Arthur Stringer

“ She herself was the daughter of a super-refined and super-feminine exclusiveness of existence that built golden walls between its offspring and all elemental life. She wondered if her world was not forgetting how to hate, as it had forgotten how to love. ”

“ The soprano voice spoke the three pregnant syllables with a quiet drawl. They fell more as the confession of a victor, than the challenge of an enemy. It was the woman’s life, thought Cynthia Britton, as she continued to gaze at her—her rudimentary and unrelated and irresponsible life in three short words. ”

“ The woman on the bed was moving her head up and down, slowly.
“I think he ought to go back,” she said, in her drawling soprano.
An inarticulate gasp fell from the wife’s lips. She closed her eyes, fighting for strength to speak, to say only the right thing, that her way might be left open and sane. She felt that she was bargaining for nothing more than the empty shell of a man—but all her life had been made up of the empty shells of things.
The woman on the bed turned and studied her visitor. The meek and wide-set eyes were penetrating in their sudden intentness of scrutiny. ”

“ As she stepped from the upholstered and mirror-lined elevator-cage, with its taint of over-strong perfume and cigar-smoke, she could no longer feel that life was crowding and narrowing itself up into one climacteric apex. ”

“ He could see it at last, through smoke-plumed chimneys and dust-stained ore-chutes, twining and crawling along the valley bottom, two miles below. That train was taking “The Boss” once more to the East; Lordly Ames wished to heaven that it wasn’t taking him alone. But there was no getting out of things as easy as that. And Lordly Ames wiped his great forehead with the back of his hand.
It was his first day back at the Big Eagle Smeltery. He was still weak and sick, and the keen mountain air cut him like a knife-blade. ”

“ The standing woman put her hand on the padded back of the rocking-chair. She looked at the room, at the bed, at the crimson-clad figure, as though she had seen them all for the first time.
“Why should I talk such things over with you?” she cried out, in her pitiful and impotent hauteur.
“Charlie does,” said the other, simply, as she brushed a crumb from her fingers.
“A woman like you ought to have children,” she drawled on, relentlessly. “I guess every man’s wife ought to have children, if she can. They keep her feelings from going to seed. They keep her from getting mean and morbid, too. ”

“ She felt herself the victim of an imprisoning and devitalizing career, where dignity forever gnawed on the proffered bones of concession and compromise. She seemed engulfed and choked in an endless gray fog of ennui, shot through with apprehension. ”

“ The woman, whose sable boa was rising and falling so quickly, studied the figure on the bed with an intentness of vision that let no detail go unrecorded, as she found her lips saying aloud: “One often does things in which one takes little immediate pleasure!” ”

“ She closed her eyes reminiscently. “D’ you want me to go on?” she asked, with a sudden inapposite timidity.
“Yes, go on!”
“But it always seemed to me that it’s—it’s awf'ly fierce, out there. Charlie says it’s only the altitude. But it grips you. You have to live hard, and drink hard, and die hard, too! But Charlie’d never stand for all that. He’s had eleven years of—of bleaching out. He belongs to your set, now. He’s a good deal like the rest of you—if you only knew just how to keep his hobble on! He's too—oh, too civilized for me. ”

“ And the staring wife was startled to see that the other woman’s eyes were flaming with some slow and mounting fire, for all her outward calmness of movement.
She waved her visitor toward the chair once more, almost imperiously.
“You may as well sit down—I want to tell you something. I’ve got to tell you, now, so you'll understand. I want a man to make a fool of himself over me. I guess that’s the only proof I can ever get. Charlie Britton never would. And he never will. The last time he was going out to the Mines I wanted him to take me out to the Big Eagle, for good. ”