Eva – "Heigho! how stupid things are. I am tired of everything. I am tired of shopping – tired of parties – tired of New York – where the same thing keeps happening over and over. I wish I was a man. I'd just take my carpet-bag and go to Europe. Come now, Ida, pray stop that, and talk to me, do!"

Ida

, putting down her book and pen:

"Well – and what about?"

"Oh, you know! – this inextricable puzzle – what does ail a certain person? Now he didn't come at all last night, and when I asked Jim Fellows where his friend was (one must pass the compliment of inquiring, you know), he said, 'Henderson had grown dumpy lately,' and he couldn't get him out anywhere."

"Well, Eva, I'm sure I can't throw any light on the subject. I know no more than you."

"Now, Ida, let me tell you, this afternoon when we stopped in the park, I went into that great rustic arbor on the top of the hill there, and just as we came in on one side, I saw him in all haste hurrying out on the other, as if he were afraid to meet me."

"How very odd!"

"Odd! Well, I should think it was; but what was worse, he went and stationed himself on a bench under a tree where he could hear and see us, and there my lord sat – perhaps he thought I didn't see him, but I did.

"Lillie and Belle Forrester and Wat Jerrold were with me, and we were having such a laugh! I don't know when I have had such a frolic, and how silly it was of him to sit there glowering like an owl in an ivy bush, when he might have come out and joined us, and had a good time! I'm quite out of patience with the creature, it's so vexatious to have him act so!"

"It is vexatious, darling, but then as you can't do anything about it why think of it?"

"Because I can't help it. Can you have a real friendship for a person and enjoy his society, and not care in the least whether you have it or not? Of course you can't. We were friends – quite good friends, and I'm not ashamed to say I miss him, very much, and then to have such an unaccountable mystery about it. I should think you'd miss him too."

"I do somewhat," said Ida, "but then you see I have so much more to think of. I have my regular work every day for papa, and I have my plan of study, and to say the truth, so far as I am concerned, though I liked Mr. Henderson very much, yet I don't miss him."

"Well, Ida, now I want to ask you, didn't you think he acted as if – "

"As if he were in love with you, you would say."

"Well – yes."

"He certainly did, if I am any judge of symptoms; but then, dear, men are often in love with women they don't mean to marry."

"Who wants to marry him, I should like to know? I'm not thinking of that."

"Well, then, Eva, perhaps he has discovered that

wants to marry you; and, perhaps, for some reason he regards that as impossible, and so is going to try to keep away."

"How perfectly hateful and stupid of him! I'd rather never have seen him."

"A man generally has this advantage over a woman in a matter of this sort, that he has an object in life which is more to him than anything else, and he can fill his whole mind with that."

"Well, Ida, that's all very true, but what object in life can a girl have who lives as we do; who has everything she can want without an effort – I for instance."

"But

have an object."

"Yes, I know you have, but I am different from you. It would be as impossible for me to do as you do, as for a fish to walk upright on dry land."

"Well, Eva, this objectless, rootless, floating kind of life that you and almost all girls lead, is at the bottom of nearly all your troubles. Literally and truly you have nothing in the world to do but to amuse yourselves; the consequence is that you soon get tired of almost every kind of amusement, and so every friendship, and flirtation assumes a disproportioned interest in your minds. There is real danger now that you may think too much of Mr." —

"Oh, stuff and nonsense, Ida! I

won't

, so there! I'll put him out of my head forthwith and bolt the door. Give me a good stiff dose of reading, Ida; one of your dullest scientific books, and get me to write you an analysis of it as we did at school. Here, let me see, 'Descent of Man.' Come, now, I'll sit down and go at it."

Eva sits down with book, pencil and paper, and turns over the leaves.

"Let's try how it looks. 'Sexual Selection'! Oh, horrid! 'Her Ape-like Proportions'! I should be ashamed to talk so about my ancestors. Apes! – of all things – why not some more respectable animal? lions or horses, for example. You remember Swift's story about the houyhnhums. Isn't this a dreadfully dull book, Ida?"

"No, I don't find it so. I am deeply interested in it, though I admit it is pretty heavy."

"But, then, Ida, you see it goes against the Bible, doesn't it?"

"Not necessarily as I see."

"Why, yes; to be sure. I haven't read it; but Mr. Henderson gave me the clearest kind of a sketch of the argument, and that is the way it impressed me. That to be sure is among the things I principally value him for; he is my milk-skimmer; he gets all the cream that rises on a book and presents it to me in a portable form. I remember one of the very last really comfortable long talks we had; it was on this subject, and I told him that it seemed to me that the modern theory and the Bible were point blank opposites. Instead of men being a

fallen

race, they are a

rising

race, and never so high as now; and then, what becomes of the Garden of Eden, and St. Paul? Now, for my part, I told Mr. Henderson I wasn't going to give up all the splendid poetry of Milton and the Bible, just because Mr. Darwin took it into his head that it was not improbable that my seventy fifth millionth grandfather might have been a big baboon with green nose and pointed ears!"

"My dear Eva, you have capital reasons for believing and

not

believing. You believe what seems most agreeable and poetic."

"Exactly, Ida; and in those far-off regions, sixteen million billion ages ago, why shouldn't I? Nobody knows what happened there; nobody has been there to see what made the first particle of jelly take to living, and turn into a germ cell, and then go working on like yeast, till it worked out into all the things we see. I think it a good deal easier to believe the Garden of Eden story, especially as that is pretty and poetical, and is in the dear old Book that is so sweet and comfortable to us; but then Mr. Henderson insists that even if we do hold the Evolution theory, the old book will be no less true. I never saw a man of so much thought who had so much reverence."

"I thought you were going to study Darwin and not think of him," said Ida.

"Well, somehow, almost every thing puts me in mind of him, because we have had such long talks about everything; and, Ida, to tell the truth, I do believe I am intellectually lazy. I don't like rough hard work, I like polishing and furbishing. Now, I want a man to go through all this rough, hard, stupid, disagreeable labyrinth of scientific terms, and pick out the meaning and put it into a few, plain words, and then I take it and brighten it up and put on the rainbows. Look here, now, think of my having to scrabble through a bog like this in the "Origin of the Species":

"'In Carthamus and some other compositæ the central achenes alone are furnished with a pappus; and in Hyoseris the same head yields achenes of three different forms. In certain Umbelliferæ the exterior seeds, according to Tanch, are orthospermous, and the central one cœlospermous, and this difference has been considered by De Candolle as of the highest systematic importance in the family.'

"Now all this is just as unintelligible to me as if it were written in Choctaw. I don't know enough to know what it means, and I'm afraid I don't care enough to know. I want to know the upshot of the whole in good plain English, and then see whether I can believe it or not; and isn't it a shame that things are so that one cannot have a sensible man to be one's guide, philosopher and friend, without this everlasting marriage question coming up? If a woman makes an effort to get or keep a valuable friend, she is supposed to be intriguing and making unfeminine efforts for a husband. Now this poor man is perfectly wretched about something – for I can see he has really gone off shockingly, and looks thin and haggard, and I can't just write him a note and ask him to come and finish his resumé of Darwin for me, without going over the boundaries; and the worst of it is, it is

who set these limits; – I myself who am a world too proud to say the first word or give the slightest indication that his absence isn't quite as agreeable as his presence."

"Well, Eva, I can write a note and request him to call and see

," said Ida, "and if you like, I will. I have no sort of fear what he will think of me."

"I would not have you for the world. It would look like an advance on our part – no indeed. These creatures are so conceited, if they once find out that you can't do without them – "

"I never observed any signs of conceit in Mr. Henderson."

"Well, I have made it an object to keep him a little humble, so far as his sex will permit, you see. But seriously, Ida, is not it curious about this marriage matter? Everybody says it's what we are made for, all the novels end with it, all the poems are about it, you are hearing about it in one way or other all the time; and yet all this while you are supposed not to care anything about it one way or the other. If a man be ever so agreeable to you, and do ever so much to make you like him, you must pretend that you are quite indifferent to him, and don't care whether he comes or goes, until such time as he chooses to launch the tremendous question at you."

"Well," said Ida, "I admit that there is just this absurdity in our life: but I avoid it all by firmly laying a plan of my own, and having a business of my own. To me marriage would be an interruption; it would require a breaking up and reconstruction of my whole plan, and of course I really think nothing about it."

"But are you firmly resolved never to marry?"

"No; but never, unless I find some one more to me than all on which I have set my heart. I do not need it for my happiness. I am sufficient to myself; and besides I have an object I hope to attain, and that is to open a way by which many other women shall secure independence and comfort and ease."

"Deary me, Ida, I wish I were like you: but I'm not. It seems to me that the only way to give most girls any concentration or object is to marry them. Then, somehow, things seem to arrange themselves, and, at all events, the world stops talking about you, and wondering what you are going to do; they get you off their minds. That I do believe was the reason why at one time I came so near drifting into that affair with Wat Sydney. Aunt Maria was so vigorous with me and talked in such a commanding manner, and with so many 'of courses,' that I really began to think I was one of the 'of courses' myself; but my acquaintance with Mr. Henderson has shown me that it would be intolerable to live with a man that you couldn't talk with about everything that comes into your head; and now I can't talk with him, and I won't marry Wat Sydney; and so what is to be done? Shall I go to Stewart's and buy me a new suit of Willow Green, or gird up the loins of my mind and go through Darwin like a man, and look out all the terms in the dictionary and come out the other side a strong minded female? or shall I go and join the Sisters of St. John, and wear a great white cape and gray gown, and have all the world say I did it because I couldn't get Wat Sydney (for that's exactly what they would say), or what shall I do? The trouble is, mamma and Aunt Maria with their expectations. It's much as mamma can do to survive

your

course, and if

take to having a 'purpose' too, I don't know but mamma would commit suicide, poor dear woman."

(Enter Alice with empressement):

"Girls, what do you think? Wat Sydney come back and going to give a great croquet party out at Clairmont, and of course we are all invited with notes in the most resplendent style, with crest and coat of arms, and everything – perfectly '

mag!

' There's to be a steamboat with a band of music to take the guests up, and no end of splendid doings; marquées and tents and illuminations and fireworks, and to return by moonlight after all's over; isn't it lovely? I do think Wat Sydney's perfectly splendid! and it's all on your account, Eva, I know it is."

"Pooh, nonsense, you absurd child, I don't believe it. I dare say its a party just to proclaim that he is engaged to somebody else."

"Do you know," added Alice, "I met Jim Fellows, and he says everybody is wild about this party – just stark, tearing wild about it – for it isn't going to be a crush – something

very

select."

"Is Jim going?"

"Yes, he showed me his ticket and Henderson's, and he declared he was going to take 'Hal,' as he called him, spite of his screams; he said that he had been writing and studying and moping himself to death, and that he should drag him out by the hair of the head. Come, Eva, let's go down to Tullegig's and have a 'kank' about costumes. I haven't a thing fit to wear, nor you either."

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE FATES

Bolton's letter excited in my mind a tumult of feeling. From the beginning of my acquaintance I had regarded him with daily increasing admiration. Young men like a species of mental fealty – a friendship that seems to draw them upward and give them an ideal of something above themselves. Bolton's ripe, elegant scholarship, his rare, critical taste, his calm insight into men and things, and the depth of his moral judgment, had inspired me with admiration, and his kindness for me with gratitude. It had always been an additional source of interest that there was something veiled about him – something that I could not exactly make out. This letter, so dignified in its melancholy frankness, seemed to let me into the secret of his life. It showed me the reason of that sort of sad and weary tolerance with which he seemed to regard life and its instincts, so different from the fiery, forward-looking hope of youth. He had impressed me from the first as one who had made up his mind to endure all things and hope for nothing. To keep watch every moment, to do the duty of the hour thoroughly, bravely, faithfully, as a sentinel paces through wind, rain and cold – neither asking why, nor uttering complaints – such seemed to be Bolton's theory of life.

The infirmity which he laid open to my view was one, to be sure, attributable in the first place to the thoughtless wrong-doing of confident youth. Yet, in its beginning, how little there was in it that looked like the deep and terrible tragedy to which it was leading! Out of every ten young men who begin the use of stimulants as a social exhilaration, there are perhaps five in whose breast lies coiled up and sleeping this serpent, destined in after years to be the deadly tyrant of their life – this curse, unappeasable by tears or prayers or agonies – with whom the struggle is like that of Laocoön with the hideous Python. Yet songs and garlands and poetry encircle the wine-cup, and ridicule and contumely are reserved for him who fears to touch it.

There was about this letter such a patient dignity, such an evident bracing of the whole man to meet in the bravest manner the hard truth of the situation, and such a disinterested care for others, as were to me inexpressibly touching. I could not help feeling that he judged and sentenced himself too severely, and that this was a case where a noble woman might fitly co-work with a man, and by doubling his nature give it double power of resistance and victory.

I went hastily up to his room with the letter in my hand after reading it. It was in the dusk of the evening twilight, but I could see him sitting there gazing out of the window at the fading sky; yet it was too dark for either of us to see the face of the other. There are some conversations that can only be held in darkness – the visible presence of the bodily form is an impediment – in darkness, spirit speaks directly to spirit.

"Bolton," I said, "I am

yours

to every intent and purpose, yours for life and death."

"And

after

," he said in a deep undertone, grasping my hand. "I knew you would be, Harry."

"But, Bolton, you judge yourself too severely. Why should you put from yourself the joys that other men, not half so good as you, claim eagerly? If I were a woman like Caroline, I can feel that I would rather share life with you, in all your dangers and liabilities, than with many another."

He thought a moment, and then said slowly, "It is well for Caroline that she has not this feeling; she probably has by this time forgotten me, and I would not for the world take the responsibility of trying to call back the feeling she once had."

At this moment my thoughts went back over many scenes, and the real meaning of all Caroline's life came to me. I appreciated the hardness of that lot of women which condemns them to be tied to one spot and one course of employment, when needing to fly from the atmosphere of an unhappy experience. I thought of the blank stillness of the little mountain town where her life had been passed, of her restlessness add impatience, of that longing to fly to new scenes and employments that she had expressed to me on the eve of my starting for Europe; yet she had told me her story, leaving out the one vital spot in it. I remembered her saying that she had never seen the man with whom she would think of marriage without a shudder. Was it because she had forgotten? Or was it that woman never even to herself admits that thought in connection with one who seems to have forgotten her? Or had her father so harshly painted the picture of her lover that she had been led to believe him utterly vile and unprincipled? Perhaps his proud silence had been interpreted by her as the silence of indifference; perhaps she looked back on their acquaintance with indignation that she should have been employed merely to diversify the leisure of a rusticated student and abandoned character. Whatever the experience might be, Caroline had carried it through silently.

Her gay, indifferent, brilliant manner of treating any approach to matters of the heart, as if they were the very last subjects in which she could be supposed to have any experience or interest, had been a complete blind to me, nor could I, through this dazzling atmosphere, form the least conjecture as to how the land actually lay.

In my former letters to her I had dwelt a good deal on Bolton, and mentioned the little fact of finding her photograph in his room. In reply, in a postscript at the end of a letter about everything else, there was a brief notice. "The Mr. Bolton you speak of taught the Academy in our place while you were away at college – and of course I was one of his scholars – but I have never seen or heard of him since. I was very young then, and it seems like something in a preëxistent state to be reminded of him. I believed him very clever, then, but was not old enough to form much of an opinion." I thought of all this as I sat silently in the dark with Bolton.

"Are you sure," I said, "that you consult for Caroline's best happiness in doing as you have done?"

There was a long pause, and at last he said with a deep, drawn breath,

"Yes. I am sure, the less I am to her the better."

"But may not your silence and apparent neglect and indifference have given pain?"

"Probably; but they helped her to cease caring for me; it was necessary that she should."

"Bolton, you are morbid in your estimate of yourself."

"You do not know all, Hal; nor what nor where I have been. I have been swept far out to sea, plunged under deep waters, all the waves and billows have been over me."

"Yet now, Bolton, surely you are on firm land. No man is more established, more reliable, more useful."

"Yet," he said with a kind of shudder, "all this I might lose in a moment. The other day when I dined with Westerford, the good fellow had his wines in all frank fellowship and pressed them on me, and the very smell distracted me. I looked at the little glass in which he poured some particularly fine sherry, and held to me to taste, and thought it was like so much heart's blood. If I had taken one taste, just one, I should have been utterly worthless and unreliable for weeks. Yet Westerford could not understand this; nobody can, except one who has been through my bitter experience. One sip would flash to the brain like fire, and then, all fear, all care, all conscience would be gone, and not one glass, but a dozen would be inevitable, and then you might have to look for me in some of those dens to which the possessed of the devil flee when the fit is on them, and where they rave and tear and cut themselves with stones till the madness is worn out. This has happened to me over and over, after long periods of self-denial and self-control and illusive hope. It seems to me that my experience is like that of a man whom some cruel fiend condemns to go through all the agonies of drowning over and over again – the dark plunge, the mad struggle, the suffocation, the horror, the agony, the clutch at the shore, the weary clamber up steep rocks, the sense of relief, recovery, and hope, only to be wrenched off and thrown back to struggle, and strangle, and sink again."

He spoke with such a deep intensity of voice that I drew in my breath, and a silence as of the grave fell between us.

"Harry," he said, after a pause, "you know we read in the Greek tragedies of men and women whom the gods have smitten with unnatural and guilty purposes. In which they were irresistibly impelled toward what they abominated and shuddered at! Is it not strange that the Greek fable should have a real counterpart in the midst of our modern life? That young man in all the inexperience and thoughtlessness of youth should be beguiled into just such a fatality; that there should be a possibility that they could be blighted by just such a doom, and yet that song, and poetry, and social illusion, and society customs should all be thrown around courses which excite and develop this fatality! What opera is complete without its drinking chorus? I remember when it used to be my forte to sing drinking songs; so the world goes! Men triumph and rejoice going to a doom to which death is a trifle. If I had fallen dead, the first glass of wine I tasted, it would have been thought a horrible thing; but it would have been better for my mother, better for me, than to have lived as I did."

"Oh, no, no, Bolton! don't say so: you become morbid in dwelling on this subject."

"No, Hal. I only know more of it than you. This curse has made life an unspeakable burden, a doom instead of a privilege. It has disappointed my friends, and subjected me to humiliations and agonies such that death seems to me a refuge; and yet it was all in its beginning mere thoughtlessness and ignorance. I was lost before I knew it."

"But you are not lost, and you shall not be!" I exclaimed, "you are good for more than most men now, and you will come through this."

"Never! to be just as others are. I shall be a vessel with a crack in it, always."

"Well, a vase of fine porcelain with a crack in it is better than earthenware without," I said.

"If I had not disappointed myself and my friends so often," said Bolton, "I might look on myself as sound and sane. But the mere sight and smell of the wine at Westerford's dinner gave me a giddy sensation that alarmed me; it showed that I was not yet out of danger, and it made me resolve to strengthen my self by making you my keeper. You have the advantage of perfectly healthy nerves that have come to manhood without the strain of any false stimulus, and you can be strong for both of us."

"God grant it!" said I, earnestly.

"But I warn you that, if the curse comes upon me you are not to trust me. I am a Christian and a man of honor in my sane moments, but let me tell you one glass of wine would make me a liar on this subject. I should lie, and intrigue, and deceive the very elect, to get at the miserable completion of the aroused fury, and there are times when I am so excited that I fear I may take that first irrevocable step; it is a horror, a nightmare, a temptation of the devil, – for that there is a devil, men with my experience know; but there is a kind of safety in having a friend of a steady pulse with me who knows all. The mere fact that you do know helps hold me firm."

"Bolton," said I, "the situation you offer to Caroline in the care of the

Ladies' Cabinet

will of course oblige her to come to New York. Shall you meet her and renew your acquaintance?"

"I do not desire to," he said.

There was a slight hesitancy and faltering of his voice as he spoke.

"Yet it can hardly be possible that you will not meet; you will have arrangements to make with her."

"That is one of the uses, among others, of having you. All that relates to her affairs will pass through you; and now, let us talk of the magazine and its programme for the season. What is the reason, Hal, that you waste your forces in short sketches? Why do you not boldly dash out into a serial story? Come, now, I am resolved among other things on a serial story by Harry Henderson."

"And I will recommend a taking title," cried Jim Fellows, who came in as we were talking, and stood behind my chair. "Let us have

HENDERSON'S HORROR; or, The Mystery of the Bloody Latch-Key

There's

a title to take with the reflecting public! The readers of serials are generally girls from twelve to twenty, and they read them with their back-hair down, lounging on the bed, just before a nap after dinner, and there must be enough blood and thunder, and murder and adultery and mystery in them to keep the dear creatures reading at least half an hour."

"I think serial stories are about played out in our day," said I.

"Not a bit of it. There's sister Nell, don't read anything else. She is regularly running on five serial stories, and among them all they keep her nicely a-going; and she tells me that the case is the same with all the girls in her set. The knowledge of the world and of human nature that the pretty creatures get in this way is something quite astounding. Nell is at present deeply interested in a fair lady who connives with her chambermaid to pass off her illegitimate child upon her husband as his own; and we have lying and false swearing, I say nothing of all other kinds of interesting things on every page. Of course this is written as a moral lesson, and interspersed with pious reflections to teach girls as how they hadn't oughter do so and so. All this, you see, has a refining effect upon the rising generation."

"But, really, Bolton, don't you think that it is treating our modern society as children, to fall in with this extreme fashion of story-telling? It seems so childish to need pictures and stories for everything. Isn't your magazine strong enough to lead and form public taste instead of following it?"

"Well, if I owned my magazine I would try it," said Bolton. "But, you see, the