
 to explain : " They call it weak-gas when they tap 
 it two or three hundred feet down ; and anybody 
 can sink a well in his backyard and get enough gas 
 to light and heat his house. I remember one fellow
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 119 
 
 that had it blazing up from a pipe through a flower- 
 bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My, 
 my, my ! You fel you gentlemen ought to go 
 out and see that country, all of you. Wish we 
 could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let 'em 
 see how it works ! Mind that one you torpedoed 
 for me 1 You know, when they sink a well," he 
 went on to the company, " they can't always most 
 generally sometimes tell whether they're goin' to 
 get gas or oil or salt-water. Why, when they 
 first began to bore for salt-water out on the 
 Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, 
 they used to get gas now and then, and then they 
 considered it a failure ; they called a gas-well a 
 blower, and give it up in disgust ; the time wasn't 
 ripe for gas yet. Now they bore away sometimes 
 till they get half-way to China, and don't seem to 
 strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put 
 a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode 
 it. They have a little bar of iron that they call a 
 Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business 
 end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if 
 you please ! You hear a noise, and in about half a 
 minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil 
 and mud and salt-Avater and rocks and pitchforks 
 and adoptive citizens ; and when it clears up the 
 derrick 's painted got a coat on that '11 wear in any 
 climate. That's what our honoured host meant. 
 Generally get some visiting lady, when there 's one 
 round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day we had 
 to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let
 
 1 20 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 me drop it, birt I declined. I told 'em I hadn't 
 much practice with Go-devils in the newspaper 
 syndicate business, and I wasn't very well myself, 
 anyway. Astonishing," Fulkerson continued, with 
 the air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, 
 " how reckless they get using dynamite when 
 they 're torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place 
 where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty 
 freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a 
 little, and that ass came up with one of 'em in his 
 hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to 
 show us how safe it was. I turned green, I was so 
 scared ; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his colour, and kind 
 of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he 
 was the fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he 'd 
 keep on hammering that cartridge, just to show that 
 it wouldn't explode, till he blew you into Kingdom 
 Come. When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos 
 drove up to his foreman. ' Pay Sheney off, and 
 discharge him on the spot,' says he. ' He 's too safe 
 a man to have round ; he knows too much about 
 dynamite.' I never saw anybody so cool" 
 
 Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulker- 
 son's flattery and, without lifting it, turned his eyes 
 toward Colonel Woodburn. "I had all sorts of 
 men to deal with in developing my property out 
 there, but I had very little trouble with them, gene- 
 rally speaking." 
 
 " Ah, ah ! you foundt the labouring-man reasonable 
 dractable tocile ? " Lindau put in. 
 
 "Yes, generally speaking," Dryfoos answered.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 121 
 
 " They mostly knew which side of their bread was 
 buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one 
 time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson 
 was out there. Some of the men tried to form a 
 union " 
 
 " No, no ! " cried Fulkerson. " Let me tell that ! 
 I know you wouldn't do yourself justice, Mr. Dry- 
 foos, and I want 'em to know how a strike can be 
 managed, if you take it in time. You see, some of 
 those fellows got a notion that there ought to be a 
 union among the working-men to keep up wages, and 
 dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos's foreman 
 was the ringleader in the business. They under- 
 stood pretty well that as soon as he found it out 
 that foreman would walk the plank, and so they 
 watched out till they thought they had Mr. Dry- 
 foos just where they wanted him everything on 
 the keen jump, and every man worth his weight 
 in diamonds and then they come to him, and 
 told him to sign a promise to keep that foreman 
 to the end of the season, or till he was through 
 with the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addi- 
 tion, under penalty of having them all knock off. 
 Mr. Dryfoos smelt a mice, but he couldn't tell where 
 the mice was ; he saw that they did have him, and 
 he signed, of course. There wasn't anything really 
 against the fellow, anyway ; he was a first-rate man, 
 and he did his duty every time ; only he 'd got some 
 of those ideas into his head, and they turned it. Mr. 
 Dryfoos signed, and then he laid low." 
 
 March saw Lindau listening with a mounting in- 
 VOL. II. 6
 
 122 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 tensity, and heard him murmur in German, " Shame- 
 ful ! shameful!" 
 
 Fulkerson went on : " Well, it wasn't long before 
 they began to show their hand, but Mr. Dryfoos 
 kept dark. He agreed to everything ; there never 
 was such an obliging capitalist before ; there wasn't 
 a thing they asked of him that he didn't do, with 
 the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry as a 
 marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh 
 men marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, 
 under the escort of a dozen Pinkertons with repeating 
 rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows found them- 
 selves out of a job. You never saw such a mad set" 
 
 " Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the 
 affair purely from an aesthetic point of view. " Such 
 a coup as that would tell tremendously in a play." 
 
 " That was vile treason," said Lindau in German 
 to March. " He 's an infamous traitor ! I cannot 
 stay here. I must go." 
 
 He struggled to rise, while March held him by 
 the coat, and implored him under his voice, "For 
 Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau ! You owe it to your- 
 self not to make a scene, if you come here." Some- 
 thing in it all affected him comically ; he could not 
 help laughing. 
 
 The others were discussing the matter, and seemed 
 not to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himself 
 and sighed : " You are right. I must have patience." 
 
 Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, " Pity your Pinker- 
 tons couldn't have given them a few shots before 
 they left."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 123 
 
 "No, that wasn't necessary," said Dryfoos. "I 
 succeeded in breaking up the union. I entered into 
 an agreement with other parties not to employ any 
 man who would not swear that he was non-union. 
 If they had attempted violence, of course they could 
 have been shot. But there was no fear of that. 
 Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut 
 each other's throats in the long-run." 
 
 "But sometimes," said Colonel Woodburn, who 
 had been watching throughout for a chance to mount 
 his hobby again, " they make a good deal of trouble 
 first. How was it in the great railroad strike of 
 '77 1 " 
 
 "Well, I guess there was a little trouble that 
 time, colonel," said Fulkerson. "But the men that 
 undertake to override the laws and paralyse the 
 industries of a country like this generally get left in 
 the end." 
 
 " Yes, sir, generally ; and up to a certain point, 
 always. But it 's the exceptional that is apt to 
 happen, as well as the unexpected. And a little 
 reflection will convince any gentleman here that 
 there is always a danger of the exceptional in your 
 system. The fact is, those fellows have the game in 
 their own hands already. A strike of the whole 
 body of the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would 
 starve out the entire Atlantic seaboard in a week ; 
 labour insurrection could make head at a dozen given 
 points, and your government couldn't move a man 
 over the roads without the help of the engineers." 
 
 " That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the
 
 124 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 dramatic character of the conjecture. He imagined 
 a fiction dealing with the situation as something 
 already accomplished. 
 
 "Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking 
 act with that thing 1 " said Fulkerson. " It would 
 be a card." 
 
 " Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson," 
 said Kendricks. 
 
 Fulkerson laughed. " Telepathy clear case of 
 mind-transference. Better see March, here, about 
 it. I'd like to have it in Every Other Week. It 
 would make talk." 
 
 " Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as 
 well as talking," said the colonel. 
 
 "Well, sir," said Dryfoos, setting his lips so 
 tightly together that his imperial stuck straight out- 
 ward, " if I had my way, there wouldn't be any 
 Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of 
 labour union in the whole country." 
 
 " What ! " shouted Lindau. " You would sobbress 
 the unionss of the voarking-men ? " 
 
 " Yes, I would." 
 
 "And what would you do with the unionss of 
 the gabidalists the drosts and gompines, and 
 boolss ? Would you dake the righdt from one and 
 gif it to the odder 1 " 
 
 " Yes, sir, I would," said Dryfoos, with a wicked 
 look at him. 
 
 Lindau was about to roar back at him with some 
 furious protest, but March put his hand on his 
 shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 125 
 
 say in German, " But it is infamous infamous ! 
 What kind of man is this 1 Who is he ? He has 
 the heart of a tyrant." 
 
 Colonel Woodburn cut in. " You couldn't do 
 that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your system. And if you 
 attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that 
 kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than 
 .you expected. Your commercialised society has 
 built its house on the sands. It will have to go. 
 But I should be sorry if it went before its time." 
 
 " You are righdt, sir," said Lindau. " It would 
 be a bity. I hobe it will last till it feelss its rotten- 
 ness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour gomes, 
 when it trops to bieces with the veight off its own 
 gorrubtion what then ? " 
 
 " It 's not to be supposed that a system of things 
 like this can drop to pieces of its own accord, like 
 the old Eepublic of Venice," said the colonel. " But 
 when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, 
 then we can begin to build anew ; and we shall build 
 upon the central idea, not of the false liberty you 
 now worship, but of responsibility responsibility. 
 The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class 
 shall be responsible to the central authority em- 
 peror, duke, president ; the name does not matter 
 for the national expense and the national defence, 
 and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of 
 all kinds for homes and lands and implements, and 
 the opportunity to labour at all times. The working- 
 classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for 
 the support of its dignity in peace, and shall be
 
 126 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 subject to its command in war. The rich shall 
 warrant the poor against planless production and the 
 ruin that now follows, against danger from without 
 and famine from within, and the poor " 
 
 " No, no, no ! " shouted Lindau. " The State shall 
 do that the whole beople. The men who voark 
 shall have and shall eat ; and the men that will not 
 voark, they shall sdarfe. But no man need sdarfe. 
 He will go to the State, and the State will see that 
 he haf voark, and that he haf foodt. All the roadts 
 and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople's 
 and be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall 
 be no rich and no boor ; and there shall not be war 
 any more, for what bower wouldt dare to addack a 
 beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that 1 " 
 
 "Lion and lamb act," said Fulkerson, not well 
 knowing, after so much champagne, what words he 
 was using. 
 
 No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said 
 coldly to Lindau, "You are talking paternalism, sir." 
 
 " And you are dalking feutalism ! " retorted the 
 old man. 
 
 The Colonel did not reply. A silence ensued, 
 which no one broke till Fulkerson said : " Well, 
 now, look here. If either one of these millenniums 
 was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, 
 what would become of Every Other Week ? Who 
 would want March for an editor? How would 
 Beaton sell his pictures ? Who would print Mr. 
 Kendricks' little society verses and short stories ? 
 What would become of Conrad and his srood
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 127 
 
 works ? " Those named grinned in support of Ful- 
 kerson's diversion, but Lindau and the colonel did 
 not speak ; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frown- 
 ing. A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulker- 
 son took one. " Ah," he said, as he bit off the end, 
 and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece, where 
 the brandy was still feebly flickering, " I wonder if 
 there '& enough natural gas left to light my cigar." 
 His effort put the flame out and knocked the derrick 
 over ; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerson 
 cackled over the ruin : " I wonder if all Moffitt will 
 look that way after labour and capital have fought it 
 out together. I hope this ain't ominous of any- 
 thing personal, Dryfoos ? " 
 
 " I '11 take the risk of it," said the old man 
 harshly. 
 
 He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Fres- 
 cobaldi's man, " You can bring us the coffee in the 
 library." 
 
 The talk did not recover itself there. Lindau 
 would not sit down ; he refused coffee, and dismissed 
 himself with a haughty bow to the company ; 
 Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all 
 round, when he had smoked his cigar ; the others 
 followed him. It seemed to March that his own 
 good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.
 
 VII. 
 
 MARCH met Fulkerson on the steps of the office 
 next morning, when he arrived rather later than his 
 wont. Fulkerson did not show any of the signs 
 of suffering from the last night's pleasure which 
 painted themselves in March's face. He flirted his 
 hand gaily in the air, and said, " How 's your poor 
 head ? " and broke into a knowing laugh. " You 
 don't seem to have got up with the lark this 
 morning. The old gentleman is in there with 
 Conrad, as bright as a biscuit ; he 's beat you 
 down. Well, we did have a good time, didn't 
 we? And old Lindau and the colonel, didn't they 
 have a good time 1 I don't suppose they ever had 
 a chance before to give their theories quite so much 
 air. Oh my, how they did ride over us ! I ! m just 
 going down to see Beaton about the cover of the 
 Christmas number. I think we ought to try it in 
 three or four colours, if we are going to observe 
 the day at all." He was off before March could 
 pull himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted 
 at the office at that hour of the morning ; he 
 always came in the afternoon on his way uptown. 
 
 The fact of his presence renewed the sinister mis-
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 129 
 
 givings with which March had parted from him the 
 night before, but Fulkerson's cheerfulness seemed 
 to gainsay them ; afterwards March did not know 
 whether to attribute this mood to the slipperiness 
 that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson, or to a 
 cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving 
 him alone to the old man, who mounted to his room 
 shortly after March had reached it. 
 
 A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face ; 
 his jaw was set so firmly that he did not seem able 
 at once to open it. He asked, without the cere- 
 monies of greeting, "What does that one-armed 
 Dutchman do on this book 1 " 
 
 11 What does he do ? " March echoed, as people 
 are apt to do with a question that is mandatory and 
 offensive. 
 
 " Yes, sir, what does he do ? Does he write for 
 it?" 
 
 " I suppose you mean Lindau," said March. He 
 saw no reason /or refusing to answer Dryfoos's de- 
 mand, and he decided to ignore its terms. " No, he 
 doesn't write for it in the usual way. He translates 
 for it; he examines the foreign magazines, and draws 
 my attention to anything he thinks of interest. But 
 I told you about this before " 
 
 " I know what you told me, well enough. And I 
 know what he is. He is a red-mouthed labour- 
 agitator. He 's one of those foreigners that come 
 here from places where they 've never had a decent 
 meal's victuals in their lives, and as soon as they get 
 their stomachs full, they begin to make trouble be- 
 6*
 
 130 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 tween our people and their hands. There 's where 
 the strikes come from, and the unions and the secret 
 societies. They come here and break our Sabbath, 
 and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung ! 
 Let 'em go back if they don't like it over here. 
 They want to ruin the country." 
 
 March could not help smiling a little at the words, 
 which came fast enough now in the hoarse staccato of 
 Dryfoos's passion. "I don't know whom you mean 
 by they, generally speaking ; but I had the impres- 
 sion that poor old Lindau had once done his best to 
 save the country. I don't always like his way of 
 talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and 
 kindest souls in the world ; and he is no more an 
 atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can't 
 allow him to be misunderstood." 
 
 " I don't care what he is," Dryfoos broke out, " I 
 won't have him round. He can't have any more 
 work from this office. I want you to stop it. I 
 want you to turn him off." 
 
 March was standing at his desk, as he had risen 
 to receive Dryfoos when he entered. He now sat 
 down, and began to open his letters. 
 
 " Do you hear 1 " the old man roared at him. " I 
 want you to turn him off." 
 
 " Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, succeed- 
 ing in an effort to speak calmly, " I don't know 
 you, in such a matter as this. My arrangements 
 as editor of Every Other Week were made with Mr. 
 Fulkerson. I have always listened to any sugges- 
 tion he has had to make."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 131 
 
 " I don't care for Mr. Fulkerson ! He has nothing 
 to do with it," retorted Dryfoos ; but he seemed a 
 little daunted by March's position. 
 
 " He has everything to do with it as far as I am. 
 concerned," March answered, with a steadiness that 
 he did not feel. " I know that you are the owner 
 of the periodical, but I can't receive any suggestion 
 from you, for the reason that I have given. Nobody 
 but Mr. Fulkerson has any right to talk with me 
 about its management." 
 
 Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and de- 
 manded threateningly : " Then you say you won't 
 turn that old loafer off? You say that I have 
 got to keep on paying my money out to buy 
 beer for a man that would cut my throat if he 
 got the chance ? " 
 
 " I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos," March 
 answered. The blood came into his face, and he 
 added : " But I will say that if you speak again of 
 Mr. Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this 
 room. I will not hear you." 
 
 Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment ; then 
 he struck his hat down on his head, and stamped 
 out of the room and down the stairs ; and a vague 
 pity came into March's heart that was not altogether 
 for himself. He might be the greater sufferer in the 
 end, but he was sorry to have got the better of that 
 old man for the moment ; and he felt ashamed of 
 the anger into which Dryfoos's anger had surprised 
 him. He knew he could not say too much in de- 
 fence of Lindau's generosity and unselfishness, and
 
 132 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 he had not attempted to defend him as a political 
 economist. He could not have taken any ground in 
 relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and he 
 felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive 
 instructions or commands from him. Yet somehow 
 he was not satisfied with the whole affair, and not 
 merely because his present triumph threatened his 
 final advantage, but because he felt that in his heat 
 he had hardly done justice to Dryfoos's rights in the 
 matter ; it did not quite console him to reflect that 
 Dryfoos had himself made it impossible. He was 
 tempted to go home and tell his wife what had 
 happened, and begin his preparations for the future 
 at once. But he resisted this weakness and kept 
 mechanically about his work, opening the letters and 
 the manuscripts before him with that curious double 
 action of the mind common in men of vivid imagi- 
 nations. It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, 
 having apparently waited to make sure that his 
 father would not return, came up from the counting- 
 room and looked in on March with a troubled face. 
 
 "Mr. March," he began, "I hope father hasn't 
 been saying anything to you that you can't overlook. 
 I know he was very much excited, and when he is 
 excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for." 
 
 The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so 
 different from any attitude the peremptory old man 
 would have conceivably taken for himself, made 
 March smile. " Oh no. I fancy the boot is on the 
 other leg. I suspect I've said some things your 
 father can't overlook, Conrad." He called the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 133 
 
 young man by his Christian name partly to dis- 
 tinguish him from his father, partly from the in- 
 fection of Fulkerson's habit, and partly from a kind- 
 ness for him that seemed naturally to express itself 
 in that way. 
 
 "I know he didn't sleep last night, after you all 
 went away," Conrad pursued, " and of course that 
 made him more irritable; and he was tried a good 
 deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said." 
 
 "I was tried a good deal myself," said March. 
 "Lindau ought never to have been there." 
 
 " No." Conrad seemed only partially to assent. 
 
 "I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned him that 
 Lindau would be apt to break out in some way. It 
 wasn't just to him, and it wasn't just to your father, 
 to ask him." 
 
 "Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive," Conrad 
 gently urged. " He did it because he hurt his 
 feelings that day about the pension." 
 
 " Yes, but it was a mistake. He knew that 
 Lindau was inflexible about his principles, as he calls 
 them, and that one of his first principles is to 
 denounce the rich in season and out of season. I 
 don't remember just what he said last night ; and I 
 really thought I 'd kept him from breaking out in 
 the most offensive way. But your father seems very 
 much incensed." 
 
 " Yes, I know," said Conrad. 
 
 " Of course, I don't agree with Lindau. I think 
 there are as many good, kind, just people among the 
 rich as there are among the poor, and that they are
 
 134 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 as generous and helpful. But Lindau has got hold 
 of one of those partial truths that hurt worse than 
 the whole truth, and " 
 
 " Partial truth ! " the young man interrupted. 
 " Didn't the Saviour himself say, ' How hardly shall 
 they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
 God'?" 
 
 " Why, bless my soul ! " cried March. " Do you 
 agree with Lindau 1 " 
 
 " I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ," said the 
 young man solemnly, and a strange light of fanati- 
 cism, of exaltation, came into his wide blue eyes. 
 "And I believe he meant the kingdom of heaven 
 upon this earth, as well as in the skies." 
 
 March threw himself back in his chair and looked 
 at him with a kind of stupetaction, in which his 
 eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw Fulker- 
 son standing, it seemed to him a long time, before 
 he heard him saying, " Hello, hello ! What 's the 
 row? Conrad pitching into you on old Lindau's 
 account, too ? " 
 
 The young man turned, and after a glance at 
 Fulkerson's light, smiling face, went out, as if in his 
 present mood he could not bear the contact of that 
 persiflant spirit. 
 
 March felt himself getting provisionally very 
 angry again. "Excuse me, Fulkerson, but did you 
 know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted 
 to see me for ? " 
 
 "Well, no, I didn't exactly," said Fulkerson, 
 taking his usual seat on a chair, and looking over
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 135 
 
 the back of it at March. " I saw he was on his ear 
 about something, and I thought I'd better not 
 monkey with him much. I supposed he was going 
 to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow." 
 Fulkerson broke into a laugh. 
 
 March remained serious. "Mr. Dryfoos," he 
 said, willing to let the simple statement have its own 
 weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more, " came 
 in here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from 
 his employment on the magazine to turn him off, 
 as he put it." 
 
 " Did he ? " asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheer- 
 fulness. " The old man is business, every time. Well, 
 I suppose you can easily get somebody else to do 
 Lindau's work for you. This town is just running 
 over with half -starved linguists. What did you 
 say ? " 
 
 " What did I say ? " March echoed. " Look here, 
 Fulkerson ; you may regard this as a joke, but / 
 don't. I 'm not used to being spoken to as if I were 
 the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sen- 
 sitive and cultivated man like Lindau, as if he 
 were a drunken mechanic; and if that's your idea 
 of me " 
 
 " Oh, hello, now, March ! You mustn't mind the 
 old man's way. He don't mean anything by it he 
 don't know any better, if you come to that." 
 
 " Then / know better," said March. " I refused 
 to receive any instructions from Mr. Dryfoos, whom, 
 I don't know in my relations with Every Other Week> 
 and I referred him to you." '
 
 136 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " You did ? " Fulkerson whistled. " He owns the 
 thing ! " 
 
 " I don't care who owns the thing," said March. 
 "My negotiations were with you alone from the 
 beginning, and I leave this matter with you. What 
 do you wish done about Lindau ? " 
 
 "Oh, better let the old fool drop," said Fulkerson. 
 " He '11 light on his feet somehow, and it will save 
 a lot of rumpus." 
 
 " And if I decline to let him drop ? " 
 
 "Oh, come, now, March; don't do that," Fulker- 
 son began. 
 
 " If I decline to let him drop," March repeated, 
 " what will you do ? " 
 
 " I '11 be dogged if I know what I '11 do," said Ful- 
 kerson. " I hope you won't take that stand. If the 
 old man went so far as to speak to you about it, his 
 mind is made up, and we might as well knock under 
 first as last." 
 
 "And do you mean to say that you would not 
 stand by me in what I considered my duty in a 
 matter of principle 2 " 
 
 "Why, of course, March," said Fulkerson coax- 
 ingly, " I mean to do the right thing. But Dryfoos 
 owns the magazine " 
 
 " He doesn't own me" said March, rising. " He 
 has made the little mistake of speaking to me as if 
 he did ; and when" March put on his hat and took 
 his overcoat down from its nail " when you bring 
 me his apologies, or come to say that, having failed 
 to make him understand they were necessary, you
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 137 
 
 are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to 
 this desk. Otherwise my resignation is at your 
 service." 
 
 He started toward the door, and Fulkerson inter- 
 cepted him. " Ah, now, look here, March ! Don't 
 do that ! Hang it all, don't you see where it leaves 
 me 1 Now, you just sit down a minute, and talk it 
 
 over. I can make you see I can show you . 
 
 Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer ! Twenty 
 of him wouldn't be worth the trouble he 's makin'. 
 Let him go, and the old man '11 come round in time.' r 
 
 "I don't think we've understood each other 
 exactly, Mr. Fulkerson," said March, very haughtily. 
 " Perhaps we never can ; but I '11 leave you to think 
 it out." 
 
 He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let 
 him pass, with a dazed look and a mechanical move- 
 ment. There was something comic in his rueful 
 bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, 
 but he said to himself that he had as much reason 
 to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not smile. 
 His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to 
 suffer any consequence rather than submit to the 
 dictation of a man like Dryfoos ; he felt keenly the 
 degradation of his connection with him, and all his 
 resentment of Fulkerson's original un candour re- 
 turned ; at the same time his heart ached with fore- 
 boding. It was not merely the work in which he 
 had constantly grown happier that he saw taken 
 from him ; but he felt the misery of the man who 
 stakes the security and plenty and peace of home
 
 138 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep 
 from him most that most men find sweet and 
 pleasant in life. He faced the fact, which no good 
 man can front without terror, that he was risking 
 the support of his family, and for a point of pride, 
 of honour, which perhaps he had no right to consider 
 in view of the possible adversity. He realised, as 
 every hireling must, no matter how skilfully or 
 gracefully the tie is contrived for his wearing, that 
 he belongs to another, whose will is his law. His 
 indignation was shot with abject impulses to go 
 back and tell Fulkerson that it was all right, and 
 that he gave up. To end the anguish of his struggle 
 he quickened his steps, so that he found he was 
 reaching home almost at a run.
 
 VIII. 
 
 HE must have made more clatter than he sup- 
 posed with his key at the apartment door, for his 
 wife had come to let him in when he flung it open. 
 " Why, Basil," she said, " what 's brought you back ? 
 Are you sick 1 You 're all pale. Well, no wonder ! 
 This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson's dinners you shall 
 go to. You 're not strong enough for it, and your 
 stomach will be all out of order for a week. How 
 hot you are ! and in a drip of perspiration ! Now 
 you'll be sick." She took his hat away, which hung 
 dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair 
 with tender impatience. "What is the matter? 
 Has anything happened ? " 
 
 " Everything has happened," he said, getting his 
 voice after one or two husky endeavours for it ; and 
 then he poured out a confused and huddled state- 
 ment of the case, from which she only got at the 
 situation by prolonged cross-questioning. 
 
 At the end she said, " I knew Lindau would get 
 you into trouble." 
 
 This cut March to the heart. " Isabel ! " he cried 
 reproachfully. 
 
 " Oh, I know," she retorted, and the tears began
 
 140 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 to come. " I don't wonder you didn't want to say 
 much to me about that dinner at breakfast. I noticed 
 it ; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn't 
 insist. I wish I had, now. If you had told me what 
 Lindau had said, I should have known what would 
 have come of it, and I could have advised you " 
 
 " Would you have advised me," March demanded 
 curiously, " to submit to bullying like that, and 
 meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty against 
 a man who had once been such a friend to me 1 " 
 
 " It was an unlucky day when you met him. I 
 suppose we shall have to go. And just when we 
 had got used to New York, and begun to like it. 
 I don't know where we shall go now ; Boston isn't 
 like home any more ; and we couldn't live on two 
 thousand there ; I should be ashamed to try. I 'm 
 sure I don't know where we can live on it. I sup- 
 pose in some country village, where there are no 
 schools, or anything for the children. I don't know 
 what they'll say when we tell them, poor things." 
 
 Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly 
 tender to his own; his wife's tears, after so much 
 experience of the comparative lightness of the griefs 
 that weep themselves out in women, always seemed 
 wrung from his own soul ; if his children suffered in 
 the least through him, he felt like a murderer. It 
 was far worse than he could have imagined, the way 
 his wife took the affair, though he had imagined 
 certain words, or perhaps only looks, from her that 
 were bad enough. He had allowed for trouble, 
 but trouble on his account : a sympathy that might
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 141 
 
 burden and embarrass him ; but lie had not dreamt 
 of this merely domestic, this petty, this sordid view 
 of their potential calamity, which left him wholly 
 out of the question, and embraced only what was 
 most crushing and desolating in the prospect. He 
 could not bear it. He caught up his hat again, ajid 
 with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, 
 rushed out of the house. He wandered aimlessly 
 about, thinking the same exhausting thoughts over 
 and over, till he found himself horribly hungry ; 
 then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and 
 when he paid, he tried to imagine how he should 
 feel if that were really his last dollar. 
 
 He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, 
 basely hoping that Fulkerson had sent him some 
 conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting there 
 for him to talk it over ; March was quite willing to 
 talk it over now. But it was his wife who again met 
 him at the door, though it seemed another woman 
 than the one he had left weeping in the morning. 
 
 " I told the children," she said, in smiling ex- 
 planation of his absence from lunch, " that perhaps 
 you were detained by business. I didn't know but 
 you had gone back to the office." 
 
 " Did you think I would go back there, Isabel ? " 
 asked March, with a haggard look. " Well, if you 
 say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos ordered 
 me to do. I 'm sufficiently cowed between him and 
 you, I can assure you." 
 
 " Nonsense," she said. " I approve of everything 
 you did. But sit down, now, and don't keep walk-
 
 142 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 ing that way, and let me see if I understand it per- 
 fectly. Of course I had to have my say out." 
 
 She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos 
 again, and report his own language precisely. From 
 time to time, as she got his points, she said, " That 
 was splendid," " Good enough for him ! " And " Oh, 
 I 'm so glad you said that to him ! " At the end she 
 said, " Well, now, let 's look at it from his point of 
 view. Let 's be perfectly just to him before we take 
 another step forward." 
 
 " Or backward," March suggested ruefully. " The 
 case is simply this : he owns the magazine." 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 "And he has a right to expect that I will con- 
 sider his pecuniary interests " 
 
 " Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests ! Don't 
 you wish there wasn't any money in the world ? " 
 
 " Yes ; or else that there was a great deal more 
 of it And I was perfectly willing to do that. I 
 have always kept that in mind as one of my duties 
 to him, ever since I understood what his relation to 
 the magazine was." 
 
 " Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of 
 justice. You 've done it a great deal more than I 
 could, Basil. And it was just the same way with 
 those horrible insurance people." 
 
 "I know," March went on, trying to be proof 
 against her flatteries, or at least to look as if he did 
 not deserve praise ; " I know that what Lindau said 
 was offensive to him, and I can understand how he 
 felt that he had a right to punish it. All I say is 
 that he had no right to punish it through me."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 143 
 
 " Yes," said Mrs. March askingly. 
 
 "If it had been a question of making Every Other 
 Week the vehicle of Lindau's peculiar opinions 
 though they 're not so very peculiar ; he might have 
 got the most of them out of liuskin I shouldn't 
 have had any ground to stand on, or at least then I 
 should have had to ask myself whether his opinions 
 would be injurious to the magazine or not." 
 
 "I don't see," Mrs. March interpolated, "how 
 they could hurt it much worse than Colonel Wood- 
 burn's article crying up slavery." 
 
 " Well," said March impartially, " we could print 
 a dozen articles praising the slavery it 's impossible 
 to have back, and it wouldn't hurt us. But if we 
 printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau 
 claims still exists, some people would call us bad 
 names, and the counting-room would begin to feel it. 
 But that isn't the point. Lindau's connection with 
 Every Other Week is almost purely mechanical ; he 's 
 merely a translator of such stories and sketches 
 as he first submits to me, and it isn't at all a ques- 
 tion of his opinions hurting us, but of my becom- 
 ing an agent to punish him for his opinions. That 
 is what I wouldn't do; that's what I never will 
 do." 
 
 " If you did," said his wife, " I should perfectly 
 despise you. I didn't understand how it was before. 
 I thought you were just holding out against Dryfoos 
 because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and 
 because you wouldn't recognise his authority. But 
 now I 'm with you, Basil, every time, as that horrid 
 little Fulkerson says. But who would have ever
 
 144 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 supposed he would be so base as to side against 
 you?" 
 
 "I don't know," said March thoughtfully, "that 
 we had a right to expect anything else. Fulkerson's 
 standards are low ; they 're merely business standards, 
 and the good that 's in him is incidental, and some- 
 thing quite apart from his morals and methods. 
 He 's naturally a generous and right-minded creature, 
 but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the 
 rest of us." 
 
 "It hasn't taught you that, Basil." 
 
 " Don't be so sure. Perhaps it 's only that I 'm 
 a poor scholar. But I don't know, really, that I 
 despise Fulkerson so much for his course this morn- 
 ing as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos 
 last night. I could hardly stomach it." 
 
 His wife made him tell her what they were, and 
 then she said, "Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn't 
 have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 "Perhaps he only did iD to keep the talk going, 
 and to give the old man a chance to say something," 
 March leniently suggested. " It was a worse effect 
 because he didn't or couldn't folloAv up Fulkerson's 
 lead." 
 
 " It was loathsome, all the same," his wife insisted. 
 "It's the end of Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I'm con- 
 cerned." 
 
 "I didn't tell you before," March resumed, after a 
 moment, " of my little interview with Conrad Dryfoos 
 after his father left," and now he went on to repeat 
 what had passed between him and the young man.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 145 
 
 " I suspect that he and his father had been having 
 aome words before the old man came up to talk with 
 me, and that it was that made him so furious." 
 
 " Yes, but what a strange position for the son of 
 such a man to take ! Do you suppose he says such 
 things to his father ? " 
 
 " I don't know ; but I suspect that in his meek 
 way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody. 
 I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank." 
 
 " Poor young fellow ! He always makes me feel 
 sad somehow. He has such a pathetic face. I don't 
 believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except that 
 night at Mrs. Horn's, when he was talking with Miss 
 Vance ; and then he made me feel sadder than ever." 
 
 " I don't envy him the life he leads at home, with 
 those convictions of his. I don't see why it wouldn't 
 be as tolerable there for old Lindau himself." 
 
 " Well, now," said Mrs. March, " let us put them 
 all out of our minds and see what we are going to 
 do ourselves." 
 
 They began to consider their wa} r s and means, 
 and how and where they should live, in view of 
 March's severance of his relations with Every Other 
 Week, They had not saved anything from the first 
 year's salary ; they had only prepared to save : 
 and they had nothing solid but their two thousand 
 to count upon. But they built a future in which 
 they easily lived on that and on what March earned 
 with his pen. He became a free lance, and fought 
 in whatever cause he thought just ; he had no ties, 
 no chains. They went back to Boston Avith the 
 VOL. II. 7
 
 146 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 heroic will to do what was most distasteful ; they 
 would have returned to their own house if they 
 had not rented it again ; but, any rate, Mrs. March 
 helped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only 
 letting rooms to lodgers. They had some hard 
 struggles, but they succeeded. 
 
 " The great thing," she said, " is to be right. I 'm 
 ten times as happy as if you had come home and 
 told me that you had consented to do what Dryfoos 
 asked, and he had doubled your salary." 
 
 " I don't think that would have happened in any 
 event," said March dryly. 
 
 " Well, no matter. I just used it for an example." 
 
 They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as 
 seems to come to people who begin life anew on 
 whatever terms. " I hope we are young enough yet, 
 Basil," she said, and she would not have it when he 
 said they had once been younger. 
 
 They heard the children's knock on the door ; 
 they knocked when they came home from school so 
 that their mother might let them in. " Shall we 
 tell them at once 1 " she asked, and ran to open for 
 them before March could answer. 
 
 They were not alone. Fulkerson, smiling from 
 ear to ear, was with them. " Is March in ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 " Mr. March is at home, yes," she said very 
 haughtily. " He 's in his study," and she led the 
 way there, while the children went to their rooms. 
 
 " Well, March," Fulkerson called out at sight of 
 him, " it 's all right ! The old man has come down."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 147 
 
 " I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talk 
 business " Mrs. March began. 
 
 " Oh, we don't want you to go away," said Ful- 
 kerson. " I reckon March has told you, anyway." 
 
 "Yes, I've told her," said March. "Don't go, 
 Isabel. What do you mean, Fulkerson ? " 
 
 " He 's just gone on up home, and he sent me 
 round with his apologies. He sees now that he had 
 no business to speak to you as he did, and he with- 
 draws everything. He 'd 'a' come round himself if 
 I 'd said so, but I told him I could make it all right." 
 
 Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole 
 affair put right, and the Marches knew him to be 
 so kindly affected toward them that they could not 
 refuse for the moment to share his mood. They 
 felt themselves slipping down from the moral height 
 which they had gained, and March made a clutch to 
 stay himself with the question, " And Lindau 1 " 
 
 "Well," said Fulkersou, "he's going to leave 
 Lindau to me. You won't have anything to do 
 with it. I '11 let the old fellow down easy." 
 
 "Do you mean," asked March, " that Mr. Dryfoos 
 insists on his being dismissed ? " 
 
 "Why, there isn't any dismissing about it," Ful- 
 kerson argued. " If you don't send him any more 
 work, he won't do any more, that's all. Or if he 
 comes round you can He 's to be referred to me. !> 
 
 March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, 
 
 felt herself plucked up from the soft circumstance of 
 
 their lives, which she had sunk back into so quickly, 
 
 and set beside him on that cold peak of principle 
 
 21
 
 148 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 again. "It won't do, Fulkerson. It's very good of 
 you and all that, but it comes to the same thing in 
 the end. I could have gone on without any apology 
 from Mr. Dryfoos ; he transcended his authority, 
 but that 's a minor matter. I could have excused it 
 to his ignorance of life among gentlemen; but I 
 can't consent to Lindau's dismissal it comes to that, 
 whether you do it or I do it, and whether it's a 
 positive or a negative thing because he holds this 
 opinion or that." 
 
 "But don't you see," said Fulkerson, "that it's 
 just Lindau's opinions the old man can't stand 1 He 
 hasn't got anything against him personally. I don't 
 suppose there 's anybody that appreciates Lindau in 
 some ways more than the old man does." 
 
 " I understand. He wants to punish him for his 
 opinions. Well, I can't consent to that, directly or 
 indirectly. We don't print his opinions, and he has 
 a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos 
 agrees with them or not." 
 
 Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say 
 nothing, but she now went and sat down in the 
 chair next her husband. 
 
 " Ah, dog on it ! " cried Fulkerson, rumpling his 
 hair with both his hands. '' What am I to do 1 
 The old man says he 's got to go." 
 
 " And I don't consent to his going," said March, 
 
 " And you won't stay if he goes 1 " 
 
 " I won't stay if he goes." 
 
 Fulkerson rose. "Well, well! I've got to see 
 about it. I 'm afraid the old man won't stand it,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 149 
 
 March ; I am, indeed. I wish you 'd reconsider. I 
 I 'd take it as a personal favour if you would. It 
 leaves me iu a fix. You see I 've got to side with 
 one or the other." 
 
 March made no reply to this, except to say, " Yes, 
 you must stand by him, or you must stand by me." 
 
 " Well, well ! Hold on a while ! I '11 see you in 
 the morning. Don't take any steps " 
 
 " Oh, there are no steps to take," said March, with 
 a melancholy smile. " The steps are stopped ; 
 that's all." He sank back into his chair when Ful- 
 kerson was gone, and drew a long breath. " This 
 is pretty rough. I thought we had got through it." 
 
 "No," said his wife. "It seems as if I had to 
 make the fight all over again." 
 
 " Well, it 's a good thing it 's a holy war." 
 
 " I can't bear the suspense. Why didn't you tell 
 him outright you wouldn't go back on any terms I " 
 
 " I might as well, and got the glory. He '11 never 
 move Dryfoos. I suppose we both would like to go 
 back, if we could." 
 
 "Oh, I suppose so." 
 
 They could not regain their lost exaltation, their 
 lost dignity. At dinner Mrs. March asked the 
 children how they would like to go back to Boston 
 to live. 
 
 " Why, we 're not going, are we ? " asked Tom 
 without enthusiasm. 
 
 "I was just wondering how you felt about it, 
 now," she said, with an underlook at her husband. 
 
 "Well, if we go back," said Bella, "I want to
 
 150 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 live on the Back Bay. It 's awfully Micky at the 
 South End." 
 
 " I suppose I should go to Harvard," said Tom, 
 " and I 'd room out at Cambridge. It would be 
 easier to get at you on the Back Bay." 
 
 The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and in 
 view of these grand expectations of his children, 
 March resolved to go as far as he could in meeting 
 Dryfoos's wishes. He proposed the theatre as a 
 distraction from the anxieties that he knew were 
 pressing equally on his wife. " We might go to the 
 Old Homestead," he suggested, with a sad irony, 
 which only his wife felt. 
 
 "Oh yes, let's!" cried Bella. 
 
 While they were getting ready, some one rang, 
 and Bella went to the door, and then came to tell 
 her father that it was Mr. Lindau. " He says he 
 wants to see you just a moment. He's in the 
 parlour, and he won't sit down, or anything." 
 
 " What can he want 1 " groaned Mrs. March, 
 from their common dismay. 
 
 March apprehended a storm in the old man's face. 
 But he only stood in the middle of the room, looking 
 very sad and grave. " You are coing oudt," he 
 said. " I won't geep you long. I haf gome to pring 
 pack dose macassines, and dis mawney. I can't do 
 any more voark for you ; and I can't geep the 
 mawney you haf baid me a'ready. It iss not hawnest 
 mawney that hass been oarned py voark ; it iss 
 mawney that hass peen male py sbeculation, and the 
 obbression off lapour, and the necessity of the boor,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 151 
 
 py a man . Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent. 
 
 Dake it ; I feel as if dere vas ploodt on it." 
 
 " Why, Lindau," March began, but the old man 
 interrupted him. 
 
 " Ton't dalk to me, Passil ! I could not haf 
 believedt it of yon. When you know how I feel 
 about dose tings, why tidn't you dell me wfiose 
 mawney you bay oudt to me ? Ach, I ton't plame 
 you I ton't rebroach you. You haf nefer thought 
 of it ; boat I / have thought, and I should be 
 cuilty, I must share that man's cuilt, if I gept hiss 
 mawney. If you hat toldt me at the peginning if 
 you hat peen frank with me boat it iss all righdt ; 
 you can go on ; you ton't see dese tings as I see 
 them; and you haf cot a family, and I am a free 
 man. I voark to myself, and when I don't voark, 
 I sdarfe to myself. But I geep my handts glean, 
 voark or sdarfe. Gif him hiss mawney pack ! I am 
 sawry for him ; I would not hoart hiss feelings, boat 
 I could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss 
 like boison ! " 
 
 March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him 
 the folly, the injustice, the absurdity of his course ; 
 it ended in their both getting angry, and in Lindau's 
 going away in a whirl of German that included Basil 
 in the guilt of the man whom Lindau called his 
 master. 
 
 "Well," said Mrs. March. "He is a crank, and 
 I think you 're well rid of him. Now you have no 
 quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can 
 keep right on."
 
 152 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me 
 feel so sneaking. What a long day it 's been ! It 
 seems like a century since I got up." 
 
 "Yes, a thousand years. Is there anything else 
 left to happen?" 
 
 " I hope not I 'd like to go to bed." 
 
 "Why, aren't you going to the theatre?" wailed 
 Bella, coming in upon her father's desperate ex- 
 pression. 
 
 " The theatre ? Oh yes, certainly ! I meant 
 after we got home," and March amused himself at 
 the puzzled countenance of the child. " Come on ! 
 Is Tom ready 1 "
 
 VIII. 
 
 FULKERSON parted with the Marches in such 
 trouble of mind that he did not feel able to meet 
 that night the people whom he usually kept so gay 
 at Mrs. Leighton's table. He went to Maroni's for 
 his dinner, for this reason, and for others more 
 obscure. He could not expect to do anything more 
 with Dryfoos at once ; he knew that Dryfoos must 
 feel that he had already made an extreme concession 
 to March, and he believed that if he was to get any- 
 thing more from him it must be after Dryfoos had 
 dined. But he was not without the hope, vague 
 and indefinite as it might be, that he should find 
 Lindau at Maroni's, and perhaps should get some 
 concession from him, some word of regret or apology 
 which he could report to Dryfoos, and at least make 
 the means of reopening the affair with him ; perhaps 
 Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would 
 back down altogether, and for March's sake would 
 withdraw from all connection with Every Other Week 
 himself, and so leave everything serene. Fulkerson 
 felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggest- 
 ing such a course to Lindau, or even of plainly 
 advising it : he did not care for Lindau a great 
 7*
 
 154 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 deal, and he did care a great deal for the 
 magazine. 
 
 But he did not find Lindau at Maroni's ; he only 
 found Beaton. He sat looking at the doorway as 
 Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came 
 and took a place at his table. Something in 
 Beaton's large-eyed solemnity of aspect invited Ful- 
 kerson to confidence, and he said, as he pulled his 
 napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the 
 scanty, often-washed linen at Maroni's was apt to 
 be), across his knees, "I was looking for you this 
 morning, to talk with you about the Christmas 
 number, and I was a good deal worked up because I 
 couldn't find you ; but I guess I might as well have 
 spared myself my emotions." 
 
 "Why ?" asked Beaton briefly. 
 
 " Well, I don't know as there 's going to be any 
 Christmas number." 
 
 " Why 1 " Beaton asked again. 
 
 " Row between the financial angel and the literary 
 editor about the chief translator and polyglot smeller." 
 
 " Lindau ? " 
 
 "Lindau is his name." 
 
 " What does the literary editor expect after 
 Lindau 's expression of his views last night 1 " 
 
 " I don't know what he expected, but the ground 
 he took with the old man was that as Lindau's 
 opinions didn't characterise his work on the maga- 
 zine he would not be made the instrument of 
 punishing him for them : the old man wanted him 
 turned off, as he calls it."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 155 
 
 "Seems to be pretty good ground," said Beaton 
 impartially, while he speculated, with a dull trouble 
 at heart, on the effect the row would have on his 
 own fortunes. His late visit home had made him 
 feel that the claim of his family upon him for some 
 repayment of help given could not be much longer 
 delayed ; with his mother sick and his father grow- 
 ing old, he must begin to do something for them, 
 but up to this time he had spent his salary even 
 faster than he had earned it : when Fulkerson came 
 in he was wondering whether he could get him to 
 increase it, if he threatened to give up his work, 
 and he wished that he was enough in love with 
 Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to 
 marry her, only to end in the sorrowful conviction 
 that he was really in love with Alma Leighton, who 
 had no money, and who had apparently no wish to 
 be married for love, even. "And what are you 
 going to do about it ? " he asked listlessly. 
 
 " Be dogged if I know what I 'm going to do about 
 it," said Fulkerson. " I 've been round all day, trying 
 to pick up the pieces row began right after break- 
 fast this morning and one time I thought I 'd got 
 the thing all put together again. I got the old man 
 to say that he had spoken to March a little too 
 authoritatively about Lindau ; that in fact he ought 
 to have communicated his wishes through me ; and 
 that he was willing to have me get rid of Lindau, 
 and March needn't have anything to do with it. 
 I thought that was pretty white, but March says the 
 apologies and regrets are all well enough in their
 
 156 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 way, but they leave the main question where they 
 found it." 
 
 " What is the main question 1 " Beaton asked, 
 pouring himself out some Chianti ; as he set the 
 flask down he made the reflection that if he would 
 drink water instead of Chianti he could send his 
 father three dollars a week, on his back debts, and 
 he resolved to do it. 
 
 " The main question, as March looks at it, is the 
 question of punishing Lindau for his private 
 opinions ; he says that if he consents to my bounc- 
 ing the old fellow it 's the same as if he bounced him." 
 
 " It might have that complexion in some lights," 
 said Beaton. He drank off his Chianti, and thought 
 he would have it twice a week, or make Maroni 
 keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father 
 two dollars. ' And what are you going to do now ? " 
 
 " That 's what I don't know," said Fulkeraon 
 ruefully. After a moment he said desperately, 
 " Beaton, you 've got a pretty good head ; why 
 don't you suggest something ? " 
 
 "Why don't you let March go ?" Beaton suggested. 
 
 " Ah, I couldn't," said Fulkerson. " I got him to 
 break-up in Boston and come here; I -like him; 
 nobody else could get the hang of the thing like he 
 has ; he 's a friend." Fulkerson said this with the 
 nearest approach he could make to seriousness, 
 which was a kind of unhappiness. 
 
 Beaton shrugged. " Oh, if you can afford to have 
 deals, I congratulate you. They 're too expensive for 
 me. Then, suppose you get rid of Dryfoos 1 "
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 157 
 
 Fulkerson laughed forlornly. " Go on, Bildad. 
 Like to sprinkle a few ashes over my boils 1 Don't 
 mind me \ " 
 
 They both sat silent a little Avhile, and then 
 Beaton said, " I suppose you haven't seen Dryfoos 
 the second time ?" 
 
 " Xo. I came in here to gird up my loins with 
 a little dinner before I tackled him, But something 
 seems to be the matter with Maroni's cook. / don't 
 want anything to eat." 
 
 "The cooking's about as bad as usual," said 
 Beaton. After a moment, he added ironically, for 
 he found Fulkerson's misery a kind of relief from 
 his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it 
 was amusing : " Why not try an envoy extraordinary 
 and minister plenipotentiary ? " 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 
 " Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you !" 
 
 " Which other old fool ? The old fools seem to 
 be as thick as flies." 
 
 " That Southern one." 
 
 "Colonel Woodburn ?" 
 
 " Mmmmm." 
 
 " He did seem to rather take to the colonel ! " 
 Fulkerson mused aloud. 
 
 " Of course he did. Woodburn, with his idiotic 
 talk about patriarchal slavery, is the man on horse- 
 back to Dryfoos's muddy imagination. He 'd listen 
 to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn 
 told him to do." Beaton smiled cynically. 
 
 Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and
 
 158 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 hat. "You've struck it, old man." The waiter 
 came up to help him on with his coat ; Fulkerson 
 slipped a dollar in his hand. " Never mind the 
 coat ; you can give the rest of my dinner to the 
 poor, Paolo. Beaton, shake ! You Ve saved my 
 life, little boy, though I don't think you meant it." 
 He took Beaton's hand and solemnly pressed it, and 
 then almost ran out of the door. 
 
 They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton's 
 when he arrived, and sat down with them, and 
 began to put some of the life of his new hope into 
 them. His appetite revived, and after protesting 
 that he would not take anything but coffee, he went 
 back and ate some of the earlier courses. But with 
 the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he 
 did not conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that 
 he was eager to get her apart from the rest for 
 some reason. When he accomplished this, it seemed 
 as if he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he 
 had not wholly contrived it. 
 
 " I 'm so glad to get a chance to speak to you 
 alone," he said at once ; and while she waited for 
 the next word he made a pause, and then said 
 desperately, " I want you to help me ; and if you 
 can't help me, there 's no help for me." 
 
 " Mah goodness," she said, " is the case so bad as 
 that ? What in the woald is the trouble 1 " 
 
 " Yes, it 's a bad case," said Fulkerson. " I want 
 your father to help me." 
 
 " Oh, I thoat you said me \ " 
 
 " Yes ; I want you to help me with your father.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 159 
 
 I suppose I ought to go to him at once, but I 'm a 
 little afraid of him." 
 
 " And you awe not afraid of me ? I don't think 
 that's very flattering, Mr. Fulkerson. You ought 
 to think Ah 'm twahce as awful as papa." 
 
 " Oh, I do ! You see, I 'm quite paralysed be- 
 fore you, and so I don't feel anything." 
 
 " Well, it 's a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis. 
 But go on." 
 
 "I will I will. If I can only begin." 
 
 " Pohaps Ah maght begin fo' you." 
 
 " No, you can't. Lord knows, I 'd like to let you. 
 Well, it 's like this." 
 
 Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, 
 after another hesitation, he abruptly laid the whole 
 affair before her. He did not think it necessary to 
 state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had 
 given Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, 
 and he was profuse of his excuses for troubling her 
 with the matter, and of wonder at himself for having 
 done so. In the rapture of his concern at having 
 perhaps made a fool of himself, he forgot why he 
 had told her ; but she seemed to like having been 
 confided in, and she said, " Well, Ah don't see what 
 you can do with you' ahdeals of friendship, except 
 stand bah' Mr. Mawch." 
 
 " My ideals of friendship ? What do you mean ? " 
 
 " Oh, don't you suppose we know ? Mr. Beaton 
 said you we' a pofect Bahyard in friendship, and 
 you would sacrifice anything to it." 
 
 "Is that so ?" said Fulkerson, thinking how easily
 
 160 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 he could sacrifice Lindau in this case. He had never 
 supposed before that he was so chivalrous in such 
 matters, but he now began to see it in that light, 
 and he wondered that he could ever have entertained 
 for a moment the idea of throwing March over. 
 
 " But, Ah most say" Miss Woodburn went on, 
 " Ah don't envy you you' next interview with Mr. 
 Dryfoos. Ah suppose you '11 have to see him at 
 once aboat it." 
 
 The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object 
 of his confidences. " Ah, there 's where your help 
 comes in. I 've exhausted all the influence / have 
 with Dryfoos " 
 
 " Good gracious, you don't expect Ah could have 
 any ! " 
 
 They both laughed at the comic dismay with 
 which she conveyed the preposterous notion ; and 
 Fulkerson said, "If I judged from myself, I should 
 expect you to bring him round instantly." 
 
 " Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, with 
 mock-meekness. 
 
 " Not at all. But it isn't Dryfoos I want you to 
 help me with ; it 's your father. I want your father 
 to interview Dryfoos for me, and I I 'm afraid to 
 ask him." 
 
 " Poo' Mr. Fulkerson ! " she said, and she in- 
 sinuated something through her burlesque compas- 
 sion that lifted him to the skies. He swore in his 
 heart that the woman never lived who was so witty, 
 so wise, so beautiful, and so good. " Come raght 
 with me this minute, if the cy oast's clea'." She
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 161 
 
 vrent to the door of the dining-room and looked in 
 across its gloom to the little gallery where her father 
 sat beside a lamp reading his evening paper ; Mrs. 
 Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook 
 below, and Alma had gone to her room. She bec- 
 koned Fulkerson with the hand outstretched behind 
 her, and said, " Go and ask him." 
 
 " Alone ! " he palpitated. 
 
 " Oh, what a cyowahcl ! " she cried, and went with 
 him. "Ah suppose you'll want me to tell him 
 aboat it." 
 
 " Well, I wish you 'd begin, Miss Woodburn," he 
 said. " The fact is, you know, I 've been over it so 
 much I 'm kind of sick of the thing." 
 
 Miss Woodburn advanced, and put her hand on 
 her father's shoulder. " Look heah, papa ! Mr. 
 Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he 
 wants me to do it fo' him." 
 
 The colonel looked up through his glasses with 
 the sort of ferocity elderly men sometimes have to 
 put on in order to keep their glasses from falling off. 
 His daughter continued : 
 
 " He 'h got into an awful difficulty with his edito' 
 and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them." 
 
 " I do not know whethah I understand the case 
 exactly," said the colonel, " but Mr. Fulkerson may 
 command me to the extent of my ability." 
 
 " You don't understand it aftah what Ah Ve said?" 
 cried the girl. " Then Ah don't see but what 
 you '11 have to explain it you'self, Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 "Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous
 
 162 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 about it, colonel," said Fulkerson, glad of the joking 
 shape she had given the affair, '' that I can only 
 throw in a little side light here and there." 
 
 The colonel listened, as Fulkerson went on, with 
 a grave diplomatic satisfaction. He felt gratified, 
 honoured, even, he said, by Mr. Fulkerson's appeal 
 to him ; and probably it gave him something of the 
 high joy that an affair of honour would have 
 brought him in the days when he had arranged for 
 meetings between gentlemen. Next to bearing a 
 challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must 
 have been grateful. But he gave no outward sign 
 of his satisfaction in making a rtsumt of the case 
 so as to get the points clearly in his mind. 
 
 " I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to 
 the serious nature of the facts, "that Mr. Lindau 
 had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his 
 questions at the dinner-table last night." 
 
 "Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; 
 and then he wanted to withdraw his words at 
 the colonel's look of displeasure. 
 
 " I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Lindau," 
 Colonel Woodburn continued, and Fulkerson felt 
 grateful to him for going on ; "I do not agree with 
 Mr. Lindau ; I totally disagree with him on socio- 
 logical points ; but the course of the conversation 
 had invited him to the expression of his convictions, 
 and he had a right to express them, so far as they 
 had no personal bearing." 
 
 "Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Wood- 
 burn perched on the arm of her father's chair.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 163 
 
 "At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. 
 Dryfoos felt a personal censure in Mr. Lindau's 
 questions concerning his suppression of the strike 
 among his workmen, he had a right to resent it." 
 
 "Exactly," Fulkerson assented. 
 
 "But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high- 
 spirited gentleman like Mr. March I confess that 
 my feelings are with him very warmly in the matter 
 could not submit to dictation of the nature you 
 describe." 
 
 " Yes, I see," said Fulkerson ; and with that 
 strange duplex action of the human mind, he wished 
 that it was his hair, and not her father's, that Miss 
 Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her 
 fan. 
 
 "Mr. Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right 
 from his point of view, and Mr. Dryfoos was equally 
 right. The position of Mr. March is perfectly 
 correct " 
 
 His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair 
 arm. " Mah goodness ! If nobody 's in the wrong, 
 ho' awe you evah going to get the mattah straight 1 " 
 
 "Yes, you see," Fulkerson added, "nobody can 
 give in." 
 
 "Pardon me," said the colonel, "the case is one 
 in which all can give in." 
 
 "I don't know which '11 begin," said Fulkerson. 
 
 The colonel rose. "Mr. Lindau must begin, sir. 
 
 We must begin by seeing Mr. Lindau, and securing 
 
 from him the assurance that in the expression of his 
 
 peculiar views he had no intention of offering any 
 
 2K
 
 164 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 personal offence to Mr. Dryfoos. If I have formed a 
 correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this will be perfectly 
 simple." 
 
 Fulkerson shook his head. "But it wouldn't 
 help. Dryfoos don't care a rap whether Lindau 
 meant any personal offence or not. As far as that 
 is concerned, he 's got a hide like a hippopotamus. 
 But what he hates is Lindau's opinions, and what 
 he says is that no man who holds such opinions 
 shall have any work from him. And what March 
 says is that no man shall be punished through him 
 for his opinions, he don't care what they are." 
 
 The colonel stood a moment in silence. " And 
 what do you expect me to do under the circum- 
 stances ? " 
 
 " I came to you for advice I thought you might 
 suggest " 
 
 " Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos ? " 
 
 "Well, that's about the size of it," Fulkerson 
 admitted. "You see, colonel," he hastened on, "I 
 know that you have a great deal of influence with 
 him ; that article of yours is about the only thing 
 he 's ever read in Every Other Week, and he 's proud 
 of your acquaintance. Well, you know," and here 
 Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so 
 much in Beaton's phrase, and had been on his tongue 
 ever since, "you're the man on horseback to him; 
 and he 'd be more apt to do what you say than if 
 anybody else said it." 
 
 " You are very good, sir," said the colonel, trying 
 to be proof against the flattery, "but I am afraid
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 165 
 
 you overrate my influence." Fulkerson let him 
 ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her 
 impatience by holding her fan against her lips. 
 Whatever the process was in the colonel's mind, he 
 said at last : "I see no good reason for declining to 
 act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very 
 happy if I can be of service to you. But" he 
 stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with precipitate 
 thanks "I think I have a right, sir, to ask what 
 your course will be in the event of failure 1 " 
 
 " Failure 1 " Fulkerson repeated, in dismay. 
 
 " Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this 
 mission is one not wholly agreeable to my feelings." 
 
 " Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you 
 that I appreciate, I 
 
 " There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that 
 there are certain aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character 
 in which he is not a gentleman. We have alluded 
 to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now. 
 I may say, however, that my misgivings were not 
 wholly removed last night." 
 
 " No," Fulkerson assented ; though in his heart he 
 thought the old man had behaved very well. 
 
 " What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent 
 to act for you, in this matter, merely as an interme- 
 diary whose failure would leave the affair in statu 
 quo." 
 
 " I see," said Fulkerson. 
 
 " And I should like some intimation, some assur- 
 ance, as to which party your own feelings are with 
 in the difference."
 
 166 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson ; 
 Miss "Woodburn let hers fall ; Fulkerson felt that he 
 was being tested, and he said, to gain time, " As 
 between Lindau and Dryfoos 1 " though he knew 
 this was not the point. 
 
 " As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March," said 
 the colonel. 
 
 Fulkerson drew a long breath, and took his cour- 
 age in both hands. " There can't be any choice for 
 me in such a case. I 'in for March, every time." 
 
 The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn 
 said, " If there had been any choice fo' you in such 
 a case, I should never have let papa sti' a step with 
 you." 
 
 " Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with 
 a literal application of the idea, " was it your inten- 
 tion that we should both go 1 " 
 
 " Well, I don't know ; I suppose it was." 
 
 " I think it will be better for me to go alone," said 
 the colonel ; and, with a colour from his experience 
 in affairs of honour, he added : " In these matters a 
 principal cannot appear without compromising his 
 dignity. I believe I have all the points clearly in 
 mind, and I think I should act more freely in 
 meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone." 
 
 Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which 
 he met these agreeable views. He felt himself ex- 
 alted in some sort to the level of the colonel's senti- 
 ments, though it would not be easy to say whether 
 this was through the desperation bred of having 
 committed himself to March's side, or through the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 167 
 
 buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed 
 in his mission. " I J m not afraid to talk with Dry- 
 foos about it," he said. 
 
 "There is no question of courage," said the 
 colonel. " It is a question of dignity of personal 
 dignity." 
 
 " Well, don't let that delay you, papa," said his 
 daughter, following him to the door, where she 
 found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on 
 with his overcoat. " Ah shall be jost wald to know 
 ho' it's toned oat." 
 
 " Won't you let me go up to the house with you ?" 
 Fulkerson began. " I needn't go in " 
 
 " I prefer to go alone," said the colonel. " I wish 
 to turn the points over in my mind, and I am afraid 
 you would find me rather dull company." 
 
 He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss 
 Woodburn to the drawing-room, where she said the 
 Leightons were. They were not there, but she did 
 not seem disappointed. 
 
 "Well, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "you have got 
 an ahdeal of friendship, su' enough." 
 
 " Me ? " said Fulkerson. " Oh, my Lord ! Don't 
 you see I couldn't do anything else ? And I 'm 
 scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel don't 
 bring the old man round, I reckon it 's all up with 
 me. But he '11 fetch him. And I 'm just prostrated 
 with gratitude to you, Miss Woodburn." 
 
 She waved his thanks aside with her fan. " What 
 do you mean by its being all up with you 1 " 
 
 " Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and
 
 168 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 I stick to March, we've both got to go overboard 
 together. Dryfoos owns the magazine ; he can stop 
 it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same 
 thing, as far as we 're concerned." 
 
 " And then what 1 " the girl pursued. 
 
 " And then, nothing till we pick ourselves up." 
 
 "Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you 
 both oat of your places ? " 
 
 " He may." 
 
 " And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a 
 principle 1 " 
 
 " I reckon." 
 
 " And you do it, jost fo' an ahdeal ? " 
 
 " It won't do to own it. I must have my little 
 axe to grind, somewhere." 
 
 " Well, men awe splendid," sighed the girl. " Ah 
 will say it." 
 
 " Oh, they 're not so much better than women," 
 said Fulkerson, with a nervous jocosity. " I guess 
 March would have backed down if it hadn't been for 
 his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and 
 you could see that she would have sacrificed all her 
 husband's relations sooner than let him back down 
 an inch from the stand he had taken. It 's pretty 
 easy for a man to stick to a principle if he has a 
 woman to stand by him. But when you come to 
 play it alone " 
 
 " Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl solemnly, " Ah 
 will stand bah you in this, if all the woald tones 
 against you." The tears came into her eyes, and 
 she put out her hand to him.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 169 
 
 " You will 1 " he shouted, in a rapture. " In 
 every way and always as long as you live ? Do 
 you mean it 1 " He had caught her hand to his 
 breast and was grappling it tight there, and drawing 
 her to him. 
 
 The changing emotions chased each other through 
 her heart and over her face : dismay, shame, pride, 
 tenderness. " You don't believe," she said hoarsely, 
 " that I meant that ? " 
 
 "No, but I hope you do mean it ; for if you don't, 
 nothing else means anything." 
 
 There was no space, there was only a point of 
 wavering. " Ah do mean it." 
 
 When they lifted their eyes from each other again 
 it was half-past ten. " No' you most go," she said. 
 
 " But the colonel our fate ? " 
 
 " The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah 'm not 
 afraid of any fate, no' that we Ve taken it into ouah 
 own hands." She looked at him with dewy eyes of 
 trust, of inspiration. 
 
 " Oh, it 's going to come out all right," he said. 
 "It can't come out wrong now, no matter what 
 happens. But who 'd have thought it, when I came 
 into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, 
 half an hour ago " 
 
 " Three houahs and a half ago ! " she said. " No' 
 you most jost go. Ah'm tahed to death. Good 
 night. You can come in the mawning to see papa." 
 She opened the door, and pushed him out with 
 enrapturing violence, and he ran laughing down the 
 steps into her father's arms. f 
 
 VOL. II. 8
 
 170 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Why, colonel ! I was just going up to meet you." 
 He really thought he would walk off his exultation 
 in that direction. 
 
 "I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the 
 colonel began gravely, " that Mr. Dryfoos adheres 
 to his position." 
 
 " Oh, all right," said Fulkerson, with unabated 
 joy. "It's what I expected. Well, my course is 
 clear ; I shall stand by March, and I guess the world 
 won't come to an end if he bounces us both. But 
 I 'm everlasting obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, 
 and I don't know what to say to you. I I won't 
 detain you now ; it 's so late. I '11 see you in the 
 morning. Good ni " 
 
 Fulkerson did not realise that it takes two to 
 part. The colonel laid hold of his arm and turned 
 away with him. "I will walk toward your place 
 with you. I can understand why you should be 
 anxious to know the particulars of my interview 
 with Mr. Dryfoos ;" and in the statement which 
 followed he did not spare him the smallest. It out- 
 lasted their walk, and detained them long on the 
 steps of the Every Other Week building. But at the 
 end, Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light 
 of heart as if he had been listening to the gayest 
 promises that fortune could make. 
 
 By the time he met March at the office next 
 morning, a little, but only a very little, misgiving 
 saddened his golden heaven. He took March's 
 hand with high courage, and said, "Well, the old 
 man sticks to his point, March." He added, with the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 171 
 
 sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn, " And / 
 stick by you. I've thought it all over, and I'd 
 rather be right with you than wrong with him." 
 
 "Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson," 
 said March. "But perhaps perhaps we can save 
 over our heroics for another occasion. Lindau 
 seems to have got in with his, for the present." 
 
 He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood 
 a moment looking at each other rather queerly. 
 Fulkerson was the first to recover his spirits. 
 "Well," he said cheerily, "that let's us out." 
 
 " Does it 1 I 'm not sure it lets me out," said 
 March; but he said this in tribute to his crippled 
 self-respect rather than as a forecast of any action 
 in the matter. 
 
 " Why, what are you going to do 1 " Fulkerson 
 asked. " If Lindau won't work for Dryfoos you 
 can't make him." 
 
 March sighed. " What are you going to do with 
 this money 1 " He glanced at the heap of bills he 
 had flung on the table between them. 
 
 Fulkerson scratched his head. "Ah, dogged if 
 / know. Can't we give it to the deserving poor, 
 somehow, if we can find 'em 1 " 
 
 "I suppose we Ve no right to use it in any way. 
 You must give it to Dryfoos." 
 
 " To the deserving rich 1 Well, you can always 
 find them. I reckon you don't want to appear in 
 the transaction ; / don't, either ; but I guess I 
 must." Fulkerson gathered up the money and 
 carried it to Conrad. He directed him to account
 
 172 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 for it in his books as conscience-money, and he 
 enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do 
 when he was told where it came from. 
 
 Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable 
 impression the affair left during the course of the 
 forenoon, and he met Miss Woodburn with all a 
 lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was 
 as happy as he when he told her how fortunately 
 the whole thing had ended, and he took her view 
 that it was a reward of his courage in having dared 
 the worst. They both felt, as the newly plighted 
 always do, that they were in the best relations with 
 the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had 
 been especially looked to in the disposition of events. 
 They were in a glow of rapturous content with 
 themselves and radiant worship of each other; she 
 was sure that he merited the bright future opening 
 to them both, as much as if he owed it directly to 
 some noble action of his own ; he felt that he was 
 indebted for the favour of Heaven entirely to the 
 still incredible accident of her preference of him 
 over other men. 
 
 Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret 
 of their love, perhaps failed for this reason to share 
 their satisfaction with a result so unexpectedly 
 brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed 
 to his ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of 
 personal feeling at which he hinted in suggesting 
 that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some 
 abstract concessions and acknowledgments ; his 
 daughter hastened to deny that these were at all
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 173 
 
 necessary ; and Fulkerson easily explained why. 
 The thing was over ; what was the use of opening 
 it up again ? 
 
 "Perhaps none," the colonel admitted. But he 
 added, " I should like the opportunity of taking Mr. 
 Lind au's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos, and 
 assuring him that I considered him a man of principle 
 and a man of honour ; a gentleman, sir, whom I was 
 proud and happy to have known." 
 
 " Well, Ah 've no doabt," said his daughter 
 demurely, "that you'll have the chance some day; 
 and we would all lahke to join you. But at the 
 same tahme, I think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it 
 fo' the present."
 
 PAET FIFTH. 
 
 SUPERFICIALLY, the affairs of Every Other Week 
 settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulker- 
 son they seemed thoroughly reinstated. But March 
 had a feeling of impermanency from what had 
 happened, mixed with a fantastic sense of shame 
 toward Lindau. He did not sympathise with 
 Lindau's opinions, he thought his remedy for existing 
 evils as wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's. 
 But while he thought this, and while he could justly 
 blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at Dryfoos's. 
 dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of 
 March's protests, still he could not rid himself of 
 the reproach of uncandour with Lindau. He ought 
 to have told him frankly about the ownership of the 
 magazine, and what manner of man the man was 
 whose money he was taking. But he said that he 
 never could have imagined that he was serious in 
 his preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men 
 who embody half the prosperity of the country; 
 and he had moments of revolt against his own 
 humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 175 
 
 monstrous that he should return Dryfoos's money as 
 if it had been the spoil of a robber. His wife agreed 
 with him in these moments, and said it was a great 
 relief not to have that tiresome old German coming 
 about. They had to account for his absence 
 evasively to the children, whom they could not very 
 well tell that their father was living on money that 
 Lindau disdained to take, even though Lindau was 
 wrong and their father was right. This heightened 
 Mrs. March's resentment toward both Lindau and 
 Dryfoos, who between them had placed her husband 
 in a false position. If anything, she resented 
 Dryfoos's conduct more than Lindau's. He had 
 never spoken to March about the affair since Lindau 
 had renounced his work, or added to the apologetic 
 messages he had sent by Fulkerson. So far as 
 March knew, Dryfoos had been left to suppose that 
 Lindau had simply stopped for some reason that did 
 not personally affect him. They never spoke of him, 
 and March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or 
 Conrad whether the old man knew that Lindau had 
 returned his money. He avoided talking to Conrad, 
 from a feeling that if he did, he should involuntarily 
 lead him on to speak of his differences with his 
 father. Between himself and Fulkerson, even, he 
 was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect 
 friendliness. Fulkerson had finally behaved with 
 honour and courage ; but his provisional reluctance 
 had given March the measure of Fulkerson's 
 character in one direction, and he could not ignore 
 the fact that it was smaller than he could have wished.
 
 176 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared 
 his discomfort or not. It certainly wore away, even 
 with March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson, in 
 the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far 
 more transient, if it existed at all. He advanced 
 into the winter as radiantly as if to meet the spring, 
 and he said that if there were any pleasanter month 
 of the year than November, it was December, 
 especially when the weather was good and wet and 
 muddy most of the time, so that you had to keep 
 indoors a long while after you called anywhere. 
 
 Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his 
 daughter's engagement, when she asked his consent 
 to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard to 
 any reality that threatens to affect the course of his 
 reveries. He had not perhaps taken her marriage 
 into account, except as a remote contingency ; and 
 certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law 
 that he had imagined in dealing with that abstrac- 
 tion. But because he had nothing of the sort 
 definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection 
 of Fulkerson with success ; he really knew nothing 
 against him, and he knew many things in his 
 favour ; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking that 
 every one felt for him in a measure ; he amused 
 him, he cheered him ; and the Colonel had been so 
 much used to leaving action of all kinds to his 
 daughter that when he came to close quarters with 
 the question of a son-in-law, he felt helpless to 
 decide it, and he let her decide it, as if it were still 
 to be decided when it was submitted to him. She
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 177 
 
 was competent to treat it in all its phases : not 
 merely those of personal interest, but those of duty 
 to the broken Southern past, sentimentally dear to 
 him, and practically absurd to her. No such South 
 as he remembered had ever existed to her know- 
 ledge, and no such civilisation as he imagined would 
 ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the 
 world as she found it, and made the best of it. She 
 trusted in Fulkerson ; she had proved his magna- 
 nimity in a serious emergency ; and in small things 
 she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. 
 She was not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing 
 fantastic in her expectations ; she was a girl of 
 good sense and right mind, and she liked the im- 
 mediate practicality as well as the final honour of 
 Fulkerson. She did not idealise him, but in the 
 highest effect she realised him ; she did him justice, 
 and she would not have believed that she did him 
 more than justice if she had sometimes known him 
 to do himself less. 
 
 Their engagement was a fact to which the 
 Leighton household adjusted itself almost as simply 
 as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the 
 ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson 
 could keep from March very long. He sent word 
 of it to Mrs. March by her husband ; and his 
 engagement perhaps did more than anything else 
 to confirm the confidence in him which had been 
 shaken by his early behaviour in the Lindau epi- 
 sode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity 
 to March. But now she felt that a man who 
 8* 2L
 
 178 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 wished to get married so obviously and entirely foi 
 love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and 
 only needed the guidance of a wife to become very 
 noble. She interested herself intensely in balancing 
 the respective merits of the engaged couple, and 
 after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new 
 character she prided herself upon recognising the 
 worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her, 
 while maintaining the general average of New 
 England superiority. She could not reconcile her- 
 self to the Virginian custom illustrated in her 
 having been christened with the surname of Madi- 
 son ; and she said that its pet form of Mad, which 
 Fulkerson promptly invented, only made it more 
 ridiculous. 
 
 Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was 
 afraid, somehow, of Beaton's taking the matter in 
 the cynical way ; Miss Woodburn said she would 
 break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess 
 it or find it out by accident, and then Fulkerson 
 plucked up his courage. Beaton received the news 
 with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meek- 
 ness that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and 
 made him wish that Beaton was engaged too. 
 
 It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left 
 him behind and forgotten; in a manner, it made 
 him feel trifled with. Something of the unfriendli- 
 ness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and 
 he allowed the sadness of his conviction that he had 
 not the means to marry on to tinge his recognition 
 of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 179 
 
 wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now 
 often in that martyr mood in which he wished to 
 help his father ; not only to deny himself Chianti, 
 but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended 
 to get for the winter. He postponed the moment 
 of actual sacrifice as regarded the Chianti, and he 
 bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach. 
 He wore it the first evening after he got it in going 
 to call upon the Leightons, and it seemed to him a 
 piece of ghastly irony when Alma complimented his 
 picturesqueness in it, and asked him to let her 
 sketch him. 
 
 " Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much 
 gloom that it made her laugh. 
 
 "If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not." 
 
 " No, no ! Go ahead ! How do you want me ? " 
 
 " Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of 
 your attitudes of studied negligence ; and twist one 
 corner of your moustache with affected absence of 
 mind." 
 
 "And you think I'm always studied, always 
 affected 1 " 
 
 " I didn't say so." 
 
 " I didn't ask you what you said." 
 
 " And I won't tell you what I think." 
 
 "Ah, I know what you think." 
 
 " What made you ask, then ? " The girl laughed 
 again with the satisfaction of her sex in cornering 
 a man. 
 
 Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and 
 put himself in the pose she suggested frowning.
 
 180 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Ah, that 's it. But a little more animation. 
 " As when a great thought strikes along the brain, 
 And flushes all the cheek.' " 
 
 She put her forehead down on the back of her 
 hand and laughed again. " You ought to be photo- 
 graphed. You look as if you were sitting for it." 
 
 Beaton said : " That 's because I know I am being 
 photographed, in one way. I don't think you ought 
 to call me affected. I never am so with you ; I 
 know it wouldn't be of any use." 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Beaton, you natter." 
 
 " No, I never flatter you." 
 
 " I meant you flattered yourself." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " Oh, I don't know. Imagine." 
 
 " I know what you mean. You think I can't be 
 sincere with anybody." 
 
 " Oh, no I don't." 
 
 " What do you think ? " 
 
 "That you can't try." Alma gave another 
 victorious laugh. 
 
 Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have 
 both feigned a great interest in Alma's sketching 
 Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which 
 they approached as nearly as possible the real 
 interest of their lives. Now they frankly remained 
 away, in the dining-room, which was very cozy after 
 the dinner had disappeared ; the colonel sat with his 
 lamp and paper in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton 
 was about her housekeeping affairs, in the content 
 she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 181 
 
 " They seem to be having a pretty good time in 
 there," said Fulkerson, detaching himself from his 
 own absolute good time as well as he could. 
 
 " At least Alma does," said Miss Woodburn. 
 
 " Do you think she cares for him 1 " 
 
 " Quahte as moch as he desoves." 
 
 " What makes you all down on Beaton around 
 here ? He 's not such a bad fellow." 
 
 " We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton 
 isn't doan on him." 
 
 " Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't 
 be much question about it." 
 
 They both laughed, and Alma said, " They seem 
 to be greatly amused with something in there." 
 
 "Me, probably," said Beaton. "I seem to amuse 
 everybody to-night." 
 
 " Don't you always ? " 
 
 "I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma." 
 
 She looked at him as if she were going to snub 
 .him openly for using her name ; but apparently she 
 decided to do it covertly. " You didn't at first. I 
 really used to believe you could be serious once." 
 
 " Couldn't you believe it again ? Now 1 " 
 
 " Not when you put on that wind-harp stop." 
 
 "Wetmore has been talking to you about me. 
 He would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase. He 
 spends his time making them." 
 
 "He's made some very pretty ones about you." 
 
 " Like the one you just quoted ? " 
 
 " No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. 
 He says ." She stopped, teasingly.
 
 182 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " What 1 " 
 
 "He says you could be almost anything you 
 wished, if you didn't wish to be everything." 
 
 "That sounds more like the school of "Wetmore. 
 That's what you say, Alma. Well, if there were 
 something you wished me to be, I could be it." 
 
 " We might adapt Kingsley : ' Be good, sweet 
 maid, and let who will be clever.' " He could not help 
 laughing. She went on: "I always thought that 
 was the most patronising and exasperating thing ever 
 addressed to a human girl ; and we Ve had to stand 
 a good deal in our time. I should like to have it 
 applied to the other ' sect ' a while. As if any girl 
 that was a girl would be good if she had the remotest 
 chance of being clever." 
 
 " Then you wouldn't wish me to be good ? ' 
 Beaton asked. 
 
 "Not if you were a girl." 
 
 "You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I 
 deserve it. But if I were one-tenth part as good as 
 you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I 
 have now. I know that I 'm fickle, but I 'm not 
 false, as you think I am." 
 
 " Who said I thought you were false 1 " 
 
 " No one," said Beaton. " It isn't necessary, 
 when you look it live it." 
 
 " Oh, dear ! I didn't know I devoted my whole 
 time to the subject." 
 
 " I know I 'm despicable. I could tell you some- 
 thing the history of this day, even that would 
 make you despise me." Beaton had in mind his
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 183 
 
 purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting 
 in so effectively, with the money he ought to have 
 sent his father. " But," he went on darkly, with a 
 sense that what he was that moment suffering for 
 his selfishness must somehow be a kind of atonement, 
 which would finally leave him to the guiltless enjoy- 
 ment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the 
 depths of baseness I could descend to." 
 
 " I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the 
 collar, " if you 'd give me some hint." 
 
 Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse 
 to her, but he was afraid of her laughing at him. 
 He said to himself that this was a very wholesome 
 fear, and that if he could always have her at hand 
 he should not make a fool of himself so often. A 
 man conceives of such an office as the very noblest 
 for a woman; he worships her for it if he is 
 magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma 
 put back her head for the right distance on her 
 sketch. " Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the 
 sublimest of human beings for advising him to get 
 Colonel Woodburn to interview Mr. Dryfoos about 
 Lindau. What have you ever done with your 
 Judas ? " 
 
 " I haven't done anything with it. Nadel thought 
 he would take hold of it at one time, but he dropped 
 it again. After all, I don't suppose it could be 
 popularised. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a 
 premium to subscribers for Every Other Week, but I 
 sat down on that." 
 
 Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she
 
 184 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 merely said, " Every Other Week seems to be going on 
 just the same as ever." 
 
 " Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe 
 Fulkerson," said Beaton, with a return to what they 
 were saying, " has managed the whole business very 
 well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice." 
 
 " Very likely," Alma suggested vaguely. " Or 
 no ! Excuse me ! He couldn't, he couldn't ! She 
 laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of 
 embarrassment. 
 
 He tried to recover his dignity in saying, " He 's 
 a very good fellow, and he deserves his happiness " 
 
 "Oh, indeed!" said Alma perversely. "Does 
 any one deserve happiness 1 " 
 
 "I know I don't," sighed Beaton. 
 
 " You mean you don't get it." 
 
 "I certainly don't get it." 
 
 "Ah, but that isn't the reason." 
 
 " What is ? " 
 
 " That 's the secret of the universe." She bit in 
 her lower lip, and looked at him with eyes of gleans 
 ing fun. 
 
 " Are you never serious 1 " he asked. 
 
 " With serious people always.' 
 
 " / am serious ; and you have the secret of my 
 
 happiness ." He threw himself impulsively 
 
 forward in his chair. 
 
 " Oh, pose, pose ! " she cried. 
 
 " I won't pose," he answered, " and you have got 
 to listen to me. You know I 'm in love with you ; 
 and I know that once you cared for me. Can't that
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 185 
 
 time won't it come back again 1 Try to think so, 
 Alma ! " 
 
 " No," she said, briefly and seriously enough. 
 
 "But that seems impossible. What is it I've 
 done what have you against me ? " 
 
 " Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn't 
 recall it if I wished. Why did you bring it up ? 
 You Ve broken your word. You know I wouldn't 
 have let you keep coming here if you hadn't 
 promised never to refer to it." 
 
 " How could I help it ? With that happiness near 
 us Fulkerson " 
 
 " Oh, it 's that 1 I might have known it ! " 
 
 "No, it isn't that it's something far deeper. 
 But if it 's nothing you have against me, what is it, 
 Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now as 
 you did then ? I haven't changed." 
 
 "But / have. I shall never care for you again, 
 Mr. Beaton ; you might as well understand it once 
 for all. Don't think it's anything in yourself, or 
 that I think you unworthy of me. I 'm not so self- 
 satisfied as that ; I know very well that I 'm not a 
 perfect character, and that I Ve no claim on perfec- 
 tion in anybody else. I think women who want 
 that are fools ; they won't get it, and they don't 
 deserve it. But I 've learned a good deal more about 
 myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of 
 work, of art, and of art alone that's what I've 
 made up my mind to." 
 
 " A woman that 's made up her mind to that has 
 no heart to hinder her ! "
 
 186 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Would a man have that had done so 1" 
 
 " But I don't believe you, Alma. You 're merely 
 laughing at me. And besides, with me you needn't 
 give up art. We could work together. You know 
 how much I admire your talent. I believe I could 
 help it serve it ; I would be its willing slave, and 
 yours, Heaven knows ! " 
 
 " I don't want any slave nor any slavery. I want 
 to be free always. Now do you see 1 I don't care 
 for you, and I never could in the old way ; but I 
 should have to care for some one more than I believe 
 I ever shall to give up my work. Shall we go on ? " 
 She looked at her sketch. 
 
 " No, we shall not go on," he said, gloomily as 
 he rose. 
 
 " I suppose you blame me," she said, rising too. 
 
 " Oh no ! I blame no one or only myself. I 
 threw my chance away." 
 
 " I 'm glad you see that ; and I 'm glad you did 
 it. You don't believe me, of course. Why do men 
 think life can be only the one thing to women ? 
 And if you come to the selfish view, who are the 
 happy women 1 I 'm sure that if work doesn't fail 
 me, health won't, and happiness won't." 
 
 " But you could work on with me " 
 
 " Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn't be 
 woman enough to wish my work always less and 
 lower than yours ? At least I Ve heart enough for 
 that ! " 
 
 " You Ve heart enough for anything, Alma. I 
 was a fool to say you hadn't."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 187 
 
 " I think the women who keep their hearts have 
 an even chance, at least, of having heart " 
 
 " Ah, there 's where you 're wrong ! " 
 
 " But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow. And 
 now I don't want you ever to speak to me about this 
 again." 
 
 " Oh, there 's no danger ! " he cried bitterly. " I 
 shall never willingly see you again." 
 
 " That 's as you like, Mr. Beaton. We Ve had to 
 "be very frank, but I don't see why we shouldn't be 
 friends. Still, we needn't, if you don't like." 
 
 " And I may come I may come here as as 
 usual 1 " 
 
 " Why, if you can consistently," she said, with a 
 smile, and she held out her hand to him. 
 
 He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a 
 bad joke that had been put upon him. At least the 
 affair went so deep that it estranged the aspect of 
 his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were 
 not very familiar ; he had spent lately a great deal 
 on rugs, on stuffs, on Japanese bric-a-brac. When 
 he saw these things in the shops he had felt that he 
 must have them ; that they were necessary to him ; 
 and he was partly in debt for them, still without 
 having sent any of his earnings to pay his father. 
 As he looked at them now he liked to fancy some- 
 thing weird and conscious in them as the silent wit- 
 nesses of a broken life. He felt about among some 
 of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe. 
 Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his 
 despair, of a remote relief, an escape ; and after all,
 
 188 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 the understanding he had come to with Alma was 
 only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit 
 between them. Beaton would have been puzzled 
 more than he knew if she had taken him seriously. 
 It was inevitable that he should declare himself in 
 love with her ; but he was not disappointed at her 
 rejection of his love ; perhaps not so much as he 
 would have been at its acceptance, though he tried 
 to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of 
 tragedy. He did not really feel that the result was 
 worse than what had gone before, and it left him 
 free. 
 
 But he did not go to the Leightons again for so 
 long a time that Mrs. Leighton asked Alma what 
 had happened. Alma told her. 
 
 " And he won't come any more 1 " her mother 
 sighed, with reserved censure. 
 
 " Oh, I think he will. He couldn't very well come 
 the next night. But he has the habit of coming, 
 and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything even the. 
 habit of thinking he 's in love with some one." 
 
 " Alma," said her mother, " I don't think it 's 
 very nice for a girl to let a young man keep coming 
 to see her after she 's refused him." 
 
 " Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the 
 girl?" " 
 
 " But it does hurt her, Alma. It it 's indelicate. 
 It isn't fair to him ; it gives him hopes." 
 
 " Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given 
 case yet. If Mr. Beaton comes again I won't see 
 him, and you can forbid him the house."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 189 
 
 " If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her 
 mother, taking up another branch of the inquiry, 
 " that you really knew your own mind, I should be 
 easier about it." 
 
 " Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I 
 do know my own mind ; and what 's worse, I know 
 Mr. Beaton's mind." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 
 " I mean that he spoke to me the other night 
 simply because Mr. Fulkerson's engagement had 
 broken him all up." 
 
 "What expressions!" Mrs. Leigh ton lamented. 
 
 " He let it out himself," Alma went on. " And 
 you wouldn't have thought it was very flattering 
 yourself. When I 'm made love to, after this, I 
 prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there 
 isn't another engaged couple anywhere about." 
 
 " Did you tell him that, Alma ? " 
 
 " Tell him that ! What do you mean, mamma ? 
 I may be indelicate, but I 'm not quite so indelicate 
 as that." 
 
 " I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, 
 but I wanted to warn you. I think Mr. Beaton was 
 very much in earnest." 
 
 " Oh, so did he !" 
 
 " And you didn't ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he 's very 
 much in earnest with Miss Vance at times, and with 
 Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he 's a painter, 
 and sometimes he 's an architect, and sometimes he 's 
 a sculptor. He has too many gifts too many tastes."
 
 190 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " And if Miss Vance, and Miss Dryfoos ' 
 
 " Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma ! 
 It 's getting so dreadfully personal ! " 
 
 " Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your 
 real feeling in the matter." 
 
 " And you know that I don't want to let you 
 especially when I haven't got any real feeling in the 
 matter. But I should think speaking in the 
 abstract entirely that if either of those arts was 
 ever going to be in earnest about him, it would 
 want his exclusive devotion for a week at least." 
 
 "I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he 
 was doing anything now at the others. I thought 
 he was entirely taken up with his work on Every 
 Other Week" 
 
 " Oh, he is ! he is ! " 
 
 "And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he 
 hasn't been very kind very useful to you, in that 
 matter." 
 
 "And so I ought to have said yes out of grati- 
 tude ? Thank you, mamma ! I didn't know you 
 held me so cheap." 
 
 "You know whether I hold you cheap or not, 
 Alma. I don't want you to cheapen yourself. I 
 don't want you to trifle with any one. I want you 
 to be honest with yourself." 
 
 " Well, come now, mamma ! Suppose you begin. 
 I 've been perfectly honest with myself, and I 've 
 been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don't care for him, 
 and I 've told him I didn't ; so he may be supposed 
 to know it If he comes here after this, he 11 come
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 191 
 
 as a plain, unostentatious friend of the family, and 
 it's for you to say whether he shall come in that 
 capacity or not. I hope you won't trifle with him, 
 and let him get the notion that he 's coming on any 
 other basis." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical 
 attitude far too keenly to abandon it for anything 
 constructive. She only said, " You know very well, 
 Alma, that 's a matter I can have nothing to do with." 
 
 " Then you leave him entirely to me 1 " 
 
 " I hope you will regard his right to candid and 
 open treatment." 
 
 " He 's had nothing but the most open and candid 
 treatment from me, mamma. It 's you that want to 
 play fast and loose with him. And to tell you the 
 truth, I believe he would like that a good deal 
 better ; I believe that if there 's anything he hates, 
 it's openness and candour." 
 
 Alma laughed, and put her arms round her 
 mother, who could not help laughing a little too.
 
 n. 
 
 THE winter did not renew for Christine and Mela 
 the social opportunity which the spring had offered. 
 After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they both made 
 their party-call, as Mela said, in due season but 
 they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither 
 she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people 
 returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe 
 for a time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards ; 
 this pretence failed them, and they fell back upon 
 their pride, or rather Christine's pride. Mela had 
 little but her good-nature to avail her in any exi- 
 gency, and if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had come to 
 call after a year of neglect, she would have received 
 them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in 
 coming. But Christine had drawn a line, beyond 
 which they would not have been forgiven ; and she 
 had planned the words and the behaviour with 
 which she would have punished them if they had 
 appeared then. Neither sister imagined herself in 
 anywise inferior to them ; but Christine was sus- 
 picious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the 
 hypothesis of the lost cards. As nothing happened
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 193 
 
 to prove or to disprove the fact, she said, " I move 
 we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, 
 at some of their meetin's." 
 
 " If you do," said, Christine, " I '11 kill you." 
 
 Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to 
 console her, and if these seemed to have no definite 
 aim, she was willing to rest in the pleasure they 
 gave her vanity ; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes 
 she even wished they were all back on the farm. 
 
 " It would be the best thing for both of you," 
 said Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of 
 desperation. " I don't think New York is any place 
 for girls." 
 
 " "Well, what I hate, mother,' said Mela, ' is, it 
 don't seem to be any place for young men, either." 
 She found this so good when she had said it that 
 she laughed over it till Christine was angry. 
 
 " A body would think there had never been any 
 joke before." 
 
 "I don't see as it's a joke," said Mrs. Dryfoos. 
 <l It 's the plain truth." 
 
 " Oh, don't mind her, mother," said Mela. " She 's 
 put out because her old Mr. Beaton ha'n't been 
 round for a couple o' weeks. If you don't watch 
 out, that fellow '11 give you the slip, yit, Christine, 
 after all your pains." 
 
 " Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, 
 Mela," Christine clawed back. 
 
 " No ; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody." 
 This was what Mela said for want of a better retort ; 
 but it was not quite true. When Kendricks came 
 VOL. II 9 2 M
 
 194 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, bhe 
 used all her cunning to ensnare him, and she had 
 him to herself as long as Beaton stayed ; Dryfoos 
 sent down word that he was not very well, and had 
 gone to bed. The novelty of Mela had worn off for 
 Kendricks, and she found him, as she frankly told 
 him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs. 
 Horn's ; but she did her best with him as the only 
 flirtable material which had yet come to her hand. 
 It would have been her ideal to have the young men 
 stay till past midnight, and her father come down- 
 stairs in his stocking-feet, and tell them it was time 
 to go. But they made a visit of decorous brevity, 
 and Kendricks did not come again. She met him 
 afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement 
 in Union Square, to get into her coupe", and made 
 the most of him ; but it was necessarily very little, 
 and so he passed out of her life without having left 
 any trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart 
 that she would have put at the disposition of almost 
 any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, 
 Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more 
 outlook into the average American nature than if he 
 had been kept a prisoner in New York society all 
 his days, perceived a property in her which forbade 
 him as a man of conscience to trifle with her ; some- 
 thing earthly good and kind, if it was simple and 
 vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it seemed 
 to him that she Avould come even to better literary 
 effect if this were recognised in her; and it made 
 her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 195 
 
 be fooled, in her merely human quality. After all, 
 he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be 
 loved, and the lures she threw out to that end 
 seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous ; he 
 could not join Beaton in laughing at her ; and he 
 did not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl, 
 either. It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of 
 honour which he mostly kept to himself because he 
 was a little ashamed to find there were so few others 
 like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other 
 girl and Christine appeared simply detestable to 
 Kendricks he had better keep away from her, and 
 not give her the impression he was in love with her. 
 He rather fancied that this was the part of a gentle- 
 man, and he could not have penetrated to that 
 sesthetic and moral complexity which formed the con- 
 sciousness of a nature like Beaton, and was chiefly a 
 torment to itself; he could not have conceived of 
 the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in 
 little things, till the straight highway was traversed 
 and wellnigh lost under their tangle. To do what- 
 ever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, 
 even though one continues to do what one will ; but 
 Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still 
 too young to understand this. 
 
 Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps 
 because he was not yet twenty-seven. He only 
 knew that his will was somehow sick ; that it spent 
 itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness 
 from the fulfilment of the most vehement wish. 
 But he was aware that his wishes grew less and les*
 
 196 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 vehement ; he began to have a fear that some time 
 he might have none at all. It seemed to him that 
 if he could once do something that was thoroughly 
 distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in 
 the right direction ; but when he tried this on a 
 small scale it failed, and it seemed stupid. Some 
 sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was 
 sure ; but he could not think of anything in particu- 
 lar to expiate ; a man could not expiate his tempera- 
 ment, and his temperament was what Beaton decided 
 to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper 
 than even fate would have gone ; he could have ful- 
 filled an evil destiny and had done with it, however 
 terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape 
 from himself ; and for the most part, he justified 
 himself in refusing to try. After he had come to 
 that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton, 
 and experienced the relief it really gave him, he 
 thought for a while that if it had fallen out other- 
 wise, and she had put him in charge of her destiny, 
 he might have been better able to manage his own. 
 But as it was, he could only drift, and let all other 
 things take their course. It was necessary that he 
 should go to see her afterward, to show her that he 
 was equal to the event ; but he did not go so often, 
 and he went rather oftener to the Dryfooses ; it was 
 not easy to see Margaret Vance, except on the society 
 terms. With much sneering and scorning, he ful- 
 filled the duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew 
 he should be dropped from her list ; but one might 
 go to many of her Thursdays without getting many
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 197 
 
 words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether 
 he wanted many ; the girl kept the charm of her 
 innocent stylishness ; but latterly she wanted to talk 
 more about social questions than about the psychical 
 problems that young people usually debate so per- 
 sonally. Son of the working-people as he was, 
 Beaton had never cared anything about such 
 matters ; he did not know about them or wish to 
 know ; he was perhaps too near them. Besides, 
 there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, 
 concerning the Dryfooses. She was too high-minded 
 to blame him for having tempted her to her failure 
 with them by his talk about them ; but she was 
 conscious of avoiding them in her talk. She had 
 decided not to renew the effort she had made in the 
 spring; because she could not do them good as 
 fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, 
 and she would not try to befriend them socially ; 
 she had a horror of any such futile sentimentality. 
 She would have liked to account to Beaton in this 
 way for a course which she suspected he must have 
 heard their comments upon, but she did not quite 
 know how to do it ; she could not be sure how much 
 or how little he cared for them. Some tentative 
 approaches which she made toward explanation were 
 met with such eager disclaim of personal interest 
 that she knew less than before what to think ; and 
 she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, 
 whom it seemed she still continued to meet in their 
 common work among the poor. 
 
 " He seems very different," she ventured.
 
 198 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "Oh, quite," said Beaton. "He's the kind of 
 person that you might suppose gave the Catholics 
 a hint for the cloistral life ; he 's a cloistered nature 
 the nature that atones and suffers for. But he 's 
 awfully dull company, don't you think 1 I never 
 can get anything out of him." 
 
 " He 's very much in earnest." 
 
 " Remorselessly. We 've got a profane and mun- 
 dane creature there at the office who runs us all, 
 and it 's shocking merely to see the contact of the 
 two natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dry- 
 foos he likes to put his joke in the form of a pre- 
 tence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive, 
 that he has an eye to office, and is working up a 
 political interest for himself on the East side it 's 
 something inexpressible." 
 
 " I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such 
 lofty disapproval that Beaton felt himself included 
 in it for having merely told what caused it. 
 
 He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, 
 "Well, the manof one ideais always alittle ridiculous." 
 
 " When his idea is right ? " she demanded. " A 
 right idea can't be ridiculous." 
 
 "Oh, I only said the man that held it alone. 
 He 's flat ; he has no relief, no projection." 
 
 She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived 
 that he had silenced her to his own disadvantage. 
 It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little 
 too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put 
 down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, 
 in his solemn staccato, " I must go. Good-bye ! " and
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 199 
 
 got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of 
 having suddenly thought of something imperative. 
 
 He went up to Mrs Horn for a moment's hail and 
 farewell, and felt himself subtly detained by her 
 through fugitive passages of conversation with half 
 a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of 
 this strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to be- 
 come confidential with him, and confidential, of all 
 things, about her niece. She ended by not having 
 palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind 
 would have been difficult to impart to a young man, 
 and after several experiments Mrs. Horn found it 
 impossible to say that she wished Margaret could 
 somehow be interested in lower things than those 
 which occupied her. She had watched with grow- 
 ing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds of 
 self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she 
 even feared her entire withdrawal from the world 
 in a life of good works. Before now, girls had 
 entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so 
 potently to the young and generous imagination, 
 and Margaret was of just the temperament to be 
 influenced by them. During the past summer she 
 had been unhappy at her separation from the cares 
 that had engrossed her more and more as their stay 
 in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she 
 had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall 
 than she would have chosen to come. Margaret had 
 her correspondents among the working-women whom 
 she befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed 
 to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike
 
 200 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 of the button-hole workers. This, of course, had its 
 ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in 
 good society, and a person of even so little humour 
 as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it. At the 
 same time she could not help foreboding the worst 
 from it ; she was afraid that Margaret's health would 
 give way under the strain, and that if she did not go 
 into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline. 
 She began the winter with all such counteractive 
 measures as she could employ. At an age when 
 such things weary, she threw herself into the plea- 
 sures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret 
 after her; and a sympathetic witness must have 
 followed with compassion her course from ball to 
 ball, from reception to reception, from parlour-read- 
 ing to parlour-reading, from musicale to musicale, 
 from play to play, from opera to opera. She tasted, 
 after she had practically renounced them, the bitter 
 and the insipid flavours of fashionable amusement, 
 in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, 
 and now at the end she had to own to herself that 
 she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the 
 girl had only grown thinner and more serious with 
 the diversions that did not divert her from the bale- 
 ful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt 
 that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret 
 could have borne either alone, but together they 
 were wearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergo 
 the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she 
 could not forego the other duties in which she found 
 her only pleasure.
 
 A HAZARD OP NEW FORTUNES. 201 
 
 She kept up her music still because she could 
 employ it at the meetings for the entertainment, 
 and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working- 
 women; but she neglected the other aesthetic in- 
 terests which once occupied her; and at sight of 
 Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught at the 
 hope that he might somehow be turned to account 
 in reviving Margaret's former interest in art. She 
 asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his classes that 
 winter as usual ; and she said she wished Margaret 
 could be induced to go again : Mr. Wetmore always 
 said that she did not draw very well, but that she 
 had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was 
 interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town 
 again ; and she murmured a regret that she had not 
 been able to see anything of them, without explain- 
 ing why ; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret 
 knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it 
 might stimulate her, perhaps. She supposed Miss 
 Leighton was still going on with her art ] 
 
 Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so. 
 
 But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to 
 pursue her aims in that direction, and she said, with 
 a sigh, she wished he still had a class ; she always 
 fancied that Margaret got more good from his in- 
 struction than from any one else's. 
 
 He said that she was very good ; but there was 
 really nobody who knew half as much as Wetmore, 
 or could make any one understand half as much. 
 
 Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore 's 
 terrible sincerity discouraged Margaret; he would 
 9*
 
 202 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 not let her have any illusions about the outcome of 
 what she was doing ; and did not Mr. Beaton think 
 that some illusion was necessary with young people 1 
 Of course it was very nice of Mr. Wetmore to be so 
 honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest 
 thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of 
 some one who would be a little less severe. Her 
 tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who 
 were coming up and going away, and Beaton per- 
 ceived that he was dismissed. 
 
 He went away with vanity flattered by the sense 
 of having been appealed to concerning Margaret, 
 and then he began to chafe at what she had said of 
 Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still 
 had a class himself. Did she mean, confound her ! 
 that he was insincere, and would let Miss Vance 
 suppose she had more talent than she really had ? 
 The more Beaton thought of this, the more furious 
 he became; and the more he was convinced that 
 something like it had been unconsciously if not 
 consciously in her mind. He framed some keen 
 retorts, to the general effect that with the atmosphere 
 of illusion preserved so completely at home, Miss 
 Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having 
 just determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's 
 Thursdays again, he decided to go once more, in 
 order to plant this sting in her capacious but some- 
 what callous bosom ; and he planned how he would 
 lead the talk up to the point from which he should 
 launch it. 
 
 la the meantime he felt the need of some present
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 203 
 
 solace, such as only unqualified worship could give 
 him ; a cruel wish to feel his power in some direction 
 where, even if it were resisted, it could not be over- 
 come, drove him on. That a woman who was to 
 Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should inti- 
 mate, however innocently the innocence made it 
 all the worse that he was less honest than Wetmore, 
 whom he knew to be so much more honest, was 
 something that must be retaliated somewhere before 
 his self-respect could be restored. It was only five 
 o'clock, and he went on uptown to the Dryfooses', 
 though he had been there only the night before last. 
 He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him. 
 
 " The young ladies are down-town shopping," she 
 said, "but I am very glad of the opportunity of see- 
 ing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived 
 several years in Europe." 
 
 "Yes," said Beaton, wondering what that could 
 have to do with he'r pleasure in seeing him alone. 
 " I believe so 1 " He involuntarily gave his words 
 the questioning inflection. 
 
 "You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't 
 find what I am going to ask so strange. Mr. Beaton, 
 why do you come so much to this house 1 " Mrs. 
 Mandel bent forward with an aspect of lady-like 
 interest, and smiled. 
 
 Beaton frowned. " Why do I come so much 1 " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Why do I . Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will 
 
 you allow me to ask why you ask ? " 
 
 " Oh, certainly. There 's no reason why I
 
 204 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 shouldn't say, for I wish you to be very frank with 
 me. I ask because there are two young ladies in 
 this house; and, in a certain way, I have to take 
 the place of a mother to them. I needn't explain 
 why ; you know all the people here, and you under- 
 stand. I have nothing to say about them, but I 
 should ,not be speaking to you now if they were 
 not all rather helpless people. They do not know 
 the world they have come to live in here, and they 
 cannot help themselves nor one another. But you 
 do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know 
 just how much or how little you mean by coming 
 here. You are either interested in one of these 
 young girls or you are not. If you are, I have 
 
 nothing more to say. If you are not .'' Mrs. 
 
 Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown 
 raore perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam. 
 
 Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely 
 kept to himself. He had always regarded her as a 
 social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a 
 civilised person living among such people as the 
 Dryfooses, but not without a humorou.s contempt; 
 he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes 
 as old Mandel, though she was not half a score of 
 years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side 
 of forty. He reddened, and then turned an angry 
 pallor. " Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you 
 ask this from the young ladies 1 " 
 
 " Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, 
 and with something in her tone that convicted 
 Beaton of vulgarity in putting his question of her
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 205 
 
 authority in the form of a sneer. " As I have sug- 
 gested, they would hardly know how to help them- 
 selves at all in such a matter. I have no objection 
 to saying that I ask it from the father of the young 
 ladies. Of course, in and for myself I should have 
 no right to know anything about your affairs. I 
 assure you the duty of knowing isn't very pleasant." 
 The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as 
 something rather nice. 
 
 "I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, 
 with a dreamy sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes, 
 and looked into hers. " If I told you that I cared 
 nothing about them in the way you intimate 1 " 
 
 " Then I should prefer to let you characterise 
 your own conduct in continuing to come here for 
 the year past, as you have done, and tacitly leading 
 them on to infer differently." They both mechani- 
 cally kept up the fiction of plurality in speaking of 
 Christine, but there was no doubt in the mind of 
 either which of the young ladies the other meant. 
 
 A good many thoughts went through Beaton's 
 mind, and none of them were flattering. He had 
 not been unconscious that the part, he had played 
 toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown 
 meaner as the fancy which her beauty had at first 
 kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware 
 that of late he had been amusing himself with her 
 passion in a way that was not less than cruel, not 
 because he wished to do so, but because he was 
 listless and wished nothing. He rose in saying, " I 
 might be a little more lenient than you think, Mrs.
 
 206 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Mandel ; but I won't trouble you with any palliating 
 theory. I will not come any more." 
 
 He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, " Of course, it 's 
 only your action that I am concerned with." 
 
 She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he 
 could not conceive what it had cost her to nerve 
 herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs. 
 Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, 
 and he went away hating her as an enemy who had 
 humiliated him at a moment when he particularly 
 needed exalting. It was really very simple for him 
 to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was 
 not at all simple for Mrs. Mandel to deal with the 
 consequences of his not coming. He only thought 
 how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor 
 woman whom he had left trembling for what she 
 had been obliged to do embodied for him the con- 
 science that accused him of unpleasant things. 
 
 " By heavens ! this is piling it up," he said to- 
 himself through his set teeth, realising how it had 
 happened right on top of that stupid insult from 
 Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his 
 place on Every Other Week he could not keep that, 
 under the circumstances, even if some pretence were 
 not made to get rid of him ; he must hurry and an- 
 ticipate any such pretence ; he must see Fulkerson at 
 once ; he wondered where he should find him at that 
 hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that it gave 
 him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he 
 could find him a little later at Mrs. Leighton's ; and 
 Fulkerson's happiness became an added injury.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 207 
 
 The thing had of course come about just at the 
 wrong time. There never had been a time when 
 Beaton needed money more ; when he had spent 
 what he had and what he expected to have so reck- 
 lessly. He was in debt to Fulkerson personally 
 and officially for advance payments of salary. The 
 thought of sending money home made him break 
 into a scoffing laugh, which he turned into a cough 
 in order to deceive the passers. What sort of face 
 should he go to Fulkerson with and tell. him that he 
 renounced his employment on Every Other Week; 
 and what should he do when he had renounced it *! 
 Take pupils, perhaps ; open a class 1 A lurid con- 
 ception of a class conducted on those principles of 
 shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted 
 he believed now she had meant to insult him pre- 
 sented itself. Why should not he act upon the sug- 
 gestion ? He thought with loathing for the whole 
 race of women-dabblers in art how easy the thing 
 would be : as easy as to turn back now and tell that 
 old fool's girl that he loved her, and rake in half his 
 millions. Why should not he do that ? No one else 
 cared for him ; and at a year's end, probably, one 
 woman would be like another as far as the love was 
 concerned, and probably he should not be more tired 
 if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she 
 were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out 
 of the question, because at the bottom of his heart 
 he believed that she must be for ever unlike every 
 other woman to him. 
 
 The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had 
 
 2N
 
 208 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 carried him far down-town, he thought ; but when 
 he looked up from it to see where he was, he found 
 himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty- 
 ninth Street, very hot and blown ; that idiotic fur 
 overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk 
 down to Eleventh ; he did not Avant to walk even to 
 the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth ; he stopped at 
 the corner to wait for a surface-car, and fell again 
 into his bitter fancies. After a while he roused him- 
 self and looked up the track, but there was no car 
 coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who 
 was lazily swinging his club by its thong from his 
 wrist. 
 
 " When do you suppose a car will be along ? " he 
 asked, rather in a general sarcasm of the absence of 
 the cars than in any special belief that the policeman 
 could tell him. 
 
 The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco 
 juice into the gutter. " In about a week," he said 
 nonchalantly. 
 
 "What's the matter?" asked Beaton, wondering 
 what the joke could be. 
 
 " Strike," said the policeman. His interest in 
 Beaton's ignorance seemed to overcome his contempt 
 of it. " Knocked off everywhere this morning except 
 Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines." He 
 spat again and kept his bulk at its incline over the 
 gutter to glance at a group of men on the corner 
 below. They were neatly dressed, and looked like 
 something better than working men, and they had a 
 holiday air of being in their best clothes.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Some of the strikers ? " asked Beaton. 
 
 The policeman nodded 
 
 "Any trouble yet?" 
 
 " There won't be any trouble till we begin to 
 move the cars," said the policeman. 
 
 Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the 
 men whose action would now force him to Avalk five 
 blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated station. 
 "If you 'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," he 
 said ferociously, " and set them up against a wall 
 and shoot them, you 'd save a great deal of bother." 
 
 " I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much," said the 
 policeman, still swinging his locust. " Anyway, we 
 sha'n't begin it. If it comes to a fight, though," he 
 said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim 
 of his helmet, " we can drive the whole six thousand 
 of 'em into the East Jliver without pullin' a trigger." 
 
 " Are there six thousand in it ] " 
 
 " About." 
 
 " What do the infernal fools expect to live on ? " 
 
 " The interest of their money, I suppose," said the 
 officer, with a gr'm of satisfaction in his irony. " It's 
 got to run its course. Then they '11 come back with 
 their heads tied up and their tails between their 
 legs, and plead to be taken on again." 
 
 " If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, 
 thinking of how much he was already inconvenienced 
 by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as one of the 
 series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands 
 of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, " I. would see them 
 starve before I 'd take them back every one of them."
 
 210 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Well," said the policeman impartially, as a man 
 might whom the companies allowed to ride free, but 
 who had made friends with a good many drivers 
 and conductors in the course of his free riding, " I 
 guess that 's what the roads would like to do if they 
 could ; but the men are too many for them, and 
 there ain't enough other men to take their places." 
 
 " No matter," said Beaton severely. " They can 
 bring in men from other places." 
 
 " Oh, they '11 do that fast enough," said the police- 
 man. 
 
 A man came out of the saloon on the corner where 
 the strikers were standing, noisy drunk, and they 
 began, as they would have said, to have some fun 
 with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered 
 slowly down toward the group as if in the natural 
 course of an afternoon ramble.- On the other side 
 of the street Beaton could see another officer 
 sauntering up from the block below. Looking up 
 and down the avenue, so silent of its horse-car 
 bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was 
 rather impressive.
 
 III. 
 
 THE strike made a good deal of talk in the office 
 of Every Other Week that is, it made Fulkerson talk 
 a good deal. He congratulated himself that he was 
 not personally incommoded by it, like some of the 
 fellows who lived up-town, and had not everything 
 under one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excite- 
 ment of it, and he kept the office-boy running out 
 to buy the extras which the newsmen came crying 
 through the street almost every hour with a 
 lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only 
 the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial 
 comments on it, which praised the firm attitude of 
 both parties, and the admirable measures taken by 
 the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed 
 the interviews with the police captains and the 
 leaders of the strike ; he equally enjoyed the 
 attempts of the reporters to interview the road 
 managers, which were so graphically detailed, and 
 with such a fine feeling for the right use of scare- 
 heads as to have almost the value of direct expres- 
 sions from them, though it seemed that they had 
 resolutely refused to speak. He said, at second- 
 hand from the papers, that if the men behaved
 
 212 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 themselves v and respected the rights of property, 
 they would have public sympathy with them every 
 time ; but just as soon as they began to interfere 
 with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in 
 their own way, they must be put down with an 
 iron hand; the phrase "iron hand "did Fulkerson 
 almost as much good as if it had never been used 
 before. News began to come of fighting between 
 the police and the strikers when the roads tried to 
 move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia, 
 and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage 
 of the police. At the same time he believed what 
 the strikers said, and that the trouble was not made 
 by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without 
 their approval. In this juncture he was relieved 
 by the arrival of the State Board of Arbitration, 
 which took up its quarters, with a great many scare- 
 heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the 
 roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute 
 before them ; he said that now we should see the 
 working of the greatest piece of social machinery in 
 modern times. But it appeared to work only in the 
 alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance. 
 The roads were as one road in declaring that there 
 was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely 
 asserting their right to manage their own affairs in 
 their own way. One of the presidents was reported 
 to have told a member of the Board, who personally 
 summoned him, to get out and to go about his 
 business. Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappoint- 
 ment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 213 
 
 sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared 
 itself powerless and got out, and would, no doubt, 
 have gone about its business if it had had any. 
 Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps 
 because the extras did not ; but March laughed at 
 this result. 
 
 " It 's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of 
 the King of France and his forty thousand men. I 
 suppose somebody told him at the top of the hill 
 that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out 
 and go about his business, and that was the reason 
 he marched down after he had marched up with all 
 that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in 
 an affair of this kind the roads have rights and the 
 strikers have rights, but the public has no rights at 
 all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to fight 
 out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and 
 precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle 
 Ages for having tolerated as any street war in 
 Florence or Verona and to fight it out at our pains 
 and expense, and we stand by like sheep, and wait 
 till we get tired. It 's a funny attitude for a city of 
 fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants." 
 
 " What would you do 1 " asked Fulkerson, a good 
 deal daunted by this view of the case. 
 
 "Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of 
 Arbitration declared itself powerless 1 We have no 
 hold upon the strikers ; and we 're so used to being 
 snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we 
 have forgotten our hold on the roads, and always 
 allow them to manage their own affairs in their own
 
 214 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 way, quite as if AVG had nothing to do with them, and 
 they owed us no services in return for their privi- 
 leges." 
 
 "That 's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering 
 his hair. " Well, it 's nuts for the colonel nowadays. 
 He says if he was boss of this town he would seize 
 the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with 
 policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come 
 to terms with the strikers ; and he 'd do that every 
 time there was a strike." 
 
 " Doesn't that rather savour of the paternalism he 
 condemned in Lindau 1 " asked March. 
 
 " I don't know. It savours of horse-sense." 
 
 "You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought 
 you were the most engaged man I ever saw ; but I 
 guess you're more father-in-lawed. And before 
 you 're married too." 
 
 " Well, the colonel 's a glorious old fellow, March. 
 I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for 
 the fun of looking on while he waltzed in. He 's on 
 the keen jump from morning till night, and he 's up 
 late and early to see the row. I 'm afraid he '11 get 
 shot at some of the fights ; he sees them all ; / can't 
 get any show at them : haven't seen a brickbat 
 shied or a club swung yet. Have you ? " 
 
 " No, I find I can philosophise the situation about 
 as well from the papers, and that's what I really 
 want to do, I suppose. Besides I 'm solemnly 
 pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of 
 crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children 
 and go with me. Her theory is that we must all die
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 215 
 
 together ; the children haven't been at school since 
 the strike began. There 's no precaution that Mrs. 
 March hasn't used. She watches me whenever I go 
 out, and sees that I start straight for this office." 
 
 Fulkerson laughed and said : " Well, it 's probably 
 the only thing that 's saved your life. Have you 
 seen anything of Beaton lately ? " 
 
 " No. You don't mean to say lie 's killed ! " 
 
 "Not if he knows it. But I don't know . 
 
 What do you say, March ? What 's the reason 
 you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike 1 " 
 
 "I knew it would fetch round to Every Other 
 Week, somehow." 
 
 "No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of news- 
 paper accounts. But you could treat it in the 
 historical spirit like something that happened 
 several centuries ago ; De Foe's Plague of London 
 style. Heigh ? What made me think of it was 
 Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could 
 go round together and take down its aesthetic 
 aspects. It 's a big thing, March, this strike is. I 
 tell you it 's imposing to have a private war, as you 
 say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, 
 and New York not minding it a bit. See ? Might 
 take that .view of it. With your descriptions and 
 Beaton's sketches well, it would just be the 
 greatest card ! Come ! What do you say ? " 
 
 " Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. 
 March if I 'm killed and she and the children are 
 not killed with me 1 " 
 
 " Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how
 
 216 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary 
 part?" 
 
 " I Ve no doubt he 'd jump at the chance. I Ve 
 yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks 
 wouldn't lay down his life for." 
 
 " Say ! " March perceived that Fulkerson was 
 about to vent another inspiration, and smiled 
 patiently. " Look here ! What 's the reason we 
 couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up 
 for us?" 
 
 " Might have a symposium of strikers and presi- 
 dents," March suggested. 
 
 " No ; I 'm in earnest. They say some of those 
 fellows especially the foreigners are educated 
 men. I know one fellow a Bohemian that used 
 to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could 
 write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get 
 Lindau to translate it." 
 
 "I guess not," said March dryly. 
 
 " Why not ? He 'd do it for the cause, wouldn't 
 he ? Suppose you put it up on him, the next time 
 you see him." 
 
 " I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He 
 added, " I guess he 's renounced me along with Mr, 
 Dryfoos's money." 
 
 " Pshaw ! You don't mean he hasn't been round 
 since 1 " 
 
 " He came for a while, but he 's left off coming now. 
 I don't feel particularly gay about it," March said, 
 with some resentment of Fulkerson 's grin. " He 's 
 left me in debt to him for lessons to the children."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 217 
 
 Fulkerson laughed out. " Well, he is the greatest 
 old fool ! Who 'd 'a' thought he 'd 'a' been in earnest 
 with tkose ' brincibles ' of his ? But I suppose there 
 have to be just such cranks ; it takes all kinds to 
 make a world." 
 
 " There has to be one such crank, it seems," March 
 partially assented. " One 's enough for me." 
 
 " I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said 
 Fulkerson. " Why, it must act like a schooner of 
 beer on him all the while, to see ' gabidal ' embar- 
 rassed like it is by this strike. It must make old 
 Lindau feel like he Avas back behind those barricades 
 at Berlin. Well, he 's a splendid old fellow ; pity 
 he drinks, as I remarked once before." 
 
 When March left the office he did not go home 
 so directly as he came, perhaps because Mrs. March's 
 eye was not on him. He was very curious about 
 some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a 
 great social convulsion, he felt people did not recog- 
 nise ; and with his temperance in everything, he 
 found its- negative expressions as significant as its 
 more violent phases. He had promised his wife 
 solemnly that he would keep away from these, and 
 he had a natural inclination to keep his promise ; 
 he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who 
 always gets shot when there is any firing on a mob. 
 He interested himself in the apparent indifference of 
 the mighty city, which kept on about its business as 
 tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in 
 its midst were a vague rumour of Indian troubles on 
 the frontier ; and he realised how there might once 
 VOL. II. 10
 
 218 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 have been a street feud of forty years in Florence 
 without interfering materially with the industry and 
 prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a 
 silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells 
 and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable ; 
 and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, 
 this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeable 
 at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of 
 the cross-town cars were beginning to run again ; 
 with a policeman on the rear of each ; on the Third 
 Avenue line, operated by non-union men, who had 
 not struck, there were two policemen beside the 
 driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, 
 to protect them from the strikers. But there were 
 no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they 
 stood quietly about in groups on the corners. 
 While March watched them at a safe distance, a 
 car laden Avith policemen came down the track, but 
 none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their 
 simple Sunday best, March thought them very quiet, 
 decent-looking people, and he could well believe that 
 they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks 
 in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe 
 that there were any such outbreaks ; he began more 
 and more to think them mere newspaper exaggera- 
 tions in the absence of any disturbance, or the dis- 
 position to it, that he could see. He walked on to 
 the East River : Avenues A, B, and C presented the 
 same quiet aspect as Second Avenue ; groups of men 
 stood on the corners, and now and then a police- 
 laden car was brought unmolested down the tracks
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 219 
 
 before them ; they looked at it and talked together, 
 and some laughed, but there was no trouble. 
 
 March got a cross-town car, and came back to the 
 West side. A policeman, looking very sleepy and 
 tired, lounged on the platform. 
 
 " I suppose you '11 be glad when this cruel war 
 is over," March suggested, as he got in. 
 
 The officer gave him a surly glance and made him 
 no answer. 
 
 His behaviour, from a man born to the joking 
 give and take of our life, impressed March. It gave 
 him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had read 
 of the French troops putting on toward the populace 
 just before the coup d'dtat; he began to feel like 
 populace ; but he struggled with himself and regained 
 his character of philosophical observer. In this 
 character he remained in the car and let it carry him 
 by the corner where he ought to have got out and 
 gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of 
 the furthermost tracks westward, where so much of 
 the fighting was reported to have taken place. But 
 everything on the way was as quiet as on the East 
 side. 
 
 Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of 
 the brake that he was half thrown from his seat, 
 and the policeman jumped down from the platform 
 and ran forward.
 
 IV. 
 
 DRYFOOS sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. 
 Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had 
 already gone down-town; the two girls lay abed 
 much later than their father breakfasted, and their 
 mother had gradually grown too feeble to come down 
 till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. 
 Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her 
 eyes were blazing. 
 
 " Look here, father ! Have you been saying any- 
 thing to Mr. Beaton ? " 
 
 The old man looked up at her across his coffee- 
 cup through his frowning brows. "No." 
 
 Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon 
 shook in her hand. 
 
 " Then what 's the reason he don't come here any 
 more ? " demanded the girl ; and her glance darted 
 from her father to Mrs. Mandel. " Oh, it 's you, is 
 it ? I 'd like to know who told you to meddle in 
 other people's business ? " 
 
 " I did," said Dryfoos savagely. " J told her to 
 ask him what he wanted here, and he said he didn't 
 want anything, and he stopped coming. That 's all. 
 I did it myself."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 221 
 
 " Oh, you did, did you 1 " said the girl, scarcely 
 less insolently than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. 
 " I should like to know what you did it for ] I 'd 
 like to know what made you think I wasn't able to 
 take care of myself. I just knew somebody had 
 been meddling, but I didn't suppose it was you. I 
 can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you 
 please, and I '11 thank you after this to leave me to 
 myself in what don't concern you." 
 
 "Don't concern me ? You impudent jade !" her 
 father began. 
 
 Christine advanced from the doorway toward the 
 table ; she had her hands closed upon what seemed 
 trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled from 
 them. She said, " Will you go to him and tell him 
 that this meddlesome minx here had no business to 
 say anything about me to him, and you take it all 
 back 1 " 
 
 " No ! " shouted the old man. " And if " 
 
 " That 's all I want of you I " the girl shouted in 
 her turn. " Here are your presents." With both 
 hands she flung the jewels pins and rings and ear- 
 rings and bracelets among the breakfast dishes, 
 from which some of them sprang to the floor. She 
 stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the 
 finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed 
 that at her father's plate. Then she whirled out of 
 the room, and they heard her running upstairs. 
 
 The old man made a start toward her, but he fell 
 back in his chair before she was gone, and with a 
 fierce, grinding movement of his jaws, controlled
 
 222 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 himself. " Take take those things up," he gasped 
 to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again 
 from his chair, but when she asked him if he were 
 unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got 
 quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the 
 intaglio ring from the table while he stood there, and 
 put it on his little finger ; his hand was not much 
 bigger than Christine's. " How do you suppose she 
 found it out 1 " he asked, after a moment. 
 
 " She seems to have merely suspected it," said 
 Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor, and with the fright in 
 her eyes which Christine's violence had brought 
 there. 
 
 " Well, it don't make any difference. She had to 
 know, somehow, and now she knows." He started 
 toward the door of the library, as if to go into the 
 hall, where his hat and coat always hung. 
 
 " Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, " I can't 
 remain here, after the language your daughter has 
 used to me I can't let you leave me I I 'm afraid 
 of her " 
 
 " Lock yourself up, then," said the old man rudely. 
 He added, from the hall before he went out, " I 
 reckon she '11 quiet down now." 
 
 He took the elevated road. The strike sesmed a 
 very far-off thing, though the paper he bought to 
 look up the stock market was full of noisy typo- 
 graphy about yesterday's troubles on the surface 
 lines. Among the millions in Wall Street there was 
 some joking and some swearing, but not much think- 
 ing about the six thousand men who had taken such
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 223 
 
 chances in their attempt to better their condition. 
 Dryfoos heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of 
 the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three 
 hours watching a favourite stock of his go up and go 
 down under the betting. By the time the Exchange 
 closed it had risen eight points, and on this and 
 some other investments he was five thousand dollars 
 richer than he had been in the morning. But he 
 had expected to be richer still, and he was by no 
 means satisfied with his luck. All through the 
 excitement of his winning and losing had played 
 the dull, murderous rage he felt toward the child 
 who had defied him, and when the game was over 
 and he started home, his rage mounted into a sort 
 of frenzy ; he would teach her, he would break her. 
 He walked a long way without thinking, and then 
 waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a pass- 
 ing coupe\ 
 
 "What has got all the cars 1 " he demanded of the 
 driver, who jumped down from his box to open the 
 door for him and get his direction. 
 
 " Been away 1 " asked the driver. " Hasn't been 
 any car along for a week. Strike." 
 
 "Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, 
 and he remained staring at the driver after he had 
 taken his seat. 
 
 The man asked, " Where to ? " 
 
 Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, 
 and he said with uncontrollable fury, "I told you 
 once ! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive along 
 slow on the south side ; I '11 show you the place." 
 20
 
 224 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 He could not remember the number of Every Other 
 Week office, where he suddenly decided to stop before 
 he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson, and 
 ask him something about Beaton : whether he had 
 been about lately, and whether he had dropped any 
 hint of what had happened concerning Christine; 
 Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's 
 confidence. 
 
 There was nobody but Conrad in the counting- 
 room, whither Dryfoos returned after glancing into 
 Fulkerson's empty office. " Where 's Fulkerson ? " 
 he asked, sitting down with his hat on. 
 
 " He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, 
 glancing at the clock. " I 'm afraid he isn't coming 
 back again to-day, if you wanted to see him." 
 
 Dryfoos twisted his head side wise and upward to 
 indicate March's room. "That other fellow out, 
 too?" 
 
 " He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered 
 Conrad. 
 
 "Do you generally knock off here in the middle 
 of the afternoon ? " asked the old man. 
 
 "No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father 
 had not been there a score of times, and found the 
 whole staff of Every Other Week at work between four 
 and five. "Mr. March, you know, always takes a 
 good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose 
 Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn't 
 much doing to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that 
 makes it dull." 
 
 " The strike yes ! It 's a pretty piece of business
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 225 
 
 to have everything thrown out because a parcel of 
 lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and get drunk." 
 Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some 
 answer to this, but the young man's mild face merely 
 saddened, and he said nothing. " I Ve got a coup6 
 out there now that I had to take because I couldn't 
 get a car. If I had my way I ''d have a lot of those 
 vagabonds hung. They're waiting to get the city 
 into a snarl, and then rob the houses pack of dirty, 
 worthless whelps. They ought to call out the 
 militia, and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for 
 them." Conrad was still silent, and his father 
 sneered, "But I reckon you don't think so." 
 
 " I think the strike is useless," said Conrad. 
 
 " Oh, you do, do you ? Comin' to your senses a 
 little. Gettin' tired walkin' so much. I should like 
 to know what your gentlemen over there on the East 
 side think about the strike, anyway." 
 
 The young fellow dropped his eyes. " I am not 
 authorised to speak for them." 
 
 "Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not author- 
 ised to speak for yourself 1 " 
 
 " Father, you know we don't agree about these 
 things. I'd rather not talk " 
 
 " But I 'm goin' to make you talk this time ! " 
 cried Dryfoos, striking the arm of the chair he sat 
 in with the side of his fist. A maddening thought 
 of Christine came over him. " As long as you eat 
 my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won't 
 have my children telling me what I shall do and 
 sha'n't do, or take on airs of being holier than me. 
 10*
 
 226 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Now, you just speak up ! Do you think those 
 loafers are right, or don't you 1 Come ! " 
 
 Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. " I 
 think they were very foolish to strike at this time, 
 when the elevated roads can do the work." 
 
 " Oh, at this time, heigh ! And I suppose they 
 think over there on the East side that it 'd been wise 
 to strike before we got the elevated." Conrad again 
 refused to answer, and his father roared, " What do 
 you think ? " 
 
 " I think a strike is always bad business. It '& 
 war ; but sometimes there don't seem any other 
 way for the working men to get justice. They say 
 that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a 
 while." 
 
 " Those lazy devils were paid enough already," 
 shrieked the old man. " They got two dollars a 
 day. How much do you think they ought to 'a' got ? 
 Twenty ? " 
 
 Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his 
 father. But he decided to answer. " The men say 
 that with partial work, and fines, and other things, 
 they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety 
 cents a day." 
 
 " They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, 
 rising and coming toward him. " And what do you 
 think the upshot of it all will be, after they've 
 ruined business for another week, and made people 
 hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men ? 
 How is it going to end ? " 
 
 "They will have to give in."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 227 
 
 " Oh, give in, heigh ! And what will you say 
 then, I should like to know 1 How will you feel about 
 it then 1 Speak ! " 
 
 " I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't 
 think that way, and I don't blame you or any- 
 body. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, 
 why, I shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I 
 believe they have a righteous cause, though they go 
 the wrong way to help themselves." 
 
 His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his 
 teeth set. " Do you dare to say that to me ? " 
 
 " Yes. I can't help it. I pity them ; my whole 
 heart is with those poor men." 
 
 " You impudent puppy ! " shouted the old man. 
 He lifted his hand and struck his son in the face. 
 Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and while 
 the blood began to trickle from a wound that 
 Christine's intaglio ring had made in his temple, he 
 looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder, and 
 said, " Father ! " 
 
 The old man wrenched his fist away, and ran out 
 of the house. He remembered his address now, 
 and he gave it as he plunged into the coup6. He 
 trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the 
 windows at the passers as he drove home ; he only 
 saw Conrad's mild grieving, wondering eyes, and the 
 biood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple. 
 
 Conrad went to the neat set-bowl in Fulkerson's 
 comfortable room, and washed the blood away, and 
 kept bathing the wound with the cold water till it 
 stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he
 
 228 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 thought he would not put anything on it. After a 
 while he locked up the office, and started out, he 
 hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the 
 direction he had taken, till he found himself in 
 Union Square, on the pavement in front of Brentano's. 
 It seemed to him that he heard some one calling 
 gently to him, " Mr. Dryfoos ! "
 
 V. 
 
 CONRAD looked confusedly around, and the same 
 voice said again, " Mr. Dryfoos ! " and he saw that 
 it was a lady speaking to him from a coup6 beside 
 the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance. 
 
 She smiled when he gave signs of having dis- 
 covered her, and came up to the door of Ler carriage. 
 " I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing to 
 talk to somebody ; nobody seems to feel about it 
 as I do. Oh, isn't it horrible ? Must they fail ] I 
 saw cars running on all the lines as I came across ; 
 it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows 
 give in 1 And everybody seems to hate them so I 
 can't bear it." Her face was estranged with excite- 
 ment, and there were traces of tears on it. " You 
 must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street 
 this way ; but when I caught sight of you I had to 
 speak. I knew you would sympathise I knew you 
 would feel as I do. Oh, how can anybody help 
 honouring those poor men for standing by one 
 another as they do ? They are risking all they have 
 in the world for the sake of justice ! Oh, they are 
 true heroes ! They are staking the bread of their 
 wives and children on the dreadful chance they 've
 
 230 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 taken ! But no one seems to understand it. No 
 one seems to see that they are willing to suffer more 
 now that other poor men may suffer less hereafter. 
 And those wretched creatures that are coming in to 
 take their places those traitors " 
 
 " We can't blame them for wanting to earn a 
 living, Miss Vance," said Conrad. 
 
 " No, no ! I don't blame them. Who am I, to do 
 such a thing ? It 's we people like me, of my class 
 who make the poor betray one another. But this 
 dreadful fighting this hideous paper is full of it ? " 
 She held up an extra, crumpled with her nervous 
 reading. " Can't something be done to stop it 1 
 Don't you think that if some one went among them, 
 and tried to make them see how perfectly hopeless 
 it was to resist the companies, and drive off the new 
 men, he might do some good ? I have wanted to 
 go and try ; but I am a woman, and I mustn't ! I 
 shouldn't be afraid of the strikers, but I'm afraid 
 of what people would say ! " Conrad kept pressing 
 his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he 
 thought might be bleeding, and now she noticed 
 this. " Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos 1 You look so 
 pale." 
 
 " No, it 's nothing a little scratch I 've got." 
 
 "Indeed you look pale. Have you a carriage? 
 How will you get home 1 Will you get in here with 
 me, and let me drive you ? " 
 
 " No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. 
 " I 'm perfectly well " 
 
 "And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 231 
 
 stopping you here, and talking in this way ? But 
 I know you feel as I do ! " 
 
 "Yes, I feel as you do. You are right right in 
 every way I mustn't keep you Good-bye." He 
 stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful hand 
 out of the window, and when he took it she wrung 
 his hand hard. 
 
 " Thank you, thank you ! You are good and you 
 are just ! But no one can do anything. It's useless ! " 
 
 The type of irreproachable coachman on the box 
 whose respectability had suffered through the 
 strange behaviour of his mistress in this inter- 
 view, drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad 
 stood a moment looking after the carriage. His 
 heart was full of joy ; it leaped ; he thought it 
 would burst. As he turned to walk away it 
 seemed to him as if he mounted upon the air. The 
 trust she had shown him, the praise she had given 
 him ; that crush of the hand : he hoped nothing, he 
 formed no idea from it, but it all filled him with 
 love that cast out the pain and shame he had been 
 suffering. He believed that he could never be un- 
 happy any more ; the hardness that was in his mind 
 toward his father went out of it ; he saw how sorely 
 he had tried him ; he grieved that he had done it, 
 but the means, the difference of his feeling about the 
 cause of their quarrel, he was solemnly glad of that 
 since she shared it. He was only sorry for his father. 
 " Poor father ! " he said under his breath as he went 
 along. He explained to her about his father in his 
 reverie, and she pitied his father too.
 
 232 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 He was walking over toward the West side, aim- 
 lessly at first, and then at times with the longing to 
 do something to save those mistaken ^men from 
 themselves forming itself into a purpose. Was not 
 that what she meant, when she bewailed her woman's 
 helplessness 1 She must have wished him to try, 
 if he, being a man, could not do something; or if 
 she did not, still he would try, and if she heard of 
 it, she would recall what she had said, and would 
 be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of 
 her pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot 
 almost what it was ; but when he came to a street- 
 car track he remembered it, and looked up and 
 down to see if there were any turbulent gathering 
 of men, whom he might mingle with and help to 
 keep from violence. He saw none anyAvhere ; and 
 then suddenly, as if at the same moment, for in his 
 exalted mood all events had a dream-like simul- 
 taneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in 
 the middle of it, a little way off, was a street-car, 
 and around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, 
 struggling men. The driver was lashing his horses 
 forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with 
 the conductor, pulling them ; stones, clubs, brick- 
 bats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men 
 trying to move them. The mob closed upon 
 them in a body, and then a patrol-wagon whirled 
 up from the other side, and a squad of policemen 
 leaped out, and began to club the rioters. Conrad 
 could see how they struck them under the rims of 
 their hats ; the blows on their skulls sounded as if
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 233 
 
 they had fallen on stone ; the rioters ran in all 
 directions. 
 
 One of the officers rushed up toward the corner 
 where Conrad stood, and then he saw at his side a 
 tall old man with a long white beard. He was call- 
 ing out at the policeman : " Ah yes ! Glup the 
 strikerss gif it to them ! Why don't you co and 
 glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss, and gick 
 your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors 1 Glup the 
 strikerss they cot no friendts ! They cot no money 
 to pribe you, to dreat you ! " 
 
 The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw 
 his left arm up to shield his head. Conrad recog- 
 nised Lindau, and now he saw the empty sleeve 
 dangle in the air, over the stump of his wrist. He 
 heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and 
 something seemed to strike him in the breast. He 
 was going to say to the policeman, "Don't strike 
 him ! He's an old soldier ! You see he has no 
 hand !" but he could not speak, he could not move 
 his tongue. The policeman stood there ; he saw his 
 face : it was not bad, not cruel ; it was like the face 
 of a statue, fixed, perdurable ; a mere image of irre- 
 sponsible and involuntary authority. Then Conrad 
 fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot 
 fired from the car. 
 
 March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his 
 car, and at the same moment he saw Lindau drop 
 under the club of the policeman, who left him where 
 he fell, and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing 
 the rioters. The fighting round the car in the
 
 234 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 avenue ceased ; the driver whipped his horses into a 
 gallop, and the place was left empty. 
 
 March would have liked to run ; he thought how 
 his wife had implored him to keep away from the 
 rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying 
 there if he would. Something stronger than his 
 will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad 
 dead beside the old man.
 
 VL 
 
 IN the cares which Mrs. March shared with her 
 husband that night she was supported partly by 
 principle, but mainly by the potent excitement 
 which bewildered Conrad's family and took all 
 reality from what had happened. It was nearly 
 midnight when the Marches left them and walked 
 away toward the elevated station with Fulkerson. 
 Everything had been done, by that time, that could 
 be done ; and Fulkerson was not without that satis- 
 faction in the business-like despatch of all the details 
 which attends each step in such an affair, and helps 
 to make death tolerable even to the most sorely 
 stricken. We are creatures of the moment ; we 
 live from one little space to another ; and only one 
 interest at a time fills these. Fulkerson was cheerful 
 when they got into the street, almost gay ; and Mrs. 
 March experienced a rebound from her depression 
 which she felt that she ought not to have experienced. 
 But she condoned the offence a little in herself, because 
 her husband remained so constant in his gravity ; and 
 pending the final accounting he must make her for 
 having been where he could be of so much use from 
 the first instant of the calamity, she was tenderly,
 
 236 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad's 
 family, and especially his miserable old father. To 
 her mind March was the principal actor in the whole 
 affair, and much more important in having seen it 
 than those who had suffered in it. In fact, he had 
 suffered incomparably.. 
 
 "Well, well," said Fulkerson. "They'll get 
 along now. We 've done all ice could, and there 's 
 nothing left but for them to bear it. Of course it 's 
 awful, but I guess it '11 come out all right. I mean," 
 he added, " they '11 pull through now." 
 
 " I suppose," said March, " that nothing is put 
 on us that we can't bear. But I should think," 
 he went on musingly, " that when God sees what 
 we poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round 
 with this eternal darkness of death, He must respect 
 us." 
 
 " Basil ! " said his wife. But in her heart she 
 drew nearer to him for the words she thought she 
 ought to rebuke him for. 
 
 "Oh, I know," he said, "we school ourselves to 
 despise human nature. But God did not make us 
 despicable, and I say whatever end He meant us 
 for, He must have some such thrill of joy in our 
 adequacy to fate as a father feels when his son 
 shows himself a man. When I think what we can 
 be if we must, I can't believe the least of us shall 
 finally perish." 
 
 "Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of 
 us," said Fulkerson, with a piety of his own. 
 
 " That poor boy's father ! " sighed Mrs. March.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 237 
 
 " I can't get his face out of my sight. He looked so 
 much worse than death." 
 
 " Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. " It 's 
 life that looks so in its presence. Death is peace 
 and pardon. I only wish poor old Lindau was as 
 well out of it as Conrad there." 
 
 "Ah, Lindau ! He has done harm enough," said 
 Mrs. March. " I hope he will be careful after this." 
 
 March did not try to defend Lindau against her 
 theory of the case, which inexorably held him re- 
 sponsible for Conrad's death. 
 
 " Lindau 's going to come out all right, I guess," 
 said Fulkerson. " He was first-rate when I saw him 
 at the hospital to-night." He whispered in March's 
 ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station 
 stairs : " I didn't like to tell you there at the house, 
 but I guess you 'd better know. They had to take 
 Lindau's arm off near the shoulder. Smashed all to 
 pieces by the clubbing." 
 
 In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for 
 them, the bereaved family Avhom the Marches had 
 just left lingered together, and tried to get strength 
 to part for the night. They were all spent with the 
 fatigue that comes from heaven to such misery as 
 theirs, and they sat in a torpor in which each waited 
 for the other to move, to speak. 
 
 Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose 
 and went out of the room without saying a word, 
 and they heard her going upstairs. Then Mela said, 
 
 " I reckon the rest of us better be goun' too, father. 
 Here, let 's git mother started."
 
 238 A HAZARD OF XKW FORTUNES. 
 
 She put her arm round her mother, to lift her 
 from her chair, but the old man did not stir, and 
 Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room. Be- 
 tween them they raised her to her feet. 
 
 " Ain't there anybody a-goin' to set up with it ? " 
 she asked, in her hoarse pipe. " It appears like folks 
 hain't got any feelin's in New York. Woon't some 
 o' the neighbours come and offer to set up, without 
 waitin' to be asked ?" 
 
 " Oh, that 's all right, mother. The men '11 attend 
 to that. Don't yon bother any," Mela coaxed, and 
 she kept her arm round her mother, with tender 
 patience. 
 
 " Why, Mely, child ! I can't feel right to have it 
 left to hirelin's, so. But there ain't anybody any 
 more to see things done as they ought. If Coonrod 
 was on'y here " 
 
 " Well, mother, you are pretty mixed ! " said 
 Mela, with a strong tendency to break into her large 
 guffaw. But she checked herself and said, " I know 
 just how you feel, though. It keeps a-comun' and 
 a-goun' ; and it 's so and it ain't so, all at once ; 
 that's the plague of it. Well, father! Ain't you 
 goun' to come 1 ' 
 
 " I 'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man gently, 
 without moving. " Get your mother to bed, that 's 
 a good girl." 
 
 " You goin' to set up with him, Jacob ? " asked the 
 old woman. 
 
 "Yes, 'Liz'beth, I '11 set up. You go to bed." 
 
 " Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it '11 do you
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 239 
 
 good to set up. I wished I could set up with you ; 
 but I don't seem to have the stren'th I did when the 
 
 twins died. I must git my sleep, so 's to 1 don't 
 
 like very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, 
 but there don't appear to be anybody else. You 
 wouldn't have to do it if Coonrod was here. There 
 I go ag'in ! Mercy ! mercy ! " 
 
 "Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; 
 and she got her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel's 
 help, and up the stairs. 
 
 From the top the old woman called down : " You 
 tell Coonrod She stopped, and he heard her 
 
 groan out, "My Lord ! my Lord !" 
 
 He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they 
 had all lingered together, and in the library beyond 
 the hireling watcher sat, another silence. The time 
 passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the 
 house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, 
 and the vague, remote rumour of the city invaded the 
 inner stillness. It grew louder toward morning, and 
 then Dryfoos knew from the watcher's deeper 
 breathing that he had fallen into a doze. 
 
 He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his 
 son was; the place was full of the awful sweetness 
 of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought, and that 
 lay above the pulseless breast. The old man turned 
 up a burner in the chandelier, and stood looking on 
 the majestic serenity of the dead face. 
 
 He could not move when he saw his wife coming 
 down the stairway in the hall. She was in her long 
 white flannel bedgown, and the candle she carried 
 2P
 
 240 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 shook with her nervous tremor. He thought she 
 might be walking in her sleep, but she said, quite 
 simply, " I woke up, and I couldn't git to sleep ag'in 
 without comin' to have a look." She stood beside 
 their dead son with him. " Well, he 's beautiful, 
 Jacob. He was the prettiest baby ! And he was 
 always good, Coonrod was ; I '11 say that for him. 
 I don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in 
 his whole life. I reckon I liked him about the best 
 of all the childern ; but I don't know as I ever done 
 much to show it. But you was always good to him, 
 Jacob ; you always done the best for him, ever since 
 he was a little feller. I used to be afraid you 'd spoil 
 him sometimes in them days ; but I guess you 're glad 
 now for every time you didn't cross him. I don't 
 suppose since the twins died you ever hit him a 
 lick." She stooped and peered closer at the face. 
 " Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye 7 " 
 Dryfoos saw it too, the wound that he had feared 
 to look for, and that now seemed to redden on his 
 sight. He broke into a low, wavering cry, like a 
 child's in despair, like an animal's in terror, like a 
 soul's in the anguish of remorse.
 
 VII. 
 
 THE evening after the funeral, while the Marches 
 sat together talking it over, and making approaches, 
 through its shadow, to the question of their own 
 future, which it involved, they were startled by the 
 twitter of the electric bell at their apartment door. 
 It was really not so late as the children's having 
 gone to bed made it seem ; but at nine o'clock it was 
 
 Ltoo late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. 
 It might be he, and March was glad to postpone the 
 impending question to his curiosity concerning the 
 immediate business Fulkerson might have with him. 
 He went himself to the door, and confronted there 
 a lady deeply veiled in black, and attended by a 
 very decorous serving-woman. 
 
 "Are you alone, Mr. March you and Mrs. 
 March ? " asked the lady, behind her veil ; and as he 
 hesitated, she said, " You don't know me ! Miss 
 Vance ; " and she threw back her veil, showing her 
 face wan and agitated in the dark folds. "I am 
 very anxious to see you to speak with you both. 
 May I come in 1 " 
 
 " Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still 
 too much stupefied by her presence to realise it. 
 VOL, It U
 
 242 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 She promptly entered, and saying, \vith a glance 
 at the hall chair by the door, "My maid can sit 
 here 1 " followed him to the room where he had left 
 his wife. 
 
 Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping 
 with the fact. She welcomed Miss Vance with the 
 liking they both felt for the girl, and with the 
 sympathy which her troubled face inspired. 
 
 " I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. 
 March," she said, " for it was the only thing left for 
 me to do ; and I come at my aunt's suggestion." 
 She added this as if it would help to account for her 
 more on the conventional plane, and she had the 
 instinctive good taste to address herself throughout 
 to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what she 
 had to say was mainly for March. " I don't know 
 how to begin I don't know how to speak of this 
 terrible affair. But you know what I mean. I feel 
 as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. 
 I don't want you to pity me for it," she said, fore- 
 stalling a politeness from Mrs. March. " I 'm the 
 last one to be thought of, and you mustn't mind me 
 if I try to make you. I came to find out all of the 
 truth that I can, and when I know just what that is 
 I shall know what to do. I have read the inquest ; 
 it 's all burnt into my brain. But I don't care for 
 that for myself : you must let me say such things 
 without minding me. I know that your husband 
 that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; 
 
 and I wished to ask him to ask him " She 
 
 stopped and looked distractedly about. " But what
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 243 
 
 folly ! He must have said everything he knew he 
 had to." Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, 
 on whom she had kept them with instinctive tact. 
 
 "I said everything yes," he replied. "But if 
 you would like to know 
 
 "Perhaps I had better tell you something first. 
 I had just parted with him it couldn't have been 
 more than half an hour in front of Brentano's ; he 
 must have gone straight to his death. We were 
 talking, and I I said, Why didn't some one go 
 among the strikers and plead with them to be peace- 
 able, and keep them from attacking the new men. 
 I knew that he felt as I did about the strikers; 
 that he was their friend. Did you see do you 
 know anything that makes you think he had been 
 trying to do that?" 
 
 "I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at 
 all till till I saw him lying dead." 
 
 "My husband was there purely by accident," 
 Mrs. March put in. " I had begged and entreated 
 him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he 
 had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman 
 strike that wretched Lindau he 's been such an 
 anxiety to me ever since we have had anything to 
 do with him here ; my husband knew him when he 
 was a boy in the West. Mr. March came home 
 from it all perfectly prostrated ; it made us all sick ! 
 Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. 
 I assure you it was the most shocking experience." 
 
 Miss Vance listened to her with that look of 
 patience which those who have seen much of the
 
 244 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 real suffering of the world the daily portion of the 
 poor have for the nervous woes of comfortable 
 people. March hung his head; he knew it would 
 be useless to protest that his share of the calamity 
 was, by comparison, infinitesimally small. 
 
 After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even 
 of her repetitions, Miss Vance said, as if it were a 
 mere matter of course that she should have looked 
 the affair up, " Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the 
 hospital " 
 
 " My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. 
 March interrupted, to give a final touch to the con- 
 ception of March's magnanimity throughout. 
 
 " The poor man seems to have been in the wrong 
 at the time," said Miss Vance. 
 
 "I could almost say he had earned the right to 
 be wrong. He 's a man of the most generous in- 
 stincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity too 
 high to be considered by a policeman with a club 
 in his hand," said March, with a bold defiance of his 
 wife's different opinion of Lindau. "It's the police- 
 man's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he 
 finds it inciting a riot." 
 
 "Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame 
 the policeman ; he was as much a mere instrument 
 as his club was. I am only trying to find out how 
 much I am to blame myself. I had no thought of 
 Mr. Dryfoos's going there of his attempting to talk 
 with the strikers and keep them quiet ; I was only 
 thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do 
 if I were a man. But perhaps he understood me to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 245 
 
 ask him to go perhaps my words sent him to his 
 death." 
 
 She had a sort of calm in her courage to know 
 the worst truth as to her responsibility that forbade 
 any wish to flatter her out of it. "I'm afraid," 
 said March, "that is what can never be known 
 now." After a moment he added, " But why should 
 you wish to know ? If he went there as a peace- 
 maker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he 
 would wish to die, I believe." 
 
 " Yes," said the girl ; " I have thought of that. 
 But death is awful ; we must not think patiently, 
 forgivingly of sending any one to their death in the 
 best cause." 
 
 "I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad 
 Dryfoos," March replied. "He was thwarted and 
 disappointed, without even pleasing the ambition 
 that thwarted and disappointed him. That poor old 
 man, his father, warped him from his simple, life- 
 long wish to be a minister, and was trying to make 
 a business-man of him. If it will be any consolation 
 to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you 
 that he was very unhappy, and I don't see how he 
 could ever have been happy here." 
 
 "It won't," said the girl steadily. "If people 
 are born into this world, it 's because they were 
 meant to live in it. It isn't a question of being 
 happy here ; no one is happy, in that old selfish way, 
 or can be ; but he could have been of great use." 
 
 " Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows ? 
 He may have been trying to silence Lindau."
 
 246 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it ! " cried Mrs. March. 
 
 Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite 
 understand. Then she turned to March. " He 
 might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I 
 know that his life here would have had a higher 
 happiness than we wish for or aim for." The tears 
 began to run silently down her cheeks. 
 
 " He looked strangely happy that day when he 
 left me. He had hurt himself somehow, and his face 
 was bleeding from a scratch ; he kept his handkerchief 
 up ; he was pale, but such a light came into his face 
 when he shook hands ah, I know he went to try 
 and do what I said ! " They were all silent, while 
 she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief 
 back into the pocket from which she had suddenly 
 pulled it, with a series of vivid, young-ladyish ges- 
 tures, which struck March by their incongruity with 
 the occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony 
 with the rest of her elegance. " I am sorry, Miss 
 Vance," he began, " that I can't really tell you any- 
 thing more " 
 
 " You are very kind," she ..said, controlling herself 
 and rising quickly. " I thank you thank you both 
 very much." She turned to Mrs. March and shook 
 hands with her and then with him. " I might have 
 known I did know that there wasn't anything more 
 for you to tell. But at least I 've found out from 
 you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to 
 bear what I must. How are those poor creatures 
 his mother and father, his sisters 1 Some day, 
 I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 247 
 
 them to the thought of myself ; but I can't pre- 
 tend to be yet. I could not come to the funeral ; I 
 wanted to." 
 
 She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who 
 answered : " I can understand. But they were 
 pleased with the flowers you sent; people are, at 
 such times, and they haven't many friends." 
 
 " Would you go to see them ? " asked the girl. 
 " Would you tell them what I Ve told you ? " 
 
 Mrs. March looked at her husband. 
 
 "I don't see what good it would do. They 
 wouldn't understand. But if it would relieve 
 
 you " 
 
 " I '11 wait till it isn't a question of self-relief," 
 said the girl. " Good-bye ! " 
 
 She left them to long debate of the event. At 
 the end Mrs. March said, " She is a strange being ; 
 such a mixture of the society girl and the saint." 
 
 Her husband answered : " She 's the potentiality 
 of several kinds of fanatic. She's very unhappy, 
 and I don't see how she 's to be happier about that 
 poor fellow. I shouldn't be surprised if she did 
 inspire him to attempt something of that kind." 
 
 " Well, you got out of it very well, Basil. I 
 admired the way you managed. I was afraid you 'd 
 say something awkward." 
 
 " Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the 
 only possible thing, I can get on pretty well. When 
 it comes to anything decorative, I 'd rather leave it 
 to you, Isabel." 
 
 She seemed insensible of his jest. " Of course he
 
 248 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 was in love with her. That was the light that came 
 
 into his face when he was going to do what he 
 
 thought she wanted him to do." 
 
 " And she do you think that she was " 
 
 " What an idea ! It wcuM have been perfectly 
 
 grotesque ! "
 
 vm. 
 
 THEIR affliction brought the Dryfooses into 
 humaner relations with the Marches, who had 
 hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the 
 odious means of their own prosperity. Mrs. March 
 found that the women of the family seemed glad of 
 her coming, and in the sense of her usefulness to them 
 all she began to feel a kindness even for Christine. 
 But she could not help seeing that between the girl 
 and her father there was an unsettled account, some- 
 how, and that it was Christine and not the old man 
 who was holding out. She thought that their sorrow 
 had tended to refine the others. Mela was much 
 more subdued, and except when she abandoned her- 
 self to a childish interest in her mourning, she did 
 nothing to shock Mrs. March's taste, or to seem 
 unworthy of her grief. She was very good to her 
 mother, whom the blow had left unchanged, and to 
 her father, whom it had apparently fallen upon with 
 crushing weight. Once, after visiting their house, 
 Mrs. March described to March a little scene between 
 Dryfoos and Mela, when he came home from Wall 
 Street, and the girl met him at the door with a kind 
 of country simpleness, and took his hat and stick, 
 11*
 
 250 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 and brought him into the room where Mrs. March 
 sat, looking tired and broken. 
 
 She found this look of Dryfoos's pathetic, and 
 dwelt on the sort of stupefaction there was in it; 
 he must have loved his son more than they ever 
 realised. "Yes," said March, "I suspect he did. 
 He 's never been about the place since that day ; he 
 was always dropping in before, on his way uptown. 
 He seems to go down to Wall Street every day, jusfc 
 as before, but I suppose that 's mechanical ; he 
 wouldn't know what else to do ; I dare say it 's best 
 for him. The sanguine Fulkerson is getting a little 
 anxious about the future of Every Other Week. Xow 
 Conrad 's gone, he isn't sure the old man will want 
 to keep on with it, or whether he '11 have to look up 
 another Angel. He wants to get married, I imagine, 
 and he can't venture till this point is settled." 
 
 " It 's a very material point to us, too, Basil," said 
 Mrs. March. 
 
 "Well, of course. I hadn't overlooked that, you 
 may be sure. One of the things that Fulkerson and 
 I have discussed is a scheme for buying the magazine. 
 Its success is pretty well assured now, and I shouldn't 
 be afraid to put money into it if I had the money." 
 
 " I couldn't let you sell the house in Boston, Basil !" 
 
 "And I don't want to. I wish we could go back 
 and live in it, and get the rent too ! It would be 
 quite a support. But I suppose if Dryfoos won't 
 keep on, it must come to another Angel. I hope it 
 won't be a literary one, with a fancy for running my 
 department."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 251 
 
 " Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be 
 glad enough to keep you ! " 
 
 " Do you think so 1 Well, perhaps. But I don't 
 believe Fulkerson would let me stand long between 
 him and an Angel of the right description." 
 
 "Well, then, I believe he would. And you've 
 never seen anything, Basil, to make you really think 
 that Mr. Fulkerson didn't appreciate you to the 
 utmost." 
 
 " I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in 
 that Lindau trouble. I shall always wonder what put 
 a backbone into Fulkerson, just at that crisis. Fulker- 
 son doesn't strike me as the stuff of a moral hero." 
 
 "At any rate, he was one," said Mrs. March, "and 
 that's quite enough for me." 
 
 March did not answer. " What a noble thing life 
 is, anyway ! Here I am, well on the way to fifty, 
 after twenty-five years of hard work, looking forward 
 to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in 
 youth. We might have saved a little more than we 
 have saved ; but the little more wouldn't avail if I 
 were turned out of my place now ; and we should 
 have lived sordidly to no purpose. Some one 
 always has you by the throat, unless you have some 
 one else in your grip. I wonder if that 's the attitude 
 the Almighty intended his respectable creatures to 
 take toward one another ! I wonder if he meant 
 our civilisation, the battle we fight in, the game we 
 trick in ! I wonder if he considers it final, and if 
 the kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray 
 for "
 
 252 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Have you seen Lindau to-day ? " Mrs. March 
 asked. 
 
 "You inferred it from the quality of my piety 1" 
 March laughed, and then suddenly sobered. "Yes, 
 I saw him. It's going rather hard with him, I'm 
 afraid. The amputation doesn't heal very well ; 
 the shock was very great, and he 's old. It '11 take 
 time. There 's so much pain that they have to keep 
 him under opiates, and I don't think he fully knew 
 me. At any rate, I didn't get my piety from him 
 to-day." 
 
 " It 's horrible ! Horrible ! " said Mrs. March. 
 " I can't get over it ! After losing his hand in the 
 war, to lose his whole arm now in this way ! It 
 does seem too cruel ! Of course he oughtn't to have 
 been there ; we can say that. But you oughtn't to 
 have been there either, Basil." 
 
 " Well, I wasn't exactly advising the police to go 
 and club the railroad presidents." 
 
 "Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos." 
 
 "I don't deny it. All that was distinctly the 
 chance of life and death. That belonged to God; 
 and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance. 
 But what I object to is this economic chance-world 
 in which we live, and which we men seem to have 
 created. It ought to be law as inflexible in human 
 affairs as the order of day and night in the physical 
 world, that if a man will work he. shall both rest 
 and eat, and shall not be harassed with any question 
 as to how his repose and his provision shall come. 
 Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 253 
 
 But in our state of things no one is secure of this. 
 No one is sure of finding work ; no one is sure of 
 not losing it. I may have my work taken away 
 from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, 
 the indigestion of a man who has not the qualifica- 
 tion for knowing whether I do it well or ill. At 
 my time of life at every time of life a man ought 
 to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he 
 shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear 
 to him, except through natural causes. But no man 
 can feel this as things are now ; and so we go on, 
 pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrust- 
 ing aside and trampling underfoot ; lying, cheating, 
 stealing ; and when we get to the end, covered with 
 blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back 
 over the way we Ve come to a palace of our own, or 
 the poor-house, which is about the only possession 
 we can claim in common with our brother-men, I 
 don't think the retrospect can be pleasing." 
 
 " I know, I know ! " said his wife. " I think of 
 those things too, Basil. Life isn't what it seems 
 when you look forward to it. But I think people 
 would suffer less, and wouldn't have to work so 
 hard, and could make all reasonable provision for 
 the future, if they were not so greedy and so 
 foolish." 
 
 " Oh, without doubt ! We can't put it all on the 
 conditions ; we must put some of the blame on 
 character. But conditions make character ; and 
 people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and 
 to shine, because having and shining are held up to
 
 254 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 them by civilisation as the chief good of life. We 
 all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not 
 good at all ; but if some one ventures to say so, all 
 the rest of us call him a fraud and a crank, and go 
 moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poor- 
 house. We can't help it. If one were less greedy, 
 or less foolish, some one else would have, and would 
 shine at his expense. We don't moil and toil to our- 
 selves alone ; the palace or the poor-house is not 
 merely for ourselves, but for our children, whom we've 
 brought up in the superstition that having and shining 
 is the chief good. We dare not teach them otherwise, 
 for fear they may falter in the fight, when it comes 
 their turn ; and the children of others will crowd 
 them out of the palace into the poor-house. If we 
 felt sure that honest work shared by all would bring 
 them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of 
 us, who did not wish our children to rise above their 
 fellows though we could not bear to have them fall 
 below might trust them with the truth. But we 
 have no such assurance ; and so we go on trembling 
 before Dryfooses, and living in gimcrackeries." 
 
 " Basil, Basil ! I was always willing to live more 
 simply than you. You know I was ! " 
 
 " I know you always said so, my dear. But how 
 many bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes would you 
 be willing to have at the street door below 1 I re- 
 member that when we were looking for a flat you 
 rejected every building that had a bell-ratchet or a 
 speaking-tube, and would have nothing to do with 
 any that had more than an electric button ; you
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 255 
 
 wanted a hall-boy, with electric buttons all over him. 
 I don't blame you. I find such things quite as 
 necessaiy as you do." 
 
 " And do you mean to say, Basil," she asked, 
 abandoning this unprofitable branch of the inquiry, 
 " that you are really uneasy about your place ? that 
 you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up being an 
 Angel, and Mr. Fulkerson may play you false ? " 
 
 " Play me false 1 Oh, it wouldn't be playing me 
 false. It would be merely looking out for himself, 
 if the new Angel had editorial tastes, and wanted 
 my place. It 's what any one would do." 
 
 " You wouldn't do it, Basil ! " 
 
 " Wouldn't 1 1 Well, if any one offered me more 
 salary than Every Other Week pays say twice as 
 much what do you think my duty to my suffering 
 family would be ? It 's give and take in the business 
 world, Isabel ; especially take. But as to being 
 uneasy, I 'm not, in the least. I Ve the spirit of a 
 lion, when it comes to such a chance as that. When 
 I see how readily the sensibilities of the passing 
 stranger can be worked in New York, I think of 
 taking up the rdle of that desperate man on Third 
 Avenue, who went along looking for garbage in the 
 gutter to eat. I think I could pick up at least 
 twenty or thirty cents a day by that little game, 
 and maintain my family in the affluence it's been 
 accustomed to." 
 
 "Basil!" cried his wife. "You don't mean to 
 say that man was an impostor ! And I Ve gone 
 about, ever since, feeling that one such case in a 
 2Q
 
 256 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 million, the bare possibility of it, was enough to 
 justify all that Lindau said about the rich and the 
 poor ! " 
 
 March laughed teasingly. "Oh, I don't say he 
 was an impostor. Perhaps he really was hungry ; 
 but if he wasn't, what do you think of a civilisation 
 that makes the opportunity of such a fraud 1 that 
 gives us all such a bad conscience for the need which 
 is, that we weaken to the need that isn't ? Suppose 
 that poor fellow wasn't personally founded on fact : 
 nevertheless, he represented the truth ; he was the 
 ideal of the suffering which would be less effective if 
 realistically treated. That man is a great comfort 
 to me. He probably rioted for days on that quarter 
 I gave him ; made a dinner very likely, or a cham- 
 pagne supper ; and if Every Other Week wants to get 
 rid of me, I intend to work that racket. You can 
 hang round the corner with Bella, and Tom can 
 come up to me in tears, at stated intervals, and ask 
 me if I Ve found anything yet. To be sure, we 
 might be arrested and sent up somewhere. But 
 even in that extreme case we should be provided 
 for. Oh no, I 'm not afraid of losing my place ! 
 I've merely a sort of psychological curiosity to 
 know how men like Dryfoos and Fulkerson will 
 work out the problem before them."
 
 IX. 
 
 IT was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself 
 shared, at least concerning Dryloos. " I don't know 
 what the old man 's going to do," he said to March, 
 the day after the Marches had talked their future 
 over. " Said anything to you yet 1 " 
 
 " No, not a word." 
 
 " You 're anxious, I suppose, same as I am. Fact 
 is," said Fulkerson, blushing a little, " I can't ask to 
 have a day named till I know where I am in con- 
 ^ nection with the old man. I can't tell whether I ; ve 
 got to look out for something else, or somebody else. 
 Of course, it's full soon yet." 
 
 " Yes," March said, " much sooner than it seems 
 to us. "We 're so anxious about the future that we 
 don't remember how very recent the past is." 
 
 "That's something so. The old man's hardly 
 had time yet to pull himself together. Well, I'm 
 glad you feel that way about it, March. I guess it 's 
 more of a blow to him than we realise. He was a 
 good deal bound up in Coonrod, though he didn't 
 always use him very well. Well, I reckon it 's apt to 
 happen so oftentimes ; curious how cruel love can 
 be. Heigh ? We 're an awful mixture, March ! "
 
 258 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Yes, that 's the marvel and the curse, as Brown- 
 ing says." 
 
 " Why, that poor boy himself," pursued Fulker- 
 son, "had streaks of the mule in him that could 
 give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old 
 man by the way he would give in to his will, and 
 hold out against his judgment. I don't believe he 
 ever budged a hair's-breadth from his original posi- 
 tion about wanting to be a preacher and not want- 
 ing to be a business man. Well, of course ! / don't 
 think business is all in all ; but it must have made 
 the old man mad to find that without saying any- 
 thing, or doing anything to show it, and after seem- 
 ing to come over to his ground, and really coming, 
 practically, Coonrod was just exactly where he first 
 planted himself, every time." 
 
 " Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. 
 Fortunately, they 're rare." 
 
 " Do you think so 1 It seems to me that every- 
 body 's got convictions. Beaton himself, who hasn't 
 a principle to throw at a dog, has got convictions the 
 size of a barn. They ain't always the same ones, I 
 know, but they 're always to the same effect, as far 
 as Beaton's being Number One is concerned. The 
 old man 's got convictions or did have, unless this 
 thing lately has shaken him all up and he believes 
 that money will do everything. Colonel Woodburn 's 
 got convictions that he wouldn't part with for untold 
 millions. Why, March, you got convictions yourself !" 
 
 " Have I ? " said March. " I don't know what 
 they are."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 259 
 
 " Well, neither do I ; but I know you were ready 
 to kick the trough over for them when the old man 
 wanted us to bounce Lindau that time." 
 
 " Oh yes," said March ; he remembered the fact ; 
 but he was still uncertain just what the convictions 
 were that he had been so staunch for. 
 
 " I suppose we could have got along without you," 
 Fulkerson mused aloud. " It 's astonishing how you 
 always can get along in this world without the man 
 that is simply indispensable. Makes a fellow realise 
 that he could take a day off now and then without 
 deranging the solar system a great deal. Now here 's, 
 Coonrod or rather, he isn't. But that boy managed 
 his part of the schooner so well that I used to 
 tremble when I thotight of his getting the better of 
 the old man, and going into a convent or something 
 of that kind ; and now here he is, snuffed out in 
 half a second, and I don't believe but what we shall 
 be sailing along just as chipper as usual inside of 
 thirty days. I reckon it will bring the old man to 
 the point when I come to talk with him about who 's 
 to be put in Coonrod's place. I don't like very well 
 to start the subject with him ; but it 's got to be 
 done some time." 
 
 " Yes," March admitted. " It 's terrible to think 
 how unnecessary even the best and wisest of us is to- 
 the purposes of Providence. When I looked at that 
 poor young fellow's face sometimes so gentle and 
 true and pure I used to think the world was appre- 
 ciably richer for his being in it. But are we appre- 
 ciably poorer for his being out of it now ? "
 
 260 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 "No, I don't reckon we are," said Fulkerson. 
 "And what a lot of the raw material of all kinds 
 the Almighty must have, to waste us the way he 
 seems to do. Think of throwing away a precious 
 creature like Coonrod Dryfoos on one chance in a 
 thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau out of 
 the way of being clubbed ! For I suppose that was 
 what Coonrod was up to. Say ! Have you been 
 round to see Lindau to-day 1 " 
 
 Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson 
 startled March. " No ! I haven't seen him since 
 yesterday." 
 
 " Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson. " I guess 
 I saw him a little while after you did, and that 
 young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried 
 about him. Or not worried, exactly ; they can't 
 afford to let such things worry them, I suppose; 
 but " 
 
 " He 's worse ? " asked March. 
 
 "Oh, he didn't say so. But I just wondered if 
 you 'd seen him to-day." 
 
 " I think I '11 go now," said March, with a pang 
 at heart. He had gone every day to see Lindau, but 
 this day he had thought he would not go, and that 
 was why his heart smote him. He knew that if he 
 were in Lindau's place Lindau would never have left 
 his side if he could have helped it. March tried to 
 believe that the case was the same, as it stood now ; 
 it seemed to him that he was always going to or 
 from the hospital ; he said to himself that it must 
 do Lindau harm to be visited so much. But he
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 261 
 
 knew that this was not true when he was met at the 
 door of the ward where Lindau lay by the young 
 doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest in 
 March's interest in Lindau. 
 
 He smiled without gaiety, and said, " He 's just 
 going." 
 
 " What ! Discharged f " 
 
 " Oh no. He has been failing very fast since you 
 
 saw him yesterday, and now " They had been 
 
 walking softly and talking softly down the aisle 
 between the long rows of beds. " Would you care 
 to see him ? " 
 
 The doctor made a slight gesture toward the 
 white canvas screen which in such places forms the 
 death-chamber of the poor and friendless. "Come 
 round this way he won't know you ! 1 've got 
 rather fond of the poor old fellow. He wouldn't 
 have a clergyman sort of agnostic, isn't he 1 A 
 good many of these Germans are but the young 
 lady who 's been coming to see him " 
 
 They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal 
 head, foreshortened to their view, lay white upon 
 the pillow, and his broad white beard flowed out 
 over the sheet, which heaved with those long last 
 breaths. Beside his bed Margaret Vance was kneel- 
 ing ; her veil was thrown back, and her face was 
 lifted; she held clasped between her hands the 
 hand of the dying man; she moved her lips in- 
 audibly.
 
 IN spite of the experience of the whole race from 
 time immemorial, when death comes to any one we 
 know we helplessly regard it as an incident of life, 
 which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this 
 is an instinctive perception of the truth that it does 
 go on somewhere ; but we have a sense of death as 
 absolutely the end even for earth, only if it relates 
 to some one remote or indifferent to us. March 
 tried to project Lindau to the necessary distance 
 from himself in order to realise the fact in his case, 
 but he could not, though the man with whom his 
 youth had been associated in a poetic friendship had 
 not actually re-entered the region of his affection to 
 the same degree, or in any like degree. The changed 
 conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart 
 concerning him ; but he could not make sure whether 
 this soreness was grief for his death, or remorse for 
 his own uncandour with him about Dryfoos, or a 
 foreboding of that accounting with his conscience 
 which he knew his wife would now exact of him 
 down to the last minutest particular of their joint 
 and several behaviour toward Lindau ever since they 
 had met him in New York.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 263 
 
 He felt something knock against his shoulder, and 
 he looked up to have his hat struck from his head 
 by a horse's nose. He saw the horse put his foot on 
 the hat, and he reflected, " Now it will always look 
 like an accordion," and he heard the horse's driver 
 address him some sarcasms before he could fully 
 awaken to the situation. He was standing bare- 
 headed in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and blocking 
 the tide of carriages flowing in either direction. 
 Among the faces put out of the carriage windows 
 he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe". The 
 old man knew him, and said, " Jump in here, Mr. 
 March " ; and March, who had mechanically picked 
 up his hat, and was thinking, " Now I shall have to 
 tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust 
 me on the street again without her," mechanically 
 obeyed. Her confidence in him had been undermined 
 by his being so near Conrad when he was shot ; and 
 it went through his mind that he would get Dryfoos 
 to drive him to a hatter's, where he could buy a 
 new hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow 
 escape to his wife till the incident was some days 
 old and she could bear it better. It quite drove 
 Lindau's death out of his mind for the moment ; 
 and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he 
 would drive up to the first cross-street and turn back 
 with him, March said he would be glad if he would 
 take him to a hat-store. The old man put his head 
 out again and told the driver to take them to the 
 Fifth Avenue Hotel. " There 's a hat-store around 
 there somewhere, seems to me," he said ; and they
 
 264 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 talked of March's accident as well as they could in 
 the rattle and clatter of the street till they reached 
 the place. March got his hat, passing a joke with 
 the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old 
 hat over again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and 
 take leave of him. 
 
 "If you ain't in any great hurry," the old man 
 said, " I wish you 'd get in here a minute. I 'd like 
 to have a little talk with you." 
 
 "Oh, certainly," said March, and he thought: 
 " It 's coming now about what he intends to do with 
 Every Other Week. Well, I might as well have all 
 the misery at once and have it over." 
 
 Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head 
 down sidewise to listen : " Go over there on Madison 
 Avenue, onto that asphalte, and keep drivin' up and 
 down till I stop you. I can't hear myself think on 
 these pavements," he said to March. But after they 
 got upon the asphalte, and began smoothly rolling 
 over it, he seemed in no haste to begin. At last he 
 said, " I wanted to talk with you about that that 
 Dutchman that was at my dinner Lindau," and 
 March's heart gave a jump with wonder whether he 
 could have already heard of Lindau's death ; but in 
 an instant he perceived that this was impossible. 
 "I been talkin' with Fulkerson about him, and he 
 says they had to take the balance of his arm off." 
 
 March nodded ; it seemed to him he could not 
 speak. He could not make out from the close face 
 of the old man anything of his motive. It was set, 
 but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 265 
 
 has lost the power to relax itself. There was no 
 other history in it of what the man had passed 
 through in his son's death. 
 
 " I don't know," Dryfoos resumed, looking aside 
 at the cloth window-strap, which he kept fingering, 
 " as you quite understood what made me the maddest. 
 I didn't tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can't 
 keep it up with a regular German ; but my father 
 wa.s Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could understand 
 what he was saying to you about me. I know I had 
 no business to understood it, after I let him think I 
 couldn't ; but I did, and I didn't like very well to 
 have a man callin' me a traitor and a tyrant at my 
 own table. Well, I look at it differently now, and I 
 reckon I had better have tried to put up with it ; and 
 
 I would, if I could have known " He stopped 
 
 with a quivering lip, and then went on. "Then, 
 again, I didn't like his talkin' that paternalism of 
 his. I always heard it was the worst kind of thing 
 for the country ; I was brought up to think the best 
 government was the one that governs the least; 
 and I didn't want to hear that kind of talk from 
 a man that was livin' on my money. I couldn't 
 bear it from him. Or I thought I couldn't before 
 
 before " He stopped again, and gulped. "I 
 
 reckon now there ain't anything I couldn't bear." 
 
 March was moved by the blunt words and the 
 mute stare forward with which they ended. " Mr. 
 Dryfoos, I didn't know that you understood Lin- 
 dau's German, or I shouldn't have allowed him 
 he wouldn't have allowed himself to go on. He 
 VOL. II. 12
 
 266 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 wouldn't have knowingly abused his position of 
 guest to censure you, no matter how much he 
 condemned you." 
 
 " I don't care for it now," said Dryfoos. " It 's all 
 past and gone, as far as I 'm concerned ; but I 
 wanted you to see that I wasn't tryin' to punish him 
 for his opinions, as you said." 
 
 "No; I see now," March assented, though he 
 thought his position still justified. " I wish " 
 
 "I don't know as I understand much about his 
 opinions, anyway ; but I ain't ready to say I want 
 the men dependent on me to manage my business 
 for me. I always tried to do the square thing by 
 my hands ; and in that particular case out there, I 
 took on all the old hands just as fast as they left 
 their Union. As for the game I came on them, it 
 was dog eat dog, anyway." 
 
 March could have laughed to think how far this 
 old man was from even conceiving of Lindau's point 
 of view, and how he was saying the worst of himself 
 that Lindau could have said of him. No one could 
 have characterised the kind of thing he had done 
 more severely than he when he called it dog eat dog. 
 
 " There 's a great deal to be said on both sides," 
 March began, hoping to lead up through this gener- 
 ality to the fact of Lindau's death ; but the old man 
 went on 
 
 " Well, a*ll I wanted him to know is that I wasn't 
 trying to punish him for what he said about things 
 in general. You naturally got that idea, I reckon ; 
 but I always went in for lettin' people say what
 
 HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 267 
 
 they please and think what they please; it's the 
 only way in a free country." 
 
 "I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make 
 little difference to Lindau now " 
 
 "I don't suppose he bears malice for it," said 
 Dryfoos, " but what I want to do is to have him 
 told so. He could understand just why I didn't 
 want to be called hard names, and yet I didn't 
 object to his thinkin' whatever he pleased. I 'd like 
 him to know " 
 
 " No one can speak to him, no one can tell him," 
 March began again, but again Dryfoos prevented 
 him from going on. 
 
 "I understand it's a delicate thing; and I'm not 
 askin' you to do it. What I would really like to do 
 if you think he could be prepared for it, some 
 way, and could stand it would be to go to him 
 myself, and tell him just what the trouble was. 
 I 'm in hopes, if I done that, he could see how I felt 
 about it." 
 
 A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau 
 with his vain regrets presented itself to March, and 
 he tried once more to make the old man understand. 
 "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, "Lindau is past all that 
 for ever," and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when 
 Dryfoos continued, without heeding him 
 
 "I got a particular reason why I want him to 
 believe it wasn't his ideas I objected to them ideas 
 of his about the government carryin' everything on 
 and givin' work. I don't understand 'em exactly, 
 but I found a writin' among my son's things"
 
 268 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 (he seemed to force the. words through his teeth), 
 " and I reckon he thought that way. Kind of a 
 diary where he put down his thoughts. My son 
 and me we differed about a good many things." 
 His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped. 
 " I wasn't very good to him, I reckon ; I crossed 
 him where I guess I got no business to crossed him ; 
 but I thought everything of Coonrod. He was the 
 best boy, from a baby, that ever was ; just so patient 
 and mild, and done whatever he was told. I ought 
 to V let him been a preacher ! O my son, my son ! " 
 The sobs could not be kept back any longer ; they 
 shook the old man with a violence that made March 
 afraid for him ; but he controlled himself at last 
 with a series of hoarse sounds like barks. " Well, 
 it 's all past and gone ! But as I understand you 
 from what } r ou saw, when Coonrod was killed, 
 he was try in' to save that old man from trouble 1 " 
 
 " Yes, yes ! It seemed so to me." 
 
 " That '11 do, then ! I want you to have him 
 come back and write for the book when he gets well. 
 I want you to find out and let me know if there 's 
 anything I can do for him. I '11 feel as if I done it 
 for my son. I '11 take him into my own house, 
 and do for him there, if you say so, when he gets so 
 he can be moved. I'll wait on him myself. It's 
 what Coonrod 'd do, if he was here. I don't feel any 
 hardness to him because it was him that got Coonrod 
 killed, as you might say, in one sense of the term ; 
 but I Ve tried to think it out, and I feel like I was 
 all the more beholden to him. because my son died
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 269 
 
 tryin' to save him. Whatever I do, I '11 be doin' it 
 for Coonrod, and that 's enough for me." He seemed 
 to have finished, and he turned to March as if to 
 hear what he had to say. 
 
 March hesitated. " I 'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos 
 
 Didn't Fulkerson tell you that Lindau was very sick!" 
 " Yes, of course. But he 's all right, he said." 
 Now it had to come, though the fact had been 
 latterly playing fast and loose with March's con- 
 sciousness. Something almost made him smile ; the 
 willingness he had once felt to give this old man 
 pain ; then he consoled himself by thinking that at 
 least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos's wish to 
 make atonement with the fact that Lindau had 
 renounced him, and would on no terms work for 
 such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from him. 
 In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, 
 and March had the momentary force to say : " Mr. 
 Dryfoos it can't be. Lindau I have just come 
 from him is dead."
 
 XL 
 
 " How did he take it ? How could he bear it ? 
 Basil ! I wonder you could have the heart to say 
 it to him. It was cruel ! " 
 
 "Yes, cruel enough, my dear," March owned to 
 his wife, when they talked the matter over on his 
 return home. He could not wait till the children 
 were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor 
 his wife was sorry that he had spoken of it before 
 them. The girl cried plentifully for her old friend 
 who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and 
 then was sorry for him, too ; and the boy listened 
 to all, and spoke with a serious sense that pleased 
 his father. " But as to how he took it," March went 
 on to answer his wife's question about Dryfoos, "how 
 do any of us take a thing that hurts ? Some of us 
 cry out, and some of us don't. Dryfoos drew a 
 kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when 
 it grieves there 's something curiously simple and 
 primitive about him and didn't say anything. 
 After a while he asked me how he could see the 
 people at the hospital about the remains; I gave 
 him my card to the young doctor there that had 
 charge of Lindau. I suppose he was still carrying
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 271 
 
 forward his plan of reparation in his mind to the 
 dead for the dead. But how useless ! If he could 
 have taken the living Lindau home with him, and 
 cared for him all his days, what would it have 
 profited the gentle creature whose life his worldly 
 ambition vexed and thwarted here ? He might as 
 well offer a sacrifice at Conrad's grave. Children," 
 said March, turning to them, " death is an exile that 
 no remorse and no love can reach. Kemember that, 
 and be good to every one here on earth, for your 
 longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to 
 the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you. 
 I wonder," he mused, " if one of the reasons why 
 we're shut up to our ignorance of what is to be 
 hereafter isn't that we should be still more brutal to 
 one another here, in the hope of making reparation 
 somewhere else. Perhaps, if we ever come to obey 
 the law of love on earth, the mystery of death will 
 be taken away." 
 
 " Well " the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. 
 March " these two old men have been terribly 
 punished. They have both been violent and wilful, 
 and they have both been punished. No one need 
 ever tell me there is not a moral government of the 
 universe ! " 
 
 March always disliked to hear her talk in this 
 way, which did both her head and heart injustice. 
 "And Conrad," he said, "what was he punished 
 for ?" 
 
 "He?" she answered, in an exaltation: "he 
 suffered for the sins of others." 
 2R
 
 272 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 " Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes. That 
 goes on continually. That 's another mystery." 
 
 He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard 
 his son saying, " I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau 
 died in a bad cause ? " 
 
 March was startled. He had always been so 
 sorry for Lindau, and admired his courage and 
 generosity so much, that he had never fairly con- 
 sidered this question. " Why, yes," he answered ; 
 "he died in the cause of disorder; he was trying 
 to obstruct the law. No doubt there was a wrong 
 there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt 
 keenly; but it could not be reached in his way 
 without greater wrong." 
 
 " Yes ; that 's what I thought," said the boy. 
 "And what's the use of our ever fighting about 
 anything in America ? I always thought we could 
 vote anything we wanted." 
 
 " We can, if we 're honest, and don't buy and sell 
 one another's votes," said his father. "And men 
 like Lindau, who renounce the American means as 
 hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them 
 into sympathy with violence, yes, they are wrong ; 
 and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as you say, 
 Tom." 
 
 "I think Conrad had no business there, or you 
 either, Basil," said his wife. 
 
 "Oh, I don't defend myself," said March. "I 
 was there in the cause of literary curiosity and of 
 conjugal disobedience. But Conrad yes, he had 
 some business there : it was his business to suffer
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 273 
 
 there for the sins of others. Isabel, we can't throw 
 aside that old doctrine of the Atonement yet. The 
 life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and 
 going about to do good ; it was suffering for the sins 
 of others ! That 's as great a mystery as the 
 mystery of death. Why should there be such a 
 principle in the world ? But it 's been felt, and 
 more or less dumbly, blindly recognised ever since 
 Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even 
 wish to suffer for them. That's what has created 
 the religious orders in all times the brotherhoods 
 and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as 
 to the mediaeval past. That 's what is driving a 
 girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that 
 the world can offer her young beauty, on to the 
 work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the 
 dying." 
 
 " Yes, yes ! " cried Mrs. March. " How how did 
 she look there, Basil 1 " She had her feminine mis- 
 givings; she was not sure but the girl was something 
 of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as 
 well as the pain ; and she wished to be convinced 
 that it was not so. 
 
 " Well," she said, when March had told again the 
 little there was to tell, " I suppose it must be a 
 great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her 
 niece going that way." 
 
 " The way of Chris 1 v asked March, with a 
 smile. 
 
 " Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how 
 to live rightly in it, too. If we were all to spend 
 12*
 
 274 A HAZARD OF ls 7 E\V FORTUNES. 
 
 our time in hospitals, it would be rather dismal for 
 the homes. But perhaps you don't think the homes 
 are worth minding 1 " she suggested, with a certain 
 note in her voice that he knew. 
 
 He got up and kissed her. "I think the gim- 
 crackeries are." He took the hat he had set down 
 on the parlour table on coming in, and started to put 
 it in the hall, and that made her notice it. 
 
 " You 've been getting a new hat ! " 
 
 " Yes," he hesitated ; " the old one had got was 
 decidedly shabby." 
 
 "Well, that's right. I don't like you to wear 
 them too long. Did you leave the old one to be 
 pressed ? " 
 
 " Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly 
 worth pressing," said March. He decided that for 
 the present his wife's nerves had quite all they 
 could bear.
 
 XII. 
 
 IT was in a manner grotesque, but to March it 
 was all the more natural for that reason, that 
 Dryfoos should have Lindau's funeral from hia 
 house. He knew the old man to be darkly groping, 
 through the payment of these vain honours to the 
 dead, for some atonement to his son, and he imagined 
 him finding in them such comfort as comes from 
 doing all one can, even when all is useless. 
 
 No one knew what Lindau's religion was, and in 
 default they had had the Anglican burial service 
 read over him ; it seems the refuge of all the home- 
 less dead. Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the 
 ceremony. She understood that it was for Coonrod's 
 sake that his father wished the funeral to be there ; 
 and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed 
 Coonrod would have been pleased. " Coonrod was 
 a member of the 'Piscopal Church; and fawther's 
 doin' the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for 
 anybody. He thought the world of Coonrod, 
 fawther did. Mela, she kind of thought it would 
 look queer to have two funerals from the same 
 house, hand-runnin', as you might call it, and one of 
 'em no relation, either; but when she saw how
 
 276 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 fawther was bent on it, she give in. Seems as if 
 she was tryin' to make up to fawther for Coonrod as 
 much as she could. Mela always was a good child, 
 but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod." 
 
 March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless 
 absurdity of Dryfoos's endeavour at atonement in 
 these vain obsequies to the man for whom he be 
 lieved his son to have died ; but the effort had its 
 magnanimity, its pathos, and there was a poetry 
 that appealed to him in this reconciliation through 
 death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only 
 have gone warring on in life. He thought, as the 
 priest went on with the solemn liturgy, how all the 
 world must come together in that peace which, 
 struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last. 
 He looked at Dryfoos, and wondered whether he 
 would consider these rites a sufficient tribute, or 
 whether there was enough in him to make him 
 realise their futility, except as a mere sign of his 
 wish to retrieve the past. He thought how we 
 never can atone for the wrong we do ; the heart we 
 have grieved and .wounded cannot kindle with pity 
 for us when once it is stilled ; and yet we can put 
 our evil from us with penitence; and somehow, 
 somewhere, the order of loving-kindness, which our 
 passion or our wilfulness has disturbed, will be 
 restored. 
 
 Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the 
 more intimate contributors of Every Other Week to 
 come. Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had 
 brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 277" 
 
 Leighton and Alma, to fill up, as he said. Mela was 
 much present, and was official with the arrangement 
 of the flowers and the welcome of the guests. She 
 imparted this impersonality to her reception of 
 Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in the outer hall 
 with his party, and whom he presented in whisper 
 to them all. Kendricks smiled under his breath, as- 
 it were, and was then mutely and seriously polite to 
 the Leightons. Alma brought a little bunch of 
 flowers, which were lost in the presence of those 
 which Dryfoos had ordered to be unsparingly 
 provided. 
 
 It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss 
 Vance come, and reassuring as to how it would look 
 to have the funeral there; Miss Vance would 
 certainly not have come unless it had been all right ^ 
 she had come, and had sent some Easter lilies. 
 
 "Ain't Christine coming down?" Fulkerson asked 
 Mela. 
 
 " No, she ain't a bit well, and she ain't been, ever 
 since Coonrod died. I don't know what 's got over 
 her," said Mela. She added, "Well, I should V 
 thought Mr. Beaton would 'a' made out to 'a' come ! " 
 
 "Beaton's peculiar," said Fulkerson. "If he 
 thinks you want him he takes a pleasure in not 
 letting you have him." 
 
 " Well, goodness knows, I don't want him," said 
 the girl. 
 
 Christine kept her room, and for the most part 
 kept her bed ; but there seemed nothing definitely 
 matter with her, and she would not let them
 
 278 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 call a doctor. Her mother said she reckoned she 
 was beginning to feel the spring weather, that 
 always perfectly pulled a body down in New York ; 
 and Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was 
 any sign of spring-fever, Christine had it bad. She 
 was faithfully kind to her, and submitted to all her 
 humours, but she recompensed herself by the freest 
 criticism of Christine when not in actual attendance 
 on her. Christine would not suffer Mrs. Mandel to 
 approach her, and she had with her father a sullen 
 submission which was not resignation. For her, 
 apparently, Conrad had not died, or had died in 
 vain. 
 
 " Pshaw ! " said Mela, one morning when she 
 came to breakfast, " I reckon if we was to send up 
 an old card of Mr. Beaton's she 'd rattle downstairs 
 fast enough. If she's sick, she's love-sick. It 
 makes me sick to see her." 
 
 Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father 
 looked up from his plate, and listened. Mela went 
 on: "/ don't know what's made the fellow quit 
 comun'. But he was an aggravatun' thing, and no 
 more dependable than water. It 's just like Mr. 
 Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him he'll 
 take a pleasure in not lettun' you have him. I 
 reckon that 's what 's the matter with Christine. I 
 believe in my heart the girl '11 die if she don't git 
 him." 
 
 Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own 
 good appetite. She now always came down to keep 
 her father company, as she said, and she did her
 
 A HAZARD OP NEW FORTUNES. 279 
 
 best to cheer and comfort him. At least she kept 
 the talk going, and she had it nearly all to herself, 
 for Mrs Mandel was now merely staying on pro- 
 visionally, and in the absence of any regrets or 
 excuses from Christine, was looking ruefully for- 
 ward to the moment when she must leave even this 
 ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world 
 outside. 
 
 The old man said nothing at table, but when 
 .Mela went up to see if she could do anything for 
 Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the 
 facts of her last interview with Beaton. 
 
 She gave them as fully as she could remember 
 them, and the old man made no comment on them. 
 But he went out directly after, and at Every Other 
 Week office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson's 
 room, and asked for Beaton's address. No one yet 
 had taken charge of Conrad's work, and Fulkerson 
 was running the thing himself, as he said, till he 
 could talk with Dryfoos about it. The old man 
 would not look into the empty room where he had 
 last seen his son alive; he turned his face away, and 
 hurried by the door.
 
 xm. 
 
 THE course of public events carried Beaton's 
 private affairs beyond the reach of his simple first 
 intention to renounce his connection with Every 
 Qther Week. In fact this was not perhaps so simple 
 as it seemed, and long before it could be put in 
 effect it appeared still simpler to do nothing about 
 the matter : to remain passive and leave the initiative 
 to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconscious- 
 ness and let recognition of any change in the 
 situation come from those who had caused the 
 change. After all, it was rather absurd to propose 
 making a purely personal question the pivot on 
 which his relations with Every Other Week turned. 
 He took a hint from March's position and decided 
 that he did not know Dryfoos in these relations ; he 
 only knew Fulkerson, who had certainly had nothing 
 to do with Mrs. Handel's asking his intentions. As 
 he reflected upon this he became less eager to look 
 Fulkerson up and make the magazine a partner of 
 his own sufferings. This was the soberer mood to 
 which Beaton trusted that night even before he 
 slept, and he awoke fully confirmed in it. As he 
 examined the offence done him in the cold light of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 281 
 
 day, he perceived that it had not come either from 
 Mrs. Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and 
 unwilling instrument of it, or from Christine, who 
 was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, 
 whom he could not hurt by giving up his place. He 
 could only punish Fulkerson by that, and Fulkerson 
 was innocent. Justice and interest alike dictated 
 the passive course to which Beaton inclined ; and he 
 reflected that he might safely leave the punishment 
 of Dryfoos to Christine, who would find out what 
 had happened, and would be able to take care of 
 herself in any encounter of tempers with her father. 
 Beaton did not go to the office during the week 
 that followed upon this conclusion; but they were 
 used there to these sudden absences of his, and as 
 his work for the time was in train, nothing was 
 made of his staying away, except the sarcastic com- 
 ment which the thought of him was apt to excite in 
 the literary department. He no longer came so 
 much to the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no 
 state of mind to miss any one there except Miss 
 Woodburn, whom he never missed. Beaton was 
 left, then, unmolestedly awaiting the course of 
 destiny, when he read in the morning paper, over 
 his coffee at Maroni's, the deeply scare-headed story 
 of Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau. He 
 probably cared as little for either of them as any 
 man that ever saw them ; but he felt a shock if not 
 a pang at Conrad's fate, so out of keeping with his 
 life and character. He did not know what to do ; 
 and he did nothing. He was not asked to the
 
 282 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, 
 
 funeral, but he had .not expected that, and when 
 Fulkerson brought him notice that Lindau was also 
 to be buried from Dryfoos's house, it was without 
 
 ] his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away. 
 
 - In his sort, and as much as a man could who was 
 necessarily so much taken up with himself, he was 
 sorry for Conrad's father; Beaton had a peculiar 
 tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how 
 his father would feel if it were he who had been 
 killed in Conrad's place, as it might very well have 
 been ; he sympathised with himself in view of the 
 possibility ; and for once they were mistaken who 
 thought him indifferent and merely brutal in his 
 failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies. 
 
 He would really have gone if he had known how- 
 to reconcile his presence in that house with the 
 terms of his effective banishment from it; and he 
 was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in 
 the situation, when Dryfoos knocked at the studio 
 door the morning after Lindau's funeral. Beaton 
 roared out "Come in !" as he always did to a knock 
 if he had not a model : if he had a model he set the 
 door slightly ajar, and with his palette on his thumb 
 frowned at his visitor, and told him he could not 
 .come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in 
 the dim passageway outside, and Beaton, who had 
 experience of people's difficulties with it, suddenly 
 jerked the door open. The two men stood con- 
 , fronted, and at first sight of each other their 
 quiescent dislike revived. Each would have been 
 willing to turn away from the other, but that
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 283 
 
 was not possible. Beaton snorted some sort of 
 inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try to 
 return ; he asked if he could, see him alone for a 
 minute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and 
 swept some paint-blotched rags from the chair which 
 he told him to take. He noticed, as the old man 
 sank tremulously into it, that his movement was 
 like that of his own father, and also that he looked 
 very much like Christine. Dryfoos folded his hands 
 tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and 
 he was rather finely haggard, with the dark hollows 
 round his black eyes, and the fall of the muscles on 
 either side of his chin. He had forgotten to take 
 his soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a 
 desire to sketch him just as he sat. 
 
 Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from 
 the dreary absence into which he fell at first. 
 " Young man," he began, " may be I Ve come here 
 on a fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that 
 beginning. 
 
 But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with 
 a shy glance aside, "I don't know what you mean." 
 
 " I reckon," Dryfoos answered quietly, "you got 
 your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak 
 to you the way she done. But if there was anything 
 wrong in the way she spoke ; or if you didn't feel 
 like she had any right to question you up as if we 
 suspected you of anything mean, I want you to say 
 so." 
 
 Beaton said nothing and the old man went on. 
 
 " I ain't very well up in the ways of the world,
 
 284 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 and I don't pretend to be. All I want is to be fair 
 and square with everybody. I've made mistakes, 
 
 though, in my time " He stopped, and Beaton 
 
 was not proof against the misery of his face, which 
 was twisted as with some strong physical ache. " I 
 don't know as I want to make any more, if I can 
 help it. I don't know but what you had a right to 
 keep on comin', and if you had I want you to say so. 
 Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in the 
 right way. I don't want to take advantage of any- 
 body; and I don't ask you to say any more than that." 
 
 Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man 
 who had humiliated him so sweet as he could have 
 fancied it might be. He knew how it had come 
 about, and that it was an effect of love for his child ; 
 it did not matter by what ungracious means she had 
 brought him to know that he loved her better than 
 his own will, that his wish for her happiness was 
 stronger than his pride ; it was enough that he was 
 now somehow brought to give proof of it. Beaton 
 could not be aware of all that dark coil of circum- 
 stance through which Dryfoos's present action 
 evolved itself ; the worst of this was buried in the 
 secret of the old man's heart, a worm of perpetual 
 torment. What was apparent to another was that 
 he was broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon 
 him, and it was this that Beaton respected and pitied 
 in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer. 
 
 " No, I had no right to keep coming to your house 
 in the way I did, unless unless I meant more than 
 I ever said." Beaton added, " I don't say that what
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 285 
 
 you did was usual in this country, at any rate ; but 
 I can't say you were wrong. Since you speak to me 
 about the matter, it 's only fair to myself to say that 
 a good deal goes on in life without much thinking 
 of consequences. That 's the way I excuse myself." 
 
 " And you say Mrs. Mandel done right ? " asked 
 Dryfoos, as if he wished simply to be assured of a 
 point of etiquette. 
 
 "Yes, she did right. I've nothing to complain 
 of." 
 
 " That 's all I wanted to know," said Dryfoos ; but 
 apparently he had not finished, and he did not go, 
 though the silence that Beaton now kept gave him 
 a chance to do so. He began a series of questions 
 which had no relation to the matter in hand, though 
 they were strictly personal to Beaton. " What 
 countryman are you 1 " he asked, after a moment. 
 
 " What countryman ? " Beaton frowned back at 
 him. 
 
 " Yes, are you an American by birth ? " 
 
 " Yes ; I was born in Syracuse." 
 
 " Protestant 1 " 
 
 "My father is a Scotch Seceder." 
 
 " What business is your father in ? " 
 
 Beaton faltered and blushed ; then he answered, 
 " He 's in the monument business, as he calls it. 
 He's a tombstone cutter." Now that he was 
 launched, Beaton saw no reason for not declaring, 
 " My father 's always been a poor man, and worked 
 with his own hands for his living." He had too 
 slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to conceal a fact
 
 286 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 from him that he might have wished to blink with 
 others. 
 
 "Well, that's right," said Dryfoos. "I used to 
 farm it myself. I've got a good pile of money 
 together, now. At first it didn't come easy ; but 
 now it 's got started it pours in and pours in ; it 
 seems like there was no end to it. I Ve got well on 
 to three million ; but it couldn't keep me from losin* 
 my son. It can't buy me back a minute of his life ; 
 not all the money in the world can do it ! " 
 
 He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to 
 Beaton, who scarcely ventured to say, " I know I 
 am very sorry " 
 
 "How did you come," Dryfoos interrupted, "to 
 take up paintin' 1 " 
 
 " Well, I don't know," said Beaton, a little scorn- 
 fully. " You don't take a thing of that kind up, I 
 fancy. I always wanted to paint." 
 
 " Father try to stop you ? " 
 
 "No. It wouldn't have been of any use. 
 Why " 
 
 " My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did 
 stop him or I thought I did. But I reckon he was 
 a preacher, all the same, every minute of his life. 
 As you say, it ain't any use to try to stop a thing 
 like that. I reckon if a child has got any particular 
 bent, it was given to it ; and it 's goin' against the 
 grain, it's goin' against the law, to try to bend it 
 some other way. There 's lots of good business men 
 Mr. Beaton, twenty of 'em to every good preacher ?" 
 
 "I imagine more than twenty," said Beaton,
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, 287 
 
 amused and touched through his curiosity as to 
 what the old man was driving at by the quaint sim- 
 plicity of his speculations. - 
 
 " Father ever come to the city ? " 
 
 " No ; he never has the time ; and my mother 's 
 a.n invalid." 
 
 " Oh ! Brothers and sisters 1 " 
 
 " Yes ; we 're a large family." 
 
 " I lost two little fellers twins," said Dryfoos 
 sadly. " But we hain't ever had but just the five. 
 Ever take portraits ? " 
 
 "Yes," said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the 
 queries as seriously as the rest. " I don't think I 
 am good at it." 
 
 Dryfoos got to his feet. " I wished you 'd paint 
 a likeness of my son. You've seen him plenty of 
 times. We won't fight about the price, don't you 
 be afraid of that." 
 
 Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he 
 was disgusted. He saw that Dryfoos was trying to 
 undo Mrs. Mandel's work practically, and get him 
 to come again to his house ; that he now conceived 
 of the offence given him as condoned, and wished to 
 restore the former situation. He knew that he was 
 attempting this for Christine's sake, but he was not 
 the man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not 
 only to tolerate him but to like him ; and in fact 
 Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this 
 end. What they both understood was that Dryfoos 
 was endeavouring to get at Beaton through Conrad's 
 memory ; but with one this was its dedication to a
 
 288 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 purpose of self-sacrifice and with the other a vulgai 
 and shameless use of it. 
 
 "I couldn't do it," said Beaton. "I couldn't 
 think of attempting it." 
 
 " Why not ? " Dryfoos persisted. " We got some 
 photographs of him ; he didn't like to sit very well ; 
 but his mother got him to ; and you know how he 
 looked." 
 
 " I couldn't do it I couldn't. I can't even con- 
 sider it. I 'm very sorry. I would, if it were 
 possible. But it isn't possible." 
 
 " I reckon if you see the photographs once " 
 
 " It isn't that, Mr. Dryfoos. But I 'm not in the 
 way of that kind of thing any more." 
 
 " I 'd give any price you 've a mind to name " 
 
 " Oh, it isn't the money ! " cried Beaton, beginning 
 to lose control of himself. 
 
 The old man did not notice him. He sat with 
 his head fallen forward, and his chin resting on his 
 folded hands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw 
 Conrad's face before him, reproachful, astonished, 
 but all gentle as it looked when Conrad caught his 
 hand that day after he struck him ; he heard him 
 say, " Father ! " and the sweat gathered on his fore- 
 head. " my God ! " he groaned. " No ; there 
 ain't anything I can do now." 
 
 Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speak- 
 ing to him or not. He started toward him : " Are 
 you ill?" 
 
 " No, there ain't anything the matter," said the 
 old man. " But I guess 1 11 lay down on your settee
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 289 
 
 a minute." He tottered with Beaton's help to the 
 aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which 
 Beaton had once thought of painting a Cleopatra ; 
 but he could never get the right model. As the old 
 man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, 
 he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton 
 was struck with his effectiveness, and the likeness 
 between him and his daughter ; she would make a 
 very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, 
 while these thoughts passed through his mind, he 
 was afraid Dryfoos would die. The old man fetched 
 his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and 
 lengthened into his normal breathing. Beaton got 
 him a glass of wine, and after tasting it he sat 
 up. 
 
 " You Ve got to excuse me," he said, getting back 
 to his characteristic grimness with surprising sudden- 
 ness, when once he began to recover himself. " I Ve 
 been through a good deal lately ; and sometimes it 
 ketches me round the heart like a pain." 
 
 In his life of selfish immunity from grief Beaton 
 could not understand this experience that poignant 
 sorrow brings ; he said to himself that Dryfoos was 
 going the way of angina pectoris ; as he began shuffling 
 off the tiger-skin he said, ' Had you better get up ? 
 Wouldn't you like me to call a doctor ? " 
 
 " I 'm all right, young man." Dryfoos took his 
 hat and stick from him, but he made for the door 
 so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his 
 elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to 
 his coupe\ 
 
 VOL. II 13
 
 290 A HAZARf) OF NEW FORTUNES; 
 
 " Hadn't you Better let me drive home with you ? n 
 he asked. 
 
 " What ? " said Dryfoos suspiciously. 
 
 Beaton repeated his question. 
 
 -" I guess I 'm able to go home alone," said Dryfoos, 
 in a surly tone, and he put his head out of the 
 window and called up " Home ! " to the driver, 
 who immediately started off, and left Beaton stand- 
 ing beside the curb-stone.
 
 XIV. 
 
 BEATON wasted the rest of the day in the 
 emotions and speculations which Dryfoos's call in- 
 spired. It was not that they continuously occupied 
 him, but they broke up the train of other thoughts, 
 and spoiled him for work; a very little spoiled 
 Beaton for work; he required just the right mood 
 for work. He comprehended perfectly well that 
 Dryfoos had made him that extraordinary embassy 
 because he wished him to renew his visits, and he 
 easily imagined the means that had brought him to 
 this pass. From what he knew of that girl he did 
 not envy her father his meeting with her when he 
 must tell her his mission had failed. But had it 
 failed ? When Beaton came to ask himself this 
 question, he could only perceive that he and Dry- 
 foos had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and 
 had parted in the same dislike with which they had 
 met. But as to any other failure, it was certainly 
 tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect. 
 He could go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as 
 before, and it was clear that he was very much de- 
 sired to come back. But if he went back it was also 
 clear that he must go back with intentions more
 
 292 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 explicit than before, and now he had to ask himself 
 just how much or how little he had meant by going 
 there. His liking for Christine had certainly not 
 increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of 
 holding a leopardess in leash had not yet palled 
 upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was 
 a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the 
 man who had no control over himself liked logically 
 enough to feel his control of some one else. The 
 fact cannot otherwise be put in terms, and the 
 attraction which Christine Dryfoos had for him, 
 apart from this, escapes from all terms, as anything 
 purely and merely passional must. He had seen 
 from the first that she was a cat, and so far as youth 
 forecasts such things, he felt that she would be a 
 shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her beauty, 
 and he knew a sort of life in which her power to 
 molest him with her temper could be reduced to the 
 smallest proportions, and even broken to pieces. 
 Then the consciousness of her money entered. 
 It was evident that the old man had mentioned 
 his millions in the way of a hint to him of what 
 he might reasonably expect if he would turn and 
 be his son-in-law. Beaton did not put it to him- 
 self in those words; and in fact his cogitations were 
 not in words at all. It was the play of cognitions, 
 of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which 
 can only be very clumsily interpreted in language. 
 But when he got to this point in them, Beaton 
 rose to magnanimity a.nd in a flash of dramatic 
 reverie disposed of a part of Dryfoos's riches in
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 293 
 
 placing his father and mother, and his brothers and 
 sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety for ever. He 
 had no shame, no scruple in this, for he had been 
 a pensioner upon others ever since a Syracusan 
 amateur of the arts had detected his talent, and 
 given him th,e money to go and study abroad. 
 Beaton had always considered the money a loan, to 
 be repaid out of his future success ; but he now 
 never dreamt of repaying it ; as the man was rich, 
 he had even a contempt for the notion of repaying 
 him ; but this did not prevent him from feeling very 
 keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrow- 
 ing money from him, though he never repaid his 
 father, either. In this reverie he saw himself sacri- 
 ficed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind 
 of admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the 
 spectacle of the dignity with which he suffered all 
 the life-long trials ensuing from his unselfishness. 
 The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to 
 regret him, contributed to soothe and natter him, 
 and he was not sure that Margaret Vance did not 
 suffer a like loss in him. 
 
 There had been times when, as he believed, that" 
 beautiful girl's high thoughts had tended toward 
 him ; there had been looks, gestures, even words, 
 that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have 
 had it ; and Beaton saw that he might easily construe 
 Mrs. Horn's confidential appeal to him to get Mar- 
 garet interested in art again as something by no 
 means necessarily offensive, even though it had been 
 made to him as to a master of illusion. If Mrs.
 
 294 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Horn had to choose between him and the life of 
 good works to which her niece was visibly abandon- 
 ing herself, Beaton could not doubt which she would 
 choose ; the only question was how real the danger 
 of a life of good works was. 
 
 As he thought of these two girls, one so charm- 
 ing and the other so divine, it became indefinitely 
 difficult to renounce them for Christine Dryfoos, 
 with her sultry temper, and her earthbound ideals. 
 Life had been so flattering to Beaton hitherto that 
 he could not believe them both finally indifferent ; 
 and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not 
 wish either of them to be very definite. What he 
 really longed for was their sympathy ; for a man 
 who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on the 
 feelings of others often has very tender feelings of 
 his own, easily lacerated, and eagerly responsive to 
 the caresses of compassion. In this frame Beaton 
 determined to go that afternoon, though it was not 
 Mrs. Horn's day, and call upon her in the hope of 
 possibly seeing Miss Vance alone. As he continued 
 in it, he took this for a sign, and actually went. It 
 did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got 
 Mrs. Horn to talking again about her niece, and Mrs. 
 Horn again regretted that nothing could be done by 
 the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works. 
 
 " Is she at home ? Will you let me see her 1 " 
 asked Beaton with something of the scientific 
 interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose 
 symptoms have been rehearsed to him. He had not 
 asked for her before.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 295 
 
 " Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Horn, and she went 
 herself to call Margaret, and she did not return with 
 her. The girl entered with the gentle grace peculiar 
 to her ; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own 
 consolation, could not help being struck with the 
 spiritual exaltation of her look. At sight of her, 
 the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, 
 that they might be something more than aesthetic 
 friends, died in his heart. She wore black, as she 
 often did ; but in spite of its fashion her dress 
 received a nun-like effect from the pensive absence 
 of her face. " Decidedly," thought Beaton, " she is 
 far gone in good works." 
 
 But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old 
 level, and he began at once to talk to her of the 
 subject he had been discussing with her aunt. He 
 said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably 
 turned her back upon possibilities which she ought 
 not to neglect. 
 
 " You know very well," she answered, " that I 
 couldn't do anything in that way worth the time 
 I should waste on it. Don't talk of it, please. I 
 suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, 
 but it 's no use. I 'm sorry it 's no use, she wishes 
 it so much ; but I 'm not sorry otherwise. You can 
 find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it ; 
 but I couldn't find anything in it but a barren 
 amusement. Mr. Wetmore is right ; for me, it 's 
 like enjoying an opera, or a ball." 
 
 " That 's one of Wetmore's phrases. He 'd sacrifice 
 anything to them."
 
 296 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 She put aside the whole subject with a look. 
 " You were not at Mr. Dryfoos's the other day. 
 Have you seen them, any of them, lately ? " 
 
 " I haven't been there for some time, no," &aid 
 Beaton evasively. But he thought if he was to get 
 on to anything, he had better be candid. " Mr. 
 Dryfoos was at my studio this morning. He 's got 
 a queer notion. He wants me to paint his son's 
 portrait." 
 
 She started. " And will you " 
 
 " No, I couldn't do such a thing. It isn't in my 
 way. I told him so. His son had a beautiful face 
 an antique profile ; a sort of early Christian type ; 
 but I 'm too much of a pagan for that sort of thing." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Yes," Beaton continued, not quite liking her 
 assent, after he had invited it He had his pride in 
 being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her 
 presence, now; and he wished that she had pro- 
 tested he was none. " He was a singular creature ; 
 a kind of survival ; an exile in our time and place. 
 I don't know : we don't quite expect a saint to be 
 rustic; but with all his goodness Conrad Dryfoos 
 was a country person. If he were not dying for a 
 cause you could imagine him milking." Beaton 
 intended a contempt that came from the bitterness 
 of having himself once milked the family cow. 
 
 His contempt did not reach Miss Vance. " He 
 died for a cause," she said. " The holiest." 
 
 "Of labour 1" 
 
 "Of peace. He was there to persuade the 
 strikers to be quiet and go home."
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 297 
 
 " I haven't been quite sure," said Beaton. " But 
 in any case he had no business there. The police 
 were on hand to do the persuading." 
 
 " I can't let you talk so ! " cried the girl. " It 's 
 shocking ! Oh, I know it 's the way people talk, 
 and the worst is that in the sight of the world it 's 
 the right way. But the blessing on the peace- 
 makers is not for the policemen with their clubs." 
 
 Beaton saw that she was nervous ; he made his 
 reflection that she was altogether too far gone in 
 good works for the fine arts to reach her ; he began 
 to think how he could turn her primitive Christi- 
 anity to the account of his modern heathenism. 
 He had no deeper design than to get flattered back 
 into his own favour far enough to find courage for 
 some sort of decisive step. In his heart he was try- 
 ing to will whether he should or should not go back 
 to Dryfoos's house. It could not be from the caprice 
 that had formerly taken him; it must be from a 
 definite purpose; again he realised this. "Of 
 course ; you are right," he said. " I wish I could 
 have answered that old man differently. I fancy he 
 was bound up in his son, though he quarrelled with 
 him, and crossed him. But I couldn't do it; it 
 wasn't possible." He said to himself that if she 
 said, "No," now, he would be ruled by her agree- 
 ment with him ; and if she disagreed with him, he 
 would be ruled still by the chance, and would go no 
 more to the Dryfoos's. He found himself em- 
 barrassed to the point of blushing when she said 
 nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own hands. 
 "I should like to have given him that comfort; I 
 13*
 
 298 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 fancy he hasn't much comfort in life ; but there 
 seems no comfort in me." He dropped his head in 
 a fit attitude for compassion ; but she poured no 
 pity upon it. 
 
 "There is no comfort -for us in ourselves," she 
 said. " It 's hard to get outside ; but there 's only 
 despair within. When we think we have done 
 something for others, by some great effort, we find 
 it's all for our own vanity." 
 
 "Yes," said Beaton. "If I could paint pictures 
 for righteousness' sake, I should have been glad to 
 do Conrad Dryfoos for his father. I felt sorry for 
 him. Did the rest seem very much broken up ? 
 You saw them all ? " 
 
 "Not all. Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sister said. 
 It's hard to tell how much people suffer. His 
 mother seemed bewildered. The younger sister is 
 a simple creature ; she looks like him ; I think she 
 must have something of his spirit." 
 
 "Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine," said 
 Beaton. " But she 's amiably material. Did they 
 say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill 1 " 
 
 " No. I supposed she might be prostrated by her 
 brother's death." 
 
 "Does she seem that kind of person to you, Miss 
 Vance 1 " asked Beaton. 
 
 " I don't know. I haven't tried to see so much 
 of them as I might, the past winter. I was not 
 sure about her when I met her ; I 've never seen 
 much of people, except in my own set, and the 
 very poor. I have been afraid I didn't understand
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 299 
 
 her. She may have a kind of pride that would not 
 let her do herself justice." 
 
 Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endea- 
 vour of praise. " Then she seems to you like a 
 person whose life its trials, its chances would 
 make more of than she is now 1 " 
 
 "I didn't say that. I can't judge of her at all; 
 but where we don't know, don't you think we ought 
 to imagine the best ? " 
 
 "Oh yes," said Beaton. "I didn't know but 
 what I once said of them might have prejudiced 
 you against them. I have accused myself of it." 
 He always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self- 
 censure, in talking with Miss Vance ; he could not 
 help it. 
 
 "Oh no. And I never allowed myself to form 
 any judgment of her. She is very pretty, don't 
 you think, in a kind of way 1 " 
 
 " Very." 
 
 " She has a beautiful brunette colouring : that 
 floury white and the delicate pink in it. Her 
 eyes are beautiful." 
 
 " She 's graceful, too," said Beaton. ' I Ve tried 
 her in colour; but I didn't make it out." 
 
 " I 've wondered sometimes," said Miss Vance, 
 " whether that elusive quality you find in some 
 people you try to paint doesn't characterise them 
 all through. Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much 
 finer and better than we would find out in the 
 society way that seems the only way." 
 
 " Perhaps," said Beaton gloomily ; and he went
 
 300 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 away profoundly discouraged by this last analysis of 
 Christine's character. The angelic imperviousness 
 of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wicked- 
 ness was so keenly aware in Christine might have 
 made him laugh, if it had not been such a serious, 
 affair with him. As it was, he smiled to think how 
 very different!}' Alma Leighton would have judged 
 her from Miss Vance's premises. He liked that 
 clear vision of Alma's even when it pierced his own 
 disguises. Yes, that was the light he had let die 
 out, and it mi.;ht have shone upon his path through 
 life. Beaton never felt so poignantly the dis- 
 advantage of having on any given occasion been 
 wanting to his own interests through his self-love 
 as in this. He had no one to blame but himself for 
 what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what 
 might happen in the future because she shut out the 
 way of retrieval and return. When he thought of 
 the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed 
 incredible, and he was always longing to give her a 
 final chance to reverse her final judgment. It 
 appeared to him that the time had come for this 
 now, if ever.
 
 XV. 
 
 WHILE we are still young we feel a kind of pride,, 
 a sort of fierce pleasure, in any important experi- 
 ence, such as we have read of or heard of in the 
 lives of others, no matter how painful. It was this 
 pride, this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realis- 
 ing that the toils of fate were about him, that 
 between him and a future of which Christine Dry- 
 foos must be the genius, there was nothing but the 
 will, the mood, the fancy of a girl who had not 
 given him the hope that either could ever again be 
 in his favour. He had nothing to trust to, in fact, 
 but his knowledge that he had once had them all ; 
 she did not deny that ; but neither did she conceal 
 that he had flung away his power over them, and 
 she had told him that they never could be his again. 
 A man knows that he can love and wholly cease to 
 love, not once merely, but several times ; he recog- 
 nises the fact in regard to himself, both theoretically 
 and practically ; but in regard to women he cherishes 
 the superstition of the romances that love is once 
 for all, and for ever. It was because Beaton would 
 not believe that Alma Leigh ton, being a woman, 
 could put him out of her heart after suffering him
 
 302 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 to steal into it, that he now hoped anything from 
 her, and she had been so explicit when they last 
 spoke of that affair that he did not hope much. 
 He said to himself that he was going to cast hirri- 
 self on her mercy, to take whatever chance of 
 life, love, and work there was in her having the 
 smallest pity on him. If she would have none, 
 then there was but one thing he could do : marry 
 Christine and go abroad. He did not see how he 
 could bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; 
 even if she knew what he would do in case of a 
 final rejection, he had grounds for fearing she would 
 not care ; but he brought it to bear upon himself, 
 and it nerved him to a desperate courage. He 
 could hardly wait for evening to come, before he 
 went to see her ; when it came, it seemed to have 
 come too soon. He had wrought himself thoroughly 
 into the conviction that he was in earnest, and that 
 everything depended upon her answer to him, but 
 it was not till he found himself in her presence, and 
 alone with her, that he realised the truth of his 
 conviction. Then the influences of her grace, her 
 gaiety, her arch beauty, above all, her good sense, 
 penetrated his soul like a subtle intoxication, and he 
 "said to himself that he was right; he could not 
 live without her ; these attributes of hers were what 
 he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, 
 to guide him. He longed so to please her, to in- 
 gratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be 
 light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal 
 absences, and gloomy recesses of introspection.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 303 
 
 " What are you laughing at ? " he asked, suddenly 
 starting from one of these. 
 
 " What you are thinking of." 
 
 " It 's nothing to laugh at. Do you know what it 
 is I 'm thinking of 1 ' 
 
 " Don't tell, if it 's dreadful." 
 
 " Oh, I dare say you wouldn't think it 's dreadful," 
 he said, with bitterness. "It's simply the case of a 
 man who has made a fool of himself, and sees no 
 help of retrieval in himself." 
 
 " Can any one else help a man unmake a fool of 
 himself 1 " she asked, with a smile. 
 
 "Yes. In a case like this." 
 
 "Dear me ! This is very interesting." 
 
 She did not ask him what the case was, but he 
 vvas launched now, and he pressed on. " I am the 
 man who has made a fool of himself " 
 
 " Oh ! " 
 
 " And you can help me out if you will. Alma, I 
 wish you could see me as I really am." 
 
 " Do you, Mr. Beaton 1 Perhaps I do." 
 
 "No; you don't. You formulated me in a cer- 
 tain way, and you won't allow for the change that 
 takes place in every one. You have changed ; why 
 shouldn't I ? " 
 
 " Has this to do with your having made a fool of 
 yourself ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Oh ! Then I don't see how you have changed." 
 
 She laughed, and he too, ruefully. " You 're cruel. 
 Not but what I deserve your mockery. But the 
 2T
 
 304 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Change was not from the capacity of making a fool 
 of myself. I suppose I shall always do that more 
 or less unless you help me. Alma ! Why can't 
 you have a little compassion ? You know that I 
 must always love you." 
 
 " Nothing makes me doubt that like your saying it, 
 Mr. Beaton. But now you 've broken your word 
 
 " You are to blame for that. You knew I couldn't 
 keep it ! " 
 
 "Yes, I'm to blame. I was wrong to let you 
 come after that. And so I forgive you for speak- 
 ing to me in that way again. But it 's perfectly im- 
 possible and perfectly useless for me to hear you any 
 more on that subject ; and so good-bye ! " 
 
 She rose, and he perforce with her. "And do 
 you mean it 1 " he asked. " For ever ? " 
 
 " For ever. This is truly the last time I will ever 
 see you if I can help it. Oh, I feel sorry enough for 
 you ! " she said, with a glance at his face. " I do 
 believe you are in earnest. But it 's too late now. 
 Don't let us talk about it any more ! But we shall, 
 if we meet, and so " 
 
 " And so good-bye ! Well I 've nothing more to 
 say, and I might as well say that. I think you Ve 
 been very good to me. It seems to me as if you had 
 been shall I say it 1 trying to give me a chance. 
 Is that so ? " 
 
 She dropped her eyes and did not answer. 
 
 " You found it was no use ! Well, I thank you 
 for trying. It's curious to think that I once had 
 your trust, your regard, and now I haven't it. You
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 305 
 
 don't mind my remembering that I had 1 It '11 be 
 some little consolation, and I believe it will be some 
 help. I know I can't retrieve the past now. It is 
 too late. It seems too preposterous perfectly lurid 
 that I could have been going to tell you what a 
 tangle I 'd got myself in, and to ask you to help 
 untangle me. I must choke in the infernal coil, but 
 I 'd like to have the sweetness of your pity in it 
 whatever it is." 
 
 She put out her hand. " Whatever it is. I do pity 
 you ; I said that." 
 
 " Thank you." He kissed the hand she gave him 
 and went. 
 
 He had gone on some such terms before ; was it 
 now for the last time ? She believed it was. She 
 felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in which his good 
 looks, his invented airs and poses, his real trouble, 
 were all alike repulsive. She did not acquit herself 
 of the wrong of having let him think she might yet 
 have liked him as she once did ; but she had been 
 honestly willing to see whether she could. It had 
 mystified her to find that when they first met in 
 New York, after their summer in St. Barnaby, she 
 cared nothing for him ; she had expected to punish 
 him for his neglect, and then fancy him as before, 
 but she did not. More and more she saw him selfish 
 and mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded and hard- 
 hearted ; and aimless, with all his talent. She ad- 
 mired his talent in proportion as she learned more 
 of artists, and perceived how uncommon it was ; but 
 she said to herself that if she were going to devote
 
 306 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 herself to art, she would do it at first hand. She 
 was perfectly serene and happy in her final rejection 
 of Beaton ; he had worn out not only her fancy, but 
 her sympathy too. 
 
 This was what her mother would not believe when 
 Alma reported the interview to her ; she would not 
 believe it was the last time they should meet ; death 
 itself can hardly convince us that it is the last time 
 of anything, of everything between ourselves and 
 the dead. " Well, Alma," she said, " I hope you '11 
 never regret what you Ve done." 
 
 " You may be sure I shall not regret it. If ever 
 I 'm low-spirited about anything, I '11 think of giving 
 Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that will cheer me up." 
 
 " And don't you expect to get married ? Do you 
 intend to be an old maid ? " demanded her mother, 
 in the bonds of the superstition women have so long 
 been under to the effect that every woman must 
 wish to get married, if for no other purpose than to 
 avoid being an old maid. 
 
 " Well, mamma," said Alma, " I intend being a 
 young one for a few years yet ; and then I '11 see. 
 If I meet the right person, ail well and good ; if not, 
 not. But I shall pick and chose, as a man does ; I 
 won't merely be picked and chosen." 
 
 " You can't help yourself ; you may be very glad 
 if you are picked and chosen." 
 
 " What nonsense, mamma ! A girl can get any 
 man she wants, if she goes about it the right way. 
 And when my ' fated fairy prince ' comes along, I 
 shall just simply make furious love to him, and grab
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 307 
 
 him. Of course, I shall make a decent pretence of 
 talking in my sleep. I believe it 's done that way, 
 more than half the time. The fated fairy prince 
 wouldn't see the princess in nine cases out of ten if 
 she didn't say something ; he would go mooning 
 along after the maids of honour." 
 
 Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror ; 
 but she broke down and laughed. " Well, you are 
 a strange girl, Alma." 
 
 " I don't know about that. But one thing I do 
 know, mamma, and that is that Prince Beaton isn't 
 the F. F. P. for me. How strange you are, mamma ! 
 Don't you think it would be perfectly disgusting to 
 accept a person you didn't care for, and let him go 
 on and love you and marry you ? It's sickening." 
 
 " Why, certainly, Alma. It 's only because I know 
 you did care for him once " 
 
 "And now I don't. And he didn't care for me 
 once, and now he does. And so we 're quits." 
 
 " If I could believe 
 
 " You had better brace up and try, mamma ; for 
 as Mr. Fulkerson says, it 's as sure as guns. From 
 the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he 's 
 loathsome to me ; and he keeps getting loathsomer. 
 Ugh ! Good night ! "
 
 XVI. 
 
 " WELL, I guess she 's given him the grand bounce, 
 at last," said Fulkerson to March in one of their 
 moments of confidence at the office. " That 's Mad's 
 inference from appearances and disappearances; 
 and some little hints from Ma Leigh ton." 
 
 "Well, I don't know that I have any criticisms 
 to offer," said March. " It may be bad for Beaton, 
 but it's a very good thing for Miss Leighton. Upon 
 the whole, I believe I congratulate her." 
 
 " Well, I don't know. I always kind of hoped it 
 would turn out the other way. You know I always 
 had a sneaking fondness for the fellow." 
 
 "Miss Leighton seems not to have had." 
 
 "It's a pity she hadn't. I tell you, March, it 
 ain't so easy for a girl to get married, here in the 
 East, that she can afford to despise any chance." 
 
 " Isn't that rather a low view of it 1 " 
 
 "It's a common-sense view. Beaton has the 
 making of a first-rate fellow in him. He 's the raw 
 material of a great artist and a good citizen. All 
 he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep 
 him from makin' an ass of himself and kickin' over
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 309 
 
 the traces generally, and ridin' two or three horses 
 bareback at once." 
 
 " It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor: 
 is rather complicated," said March. " But talk to 
 Miss Leighton about it. / haven't given Beaton 
 the grand bounce." 
 
 He began to turn over the manuscripts on his 
 table, and Fulkerson went away. But March found 
 himself thinking of the matter from time to time 
 during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it 
 when he went home. She surprised him by taking 
 Fulkerson's view of it. 
 
 " Yes, it 's a pity she couldn't have made up her 
 mind to have him. It 's better for a woman to be 
 married." 
 
 " I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was 
 well. But what would become of Miss Leighton's 
 artistic career if she married 1 " 
 
 " Oh, her artistic career ! " said Mrs. March, with 
 matronly contempt of it. 
 
 " But look here ! " cried her husband. " Suppose 
 she doesn't like him ? " 
 
 "How can a girl of that age tell whether she 
 likes any one or not ? " 
 
 "It seems to me you were able to tell at that age, 
 Isabel. But let 's examine this thing. (This thing ! 
 I believe Fulkerson is characterising my whole par- 
 lance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn't we 
 rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage ? 
 When we consider the enormous risks people take 
 in linking their lives together, after not half so
 
 310 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I 
 think we ought to be glad whenever they don't do 
 it. I believe that this popular demand for the 
 matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. 
 We get to thinking that there is no other happiness 
 or good fortune in life except marriage ; and it 's 
 offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, 
 courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life. 
 We all know it isn't. We know that in reality 
 marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it 
 for the asking if he keeps asking enough people. 
 By-and-by some fellow will wake up and see that a 
 first-class story can be written from the anti-marriage 
 point of view ; and he '11 begin with an engaged 
 couple, and devote his novel to disengaging them, 
 and rendering them separately happy ever after in 
 the cUnofiment. It will make his everlasting for- 
 tune." 
 
 " Why don't you write it, Basil 1 " she asked. "It 's 
 a delightful idea. You could do it splendidly." 
 
 He became fascinated with the notion. He de- 
 veloped it in detail ; but at the end he sighed and 
 said, "With this Every Other Week work on my 
 hands, of course I can't attempt a novel. But per- 
 haps I sha'n't have it long." 
 
 She was instantly anxious to know what he 
 meant, and the novel and Miss Leighton's affair 
 were both dropped out of their thoughts. " What 
 do you mean ? Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything 
 yet?" 
 
 " Not a word. He knows no more about it than
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 311 
 
 I do. Dryfoos hasn't spoken, and we 're both afraid 
 to ask him. Of course, I couldn't ask him." 
 
 " No." 
 
 " But it 's pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hang- 
 ing by the gills, so, as Fulkerson says." 
 
 " Yes, we don't know what to do." 
 
 March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; 
 and Fulkerson said that if the old man pulled out, 
 he did not know what would happen. He had no 
 capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that 
 the old man had pulled out would damage it so that 
 it would be hard to get anybody else to put it. In 
 the meantime Fulkerson was running Conrad's 
 office-work, when he ought to be looking after the 
 outside interests of the thing ; and he could not see 
 the day when he could get married. 
 
 " I don't know which it 's worse for, March : you 
 or me. I don't know, under the circumstances, 
 whether it 's worse to have a family or to want to 
 ^ave one. Of course of course ! We can't hurry 
 the old man up. It wouldn't be decent, and it 
 would be dangerous. We got to wait." 
 
 He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos. for some 
 money ; he did not need any, but he said may be the 
 demand would act as a hint upon him. One day, 
 about a week after Alma's final rejection of Beaton, 
 Dryfoos came into March's office. Fulkerson was out, 
 but the old man seemed not to have tried to see him. 
 
 He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he 
 sat down, and looked at March a while with his old 
 eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old eyes
 
 312 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 stimulated to sleeplessness. Then he said abruptly, 
 " Mr. March, how would you like to take this thing 
 off my hands ? " 
 
 " I don't understand, exactly," March began ; but 
 of course he understood that Dryfoos was offering to 
 let him have Every Other Week, on some terms or 
 other, and his heart leaped with hope. 
 
 The old man knew he understood, and so he did 
 not explain. He said, "I am going to Europe, to 
 take my family there. The doctor thinks it might 
 do my wife some good ; and I ain't very well myself 
 and my girls both want to go ; and so we 're goin'. 
 If you want to take this thing off my hands, I reckon 
 I can let you have it in 'most any shape you say. 
 You're all settled here in New York, and I don't 
 suppose you want to break up, much, at your time 
 of life, and I 've been thinkin' whether you wouldn't 
 like to take the thing." 
 
 The word, which Dryfoos had now used three 
 times, made March at last think of Fulkerson ; he 
 had been filled too full of himself to think of any one 
 else till he had mastered the notion of such wonderful 
 good fortune as seemed about falling to him. But 
 now, he did think of Fulkerson, and with some 
 shame and confusion ; for he remembered how when 
 Dryfoos had last approached him there on the 
 business of his connection with Every Other Week, he 
 had been very haughty with him, and told him that 
 he did not know him in this connection. He blushed 
 to find how far his thoughts had now run without 
 jencountering this obstacle of etiquette.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 313 
 
 " Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson 1 " he asked. 
 
 "No, I hain't. It ain't a question of manage- 
 ment. It 's a question of buying and selling. I offer 
 the thing to you first. I reckon Fulkerson couldn't 
 get on very well without you." 
 
 March saw the real difference in the two cases, 
 and he was glad to see it, because he could act more 
 decisively if not hampered by an obligation to con- 
 sistency. " I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos ; 
 extremely gratified ; and it 's no use pretending that 
 I shouldn't be happy beyond bounds to get posses- 
 sion of Every Other Week. But I don't feel quite 
 free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson." 
 
 " Oh, all right ! " said the old man, with quick 
 offence. 
 
 March hastened to say, " I feel bound to Mr. Ful- 
 kerson in every way. He got me to come here, and 
 I couldn't even seem to act without him." 
 
 He put it questioningly, and the old man an- 
 swered, "Yes, I can see that. When '11 he be in 1 I 
 can wait." But he looked impatient. 
 
 "Very soon, now," said March, looking at his 
 watch. " He was only to be gone a moment," and 
 while he went on to talk with Dryfoos, he wondered 
 why the old man should have come first to speak 
 with him, and whether it was from some obscure 
 wish to make him reparation for displeasures in the 
 past, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson. 
 Whichever light he looked at it in, it was flattering. 
 
 "Do you think of going abroad soon ?" he asked. 
 
 "What? Yes I don't know I reckon. We 
 VOL. II. 14
 
 314 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 got our passage engaged. It's on one of them 
 French boats. We 're goin' to Paris." 
 
 "Oh! That will be interesting to the young 
 ladies." 
 
 "Yes. I reckon we're goin' for them. Tain't 
 likely my Avife and me would want to pull up stakes 
 at our age," said the old man sorrowfully. 
 
 " But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos," 
 said March, with a kindness that was real, mixed as 
 it was with the selfish interest he now had in the 
 intended voyage. 
 
 " Well, may be, may be," sighed the old man ; and 
 he dropped his head forward. " It don't make a 
 great deal of difference what we do or we don't do, 
 for the few years left." 
 
 "I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual," said 
 March, finding the ground delicate and difficult. 
 
 "MiddhV, middlin'," said the old man. "My 
 daughter Christine, she ain't very well." 
 
 "Oh," said March. It was quite impossible for 
 him to affect a more explicit interest in the fact. 
 He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few moments, and 
 he was vainly casting about in his thought for some- 
 thing else which would tide them over the interval 
 till Fulkerson came, when he heard his step on the 
 stairs. 
 
 " Hello, hello !" he said. " Meeting of the clans !" 
 It was always a meeting of the clans, with Fulker- 
 son, or a field day, or an extra session, or a regular 
 conclave, whenever he saw people of any common 
 interest together. " Hain't seen you here for a good
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 315 
 
 while, Mr. Dryfoos. Did think some of running 
 away with Every Other Week one while, but couldn't 
 seem to work March up to the point." 
 
 He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the 
 papers on the corner of March's desk, and sat down 
 there, and went on briskly with the nonsense he 
 could always talk, while he was waiting for another 
 to develop any matter of business ; he told March 
 afterward that he scented business in the air as soon 
 as he came into the room where he and Dryfoos 
 were sitting. 
 
 Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to 
 March, who said, after an inquiring look at him, 
 "Mr. Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have 
 Every Other Week, Fulkerson." 
 
 " Well, that 's good ; that suits yours truly ; March 
 & Fulkerson, publishers and proprietors, won't pre- 
 tend it don't, if the. terms are all right." 
 
 " The terms," said the old man, " are whatever 
 you want 'em. I haven't got any more use for the 
 
 concern " He gulped, and stopped ; they knew 
 
 what he was thinking of, and they looked down in 
 pity. He went on. " I woon't put any more money 
 in it ; but what I 've put in a'ready, can stay ; and 
 you can pay me four per cent." 
 
 He got upon his feet ; and March and Fulkerson 
 stood, too. 
 
 " Well, I call that pretty white," said Fulkerson. 
 " It 's a bargain as far as I 'm concerned. I suppose 
 you '11 want to talk it over with your wife, March ? " 
 
 " Yes ; I shall," said March. " I can see that it's
 
 316 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 a great chance ; but I want to talk it over with my 
 wife." 
 
 " Well, that 's right," said the old man. " Let me 
 hear from you to-morrow." 
 
 He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round 
 the room. He caught March about his stalwart girth 
 and tried to make him waltz ; the office-boy came to 
 the door, and looked on with approval. 
 
 " Come, come, you idiot ! " said March, rooting 
 himself to the carpet. 
 
 " It 's just throwing the thing into our mouths," 
 said Fulkerson. " The wedding will be this day 
 week. No cards ! Teedle-lumpty diddle ! Teedle- 
 lumpty-dee ! What do you suppose he means by it, 
 March ? " he asked, bringing himself soberly up, of a 
 sudden. " What is his little game ? Or is he crazy ? 
 It don't seem like the Dryfoos of my previous 
 acquaintance." 
 
 " I suppose," March suggested, " that he 's got 
 money enough, so that he don't care for this " 
 
 " Pshaw ! You 're a poet ! Don't you know that 
 the more money that kind of man has got, the more 
 he cares for money 1 It 's some fancy of his like 
 
 having Lindau's funeral at his house By jings, 
 
 March, I believe you 're his fancy ! " 
 
 " Oh, now ! Don't you be a poet, Fulkerson ! " 
 
 " I do ! He seemed to take a kind of shine to you 
 from the day you wouldn't turn off old Lindau ; he 
 did indeed. It kind of shook him up. It made him 
 think you had something in you. He was deceived 
 by appearances. Look here ! I 'm going round to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 317 
 
 see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing to 
 her. I know Mrs. March ! She wouldn't believe 
 you knew what you were going in for. She has a 
 great respect for your mind, but she don't think 
 you 've got any sense. Heigh 1 " 
 
 " All right," said March, glad of the notion ; and 
 it was really a comfort to have Fulkerson with him 
 to develop all the points ; and it was delightful to 
 see how clearly and quickly she seized them ; it 
 made March proud of her. She was only angry 
 that they had lost any time in coming to submit 
 so plain a case to her. Mr. Dryfoos might change 
 his mind in the night, and then everything would 
 be lost. They must go to him instantly, and tell 
 him that they accepted ; they must telegraph him. 
 
 "Might as well send a district messenger; he'd 
 get there next week," said Fulkerson. " No, no ! 
 It'll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better for 
 it. If he 's got this fancy for March, as I say, he 
 ain't agoing to change it in a single night. People 
 don't change their fancies for March in a lifetime. 
 Heigh ? " 
 
 When Fulkerson turned up very early at the 
 office next morning, as March did, he was less 
 strenuous about Dryfoos's fancy for March. It was 
 as if Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon 
 that theory, as something unjust to his own merit, 
 for which she would naturally be more jealous than 
 he. 
 
 March told him, what he had forgotten to tell 
 him the day before, though he had been trying, all
 
 318 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 through their excited talk, to get it in, that the 
 Dryfooses were going abroad. 
 
 " Oh, ho ! " cried Fulkerson. " That 's the milk in 
 the cocoanut, is it ? Well, I thought there must be 
 something." 
 
 But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all 
 in her conviction that it was Mr. Dryfoos's fancy 
 for her husband which had moved him to make him 
 this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that 
 it had first been made to him, without regard to 
 Fulkerson. "And perhaps," she went on, "Mr. 
 Dryfoos has been changed softened ; and doesn't 
 find money all in all any more. He 's had enough 
 to change him, poor old man ! " 
 
 " Does anything from without change us 1 " her 
 husband mused aloud. " We 're brought up to 
 think so by the novelists, who really have the 
 charge of people's thinking, nowadays. But I 
 doubt it, especially if the thing outside is some 
 great event, something cataclysmal, like this tre- 
 mendous sorrow of Dryfoos's." 
 
 "Then what is it that changes us? " demanded his 
 wife, almost angry with him for his heresy. 
 
 "Well, it won't do to say, the Holy Spirit in- 
 dwelling. That would sound like cant at this day. 
 But the old fellows that used to say that had some 
 glimpses of the truth. They knew that it is the 
 still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the 
 deafening blasts of doom. I suppose I should have 
 to say that we didn't change at all. We develop. 
 There 's the making of several characters in each of
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 319 
 
 us ; we are each several characters, and sometimes 
 this character has the lead in us, and sometimes 
 that. From what Fulkerson has told me of Dry- 
 foos I should say he had always had the potentiality 
 of better things in him than he has ever been yet ; 
 and perhaps the time has come for the good to 
 have its chance. The growth in one direction has 
 stopped ; it 's begun in another ; that 's all. The 
 man hasn't been changed by his son's death ; it 
 stunned, it benumbed him ; but it couldn't change 
 him. It was an event, like any other, and it had 
 to happen as much as his being born. It was fore- 
 cast from the beginning of time, and was as en- 
 tirely an effect of his coming into the world " 
 
 " Basil ! Basil I " cried his wife. " This is fatal- 
 ism ! " 
 
 " Then you think," he said, " that a sparrow falls 
 to the ground without the will of God ? " and he 
 laughed provokingly. But he went on more soberly. 
 " I don't know what it all means, Isabel, though I 
 believe it means good. What did Christ himself 
 say ? That if one rose from the dead it would not 
 avail. And yet we are always looking for the mira- 
 culous ! I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves 
 for his son, whom he treated cruelly without the final 
 intention of cruelty, for he loved him and wished to 
 be proud of him ; but I don't think his death has 
 changed him, any more than the smallest event in 
 the chain of events remotely working through his 
 nature from the beginning. But why do you think 
 he 's changed at all 1 Because he offers to sell me 
 2U
 
 320 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 Every Other Week on easy terms ? He says himself 
 that he has no further use for the thing; and he 
 knows perfectly well that he couldn't get his money 
 out of it now, without an enormous shrinkage. He 
 couldn't appear at this late day as the owner, and 
 sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth 
 of what it's cost him. He can sell it to us for all 
 it 's cost him ; and four per cent, is no bad interest 
 on his money till we can pay it back. It 's a good 
 thing for us ; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos 
 has done us the good, or whether it 's the blessing 
 of Heaven. If it 's merely the blessing of Heaven, I 
 don't propose being grateful for it." 
 
 March laughed again, and his wife said, " It 's 
 disgusting." 
 
 " It 's business," he assented. " Business is busi- 
 ness; but I don't say it isn't disgusting. Lindau 
 had a low opinion of it." 
 
 " I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a 
 better man than Lindau," she proclaimed. 
 
 " Well, he 's certainly able to offer us a better 
 thing in Every Other Week," said March. 
 
 She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish 
 of his cynicism, and that at heart he was as humbly 
 and truly grateful as she was for the good fortune 
 opening to them.
 
 XVII. 
 
 BEATON was at his best when he parted for the 
 last time with Alma Leighton, for he saw then that 
 what had happened to him was the necessary conse- 
 quence of what he had been, if not what he had 
 done. Afterward he lost this clear vision ; he began 
 to deny the fact ; he drew upon his knowledge of 
 life, and in arguing himself into a different frame of 
 mind he alleged the case of different people who had 
 done and been much worse things than he, and yet 
 no such disagreeable consequence had befallen them. 
 Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance, 
 and he said to himself that it was this that made him 
 desperate, and willing to call evil his good, and to 
 take his own wherever he could find it. There was a 
 great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry 
 in the mood in which he went to see Christine Dry- 
 foos, the night when the Marches sat talking their 
 prospects over ; and nothing that was decided in his 
 purpose. He knew what the drift of his mind was, 
 but he had always preferred to let chance determine 
 his events, and now since chance had played him 
 such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole re- 
 sponsibility. Not in terms, but in effect, this was 
 14*
 
 322 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 his thought as he walked on uptown to pay the first 
 of the visits which Dryfoos had practically invited 
 him to resume. He had an insolent satisfaction in 
 having delayed it so long ; if he was going back he 
 was going back on his own conditions, and. these 
 were to be as hard and humiliating as he could make 
 them. But this intention again was inchoate, float- 
 ing, the stuff of an intention, rather than intention ; 
 an expression of temperament chiefly. 
 
 He had been expected before that. Christine had 
 got out of Mela that her father had been at Beaton's 
 studio, and then she had gone at the old man and 
 got from him every smallest fact of the interview 
 there. She had flung back in his teeth the good-will 
 toward herself with which he had gone to Beaton. 
 She was furious with shame and resentment ; she 
 told him he had made bad worse, that he had made 
 a fool of himself to no end ; she spared neither his 
 age, nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will 
 could not rise against hers. She filled the house 
 with her rage, screaming it out upon him ; but when 
 her fury was once spent, she began to have some 
 hopes from what her father had done. She no 
 longer kept her bed; every evening she dressed 
 herself in the dress Beaton admired the most, and 
 sat up till a certain hour to receive him. She had 
 fixed a day in her own mind before which, if he 
 came, she would forgive him all he had made her 
 suffer : the mortification, the suspense, the despair. 
 Beyond this, she had the purpose of making her 
 father go to Europe ; she felt that she could no
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 323 
 
 longer live in America, with the double disgrace 
 that had been put upon her. 
 
 Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming 
 the insolent caprice seized him to ask for the young 
 ladies instead of the old man, as he had supposed 
 of course he should do. The maid who answered 
 the bell, in the place of the reluctant Irishman of 
 other days, had all his hesitation in admitting that 
 the young ladies were at home. 
 
 He found Mela in the drawing-room. At sight of 
 him she looked scared ; but she seemed to be reas- 
 sured by his calm. He asked if he was not to have 
 the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos too ; and Mela 
 said she reckoned the girl had gone upstairs to tell 
 her. Mela was in black, and Beaton noted how well 
 the solid sable became her rich, red blond beauty ; 
 he wondered what the effect would be with Christine. 
 
 But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning. 
 He fancied that she wore the lustrous black silk, 
 with the breadths of white Venetian lace about the 
 neck which he had praised, because he praised it. 
 Her cheeks burned with a Jacqueminot crimson, 
 what should be white in her face was chalky white. 
 She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, 
 and after giving him her hand, sat down and waved 
 it to and fro slowly, as he remembered her doing 
 the night they first met. She had no ideas, except 
 such as related intimately to herself, and she had no 
 gabble, like Mela ; and she let him talk. It was 
 past the day when she had promised herself she 
 would forgive him ; but as he talked on she felt all
 
 324 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 her passion for him revived, and the conflict of desires, 
 the desire to hate, the desire to love, made a dizzying 
 whirl in her brain. She looked at him, half doubting 
 whether he was really there or not. He had never 
 looked so handsome, with his dreamy eyes floating 
 under his heavy overhanging hair, and his pointed 
 brown beard defined against his lustrous shirt-front. 
 His mellowly modulated, mysterious voice lulled her; 
 when Mela made an errand out of the room, and 
 Beaton crossed to her and sat down by her she 
 shivered. 
 
 " Are you cold ? " he asked, and she felt the cruel 
 mockery and exultant consciousness of power in his 
 tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels captivity in the 
 voice of its keeper. But now, she said she would 
 still forgive him if he asked her. 
 
 Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the 
 former level ; but Beaton had not said anything 
 that really meant what she wished, and she saw that 
 he intended to say nothing. Her heart began to 
 burn like a fire in her breast. 
 
 "You been tellun' him about our goun' to 
 Europe ? " Mela asked. 
 
 "No," said Christine briefly, and looking at the 
 fan spread out on her lap. 
 
 Beaton asked when ; and then he rose, and said 
 if it was so soon, he supposed he should not see 
 them again, unless he saw them in Paris j he might 
 very likely run over, during the summer. He said 
 to himself that he had given it a fair trial with 
 Christine, and he could not make it go.
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 325 
 
 Christine rose, with a kind of gasp, and mechani- 
 cally followed him to the door of the drawing-room ; 
 Mela came too; and while he was putting on his 
 overcoat, she gurgled and bubbled in good-humour 
 with all the world. Christine stood looking at him, 
 and thinking how handsomer still he was in his over- 
 coat ; and that fire burned fiercer in her. She felt 
 him more than life to her and knew him lost, and 
 the frenzy that makes a woman kill the man she 
 loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she can- 
 not have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul. 
 He gave his hand to Mela, and said, in his wind- 
 harp stop, " Good-bye." 
 
 As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed 
 it aside with a scream of rage ; she flashed at him, 
 and with both hands made a feline pass at the face 
 he bent toward her. He sprang back,, and after an 
 instant of stupefaction he pulled open the door be- 
 hind him, and ran out into the street. 
 
 " Well, Christine Dryfoos ! " said Mela. " Spag 
 at him like a wild-cat ! " 
 
 " I don't care," Christine shrieked. " I '11 tear his 
 eyes out ! " She flew upstairs to her own room, and 
 left the burden of the explanation to Mela, who did 
 it justice. 
 
 Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in 
 his studio, reeking with perspiration and breathless. 
 He must almost have run. He struck a match with 
 a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass. 
 He expected to see the bleeding marks of her nails 
 on his cheeks, but he could see nothing. He
 
 326 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 grovelled inwardly ; it was all so low and coarse and 
 vulgar ; it was all so just and apt to his deserts. 
 
 There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on 
 the mantel which he had kept loaded to fire at a cat 
 in the area. He took it and sat looking into the 
 muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill 
 him. It slipped through his hand and struck the 
 floor, and there was a report; he sprang into the 
 air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found 
 himself still alive, with only a burning line along his 
 cheek, such as one of Christine's finger-nails might 
 have left. 
 
 He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact 
 that he had got his punishment in the right way, and 
 that his case was not to be dignified into tragedy.
 
 XVIII. 
 
 THE Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the 
 Dryfooses off on the French steamer. There was 
 no longer any business obligation on them to be 
 civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason 
 in the attention they offered. Every Other Week had 
 been made over to the joint ownership of March 
 and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a 
 hardness on Dryfoos's side which certainly left Mrs. 
 March with a sense of his incomplete regeneration. 
 Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she 
 pitied him ; he looked wearied and bewildered ; 
 even his wife, with her twitching head, and her 
 prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely out, while she 
 clung to Mrs. March's hand where they sat together 
 till the leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less 
 pathetic. Mela was looking after both of them, and 
 trying to cheer them, in a joyful excitement. " I 
 tell 'em it's goun' to add ten years to both their 
 lives," she said. "The voyage '11 do their healths 
 good ; and then, we 're gittun' away from that 
 miser'ble pack o' servants that was eatun' us up, 
 there in New York. I hate the place ! " she said, 
 as if they had already left it. " Yes, Mrs. Mandel 's
 
 328 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 goun', too," she added, following the direction of 
 Mrs. March's eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel 
 speaking to Christine on the other side of the cabin. 
 " Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, and she 
 was goun' to leave, hut here only the other day, 
 Christine offered to make it up with her, and now 
 they're as thick as thieves. Well, I reckon we 
 couldn't very well 'a' got along without her. She 's 
 about the only one that speaks French in this family." 
 
 Mrs. March's eyes still dwelt upon Christine's 
 face ; it was full of a furtive wildness. She seemed 
 to be keeping a watch to prevent herself from look- 
 ing as if she were looking for some one. " Do you 
 know," Mrs. March said to her husband as they 
 jingled along homeward in the Christopher Street 
 T^ob-tail car, " I thought she was in love with that de- 
 testable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time ; and that 
 he was amusing himself with her." 
 
 " I can bear a good deal, Isabel," said March, " but 
 I wish you wouldn't attribute Beaton to me. He 's 
 the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of yours." 
 
 " Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you '11 both get 
 rid of him, in the reforms you 're going to carry out." 
 
 These reforms were for a greater economy in the 
 management of Every Other Week ; but in their very 
 nature they could not include the suppression of 
 Beaton. He had always shown himself capable 
 and loyal to the interests of the magazine, and both 
 the new owners were glad to keep him. He was 
 glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of 
 indifference, when they came to look over the new
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 329 
 
 arrangement with him. In his heart he knew that 
 he was a fraud ; but at least he could say to himself 
 with truth that he had not now the shame of taking 
 Dryfoos's money. 
 
 March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points 
 where it had seemed indispensable to spend, as long 
 as they were not spending their own : that was only 
 human. Fulkerson absorbed Conrad's department 
 into his, and March found that he could dispense 
 with Kendricks in the place of assistant which he 
 had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that 
 March was overworked. They reduced the number 
 of illustrated articles, and they systematised the pay- 
 ment of contributors strictly according to the sales 
 of each number, on their original plan of co-opera- 
 tion : they had got to paying rather lavishly for 
 material without reference to the sales. 
 
 Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and 
 went on his wedding journey out to Niagara, and 
 down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line of 
 travel that the Marches had taken in their wedding 
 journey. He had the pleasure of going from Mon- 
 treal to Quebec on the same boat on which he first 
 met March. 
 
 They have continued very good friends, and their 
 wives are almost without the rivalry that usually 
 embitters the wives of partners. At first Mrs. 
 March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson's speaking of 
 her husband as the Ownah, and March as the 
 Edito'j but it appeared that this was only a con- 
 venient method of recognising the predominant
 
 330 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 quality in each, and was meant neither to affirm 
 nor to deny anything. Colonel Woodburn offered 
 as his contribution to the celebration of the co- 
 partnership, which Fulkerson could not be pre- 
 vented from dedicating with a little dinner, the 
 story of Fulkerson's magnanimous behaviour in 
 regard to Dryfoos at that crucial moment when it 
 was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos 
 or give up March. Fulkerson winced at it ; but 
 Mrs. March told her husband that now, whatever 
 happened, she should never have any misgivings of 
 Fulkerson again ; and she asked him if he did not 
 think he ought to apologise to him for the doubts 
 with which he had once inspired her. March said 
 that he did not think so. 
 
 The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside 
 hotel in easy reach of the city ; but they returned 
 early to Mrs. Leighton's, with whom they are to 
 board till spring, when they are going to fit up Ful- 
 kerson's bachelor apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. 
 March, with her Boston scruple, thinks it will be 
 odd, living over the Every Other Wed: offices; but 
 there will be a separate street entrance to the 
 apartment; and besides, in New York you may do 
 anything. 
 
 The future of the Leightons promises no imme- 
 diate change. Kendricks goes there a good deal to 
 see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he 
 comes to see Alma. He has seemed taken with her 
 ever since he first met her at Dryfoos's, the day of 
 Lindau's funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to
 
 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 331 
 
 dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that 
 kind, he justly argues with March that there can be 
 no harm in it, and that we are liable to be struck by 
 lightning any time. In the meanwhile there is no 
 proof that Alma returns Kenclricks' interest, if he 
 feels any. She has got a little bit of colour into the 
 fall exhibition ; but the fall exhibition is never so 
 good as the spring exhibition. Wetmore is rather 
 sorry she has succeeded in this, though he promoted 
 her success. He says her real hope is in black and 
 white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her 
 original aim of drawing for illustration. . 
 
 News has come from Paris of the engagement of 
 Christine Dryfoos. There the Dryfooses met with 
 the success denied them in New York ; many 
 American plutocrats must await their apotheosis in 
 Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a 
 translation. Shortly after their arrival they were 
 celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire 
 American family of natural-gas extraction who had 
 arrived in the capital of civilisation ; and at a French 
 watering-place Christine encountered her fate a 
 nobleman full of present debts and of duels in the 
 past. Fulkerson says the old man can manage the 
 debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist. 
 " They say those fellows generally whip their wives. 
 He 'd better not try it with Christine, I reckon, un- 
 less he 's practised with a panther." 
 
 One day, shortly after their return to town in the 
 autumn from the brief summer outing they permitted 
 themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance. At
 
 332 A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. 
 
 first they did not know her in the dress of the sister- 
 hood which she wore; but she smiled joyfully, 
 almost gaily, on seeing them, and though she hurried 
 by with the sister who accompanied her, and did 
 not stay to speak, they felt that the peace that 
 passeth understanding had looked at them from her 
 eyes. 
 
 " Well, she is at rest, there can't be any doubt of 
 that," he said, as he glanced round at the drifting 
 black robe which folloAved her free, nun-like walk. 
 
 "Yes, now she can do all the good she likes," 
 sighed his wife. " I wonder I wonder if she ever 
 told his father about her talk with poor Conrad that 
 day he was shot ? " 
 
 "I don't know. I don't care. In any event it 
 would be right. She did nothing wrong. If she 
 unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to 
 die for God's sake, for man's sake." 
 
 "Yes yes. But still " 
 
 " Well, we must trust that look of hers." 
 
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