Season shifted into season, and meanwhile an impalpable veil of difference was falling between the architect and his wife. The peaceful days of winter, early spring, and late autumn were precious to the woman—days when the silent processes of nature touched her senses softly, and she could live undisturbed by calls and dinners with their array of familiar faces. Then she heard the birds in the trees behind the house, and listened to the rustling of the tall poplars beneath her windows, and watched the vivid colors of the lake. This harmony of nature, this great enveloping organism of peace, she was beginning to feel, was all that life held for her,—nature and her children, whose wants she fulfilled. Yet ever in the background, not far away, there hung in the horizon that black cloud above the city, which could not wholly be shut out in any revery of country peace. For with it she and her children were linked by all the cords of modern life.

She had felt the sly reproach in Venetia\'s references to Dr. Coburn. The seedy doctor had drawn her strongly, and yet in the face of her husband\'s contemptuous indifference to him she had made but one or two feeble attempts to reach him. A few times, also, she had visited the bookbinder\'s sickly wife, and after the birth of little Francis had revived the class in bookbinding. Jackson had fitted up a studio for the class out of an old teahouse on the bluff, where during mild weather they received their friends in ?sthetic informality. But the class had soon dwindled, the young married women of whom it was composed flitting to other pursuits, and the taciturn bookbinder taking offence at a fancied slight suddenly ceased his visits. Some weeks later when Helen called at the Husseys\' rooms to see the wife, she found that they had moved away, and having written Dr. Coburn for their address without success, she had made no further attempt to find them.

Thus ended her efforts to reach that world which lay outside her own circle. More and more, as her married life went on, she had succumbed to the milieu that her husband had chosen. As his struggle for success grew hotter, she, too, in her way, had been absorbed into it, and had become the domestic and social satellite which he needed in his relations with rich clients. And so Venetia\'s careless defence of herself pricked her. Was there, after all, anything more admirable in the decent life that she and her husband led with its little circle of selfish activities than in the crude outbreaks of Venetia Phillips which had caused so much perturbation in Forest Park? They were not vicious to be sure,—the people she lived with; they were merely dull and negative.


One of these brooding days shortly after the talk on the club veranda, Helen set forth to a neighbor\'s with a bundle of books and some flowers for Mrs. Buchanan, who was giving a dinner that evening. She had reached the point in the winding road where a long bridge crossed a deep ravine on the level with the topmost branches of lofty trees. At the other end of the bridge a man was standing looking down into the green depths below. He was so much absorbed in the ravine that he did not hear the woman\'s steps as she drew near. When she passed behind him, he glanced up with a startled look in his black eyes, and grasping the bicycle by his side was moving off.

"Don\'t you remember me, Mr. Hussey?" Helen asked, holding out her hand. "How are you? I am so glad to see you again. Did you ride out all the way from the city? We don\'t see many bicycles these days."

She poured forth her little flood of amiable sentences, while the bookbinder stood quietly holding his wheel.

"Yes," he answered slowly, when she paused. "I rode out on my wheel. I wanted to see how the country looked."

He paused and then continued: "Yes, I\'ve been out of the city considerable after my wife died. I went West, to Kansas City. But I came back. I\'m used to this place. My woman died here, and the child, too."

"I tried to find you after the class broke up," Helen explained. "I wanted to get your wife to come out here and visit me."

"That was nice and kind of you," he answered dryly.

"I have an errand a little way from here. Won\'t you go with me and then come back to the house?" she persisted, piqued by his tone.

"Thank you, I don\'t believe I will. It\'s time I was starting back to the city."

"You had better rest awhile first."

"I ain\'t particularly tired. You are very good. What do you want me to come for?" he asked abruptly, and then continued to speak as if he were talking to himself: "You and I ain\'t the same kind of folks. We are placed different on this earth, and there\'s no getting away from the fact. It\'s best for us both to keep where we belong."

"Nonsense!" she retorted.

"As I have looked about among folks," he went on calmly, "I\'ve seen that\'s the best way, in the long run—for the rich and the poor to keep to themselves. That\'s why you didn\'t see nothing of me after the ladies got tired of binding books. Not that I\'ve got anything against those better fortuned than me. It\'s just the way things are made to run. So long as the present order lasts, man is divided from man—and that\'s all there is to it. The only use the poor man has for the rich man is to get work from him and some pay for it. The only use the rich man has for the poor man is to get his work done. And they\'d better do their business apart, as far apart as they can."

"My husband isn\'t rich. We have to struggle, too."

Hussey smiled sceptically.

"I had all I could do when the woman was living to keep a decent room or two, and find enough to eat. There\'s some difference between us, ain\'t there? And I don\'t speak like you, and maybe I eat different at the table."

"That\'s all very important," Helen laughed.

"It\'s the little things that separate, not the big ones. You look around your own kind of folks and see if that\'s not so. It\'s just the silly scraps of ways that keep man from man."

"Well, it\'s too good a day to quarrel about that. At least, you and I can both enjoy those trees down there."

A victoria came toward them at a lively trot, making the wooden planking resound. The lady in the carriage leaned forward and bowed to Helen, and then cast a second, longer glance at her companion.

"She\'s wanting to know who that man is you\'re talking to," Hussey remarked ironically. "No, them trees and the country in general ain\'t the same to me and you. You folks squat right out here and buy up all the land you can lay your hands on, at least all that can be got at easily from the city. Perhaps, though, some day it will be different, and the beautiful parts of the country will be kept for all to have."

They began to cross the bridge, and Helen holding the man in talk wiled him as far as her own gate, with an unreasoning determination to make him come into her house.

"I suppose I ought to take that bundle there," Hussey observed as they walked, pointing to the parcel that Helen held in her hand.

"It\'s nothing."

"I notice that don\'t make any difference among your kind. Your men folks may let their women suffer in other ways, but they fetch and carry for you in public."

"Yes—that\'s so," Helen laughed.

"That bundle ain\'t nothing for you to carry. You wouldn\'t have started out with it if it had been. It\'s the same way about giving a woman a seat in a car. If she looks as if she needed it, why a humane man would give her his seat the same as he would to a tired man. But most times the man needs it more."

"You wouldn\'t have wanted your wife to stand?"

"Well, she weren\'t never real well, not after the child came."

He spoke more gently, and added without any polite delicacy, "There must have been something wrong happened then, for she got up weak, and couldn\'t bear children no more."

"You miss her!"

"Yes, sometimes, when work\'s plenty, and I feel strong, and there\'s something for her to live for. Most time............