Edward S. Van Zile

“ It would be cruel, unnecessary, to make her explain herself more fully. One thought overshadowed all others in his mind. If she did not care for him,—why should he mince words?—did not love him, she would not admit that she was sorry that he was to be by her side for so long a time. She had confessed to him that the shadow of self-distrust was on her soul. He could not ask for more. All men may be selfish, but at a great crisis there are those who can be chivalric.
Richard reseated himself and looked at her mournfully. ”

“ You are treating a great crisis in your life with more cold-blooded cynicism than I thought you retained. Don’t you see that you may be doing Gertrude Van Vleck a great wrong? Don’t you understand that you may be recklessly throwing away your chance of lifelong happiness? What have your years, or your past, or your theories got to do with the matter? The only question at issue in the whole affair is this: Does Gertrude Van Vleck love you? If she does, your sacrifice would be simply a cruelty. If she doesn’t, your sacrifice wouldn’t be a sacrifice. ”

“ Lent means more to us, whose days are nearly all Easters, than to people who spend their whole lives in the shadow of self-sacrifice and denial. Do you know, Harriet, I sometimes feel a great pity for the worried and overworked world that lies outside our set. It seems so unjust that a few of us should have all the good things of the earth, while the millions are obliged to toil and sicken and die in the mere effort to get enough to eat and wear.”
Mrs. Percy-Bartlett looked at Gertrude with undisguised astonishment in her eyes. ”

“ It was this gift—a dangerous one to a man who wishes to make a solid rather than a glittering success of life—that had suddenly given him a prominent place on the Trumpet as the spiciest paragrapher the editorial page had had for years. And it was this faculty applied to the airy nothings of unimportant conversation that had given him the reputation of being a wit—a reputation much more to be dreaded than that of a rake. No woman fears a rake, but she has a deep-seated dread of a wit. ”

“ John Fenton and Richard Stoughton were seated side by side near one end of the room, awaiting with true La Rian patience the coming of the soup. No one who is in a hurry ever goes to La Ria’s on Saturday night. Impatience is sacrilege in that Bohemian republic that lies under the sidewalk on a down-town street, and draws into its charming boundaries many of the brightest men and most attractive women in the city. La Ria’s is both a pleasure and a protest. The pleasure is on the surface, the protest is underneath. ”

“ Fenton arose, and resumed his impatient march up and down the room.
“How impetuous youth is!” he remarked after a time. Then he halted; and, standing in front of Richard, looked down at the young man solemnly. “You know little of true love, Richard. It is based on unselfishness and is only true to itself when it remains worthy of its foundation. Listen, boy, and learn. If I propose to Gertrude Van Vleck, and she rejects me, I have subjected to a painful experience the woman I love. If she accepts me, the same result, emphasized, is reached; for I am not worthy of her, Richard. ”

“ You believe in certain novel theories, and have become a convert to various economic teachings that embrace more in their ultimate effects than a mere question of taxation. You are suddenly confronted by the fact that it is possible for even political economy to demand martyrs on the altars it has raised. Naturally, you object to being a martyr.”
“Your way of putting it, Richard,” said Fenton slowly, “may have a basis of truth. I admit that I seem to have come to a turning-point imperatively demanding a decision on my part that will have a radical effect on my life.” ”

“ But as Fenton strode down the avenue, so deep in self-communion that he noted not the beauty of the night, he realized that influences he could not trace, and whose force he could not measure, had been at work to disturb the even tenor of his life, and to throw him back into that state of unrest and questioning that had agitated his existence before he had abandoned, as he fondly thought forever, the ambitions that the average man cherishes. ”

“ Perhaps I have grown weary of work, or this great city has had a depressing effect upon my aspirations. Whatever may be the reason, however, I find that I no longer build the castles in the air that I raised with so much enthusiasm not long ago. Why is it, do you think?”
He glanced at her searchingly; and, as their eyes met, her cheeks lost something of their color.
“Ambition may sleep, but it never dies, Mr. Stoughton. You are suffering from the reaction of your sudden and remarkable success.” ”

“ The words, and the pleading tone in which they were uttered, combined to make her remark sound more like a prayer to his generosity than a statement founded on a time-worn truth.
“I will try,” whispered Richard earnestly, “I will try to be an ideal friend to you. I would rather have your friendship than the love of any other woman in the world.”
She smiled up at him gratefully, as though he had made a great sacrifice for her happiness. They say that Love is blind. ”

“ The gentle, affectionate smile on Fenton’s face was an unwonted visitor to that stern countenance. Richard impulsively put out his hand to his friend.
“There is nothing to forgive, old man. I realize the unselfishness that prompts you to long for a change in the conditions that beget so much human suffering. Don’t think that I am so heartless that the scenes we have just witnessed do not affect me. They do; and I fully understand that the future has the greatest problem of all the ages yet to solve. ”

“ Accepting the complexity of society as a stimulating, and perhaps encouraging, fact, he objected to its personal application. He had tried hard to be a rebel in manner as well as in theory. That he had sent up a flag of truce was a conviction that filled him with both self-distrust and discontent.
As he turned into the side street leading to Stoughton’s lodgings, he stopped before a brilliantly lighted saloon. For fully a month Fenton had abstained almost entirely from alcoholic stimulants; but at this moment he craved the revivifying influence of a cocktail. ”

“ The end of the last century found the world emphasizing the brotherhood of man. The end of the present century is busy underscoring the sisterhood of woman. Is it strange that the last years of the eighteenth century were not more disturbing to the institution of marriage than are the closing days of the nineteenth century? The only conclusion that seems deducible to the student of contemporary social unrest is that the millennium will not be reached until the problem of how to make a home a club is solved. ”

“ Society did not feel certain that Gertrude Van Vleck might not at any moment perpetrate a witticism that would scratch the face of its most cherished traditions. The worst of it was that her position in society was so firmly established that she could afford to indulge her appreciation of the ludicrous and her inclination to look at things in an original way. Society was powerless to discipline her. ”

“ They both glanced at Gertrude and John Fenton, who were deep in conversation in the opposite corner of the drawing-room.
“I am very glad that all responsibility for the man’s future has been taken off of my hands,” said Richard. “The fact is, I feel that I have all that I can do to take care of myself.”
He looked into her eyes with an expression in his own that was hardly allowable—even at a musicale.
“How selfish a man is,” Mrs. Percy-Bartlett murmured musingly. “It is almost impossible for him to be a consistent friend to another man. How much less is he able to be a true friend to a woman.” ”

“ Gertrude Van Vleck had thought much about the strange problems that the life of the world presents, but the final and most significant riddle that haunts the mind of man, the awful question that death asks, had never touched her deeply. ”

“ Bear in mind that the brain-machine that turns out the ideas it presents is laboring under the obstacles that poor, weak, erring human nature begets, while the engines that deal with the materialistic make-up of the paper are influenced neither by jealousy nor heart-burning, neither by revenge nor malice. If the harmony that prevails in the workings of the press-room could dominate the editorial departments, an ideal newspaper would be the result—a result that will not be obtained until the millennium has done its elevating work. ”

“ I worked out the story on lines intended to show, in a comparatively small compass, that we are as powerless and unimportant in the infinite realm of existence as the foolish little flies that buzz so loud on a summer’s day. If I should rewrite the story to-day, I am not quite sure that I should take so hopeless a view of the significance of human life. ”

“ Even the greatest men have flaws in their make-up, Richard—and I have mine.”
As they left the restaurant, strolling leisurely toward Broadway, they found the streets less crowded than they had been an hour before.
“It is the time,” said Fenton, “when the city rests for a moment from labor, and pauses to catch its breath before it begins to dissipate—the interlude between its work for earthly taskmasters and its work for Satan.” ”

“ Percy-Bartlett. The generous, affectionate heart of the girl rebelled against the necessity that compelled her to take this course; but there seemed to be, at the moment, no alternative.
Gertrude had had but little personal contact with that mysterious thing we call death.252 The suddenness of her friend’s bereavement appalled her. There comes a time in every one’s experience, early or late, when the insignificance of one human life in the make-up of the illimitable universe is emphasized with a stunning force that leaves us wiser, perhaps, but infinitely more sad. ”

“ In these days there is hardly anything that can be called unwomanly—if it is done gracefully.”
Gertrude smiled sadly as she looked into her friend’s sympathetic eyes. They both realized that the problem they were discussing was not an abstract question, but that, on the contrary, it possessed a concrete and vital significance for one of them.
“I’m afraid, Harriet,” said Gertrude musingly, “that I cannot keep up with women who are determined to be in the front ranks of the new movement. I have too many conservative characteristics in my make-up, inherited from my father.” ”

“ Wherever the blame may lie for the inequalities that exist in the distribution of wealth, surely Cornelius Van Vleck cannot be held responsible. He is as much the victim of a system as you are. But he bears his burden without a protest. Never during his long life as a man of great financial and social importance has Cornelius Van Vleck been heard to reproach his ancestors for the load of responsibility that they placed upon his shoulders. He has lived up to his position in the community with an almost heroic devotion to his lofty duties ”

“ A man is always going up or coming down in a newspaper office,—a fact that proves how like the world at large a journalistic sanctum is. In Mr. Robinson’s eyes, Fenton and Stoughton were on the up-grade. Regarding Fenton he had long been in doubt. He had grown to look upon him as a man of ability who had lost all ambition, and whose questionable habits and iconoclastic tendencies of thought had unfitted him for any higher place than he already held. ”

“ If you grasp the full significance of this illustration, O gentle reader,243 you will be able to understand why it is that in these progressive times not only married men but married women have their clubs. We all crave sympathy, and an outlet for the unrest that is in us. If we cannot find them at home, we must go to our club, where we may meet some one who understands us, and who will offer us a relief-pipe for the pent-up individuality that so sorely chafes us. And thus it is that both men and women need their clubs to-day. ”

“ Furthermore, it was suspected that Gertrude Van Vleck was in sympathy with the effort of woman to break away from her time-honored subserviency to man, and to do a great deal of independent thinking about the problems that agitate the world. She had given her countenance to the efforts of women to turn the political scale at the last election into the lap of reform,—whatever that elusive thing may be,—and she had been a pioneer in the movement that had gained recognition for the bicycle from the swell set. ”