r- HER HUSBAND'S PURSE ffltt OF CALIF. LIBKAKY, LOS BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR BARNABETTA BETROTHAL OF ELYPHOLATE, AND OTHER TALES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH CROSSWAYS ELUSIVE HlLDEGARDE THE FIGHTING DOCTOR His COURTSHIP MARTHA OF THE MENNONITE COUNTRY THE PARASITE REVOLT OF ANNE ROYLE SABINA, STORY OF THE AMISH TILLIE, A MENNONITE MAID WARREN HYDE WHEN HALF-GODS Go THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y. "Oh! " her voice rippled with laughter, "this is the twentieth century A. D.,not B. c., Daniel " HER HUSBAND'S PURSE BY HELEN R. MARTIN ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN NEWTON HOWITT GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1916 Copyright, 19 16, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian COPYRIGHT, 1915, 1916, SMITH PUBLISHING HOUSE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS " Oh! " her voice rippled with laughter, " this is the twentieth century A. D., not B. C., Daniel " (see page 180) Frontispiece FACING PAGE " ' Benefactor' ? " she read, " * a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.' You see, I'm your benefactor, according to the Standard " . . . 50 Margaret suddenly laid down her napkin and rushed from the room, every nerve in her sick and quivering with the physical and moral disgust she felt 220 "You will be glad to know, Jennie, that I have persuaded mother to spend the night with us," Margaret said 272 S4 503 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE HER HUSBAND'S PURSE THE Pennsylvania town of New Munich was elec- trified by the sudden and entirely unlooked-for announcement of the betrothal of Daniel Leit- zel, Esquire; but his two maiden sisters with whom he lived, and to whom the news was also wholly unexpected, were appalled, confounded. That Danny should have taken such a step independently of them (who did all his thinking for him outside of his profession) was a cataclysmal epi- sode. Of course it never would have happened without their knowledge if Danny had not been temporarily away from his home on business and far removed from their watchful care watchful these twenty years past that no designing Jezebel might get a chance at the great fortune of their petted little brother though it must be admitted that Danny was by this time of a marriageable age, being just turned forty-five. "To think he'd leave us learn about it in the newspapers yet, sooner 'n he'd come home and face us with it ! Yes, it looks anyhow as if he was ashamed of the girl he's picked out!" exclaimed Jennie, a stern and uncompromising spin- ster of sixty, as she and her sister Sadie, sitting in the [3] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE elaborately furnished and quite hideous sitting-room of their big, fine house on Main Street, stared in consterna- tion at the glaring headlines of the New Munich Evening Intelligencer, which announced, in type that to the sisters seemed letters of flame, the upsetting news of their idol- ized brother having been at last matrimonially trapped. Being confronted with his betrothal in print seemed to make it hopelessly incontrovertible. They might have schemed to avert the impending catastrophe of his mar- riage (in case Danny had been taken in by an Adventuress) did not the Intelligencer unequivocally state (and the Intelligencer's statements were scarcely less authoritative to Jennie and Sadie Leitzel than the Bible itself) that Danny would be married to the Unknown inside of a month. If the Intelligencer said so, it seemed useless to try to stop it. "To think he'll be married to her already before we get a chance, once, to look her over and tell him if she'd suit him!" lamented Sadie who was five years younger than Jennie. "Well," pronounced Jennie, setting her thin lips in a hard line, " she'll find out when she gets here that she ain't getting her fingers on our Danny's money! She'll get fooled if she's counting on that. She'll soon learn that she'll have to do with just what he likes to give her and no more! And of course Danny '11 consult us as to just how much he ought to leave her handle. When she finds out," Jennie grimly prophesied, "that our Danny always does the way we advise him to and that she'll have to keep on the right side of us, I guess she won't like it very well ! " [4] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "We can only hope that she ain't such a bold, common thing that just took our Danny in, that way!" sighed Sadie. "But why would he hurry it up so, like as if he was afraid we would mebby put a stop to it? She put him up to fixing it all tight before he could change his mind!" Jennie shrewdly surmised. "It does look that way!" fretted Sadie. Jennie, the elder sister, was tall, gaunt, and rawboned. Though approaching old age, her dominating spirit and grasping ambitions had preserved her vigour, physically and mentally. Her sharp face was deeply lined, but the keenness of her eyes was undimmed, her shoulders were erect, her hair was thick and black. The expression of her thin slit of a mouth was almost relentlessly hard. Sadie, five years younger, had also a will of her own, but happily it had always operated on a line so entirely in harmony with that of her sister, that they had lived to- gether all their lives without friction, the younger woman unconsciously dominated by the elder. Indeed, no one could abide under the same roof with Jennie Leitzel who ventured openly to differ with her. Fortunately, even Sadie's passion for dress did not clash with Jennie's miser- liness, for Sadie, too, was miserly, and Jennie loved to see her younger sister arrayed gorgeously in cheap finery, her taste inclining to that of a girl of sixteen. A dormant mother-instinct, too, such as must exist, however obscurely, in every frame of woman, even in that of a Jennie Leitzel, found an outlet in coddling Sadie's health and in minister- ing to and encouraging a certain plaintiveness in the [5] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE younger woman's disposition. So, these two sisters, de pending upon and complementing each other, of congenial temperaments, and with but one common paramount in- terest in life, the welfare of their incomparable younger brother whom they had brought up and of whom they were inordinately proud, lived together in the supreme enjoyment of the high estate to which their ambitions and their unflagging efforts had uplifted the Leitzel family from rural obscurity to prominence and influence in their county town of New Munich. To be sure, the sisters realized that they held what they called their "social position" only as appendages to Danny Danny who had been to college, who was the head of a great corporation law firm, who was enormously rich and a highly eligible young man; that is, he used to be young; and though New Munich regarded him as a confirmed old bachelor, his sisters still looked upon him as a dashing youth and a great matrimonial prize. They were not ashamed, but proud, of the fact that people tolerated them because they were Danny's sisters. It may seem strange that anything calling itself "so- ciety" could admit women so crude as Jennie and Sadie, even though they were appendages to a bait so dazzling as Danny Leitzel, Esquire. But in communities where the ruling class is descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch, "society" is remarkably elastic and has almost no closed doors to the appeal of wealth, however freighted it may be with vulgarity and illiteracy; and, be it known, Danny's sisters were not only financially independent of Danny, but even wealthy, quite in their own right. fel HER HUSBAND'S PURSE In spite of this fact, however, what social footing they had in the little town of New Munich had not been ac- quired so easily as to make it appear to them other than a very great possession. As to the big, fine house in which they lived, it had been Danny's money which, in the early days of his prosperity, had, at his sisters' instigation, built this grand dwelling on the principal street of New Munich, to dazzle and catch the town. The room in which the sisters sat to-night would have seemed to one who knew them a perfect expression of themselves its tawdry grandeur speaking loudly of their pride in money and display, and of, at the same time, their penuriousness; the absence of books and of real pictures, but the obtrusive decorations of heavy gilt frames on chromos; the luridly coloured domestic carpets; heavy, ugly upholstered furniture, manifesting the unfortunate combination of ample means with total absence of culture. It would seem that in a rightly organized social system women like these would not possess wealth, but would be serving those who knew how to use wealth. "To think our Danny 'd marry a stranger, yet, from away down South, when he could have picked out Con- gressman Ocksreider's daughter, or Judge Kuntz's oldest girl or Mamie Gundaker and her father a bank president ! Any of these high ladies of New Munich he could have!" wailed Sadie. "They'd be only too glad to get our Danny! And here he goes and marries a stranger ! " "It ain't like him that he'd up and do this thing [7] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE behind our backs, without askin' our adwice!" Jennie exclaimed. "Think of the grand wedding we could have had here in New Munich!" Sadie sighed. "And we don't even know if she's well-fixed or poor!" cried Jennie in a wildly worried tone. "But I hardly think," Sadie tried to comfort her, "that Danny would pick out a poor girl. Nor a common one, either, so genteel as what we raised him ! " "But men get so easy fooled with women, Sadie! If she's smart, she could easy come over Danny." "Unless he got stubborn-headed for her." "Well," admitted Jennie, "to be sure Danny can get awful stubborn-headed sometimes. But if she's smart and found out how rich he is, she'd take care not to get him stubborn-headed. ' ' "Yes, that's so, too," nodded Sadie. "I wonder if she's a fancy dresser?" Sadie's love of clothes was second only to her devotion to Danny. She was dressed this evening in a girlish Em- pire gown made of red cheesecloth. "What will folks say to this news, anyhow?" scolded Jennie. "I'll have a shamed face to go on the street, us not knowing anything about it, not even who she is yet! If folks ast us, Sadie, we must leave on we did know we'll just say, 'Oh, it ain't news to us /" "But how could we know much when Danny himself has knew her only a little over a month, Jennie? " "Yes, don't it, now, beat all?" "Yes, don't it!" [8] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "That shows what she is marrying a man she knew only a month or so!" "Well, to be sure, it wouldn't take her even a month, Jennie, to see what a catch our Danny is." "If she does turn out to be a common person," said Jen- nie with her most purse-proud look and tone, "she's any- how got to act genteel before folks and not give Danny and us a shamed face here in New Munich high up as we've raised our Danny and hard as we worked to do it yet!" "Yes, the idea!" mourned Sadie. "Yes, the very idea!" nodded Jennie vindictively. "I shouldn't wonder," she added anxiously, always con- cerned for her sister's health which was really quite re- markably perfect, "if this shock give you the headache, Sadie!" "I shouldn't wonder!" Sadie shook her head sadly. "Read me off the piece in the paper and see what it says all," Jennie ordered. "But sit so the light don't give you the headache." Sadie, adjusting her spectacles and turning on the elec- tric table lamp at her elbow, read the glaring article which had that evening appeared on the first page of their daily paper and which every household in New Munich was, they knew, now reading with feelings of astonishment, curiosity, disappointment or chagrin, as the case might be, for the sisters were sure that many heartaches among the marriageable maidens of the town would be caused by the news that Danny was no longer within their possible reach. These twenty-five years past he and his gold had [9] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE been dangling before them and now to have him appro- priated, without warning, by a non-resident ! The article was headed in large type: "ONE MORE VICTIM OF CUPID'S DARTS- DANIEL LEITZEL LED LIKE A LAMB TO HYMEN'S ALTAR." Sadie breathed heavily as she read : In a communication received at this office to-day from our esteemed fellow-citizen, Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, sojourning for the past four weeks in the balmy South, we are informed of his engagement and impending marriage to "a young lady of distinguished Southern lineage," one who, we may feel sure, will grace very acceptably the social circle here of which Mr. Leitzel is such a prominent, pros- perous, and pleasant member. The news comes to our town as a great surprise, for we had almost begun to give Danny up as a hopeless bach. He will, however, lead his bride to Hymen's altar early next month and bring her straightway to his palatial residence on Main Street, presided over by his estimable sisters, Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie. New Munich offers its congratulations to her es- teemed fellow-citizen, though some of us wonder why he found it necessary to go so far away to find a wife, with so many lovely ladies here in his native town to choose from. Love, however, we all know, is a capricious mistress and none may guess whither she may lead. The happy and fortunate lady, Miss Margaret Berke- ley of Berkeley Hill, a distinguished and picturesque old colonial homestead two miles out of Charleston, [10] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE S. C., is, we are informed, a lineal descendant on her moth- er's side of two governors of her native state and the niece of the learned scholar and eminent psychologist, the late Dr. Osmond Berkeley, with whom Miss Margaret made her home at Berkeley Hill until his decease a year ago, since which sad event she has continued to reside at this same homestead, her married sister and family living with her, this sister being the wife of a Charleston attorney with whom Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, has been conducting some legal railroad business in Charleston and through whom our esteemed fellow-citizen, it seems, met his happy doom. New Munich's most aristocratic society will anticipate with pleasurable interest the arrival of the happy bride and groom, Mrs. and Mr. Daniel Leitzel. No doubt many very elegant society events will take place this winter in honour of the newcomer among us; for New Munich is noted for its hospitality. "It don't say," Jennie sharply remarked, "whether she's well-fixed though to be sure if she comes from such high people they'd have to be rich." "But her grand relations are all deceased, the paper says," returned Sadie despondently. "You may better believe, Jennie, if she had money, Danny would have told the noospapers." " It says in the paper she's living with her married sister, and it looks to me," Jennie shrewdly surmised, "as if her brother-in-law (that lawyer Danny had dealings with) wanted to get rid of her and worked her off on our Danny. Or else that she took up with Danny to get a home of her own." [11] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Do you think Danny could be so easy worked?" Sadie doubtfully inquired. "He's a man," Jennie affirmed conclusively (though there were those among Danny's acquaintances who would not have agreed with Jennie); "and any man can be worked." "You think?" "To be sure. Danny would have been roped in long ago a'ready if I hadn't of opened his eyes to it, still, when he was being worked." "Yes, I guess," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jennie, what'll Hiram say when he hears it, I wonder! " Hiram was their brother next in age to Jennie, who, upon the family's sudden, unexpected access to wealth thirty-five years before, through the discovery of coal on some farm land they owned, had been a young farmer working in the fields, and had immediately decided to use his share of the money obtained from leasing the coal land to prepare himself for what had then seemed to him a dizzy height of ambition, the highest human calling, the United Brethren ministry. For twenty years now he had been pastor of a small church in the neighbouring bor- ough of Millerstown. His sisters were very proud to have a brother who was "a preacher." It was so respectable. They never failed to feel a thrill at sight of his printed name in an occasional number of the Millerstown New Era "Rev. Hiram Leitzel." But Hiram did not, of course, hold Danny's high place in their regard; Danny, their little brother whom they had reared and who had repaid them by such a successful career in money-making [121 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE that he had, at the age of forty-five, accumulated a for- tune many times larger than that he had inherited. "Hiram will take it awful hard that Danny's getting married," affirmed Jennie. "He'd like you and me an Danny, too, to will our money to his children. He always hoped, I think, that Danny wouldn't ever get married, so's his children would get all. To be sure the ministry ain't a money-making calling and Hiram has jealous feelings over Danny that he's so rich and keeps getting richer. Hiram likes money, too, as much as Danny does." "I wonder," speculated Sadie, "if Danny's picked out as saving and hard-working a wife as what Hiram's got." The characteristic Leitzel caution that Hiram had ex- ercised in "picking out" a wife had prolonged his bachelor- hood far into middle life. He had now been married ten years and had four children. Keenly as the Leitzels loved money, none of them, not even Hiram himself, had ever regretted his going into the ministry. It gave him the kind of importance in the little borough of Millerstown that was manna to the Leitzel egotism. Hiram really thought of himself (as in his youth he had always looked upon ministers) as a kind of demigod; and as the people of Millerstown and even his own wife treated him as though he were one, he lived in the complacent enjoyment of his delusion. He had greatly pleased his sisters and his brother Daniel by marrying the daughter of the richest man in his congre- gation, and they all approved of the frugality by which he and his wife managed to live on the little salary he drew [13] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE from his church, letting his inherited wealth and that of his wife accumulate for the children. "It ain't likely," Jennie replied to Sadie's speculation, "that Danny's marrying as well as Hiram married, when he's acting without our adwice." "No, I guess anyhow not," agreed Sadie. "Say, Jen- nie!" she suddenly whispered mysteriously. "Well, what?" "Will we leave Mom know about Danny's getting married?" "Well, to be sure she'll have to find it out," Jennie curtly answered. "It'll mebby be printed in the County Gazette and she sees that sometimes." "Say, Jennie, if Danny's wife is a way -up lady, what'll she think of Mom yet, with her New Mennonite garb and her Dutch talk that way, and all! My goodness!" "Well, a body can't help for their step-mothers, I guess!" "But she's so wonderful common and ignorant. I guess Danny would be ashamed to leave his wife see her. And his wife would laugh so at her clothes and her talk!" "But how would his wife ever get a chance to see her? We don't ever have Mom in here and we never take any one out to see her." "That's so, too," Sadie acquiesced. "I guess Hiram'll press it more'n ever now that we'd ought to put Mom to the poorhouse and rent our old home. The land would bring a good rent, he says, and we've no call to leave her live on it free any longer. But I tell Hiram it would make talk if we put her to the poor- [14] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE house. Hardly any one knows we got a step-mother, and we don't want to start any talk." "Yes, well, but how could they blame us when she ain't our own mother?" Sadie protested. "But you know how she brags about us so proud to her neighbours out there in Martz Township just as if we was her own sons and daughters and tells 'em how grand we live and how much Danny is thought of and how smart he is and what fine sermons Hiram preaches and how she kep' us all when we were little while Pop drank so and we hadn't anything but what she earned at the wash-tub! Yes," said Jennie indignantly, "she tells it all right out perfectly shameless and anybody to hear her talk would think we was her own flesh and blood!" "Yes, it often worries me the way the folks out there talk down on us and say she always treated us like her own and we always treated her like a step-mother!" fretted Sadie. "Well, I guess we needn't mind what such common, poor country folks say about us!" sneered Jennie. "All the same" she suddenly lowered her voice apprehensively "we darsent start folks talking, or first thing we know they'll be saying we cheated Mom out of her widow's third because she was too ignorant to claim it!" "How would they have dare to say that when the land come from our own mother in the first place?" pleaded Sadie. "And Danny always says we've got our moral right to all the money even if we haven't the legal right." "Yes, and he always says, too, that if we ain't awful careful we'll have a lawsuit yet, and be forced to give a [15] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE lot of our money over to Mom ! Yes, I often say to Hiram, 'Better leave sleeping dogs lay,' I say, 'and not go tryin' to put Mom into the poorhouse.' " "Yes, I guess anyhow then!" breathed Sadie. "By to-morrow" Jennie veered off from the precarious topic of their step-mother, for here was ice too thin for even private family handling "we'll be getting a letter from Danny giving us the details. Say, Sadie, if he don't offer to pay our way, I ain't using my money to travel that far to his wedding." "Nor me, either," said Sadie. "Do you think, Jennie," she anxiously asked, "folks will talk at our still keeping house for Danny when he's married? You know how Danny always made us promise we'd stay by him, married or single?" Jennie sniffed. "As if he could get along without us! As if any one else could learn his ways and how he likes things and him so particular about his little comforts! He wouldn't leave us go away! And look at what he saves with us paying half the household expenses!" "And as for his wife's not liking it " began Sadie. "As for her," Jennie sharply put in, "she's coming here without asking us if we like it she'll be put in her place right from the start." "But if she's got money of her own mebby," Sadie sug- gested doubtfully, "she could be independent, too, then." " Well, to be sure she'd put her money in her husband's care, wouldn't she? and him a lawyer." "A body couldn't be sure she'd do that till they saw once what kind of a person she was, Jennie." [16] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Well," Jennie stoutly maintained, "Danny '11 see that she does." It will be noted that the story of Miss Berkeley's "dis- tinguished lineage" did not greatly impress Jennie and Sadie Leitzel. They did not quite understand it. They knew nothing about such a thing as a distinguished lineage; New Munich "aristocrats" certainly did not have any; and the sisters' experiences being limited to life as it was in New Munich, whose "first families" were such only by reason of their "means," Sadie and Jennie were ignorant of any other measure of excellence. To be poor and at the same time of any significance, was a combina- tion unknown to them. As the newspapers did not state how closely those an- cestral governors were related to Miss Berkeley, the rela- tionship was undoubtedly so distant as to be negligible. The one thing that would have softened their attitude toward their new relative would have been an unequivocal statement as to the firm financial standing of her family. And on that point the newspaper, though furnished by Daniel himself with the facts, was ominously silent. The conclusion was unmistakable. She was certainly penni- less. It was not greatly to be wondered at that the Leitzels worshipped money. It was money that had done every- thing for them: it had rescued them from a fearful struggle for a bare existence on a small, heavily mortgaged farm; it had freed them from the grind of slavish labour; from an obscurity that had been bitterly humiliating to the self- esteem and the ambition which was characteristic of every f 171 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE one of them. It was money that had given them power, place, influence; that made their fellowmen treat them with deference and relieved them from the necessity of treating any one else with deference. They knew of no worth in life unpurchasable by money. They did not, therefore, know of their own spiritual pauperism; their abject poverty. [18] n THE betrothal and impending marriage of Daniel Leitzel was the only topic of discussion that eve- ning at the New Munich Country Club dance. Certainly New Munich had a Country Club. "Up to date in every particular." There was nothing in the way of being smartly fashionable that the town of New Munich lacked. Well, if up to the present it had lacked old fami- lies of "distinguished lineage," who, in these commercial days, regarded that kind of thing? Anyway, was not that lack (if lack it had been) now to be supplied by the newcomer, Mrs. Daniel Leitzel? Not only at the Country Club dance, but wherever two or three were gathered together at the mid-week Prayer Meeting, at the Woman's Suffrage Headquarters, at the Ladies' Literary Club, at the Episcopal Church Vespers, at the auction bridge given at Congressman Ocksreider's home Danny LeitzeFs betrothal was talked about. "Just imagine this 'daughter of a thousand earls ' ' "Governors, not earls," corrected Mr. Schaeffer, the whist partner of the first speaker who was Miss Myrtle Deibert, as supper was being served at eleven o'clock on the card tables at Congressman Ocksreider's. "A thou- sand governors and highbrows shy-lologists, or some- thing like that whatever they are!" [19] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Well, just imagine such a person living at the Leit- zels!" "But you don't suppose Danny's sisters will still live with him after he's married!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert, the second young man at the table. "If he thinks it more economical, they certainly will," declared Miss Myrtle Deibert. "Whew!" exclaimed Mr. Bleichert. "Good-night!" "Who would have supposed any nice girl would have married old Danny Leitzel!" marvelled Mr. Schaeffer. "Oh, come now," protested Mr. Bleichert who was a cynic, "why have all the girls, from the buds just out, up to the bargain -counter maidens in their fourth 'season,' been inviting Danny Leitzel to everything going, and run- ning after him heels over head, ever since he built his ugly, expensive brick house on Main Street? Tell me that, will you?" It should be stated here that it was an accepted social custom in New Munich for the people at one card table to discuss the clothes, manners, and morals of those at the next table. "You know perfectly well," retorted Miss Deibert, "that at least two girls in this town, when it came to the point of marrying Danny, chucked it." "I should think they might," said Schaeffer. "Why, he isn't a man, he's a weasel, a rat, a money-slot!" "Well, of course, the girl or old maid, 'bird or devil,' that has caught him at last, isn't marrying him for himself, but for his money," serenely affirmed Myrtle Deibert. "When she meets his two appendages, Miss Jennie and [201 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE Miss Sadie, she'll wish she was single again!" predicted Mr. Bleichert. "They'll probably think it their business to manage Danny's wife the way they manage him," Miss Deibert declared. "I hope she's a spendthrift," shrugged Mr. Schaeffer. " It would give Dan Leitzel the shock he needs to find him- self married to a spendthrift." "She won't be one after she's Mrs. Daniel Leitzel!" Miss Deibert confidently asserted. "But of course she's rich Dan Leitzel wouldn't marry a dowerless woman," said Bleichert. "Well, then he won't let her spend her money," Miss Deibert settled that. The second young lady at this card table, a pale, serious- looking girl, did not join in the discussion, but sat with her eyes downcast, toying with her food, as the rest chat- tered. The other three did not give Miss Aucker credit for remaining silent because she found their gossip vulgar and tiresome (which was indeed her true reason) but at- tributed her disinclination to talk to the fact that during the past year Daniel Leitzel had been rather noticeably attentive to her; so much so that people had begun to look for a possible interesting outcome. Miss Deibert, Mr. Schaeffer, and Mr. Bleichert, therefore, all considered her demeanour just now to be an indelicately open expression of her chagrin at the news they discussed. "He was her last chance," Miss Deibert was thinking. "She must be nearly thirty." "One would think she wouldn't show her disappoint- [211 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE ment so frankly," Mr. Schaeffer was mentally criticising her. "You know," chuckled Miss Deibert as she dabbed with her fork at a chicken croquet, "Danny, away from his sisters and his awful house and among strangers, would appear so like a perfect gentleman, even if he is 'a rat, a weasel, a money-slot,' that I think even the descendant of earls or governors might be deceived. You see he's had so many advantages; he was only ten years old when they discovered coal on their land and got rich over night. And from the first, his sisters gave him every advantage they could buy for him, sending him to the best private schools, and then to college, and then to the Harvard Law School; and every one knows that Danny Leitzel is no fool, but a brilliant lawyer. So I do think that, detached from his setting here, there's nothing about Danny that would lead an unsuspecting South Carolina bride to imagine such contingencies as Jennie and Sadie and that Main Street house. I suppose she lives in an ancestral colonial place full of antique mahogany, the kind we all buy at junk shops when we have money enough." "What kind of a woman would it be that could stand Dan Leitzel's penuriousness?" Mr. Schaeffer speculated. "He makes money like rolling down hill and I've heard him jew down the old chore woman that scrubs his office and haggle over a fifty -cent bill for supper at the club. He's the worst screw I ever knew. And mind you, his bride's a Southern woman, accustomed to liberality and gallantry and everything she won't find at Danny's house!" [22] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE 'Do you know (not many people in New Munich do seem to know) that the Leitzels' mother is living?" said Miss Deibert. "What?" "I know a woman that knows her. She lives in the Leitzels' old farmhouse out in Martz Township." "But Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie are too old to have a mother living." " It's their step-mother. But she brought them up from little children and I heard she even took hi washing to support them when their own father drank and now they're ashamed of her and don't have anything to do with her. I was told she's a dear old soul and never speaks against them, but is as proud of their rise in the world as if she were their own mother. The neighbours out there say she has a hard time getting on and that they don't do a thing for her except let her live in their old tumble-down farmhouse. Isn't it a shame, as rich as they are!" "You can't believe everything you hear." "But it would be just like them!" affirmed Bleichert. "Mary!" Miss Deibert suddenly laid her hand play- fully on that of the silent Miss Aucker. "Congratula- tions on your escape, my dear!" "I was never in the least danger, Myrtle. Aren't we gossiping rather dreadfully? I've been wondering" she looked up with a smile that transformed her seriousness into a gentle radiance "what a newcomer like Mr. Leitzel's wife, doomed to live here, will do with us and our social life, if she really is a woman of breeding and culture. I wonder whether it would be possible this winter to make [23] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE our social coming together count for something more than well, than just an utter waste of time. What is there in it all our afternoon teas, auction bridge, luncheons, dinners, dances. The dances are of course the best thing we do because they are at least refreshing and rejuvenat- ing. But don't you think, Myrtle, that we might make it all more worth while?" "There's the Ladies' Literary Club," Myrtle suggested, "for those that want something 'worth while,' as you put it. I think it's an awful bore myself." "Of course it is," Mary agreed. "But what would you suggest then?" "I suppose it is after all a question of what is in our- selves. A dozen literary clubs at which we read abstracts from encyclopedias wouldn't alter the fact that when we get together we have so little, so little to give to each other!" "Oh, I don't know!" protested Myrtle. "We all read all the latest books and magazines and talk about them, and " At an adjoining table another phase of the agitating news was being threshed out. "If she's what the papers say she is, I suppose she'll turn up her nose at New Munich," said the daughter of the Episcopal rector. "Oh, I don't think she need put on any airs!" said Miss Ocksreider, the hostess's daughter. "I've visited down South and I can tell you we're enough more up to date here in New Munich. Nearly every one down there, even their aristocrats, is so poor that up here they wouldn't be [24] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE anybody. It's awfully queer the way those Southerners don't care anything about appearances. They tell you right out they can't afford this and that, and they don't seem to think anything of wearing clothes all out of style. There was an awfully handsome new house in the town where I stopped, and when I asked the hotel clerk who lived in it and if they weren't great swells, he said: 'Oh, no, they are not in society; they're not one of OUT families, though they're very nice people, of course, members of church and good to the poor and all like that.' 'Not in society in a little town like this Leesburg, and living in a mansion like that?' I said. Yes, that's the way they are down there." "How queer!" came from two of her table companions to whom, like herself, any but money standards of value were rather vague and hazy. "But if they don't care for money down there, then what's this girl marrying Dan Leitzel for?" one of the men candidly wondered. "Well, you know there's no accounting for tastes." "I could excuse any woman's marrying for money in these days it's only prudent," said the candid one; "but I certainly couldn't respect a woman that married Dan Leitzel for anything else." "It's to be hoped she's an up-to-date girl and not a clinging vine, for Danny will need very firm handling to make him part with enough money to keep her in gloves and slippers and other necessary luxuries," said Miss Ocksreider. "Yes, if it were only her husband that she'll have to manage; but there are Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie, too!" [25] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE cried the rector's daughter. "Danny doesn't so much as put on a necktie without consulting them. They even tie it for him and part his hair for him." "That may be," said one of the men, "but let me tell you that any one who thinks Dan Leitzel hasn't any force of character better take another guess. If he lets his sis- ters choose his neckties for him, it's because he doesn't want to do it himself. He's the most consummately self- ish individual I've ever known in the whole course of my long and useful life and the most immovably obstinate. Weak? Why, when that fellow takes a notion, he's a mule for sticking to it. Reason with him? Go out in your chicken yard and reason with your hens. It wouldn't be as futile!" "He may be independent of his sisters, but his wife won't be!" prophesied the rector's daughter darkly. "Anyway," said Miss Ocksreider, "it will be interesting, won't it, to look on this winter at the drama or comedy or tragedy, as the case may be, of Danny Leitzel's marriage? " "Won't it!" exclaimed in chorus her hearers. But at one of the other tables a man was at this moment remarking: "You may all laugh at Dan Leitzel he's funny of course but he's all the same a man of brains and education, of wealth and influence and power. In short, he's a successful man. And in Pennsylvania who asks anything more of a man?" [26] m MEANTIME, several hundred miles away, the two objects of all this criticism and speculation were not so apprehensive for their future as were the gossips of New Munich, though it must be confessed that the prospective bridegroom, in spite of his jubilant happi- ness, did have one or two misgivings on certain points, and that the bride, while wholly ignorant of the real calibre of the man she was about to marry, and having no concep- tion of such a domestic and social environment as that from which he had sprung, nevertheless did not even im- agine herself romantically in love with him. That a girl like Margaret Berkeley could have become involved in a love affair and an actual betrothal with a man like Daniel Leitzel, while apparently inexplicable, becomes, in view of her unique history and present circum- stances, not only plausible, but almost inevitable. Her entanglement with him may be dated from a certain evening just twenty -four hours before she met or even heard of him, when a little episode, trivial enough in itself, opened her eyes to an ugly fact in her relation with her sister to which she had been rather persistently blind. She had been radiantly happy all that day because of the unusual circumstance that she had something delight- ful to anticipate for the evening. Her godmother, who [27] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE lived in Charleston, had 'phoned out to Berkeley Hill to invite her to go with her to see Nazimova in "Hedda Ga- bler"; and as Margaret had seen only three plays in all the twenty-five years of her life (though she had avidly read every classic drama in the English and French languages) she was greatly excited at the prospect before her. So barren had her girlhood been of youthful pleasures, so sombre and uneventful her daily routine, and so repressed every natural, restless instinct toward brightness and hap- piness, that the idea of seeing a great dramatic perform- ance loomed big before her as an intoxicating delight. All day, alone in her isolated suburban home, in charge of her elder sister's three small children and of the two rather decrepit negro servants of the great old place, she had gone tripping and singing about the house. She had been quite unable to settle down to the prosaic work of mending the week's laundry, or of wrestling with the intricacies of Henry James' difficult style in "The Golden Bowl" in which, the night before, she had been passionately absorbed. She could scarcely wait for her sister Harriet to come home from town, where she was attending a young ma- trons' luncheon party, so eager was she to tell her of the treat she was going to have. "She will be so glad for me. I've scarcely been out- side the hedge for a month, and she has been having such a gay time herself she's so popular. She'll be so glad I'm going!" she repeated to herself, trying to ignore the doubt in her heart on that point. But when at half-past four in the afternoon Harriet re- turned, the blow fell upon Margaret. [28] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Harriet, dear!" she exultantly greeted her sister with her splendid news the moment the latter came into the house, "Aunt Virginia is going to take me to see Nazimova to-night ! Oh ! " She laughed aloud, and danced about the spacious hall in her delight, while her sister, a very comely young matron of thirty-five, leisurely removed her wraps. "But Walter and I are going," Harriet casually re- marked as she tossed her cloak over a carved, high-backed chair. " The editor of the Bulletin gave Walter two tickets as part payment for some legal business Walter did for him. Of course you and I can't both be away from the children. Has the baby had her five o'clock bottle?" "It isn't quite five yet." "Will you see that she gets it, dearie? I'm so dead tired, I'll have to rest before dinner if I'm going into the city again to-night. Will you attend to it?" "Yes." "That's a dear. I'm going up to lie down. Don't let the children come to my room and wake me, will you, dear?" she added as she started languidly upstairs. "But, Harriet!" "What?" Harriet asked, not stopping. "I accepted Aunt Virginia's invitation and she is com- ing out in her motor for me!" "Too bad! I'm awfully sorry. You'd better 'phone at once or she will be offended. Tell her that as we are much too poor to buy tickets for the theatre, we can't pos- sibly refuse to use them on the rare occasions when they're given to us!" Harriet laughed as she disappeared around the curve of the winding stairway. [29] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE Margaret sprang after her. "Oh, Harriet! I can't give it up!" Her voice was low and breathless. "But if you 'phone at once Aunt Virginia won't be cross. You know, dearie, you shouldn't make engagements with- out first finding out what ours are." And Harriet moved on up the stairs to her bedroom. Margaret was ashamed of her childishness when at dinner that evening Walter, her brother-in-law, inquiring, in his kind, solicitous way, the cause of her pallor and silence, she burst out crying and rushed from the table. Walter, looking shocked and distressed, turned to his wife for an explanation. But Harriet's face expressed blank astonishment. "Why, I can't imagine! Unless she's tired out from having had the children all day. I was at Mrs. Duncan's luncheon, you know. I didn't get home until nearly five. I'll tell Margaret to go to bed early to-night and rest up." Walter Eastman, searching his wife's face keenly, shrugged his big shoulders at the impenetrability of its in- nocent candour. No use to try to get at the truth of any- thing from Harriet. She wasn't exactly a liar, but she had a genius for twisting facts to suit her own selfish ends and all Harriet's ends were selfish. Even the welfare of her children was secondary to her own comfort and con- venience. Walter had no illusions about the wife of his bosom and the mother of his three children. He knew perfectly well that she loved no one as she loved herself, and that this dominating self-love made her often cold- blooded and even sometimes a bit false, though always, he was sure, unconsciously so. He was still quite fond of [30] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE her, which spoke well for them both, considering that they had been married nine years. Of course, after such a length of time they were no longer "in love." But Harriet was an easy-going, good-natured woman, when you didn't cross her; and as he was also easy-going and good-natured, and never crossed her when he could avoid it, they got on beautifully and had a pretty good time together. Walter wondered sometimes what Harriet would do if placed in circumstances where her own inclinations would have to be sacrificed for those of another. For instance, if she and Margaret had to change places. "Take Margaret to the play with you to-night and I'll stay home with the kiddies, Harriet," he suggested, look- ing at his wife across their beautifully appointed dinner- table with its old family china and silver. Harriet, in her home-made evening gown, graced with distinction the stately dining-room furnished in shining antique mahog- any, its walls hung with interesting portraits. "If Mar- garet's had charge of the children all day, she ought not to have them to-night." "No." Harriet shook her head. "Margaret ought not to go out to-night, she's too tired. And I want you with me, dear. Margaret is not my husband, you know. That's the danger of having one of your family living with you," she sighed. "It is so apt to make a husband and wife less near to each other. I am always resisting the in- clination, Walter, dear, to pair off with Margaret instead of with you. I resist it for your sake, for the children's sake, for the sake of our home." "I shall feel a selfish beast going to a play and leaving [31]' HER HUSBAND'S PURSE that dear girl alone here with the babies. They're our babies, not hers, you know." "She loves them like her own; she's crazy about them. They are the greatest pleasure she has, Walter." "Because she hasn't the sort of young pleasures she ought to have. And because she's so unselfish, Hat, that she lets herself be imposed upon to the limit! I've been thinking, lately, that we ought to do more than we do for Margaret; she ought to know girls of her own age; she ought to have a bit of social life, now that the year of mourning is over. It's too dull for her, sticking out here eternally, minding our children and seeing after the house." "But she's used to sticking out here and seeing after the house. When she lived here with Uncle Osmond she had a lot less diversion and life about her than she has now, and you know how deadly gloomy it was here then. We've brightened it up and made it a home for Margaret." "The fact that she had to sacrifice her girlhood for your uncle is all the more reason why she shouldn't sacrifice what's left of it for our children." "If Margaret doesn't complain, I don't see why you need, dear." "She'd never complain she never thinks of herself. Your Uncle Osmond took care not to let her form the habit! For that very reason we should think for her a bit, Hattie, dear. I say, we've got to let Margaret in for some young society." "When I can't afford to keep up my social end, let alone hers? And if we should spend money that way for Mar- garet, where would the children come in?" HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Oh, pshaw!" said Walter impatiently. "You're bluff- ing! You care no more about the money side of it than I do. You're not a Yankee tight- wad! Margaret need not live the life of a nursemaid because we're not rich, any more than you do, honey. It's absurd! And it's all wrong. What you're really afraid of, Hat, is that if she went about more, you'd have to stay at home now and then with your own babies. Eh, dear?" But he was warned by the look in his wife's face that he must go no further. He was aware of the fact that Har- riet was distinctly jealous of his too manifest liking for Margaret. Being something of a philosopher, he had felt occasionally, when his sister-in-law had seemed to him more than usually charming and irresistible, that a wife's instinctive jealousy was really a Providential safeguard to hold a man in check. He wondered often why he found Margaret so tremen- dously appealing, when undoubtedly his wife, though ten years older than her sister, was much the better looking of the two. He was not subtle enough to divine that it was the absolutely feminine quality of Margaret's person- ality, the penetrating, all-pervasive womanliness which one felt in her presence, which expressed itself in her every movement, in every curve of her young body it was this which so poignantly appealed to his strong virility that at times he felt he could not bear her presence in the house. He would turn from her and look upon his wife's much prettier face and finer figure, only to have the fire of his blood turn lukewarm. For he recognized, with fatal clearness, that though Harriet had the beautiful, clear- [33] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE cut features and look of high breeding characteristic of the Berkeley race, her inexpressive countenance betrayed a commonplace mind and soul, while Margaret, lacking the Berkeley beauty, did have the family look and air of breeding, which gave her, with her countenance of intelli- gence and sensitiveness, a marked distinction; and Walter Eastman was a man not only of temperament, but of the poetic imagination that idealizes the woman with whom he is at the time in love. "The man that marries Margaret will never fall out of love with her she's magnetic to her finger-tips! What's more, there's something in her worth loving worth loving forever ! " At this stage of his reflections he usually pulled himself up short, uncomfortably conscious of his disloyalty. Har- riet, he knew, was wholly loyal to him, proud of him, thinking him all that any woman could reasonably expect a husband to be a gentleman of old family, well set up physically, and indeed good-looking, chivalrous to his wife, devoted to his children, temperate in his habits, up- right and honourable. She did not even criticise his natural indolence, which, rather than lack of brains or opportunity, kept his law practice and his earnings too small for the needs of his growing family; but Harriet preferred to do without money rather than have her hus- band be a vulgar "hustler," like a "Yankee upstart." It was this same indolence of Walter's, rather than want of force of character, which led him to stand by passively and see his sister-in-law constantly imposed upon, as he distinctly felt that she was, though he realized that Mar- [34] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE garet herself, dear, sweet girl, never seemed conscious of it. Her unexpected outburst at dinner to-night had shocked and hurt him to the quick. He was sure that something really outrageous on Harriet's part must have caused it. Yet rather than "raise a row" with Harriet, he acquiesced in her decision to leave Margaret at home. It must be said in justice to him that had his astute wife not kept him in ignorance of their Aunt Virginia's invita- tion to Margaret he would undoubtedly have taken a stand in the matter. Harriet, carefully calculating the limit of his easy forbearance, knew better than to tell him of that invitation; and she could safely count upon Margaret not to put her in the wrong with Walter. Margaret, meantime, locked in her room, had quickly got over her outbreak of weeping and was now sitting up- right upon her bed, resolutely facing her quandary. It was Harriet's assumption of authority, with its im- plication of her own subservient position, that was open- ing Margaret's eyes this evening to the real nature of her position in her sister's household. "Suppose I went straight to her just now, all dressed for the theatre, and told her in an off-hand, careless, artis- tic manner that I couldn't possibly break my engagement with Aunt Virginia!" Margaret, perched Turk-fashion on the foot of her bed, her hands clasped about one knee, her cheeks flushed, her eyes very bright, contemplated in fancy Harriet's con- sternation at such an unwonted procedure on her part and she knew she would not do it. Not because, like Walter, she was too indolent to wrestle with Harriet's [351 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE cold-blooded tenacity; nor because she was in the least afraid of her sister. After living eight years with Uncle Osmond she would hardly quail before Harriet! But it was that thing Harriet had said to her this afternoon that awful thing that burned in her brain and heart it was that with which she must reckon before she could take any definite stand. "You should not make any engage- ments without first finding out what ours are," Harriet had said, which, in view of all the circumstances, simply meant, "Being dependent upon us for your food and clothes, your time should be at our disposal. You are no more free to go and come than are the cook and butler." Now of course Harriet would never admit for an instant that she felt like that. Margaret knew perfectly well that her sister did not begrudge the little it cost to keep her with them. Harriet was not so thrifty as that. This at- titude, then, was probably only a pretext to cover some- thing else which Harriet was no doubt unwilling to admit even to her own soul, that something else which Margaret, herself, had tried so long not to see, which made her pres- ence at Berkeley Hill unwelcome to both Walter and Har- riet. And Harriet, too proud to acknowledge her true reason for wishing her sister away, pretended to an eco- nomic one. "Suppose I said to her, 'You must not make engage- ments without first finding out what mine are?' Now if she had only said, ' We should not make engagements with- out first consulting with each other.' But she put all the obligation where she tries to persuade herself that it be- longs." [36] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE When presently Margaret heard her sister and Walter leave the house to go to the theatre she got up from her bed and went to Harriet's room adjoining the nursery, to keep guard over the three sleeping children until their parents came home. Lying on a chintz-covered couch at the foot of Harriet's huge four-posted bed, she thought long and earnestly upon every phase of her difficult situation, determined that be- fore she slept she would solve the apparently impossible problem of how she might leave Berkeley Hill. [37] IV NINE years ago it was that Margaret, a girl of six- teen, had come out from Charleston to live at Berkeley Hill as nurse, amanuensis, housekeeper, and companion to her sickly, irritable, and eccentric old Uncle Osmond Berkeley, eminent psychologist, scholar, and author, who at that time owned and occupied the Berkeley homestead. It was the death of her father and Harriet's immediate marriage that, leaving her homeless and penniless, had precipitated upon her those years of imprisonment with an irascible invalid. Indeed so com- pletely stranded had she been that she had accepted only too thankfully her uncle's grudging offer to give her a home with him on condition that she give him in return every hour of her time, making herself useful in every variety of occupation he saw fit to impose, and to do it all with entire cheerfulness and absolutely no complaining. That was the chief of his many " unqualified conditions " a cheerful countenance at all times, no matter what her fancied reason for dissatisfaction, and no matter how gloomy he might be. "I'm never cheerful," he had affirmed, "and that's why I require you always to be so. If that seems to you un- reasonable and illogical, you're stupid. Give the matter a little thought and light may come to you. You'll have [38] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE plenty of chance, living with me, to develop what little thinking powers you may have much more chance than you'd ever have in a school for young ladies, where you no doubt think I ought to send you for the next two or three years. Schools for young ladies! Ha!" he laughed sar- donically. "Ye gods! Thank me for rescuing you from the fate of being 'finished' at one of them! Well named 'finishing schools!' They certainly are a girl's finish so far as common sense, capacity for usefulness, and ability to think for herself are concerned! And there actually are parents of daughters who seriously regard such schools as institutions of 'education!' Yes, education, by God! You'll get more education, my girl, from one week of my conversation than you would from a decade of one of those parasite factories!" It was in the library at Berkeley Hill, the stately old country home which for seven generations had belonged to the Berkeley family, that this preliminary interview had taken place, her uncle in his reclining chair before a great open hearth, the firelight playing upon his pallid, intel- lectual face crowned with thick, white hair, and upon the emaciated hands clasping a volume on his knee. Repel- lently harsh he seemed to the shrinking maiden standing before him in her deep mourning, to be inspected, ap- praised, and catechised; for in spite of the fact that she had been born and brought up in the city of Charleston, only two miles away, her uncle had never seen enough of her to know anything about her. Perceiving, now, how the girl shrank from him, his eyes sparkled; there was something ghoulish in his love of cow- [39] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE ing those who served him. For the past ten years he had had no woman near him save hired attendants who cringed before his bullying. " A human creature who lets itself be bullied deserves no better," was his theory, and he never spared a sycophant. "The day I have you weeping on my hands," he warned his niece as she stood pale and silent before him, "or even looking as though you were trying not to weep, out you go !" The fact that the girl was scarcely more than a child, that she was alone and penniless, did not soften him. "She's old enough to show her mettle if she has any. If she hasn't, no loss if she's crushed in the grind of serving me, for I'm useful, and shall be while I breathe and think." "Well, what have you to say for yourself, wench?" he demanded when she had heard without a word his uncom- promising statements as to what he would require of her in return for the "home" he would give her. "I accept all your unqualified conditions, Uncle Os- mond," she answered quietly, no tremor in her voice; and the musical, soft drawl of her tone fell with an oddly sooth- ing and pleasing effect upon the invalid's rasped nerves; "if you'll accept my one condition." Her uncle's white head jerked like a startled animal's. " What? What? " he ejaculated after an instant's stunned silence. "Your condition? Huh! You making a con- dition, upon my word ! What pertness is this? A 'condi- tion' upon which you'll accept my charity!" "Not your 'charity.' The self-supporting position of your cheerful, uncomplaining, industrious, capable, untir- ing, companionable, intelligent chattel," came the musical, [40] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE lazy drawl in reply. "My condition is that you solemnly promise never again to call me a 'wench.' " "I'll call you what I see fit to call you! If you're so damned squeamish, I won't have you near me! I'd be hurling books at your head ! " "I'm not 'damned squeamish,' Uncle Osmond, indeed I'm not. I really rather like the way you swear, it's so manly and exciting. But I won't be called a 'wench.'" "Why not? I won't have my liberty of speech ham- pered!" "Very well, then, Uncle Osmond, dear, I won't come." "You shan't come! I wouldn't have you in the house, Miss Pernicketty!" "Good-bye, then. I'm very sorry for you, Uncle Os- mond. I'm sure the loss is yours. I would have been very kind to you." "Sorry for me! You think well of yourself, don't you, wench?" "At least so well that I'll go out sewing by the day, or stand in a store, or go on the stage, or turn evangelist (I've heard there's money in that) before I'll be called a wench!" "What in hell do you imagine the word means?" "I don't know what it means, but I won't be addressed as a wench." " Get the dictionary. Look it up." " But I won't be called a wench no matter what it means." "Won't be called one! You dictate to me? Under- stand, girl, nobody dictates to me! Read Shakespeare's sonnet, Lucrece: [41] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE " ' Know, gentle wench, it small avails my mood.* No offence in the word, you see, my authority being our greatest English poet." "Good-bye, Uncle Osmond," she said, turning away and walking toward the door. "Come back and behave yourself!" She came back at once. "All right and don't ever forget your promise." "I promised nothing. I never make promises." "Your acceptance of my condition is a promise." "Acceptance of your condition!" He choked and spluttered over it. "And it's a mighty small condition considering all I'm going to do for you with cheerfulness, amiability, a pleas- ant smile " "Hold your tongue and speak when you are spoken to!" he growled, apparently furious, but secretly exulting at the child's refreshing fearlessness with him. It had been an instinct of self-preservation that had led Margaret to demonstrate to her uncle, in that very first hour with him, that the line would have to be drawn some- where in his browbeating. And the word "wench" had served her purpose. Thereafter, in the eight years that she lived with him, docile and patient as she always was, he never forgot, and she never had to remind him, that there was a limit past which he could not safely venture in the indulgence of his tendency to tyrannize. But her life was hard; most girls would have found its monotony and self-sacrifice unbearable; its gloomy envir- onment in the great empty barn of a house too depressing; [421 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE its close confinement within the narrow limits of the un- kept grounds, overgrown with weeds and bushes, and dark with big trees and a high hedge of hemlocks, as bad as any jail. There were sometimes weeks at a stretch during which she saw no human being save her uncle and the old negro couple who had lived on the place for a quarter of a century; for though Harriet and her husband lived in Charleston, her uncle would spare her so seldom to visit them, and was so exacting as to her speedy return to him that she soon fell into the way of confining her intercourse with her sister almost entirely to a weekly exchange of letters. In spite, however, of her isolation Margaret felt that there were compensations in her lot. She had resources within herself in her love of books, and she found in her uncle's rich intellectual equipment, of which he freely gave her the benefit in their daily association, a stimulus, a variety, and even an excitement that meant much more to her than the usual girl's diversions of frocks, parties, and beaus would have meant. It is true she often longed for a congenial companion of her own age, she hungered for affection, she suffered keenly in her occasional feverish paroxysms of restlessness, and there were times when the surging fountains of her youth threatened to break down the barriers that imprisoned a nature that was both large and impassioned. "She's temperamental enough!" was her uncle's early conclusion as, from day to day, the girl's mind and heart were unfolded to his keen observation. Her rare periods of passionate discontent, however, [43] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE though leaving her spent and listless for a time after they had passed over her, did not embitter her. There was a fund of native sweetness in Margaret's soul that even her life with cynical old Osmond Berkeley could npt blight. That philosopher marvelled often at his inability to spoil her, remarkably open as he found her young mind to the ideas and theories which he delighted in impressing upon her. It was indeed amazing how readily she would select from the intellectual feast daily spread before her what was wholesome and pure and reject what was mor- bid. "That's right," he would approve when she would frankly refuse to accept a dogma laid down to her. "Bet- ter think for yourself, even though you think wrongly, than do as the other females of the species do believe whatever they are told to believe or, worse, what it suits their personal interests to believe. Be everlastingly thank- ful to me that I encourage you to think for yourself, to face the facts of life. George Meredith writes, ' The edu- cation of girls is to make them think that facts are their enemies.' You shall not escape some knowledge of facts if I can help it!" " It's awfully nice of you to care so much about my mind, Uncle Osmond," she gratefully responded. "To really care for anything about me. I do love to be mothered and coddled and made much of L" "Huh! 'Mothered and coddled and made much of!' You're at the wrong shop! And don't let me hear you misuse that word 'nice.'" "I insist upon being pleased at your caring at least [44] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE about my mind! I'd be grateful even to a dog that was good to me." "I'm not a dog, and I'm never so 'good' to any one that you could notice it particularly." "Don't try to make yourself out worse than you are; you're bad enough, honey, in all conscience!" "Hold your impudence and bring me Volume Third of Kant's 'Critique.'" "Oh, dear!" Margaret sighed as she obeyed, "is it going to be that awful dope to-day? I hoped up to the last you'd choose an exciting novel. Do you know I don't think it's womanly to understand Kant's 'Critique."' "I've no desire to be womanly. Do as I tell you." In addition to finding his niece capable and patient as a nurse and housekeeper, Margaret interested him more than any individual he had known in many years. He secretly blessed the hour when she had come into his sombre life to enliven and, yes, enrich it. Not for worlds, however, would he have let her know what she was to him. There were rare moments when he was actually moved to an expression of gratitude and tenderness for his long- suffering victim; but Margaret's touchingly eager response to such overtures (heart-hungry as she was in her loneli- ness) while gratifying him, had always the effect of making him promptly withdraw into his hard shell again and to counteract, by his most trying exactions, his momentary softness; so that in time she learned to dread any least sign of amiability. She did not know the full extent of her uncle's selfishness in his treatment of her : how ruthlessly he schemed to avert [45] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE the danger which he thought often threatened him of los- ing her to some one of the half-dozen middle-aged or elderly gentlemen of learning who had the habit of visiting him in his retirement and who, to the last man of them, whether married or single, adored his niece. It seemed that no man could lay eyes on her without promptly loving her (what men called love). Even his physician, happily mar- ried and the father of four lusty boys, was, Berkeley could see, quite mad about her, though Margaret never discov- ered it; she only thought him extremely agreeable and kind and liked him accordingly. Indeed the only fun she ever got out of this train of admirers was an occasional hour of liberty while they were closeted with her uncle; for he took care, as soon as he realized how alluring she was to most men, to have her out of the way when his acquaintances dropped in, a deprivation to his own comfort for which the visitor paid in an extra dose of pessimism and irony. "When that child falls in love," Berkeley once told him- self, "as of course so temperamental a girl is bound to do sooner or later, it will go hard with her. Let her wait, how- ever, until I'm gone. Time enough for her then. I need her. Couldn't endure life without her now that I'm used to her!" So he not only gave her no opportunity to meet mar- riageable men, he tried to unsex her, to engraft upon her mind his own cynicism as to the thing named love, his conviction of its gross selfishness, his scorn of sentimental- ity and of "the hypocrisy that would idealize an ephemeral emotion grounded in base, egoistic appetite." "All 'love,' all attraction of whatever nature, is grounded [46] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE in sex," he would affirm. "The universe is upheld and constantly recreated by the ceaseless action of so-called love. A purely natural, physical phenomenon, there- fore. There is not in life such a thing as a disinterested love." "A mother's love?" Margaret once suggested in reply to this avowal. "Entirely selfish. She loves her child as part of herself; all her pride and ambition for it are because it is hers." "Well, if you call a mother's love selfish, there's no use saying anything more." "And not to mince matters," he reaffirmed, "I want you to know for your own protection that a man's love for a woman is that of a beast of prey for its victim!" "But I'm so safe here, I don't need such protection; I never see a man. No one but learned scholars ever come here." "'Learned scholars' are not men, then, in your cate- gory?" "Not the interesting wild kind that you warn me against." "The man, woman, or 'learned scholar,' who has not a devil as well as an angel in his soul, a beast as well as a god, is too limited a creature to see life whole and big and round." "Am 7, then," she inquired with interest, "a devil and a beast as well as an angel and a goddess, do you think?" "Mostly devil, you! I couldn't stand the angel-goddess combination. Even you, my girl, are wholly selfish; you would not stay with me for one day if it were not that I [47] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE give you a home. Come, now," he invited, and evidently expected a protest against this assertion. "Why, of course I shouldn't. Why would I?" He looked rather blank at this, though privately he never failed to find her honesty refreshing. "I never understood," she added, "that it was a ques- tion of affection between you and me, did you, my dear?" "'Affection! '" he sneered bitterly. "Affection for our- selves!" "Of course. You wouldn't give me a bright and happy home like this if you did not need me to wait on you thirty- six hours out of the twenty-four with a cheerful, Cheshire- cat smile, and all for my food, bed, and two new frocks and hats a year." "Have you no appreciation, girl, of the liberal education it is for you to be with me, to be permitted to read to me, to have such a library as mine at your command?" "Yes, indeed, Uncle Osmond." "Well, then?" "But I don't stay here for the pleasure of your amiable society, dear," she assured him, patting his hand. "You're far too much like your old Scotch Thomas Carlyle that you admire so much. My goodness, what a life Jane must have led with that old curmudgeon!" "Hold your impudent tongue!" "Yes, dear." "Don't speak to me again to-day!" "Thanks; I'm so glad you don't also require me to be brilliantly conversational. I'd really have to charge extra for that, Uncle Osmond." [48] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Get me my eggnog!" In spite of all Osmond Berkeley's precautions, however, Margaret did, of course, go through the intense and fiery ordeal of "falling in love"; for when a maiden's budding soul begins to unfold to the beauty of life, to throb and thrill before the wonder and mystery of the universe, no walled imprisonment can check the course of nature she is bound to suffer the bitter-sweet experience of becoming enamoured of something, it doesn't much matter what; a cigar-shop Indian will suffice if nothing more lively comes her way. For circumstances are, after all, nothing but "machinery, just meant to give thy life its bent." Berke- ley, priding himself on his knowledge of sex-psychology, knowing that girls isolated in boarding-schools fall in love with their woman teachers, and in colleges with each other, nevertheless persuaded himself that he could, in this in- stance, defeat nature; that Margaret was being safe- guarded too absolutely to admit of her finding any outlet whatever for the pent-up emotional current of her woman- hood. But there came to Berkeley Hill one day a stranger, an earnest young minister of Charleston, who, having read a magazine article of Osmond Berkeley's in which "the hysterical, unwholesome excitement of evangelistic re- vivals" was demonstrated to be purely physiological, wished to remonstrate with its author and point out to him that he was grievously mistaken. One keenly appraising glance at the embarrassed, awk- ward young man as he was shown into the library where Berkeley sat in his armchair before the fire, with Margaret [49] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE at his side reading to him from a just published work by Josiah Royce, made her uncle decide that it would be superfluous to send her from the room "on account of a creature like this, with no manners, no brains, and an Adam's apple!" But it was the young man's deadly earnestness in the discussion between these two unequal protagonists that impressed itself upon Margaret's hungry imagination; his courage in coming with what he conceived to be his burn- ing message of truth to such a formidable "enemy to truth" as the famous scholar, Dr. Osmond Berkeley. Evidently, the young man's conscience, in spite of his pain- ful shyness, had lashed him to this visit, more dreadful than a den of lions. There were still, even in these days, it seemed, martyrs for religion. Now, while Margaret of course recognized the intel- lectual feebleness of the young minister's side of the ques- tion which was under fire, nevertheless, before his visit was concluded, his brow wore for her a halo; his thin little voice was rich music to her quivering nerves; his un- sophisticated manner the outward sign of a beautiful sim- plicity; his Adam's apple a peculiar distinction. Berkeley, as soon as he found his visitor a bore, made short work of him and got rid of him without ceremony. In Margaret's eyes the young man stood up to his rebuffs like a hero and a martyr. Her uncle did not notice, upon her return to the library after seeing the young man into the hall, how bright were her eyes, how flushed her cheeks, how sensitive the curve of her lips. [50] " ' Benefactor' ? " she read, " ' a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.' You see, I'm your benefactor, accord- ing to the Standard " HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Ha, ha!" he laughed sardonically, "wouldn't you rather go to hell than have to hear him preach?" "You laugh like a villain in a melodrama!" retorted Margaret. "I haven't laughed for twenty years except at damned fools. When did you ever see a melodrama?" "Aunt Virginia took Harriet and me to see The Two Orphans once." "Damned presumption of the fellow to come here and take up my time! He isn't even a gentleman." "I thought you prided yourself on not being a snob, Uncle Osmond." "Don't be stupid. Breeding is breeding" "Well, what is good breeding if it isn't being courteous in your own house? You may call that young man com- mon, but I doubt whether he bullies women ! " "You're cross!" he snapped at her. "Look pleasant!" he commanded, bringing his hand down heavily on the arm of his chair. "I won't!" And for the first and only time in all the eight years of her life with him, Margaret turned upon him with a stamp of her foot. He stared at her incredulously. "You call that good breeding, do you, stamping your foot at your benefactor?" "Benefactor?"' Margaret flew across the room and violently turned the pages of the dictionary on a stand in the corner. "'Benefactor,'" she read, "'a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.' You see, I'm your benefactor, ac- cording to the Standard." [51] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "You're begging the question: is it well-bred for a young lady to stamp her foot? " "I'm ashamed that I did it, Uncle Osmond, and I beg your pardon." "Your tone is not contrite!" he objected. But an un- wonted flash in her eyes made him see that this was one of the places where he would have to "draw the line." "You are tired," he said abruptly. "No wonder, after listening to the braying of that evangelical ass for nearly an hour! Put on your wraps and take a run about the grounds." As with a look of relief Margaret turned to leave the room, he added in a tone that was almost gentle, "Put on your heavy coat, child, the air is very raw." "Thank you, Uncle Osmond." "And come back looking cheerful." "I shall have to turn Christian Scientist if I'm to be cheerful under all circumstances and you say you hate Christian Scientists because they are always so damned pleasant." "You can't turn Christian Scientist and live in the same house with me ! " "But, Uncle Osmond, dear, I'm beginning to see that a Christian Scientist is the only thing that could live in the same house with you!" With that she left him, to a half-hour of anxious consid- eration of her final thrust; for the one dread that hung over his life was the possibility of Margaret's deserting him. [52 MARGARET'S suddenly conceived passion for the young minister went through all the usual phases. It was not, of course, the individual himself, but her impossible inhuman ideal of him, of which she was enamoured, the man himself was as unknown to her as though she had never seen him; his image merely served as a dummy to be clothed with her rich imaginings. The thought of him dwelt with her every moment of the day, making her absent-minded and listless, or feverishly talk- ative. She made excuses to go frequently to town, to a dentist, to a doctor, to see Harriet, just for a chance to drive past the minister's parsonage, for even if she did not catch a glimpse of him, it was manna to her soul to look upon the place of his abode. She would have delighted to have lain her cheek upon the doorsill his foot had pressed. The actual sight, once or twice, of his ungainly figure on the street, set her heart to thumping so that she could not breathe. Her discovery, through a paragraph in the religious news of a daily paper, that he was married, did not affect her, for she was not conscious of any desire to marry him; she only wanted to see him, to hear him, to feel herself alive in all her being, in his presence. Even the sermon she managed to hear him preach one Sunday morning, when a visit from one of the scholarly [53] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE gentlemen whom her uncle considered dangerous, gave her a free half day, even her recognition, through that sermon, of the man's mental barrenness, did not quench her passion. What did finally kill it, after three months of mingled misery and ecstasy, was an occasion as trivial as that which had given birth to it. One day, in front of a gro- cery shop, where some provisions were being piled into her phaeton, and where, to her quivering delight, the Object of her adoration just chanced at that moment to come to make some purchases, she heard him say to a negro em- ployee of the grocer, "Yes, sir, two pecks of potatoes and a head of cabbage; no, sir, no strawberries." To say "sir" to a negro! The scales fell from Marga- ret's eyes. Her heart settled down comfortably in her bosom. Her nerves became quiet. The young minister stood before her as he was. His Adam's apple was no longer a peculiar distinction, but an Adam's apple. For this was South Carolina. Thereafter, her uncle found her a much more comfort- able companion. But keenly observant though he was, he had never suspected for a moment, during those three months of Margaret's obsession, that she was actually experiencing the thing he was so persistently trying to avert; for it would not have been conceivable to him that any woman, least of all his niece, Margaret Berkeley, could fall in love with "a milksop" like "Rev. Hoops," as the poor man's printed visiting card proclaimed him. Never in all the rest of her life could Margaret laugh at that youthful ordeal. That she could have been so in- [541 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE sanely deluded was a mystery to wonder over, to speculate about; but the passion itself, the depth, the height, the glory of it, its revelation of human nature's capacity for ecstasy all this was a reality that would always be sacred to her. At the same time, her discovery that an emotional ex- perience so intense and vital, so fundamental, could grow out of an absolute illusion and be so ephemeral, made her almost as cynical about love as was her uncle himself; so that always after that the seed of skepticism, which he so earnestly endeavoured to plant in her mind, fell on pre- pared soil. Had Margaret adopted indiscriminately her uncle's philosophical, ethical, social, political, or even literary ideas, it would certainly have unfitted her for living in a society so complacent, optimistic, and conventional as that of most American communities. As it was, the opinions she did come to hold, from her intercourse with this fear- less, if pessimistic, thinker, and from her wide and varied reading with him, and also the ideals of life she formed in the solitude which gave her so much time for thought, were unusual enough to make her unique among women. One aspect of this difference from her kind was that she was entirely free from the false sentimentality of the aver- age young woman, and this in spite of the fact that she was fervently imaginative and, in a high degree, sensitive to the beauty and poetry of life. Another and more radical point of difference was that she had what so very few women do have spiritual and intellectual fearlessness. And both of these mental attitudes she owed not only to [55] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE her own natural largeness of heart and mind, but to the strong bias given her by her uncle toward absolute hon- esty. While, by reason of her more than ordinary mentality, as well as because of a very adaptable disposition, Mar- garet bore her life of self-sacrifice and isolation with less unhappiness than most girls could have done, there was one phase of it which was vastly harder upon her. Her nature being unusually strong in its affections, it took hard schooling indeed before she could endure with stoicism the loveless life she led. It was upon her relation with her elder sister Harriet, the only human being who really be- longed to her, that she tried to feed her starved heart, cher- ishing almost with passion this one living bond; idealizing her sister and her sister's love for her, looking with an intensity of longing to the time when she would be free to be with Harriet, to lavish upon her all her unspent love, to live in the happiness of Harriet's love for her. Harriet's lukewarmness, not manifest under her easy, good-natured bearing, was destined one day to come as a great shock to Margaret. It was one night about five months before her uncle's sudden death that he talked with her of his will. They were together in the library, waiting for Henry, the negro manservant, to finish his night's chores about the place before coming to help the master of the house to bed. "I trust, Margaret," Berkeley, with characteristic abruptness, broke a silence that had fallen between them, "that you are not counting on flourishing as an heiress when I have passed out?" [561 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "I must admit," said Margaret apologetically, "that I never thought of that, stupid as it may seem to you, Uncle Osmond. Now that you mention it, it would be pleasant." " ' Pleasant? ' To have me die and leave you rich? " "I mean only the heiress part would be pleasant and having English dukes marrying me, you know, and all that." "How many English dukes, pray? I fancy they are a high-priced commodity, and my fortune isn't colossal." "I shouldn't want a really colossal fortune." "Modest of you. But," he added, "if I did mean to do you the injury of leaving you all I have, it would be more than enough to spoil what is quite too rare and precious for spoiling" he paused, his keen eyes piercing her as he deliberately added "a very perfect woman." "Meaning me?" Margaret asked with wide-eyed as- tonishment. " So I don't intend to leave you a dollar." " Suit yourself, honey." "You are like all the Berkeleys, entirely lacking in money sense. Now the lack of money sense is refreshing and charming, but disastrous. I shall not leave my money to you for four reasons." He counted them off on his long, emaciated fingers. "First, because you wouldn't be sufficiently interested in the damned money to take care of it; secondly, you'd give it away to your sister, or to her husband, or to your own husband, or to any one that knew how to work you ; thirdly, riches are death to contentment and to usefulness and the creator of parasitism; fourthly, [57] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE I wish you to be married for your good, sweet self, my dear child, and not for my money." "But if I'm penniless, / may have to marry for money. From what you tell me of love, money is the only thing left to marry for. And if it has to be a marriage for money, I prefer to be the one who has the money, if you please, Uncle Osmond." "Well, you won't get mine. I tell you you are worth too much to be turned into one of these parasitical women who are the blot on our modern civilization. In no other age of the world has there been such a race of feminine parasites as at the present. Let me tell you something, Margaret: there is just one source of pure and unadulter- ated happiness in life, and that I bequeath to you in with- holding from you my fortune. Congenial work, my girl, is the only sure and permanent joy. Love? Madness and anguish. Family affection? Endless anxiety, heart- ache, care. You are talented, child; discover what sort of work you love best to do, fit yourself to do it preemi- nently well, and you'll he happy and contented." "But my gracious! Uncle Osmond, what chance have I to fit myself for an occupation, out here at Berkeley Hill, taking care of you? These years of my youth in which I might be preparing for a career I'm devoting to you, my dear. So I really think it would only be poetic justice for you to leave me your money, don't you?" Her uncle, looking as though her words had startled and surprised him, did not answer her at once. Con- sidering her earnestly as she sat before him, the firelight [581 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE shining upon her dark hair and clear olive skin, the peculiar expression of his gaze puzzled Margaret. "That," he said slowly, "is an aspect of your case I had not considered." "Of course you had not; it wouldn't be at all like you to have considered it, my dear." "Well," he snapped, "my will is made. I'm leaving all I have, except this place, for the founding of a college which shall be after my idea of a college. Berkeley Hill, however, must, of course, remain in the family." "Don't, for pity's sake, burden the family (that's Harriet and me) with Berkeley Hill, Uncle Osmond, if you don't give us the wherewithal to keep it up and pay the taxes on it!" protested Margaret. Again her uncle gazed at her with an enigmatical stare. "Huh!" he muttered, "you've got some money sense after all. More than any Berkeley / ever met." "I know this much about money," she said senten- tiously: "that while poverty can certainly rob us of all that is worth while in life, wealth can't buy the two es- sentials to happiness love and good health." " Since when have you taken to making epigrams?" "Why, that is an epigram, isn't it! Good enough for a copybook." "I tell you, girl, if I leave you rich, I rob you of the necessity to work, and that is robbing you of life's only worth. The most pitiable wretches on the face of the earth are idle rich women." " If it's all the same to you, Uncle Osmond, I'd rather take my chances for happiness with riches than without them." [59] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "I am to understand, then, that you actually have the boldness to tell me to my face that you expect me to leave to you all I die possessed of? " "Yes, please." "It's wonderfully like your damned complacency! Well, as I've told you, I've already made my will." "Here's Henry to take you upstairs. But you can make it over, or add a codicil. Which shall I bring you to-night, an eggnog or beer?" " I'm sick of all your slops. Let me alone." "Yes, dear. Good-night," she answered with the perfunctory, artificial pleasantness which she always em- ployed, as per contract, in responding to his surliness; and the absurdity, as well as the audacity, of that bought-and- paid-for cheerfulness of tone, never failed to entertain the old misanthrope. Five months later the will which Osmond Berkeley's lawyer read to the "mourners" gave Berkeley Hill to Margaret and her sister, Mrs. Walter Eastman, while all the rest of the considerable estate was left to a board of five trustees to be used for the founding of a college in which there should be absolute freedom of thought in every department, such a college as did not then exist on the face of the earth. Harriet's husband, being a lawyer, offered at once to secure for Margaret, through process of law, a reasonable compensation for her eight years of service. But Mar- garet objected. "You see Uncle Osmond didn't wish me to have any of his money, Walter." [60] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Don't be sentimental about it, Margaret. Your uncle had a lot of sentiment, didn't he, about your sacri- ficing your life for him? " "He had his reasons for not giving me his money. He sincerely thought it would be better for me not to have it. He really did have some heart for me, Walter. I'm not sentimental, but I couldn't touch a dollar he didn't wish me to have." "Then you certainly are sentimental," Walter insisted. Almost immediately after the funeral Harriet and her family moVed out from Charleston to live at Berkeley Hill with Margaret, retaining the two old negroes who for so many years had done all the work that was done on the estate. " We couldn't rent the place without spending thousands in repairing it, so we'll have to live on it ourselves." The sentiment that Margaret and Harriet cherished for this old homestead which had for so long been occupied by some branch of the family was so strong as to preclude any idea of selling the place. It was Margaret's wish, at this time, to go away from Berkeley Hill and earn her own living, as much for the adventure of it as because she thought she ought not to be a burden to Walter. But the Southerner's principle that a woman may with decency work for her living only when bereft of all near male kin to earn it for her led Walter to protest earnestly against her leaving their joint home. Harriet, too, was at first opposed to it. "You could be such a help and comfort to me, Margaret, [61] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE dear, if you'd stay. Henry and Chloe are too old and have too much work to do on this huge place to help me with the children; and out here I can't do as I did in Charleston get in some one to stay with the babies whenever I want to go anywhere. So you see how tied down I'd be. But with you here, I should always feel so comfortable about the children whenever I had to be away from them." "But for what it would cost Walter to support me, Harriet, dear, you could keep a nurse for the children." "And spend half my time at the Employment Agency. A servant would leave as soon as she discovered how lonesome it is out here, a half mile from the trolley line. It's well Henry and Chloe are too attached to the place to leave it." " So the advantage of having me rather than a child's nurse is that I'd be a fixture?" Margaret asked, hiding with a smile her inclination to weep at this only reason Harriet had to urge for her remaining with her. "Of course you'll be a fixture," Harriet answered af- fectionately. "Walter and I are only too glad to give you a home." So, for nearly a year after her uncle's death, Margaret continued to live at Berkeley Hill. Harriet always referred to their home as "My house," "My place," and never dreamed of consulting her younger sister as to any changes she saw fit to make in the rooms or about the grounds. It was during these first weeks of Margaret's life with Harriet that she suffered the keen grief of finding her own warm affection for her sister thrown back upon itself in [62] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE Harriet's want of enthusiasm over their being together; her always cool response to Margaret's almost passionate devotion; her abstinence from any least approach to sisterly intimacy and confidence. It was not that Harriet disliked Margaret or meant to be cold to her. It was only that she was constitutionally selfish and indifferent. So, in the course of time, Margaret came to lavish all the thwarted tenderness of her heart upon her sister's three very engaging children. But before that first year of her new life had passed over her head she came to feel certain conditions of it to be so unbearable that, in spite of Walter's protests (only Walter's this time), she made a determined effort to get some self-supporting employment. And it was then that she became aware of a certain fact of modern life of which her isolation had left her in ignorance: she discovered that in these days of highly specialized work there was no em- ployment of any sort to be obtained by the untrained. School teachers, librarians, newspaper women, even shop- girls, seamstresses, cooks, and housemaids must have their special equipment. And Margaret had no money with which to procure this equipment. There is, perhaps, no more tragic figure in our strenuous modern life than the penniless woman of gentle breeding, unqualified for self- support. The worst phase of Margaret's predicament was that it had become absolutely impossible for her to continue to live longer under the same roof with Walter and Har- riet. The simple truth was, Harriet was jealous of Wal- ter's quite brotherly affection for her for so Margaret [63] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE interpreted his kindly attitude toward her. Having no least realization of her own unusual maidenly charm, the fact that her brother-in-law was actually fighting a grande passion for her would have seemed to her grotesque, incredible; for Walter, being a Southern gentleman, con- trolled his feelings sufficiently to treat her always with scrupulous consideration and courtesy. Therefore, she considered Harriet's jealousy wholly unreasonable. Why, her sister seemed actually afraid to trust the two of them alone in the house together! (Margaret did not dream that Walter was afraid to trust himself alone in the house with her.) And if by chance Harriet ever found them in a tete-a-tete, she would not speak to Margaret for days, and as Walter, too, was made to take his punishment, Margaret was sure he must wish her away. Of course, since she had become a cause for discord and unhappiness between Harriet and Walter, she must go. A way must be found for her to live away from Berkeley Hill. It was this condition of things which she faced the night she lay on the couch in her sister's room keeping guard over her sleeping children while Harriet and Walter were seeing Nazimova in "Hedda Gabler." [64] VI WALTER EASTMAN, on his way to town next morning, to his law office, considered earnestly his young sister-in-law's admonition given him just after breakfast, that he must that day borrow for her a sufficient sum of money to enable her to take the course of instruction in a school for librarians, giving as security a mortgage on her share in Berkeley Hill. And the con- clusion to which his weighty consideration of the prop- osition brought him was that instead of mortgaging their home, he would bring Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, out to Berkeley Hill to dinner. "Margaret's never had a chance. She's never in her life met any marriageable men. It's about time she did. She hasn't the least idea what a winner she'd be, given her fling! And the sooner she's married," he grimly told himself, "the better for me, by heaven!" Walter was too disillusioned as to the permanence and reality of love to feel any scruples about letting Margaret in for matrimony with a man twenty years her senior and of so little personal charm as was the prominent Pennsylvania lawyer, Mr. Leitzel, so long as the man was decent (as Leitzel so manifestly was) and a gentleman. It would have taken a keener eye than Walter Eastman's to have perceived, on a short, casual acquaintance, that [65] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE the well-mannered, able, and successful corporation lawyer was not, in Walter's sense, a gentleman. For Daniel had, ever since the age of ten, been having many expensive "ad- vantages." And so it came to pass that that same evening found Mr. Leitzel, after a dainty and beautifully appointed dinner at Berkeley Hill, alone with his host's young sister- in-law, in the wonderfully equipped library of the late em- inent Dr. Osmond Berkeley. His comely hostess, Mrs. Eastman, had excused herself after dinner to go to her babies, and Eastman himself had just been called to the telephone. Daniel, always astutely observant, recognized their scheme to leave him alone with this marriageable young lady of the family, while Margaret herself never dreamed of such a thing. Daniel was always conscious, in the presence of young women, of his high matrimonial value. He had always regarded his future wife, whoever she might be, as a very fortunate individual indeed. His sisters, in whom his faith was absolute, had, for twenty-five years, been in- stilling this dogma into him. Also, Daniel was mistaking the characteristic Southern cordiality of this family for admiration of himself. Especially this attractive girl, alone with him here in the great, warm, bright room, packed with books and hung with engravings and prints, manifested in her attentive and pleasant manner how irresistible she found him. Daniel loved to be made much of. And by such a girl as this! The blood went to his head as he contemplated her, seated before him in a low [661 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE chair in front of the big, old-fashioned fireplace, dressed very simply all in white. How awfully attractive she was! Odd, too, for she wasn't, just to say, a beauty. Daniel considered himself a connoisseur as to girls, and he was sure that Miss Berkeley's warm olive skin just escaped being sallow, that her figure was more boyish than feminine, and her features, except, perhaps, her beautiful dark eyes, not perfect. But it was her arresting individuality, the subtle magnetism that seemed to hang about her, challenging his curiosity to know more of her, to understand her, that fascinated him in a manner unique in his experience of womankind. Subtle, indeed, was the attraction of a woman who could, in just that way, impress a mind like Daniel's, which, extraordinarily keen in a practical way, was almost devoid of imagination. But everything this evening conduced to the firing of what small romantic faculty he possessed: the old home- stead suggestive of generations of ease and culture, the gracious, soft-voiced ladies, their marked appreciation of himself (which was of course his due), the good dinner served on exquisite china and silver in the spacious dining- room (Daniel, in his own home, had never committed the extravagance of solid mahogany, oriental rugs, and family portraits, but he had gone so far as to price them and therefore understood what an "outlay" must have been made here). And then the beautiful drawing-room into which he had been shown upon his arrival, furnished in antique Hepplewhite, the walls hung with Spanish and Dutch oils. And now this distinguished looking library in which they sat. Almost all the books Daniel [671 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE possessed, besides his law books, were packed into a small oak bookcase in his own bedroom. But here were books in many languages; hundreds of old volumes in calf and cloth that showed long and hard usage, as well as shelves and shelves of modern works in philosophy, science, his- tory, poetry, and fiction. What would it feel like to have been born of a race that for generations had been educated, rich, and respectable not to remember a time when your family had been poor, ignorant, obscure, and struggling for a bare existence? In New Munich the "aristocracy" was made up of people who kept large department or jewellery or drug stores, or were in the wholesale grocery business; even Congressman Ocksreider had started life as an office boy and Judge Miller's father had kept a livery stable. This home seemed to stand for something so far removed from New Munich values ! And these two ladies of the house he was sure he had never in his life met any ladies so "elegant and refined" in their speech, manner, movements, and appearance. Daniel's recognition of all this, however, did not humble or abash him. He had too long enjoyed the prerogative that goes with wealth not to feel self-assured in any circum- stances, and his attitude toward mankind in general was patronizing. It never occurred to him for an instant that a family living like this could be poor. Wealth seemed to him so essentially the foundation of civilization that to be en- joying social distinction, ease, comfort, and even luxury, with comparative poverty, would have savoured of an- archy. [68] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE Margaret, meantime, was regarding "Walter's odd little lawyer-man," who had been quite carelessly left on her hands, with rather lukewarm interest, though there were some things about him that did arrest her curious atten- tion : the small, sharp eyes that bored like gimlets straight through you, and the thin, tightly closed lips that seemed to express concentrated, invincible obstinacy. "No wonder he's a successful lawyer," she reflected. "No detail could escape those little eyes, and there'd be no appeal, I fancy, from his viselike grip of a victim. He'd have made even a better detective." The almost sinister power of penetration and strength of will that the man's sharp features expressed seemed to her grotesquely at variance with his insignificant physique. "There never has been a great woman lawyer, has there?" she asked him, "except Portia?" "'Portia?' Portia who? I had not you mean, per- haps, some ancient Greek?" asked Daniel. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "'The quality of mercy is not strained!' Yes. Just so. Portia. "Merchant of Venice," he added, looking highly pleased with himself. "I studied drama in my freshman year at Harvard." "Did you?" "Yes. My sisters had me very thoroughly educated. Very expensively, too. But this 'Portia' she was of course a fictitious, not a historic, character, if I remember rightly. Women haven't really brains enough, or of the sort, that could cope with such severe study as that of the law." He waved the matter aside with a gesture of his long, thin fingers. [69] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "I'm not sure of that," Margaret maintained. "But the courtroom is no place for a decent woman," said Daniel dogmatically. "But she could specialize. These are the days, I'm told, when to succeed is to specialize. She wouldn't need to practise in the criminal courts." "I trust," said Daniel stiffly, "you are not a Suffragist. You don't look like one." "How do they look?" "I never saw one, for we don't have them in New Munich, where I live. But I'm sure they don't look so womanly as you do." "I hope that to look womanly isn't to look stupid," said Margaret solicitously. "Why should it? though to be sure a woman does just as well if she isn't too bright." "If to be womanly meant all that some men seem to think it means, we'd have to have idiot asylums for womanly females," declared Margaret. " I suppose " she changed the subject and perfunctorily made conversation "a lawyer's work is full of interest and excitement?" "Well," Mr. Leitzel smiled, "in these days, a lawyer for a corporation has got to be Johnny-on-the-spot." "I have always thought that a general practitioner must often find his work a terrible strain upon his sym- pathies," said Margaret. "Oh, no; business is business, you know." "And necessarily inhuman?" "Unhuman, rather. A man must not have 'sympathies' in the practice of the law." [70] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "He can't help it, can he? unless he's a soulless monster." Daniel looked at her narrowly. What a queer ex- pression for a young lady to use: "a soulless monster." "Your brother-in-law, for instance," he inquired with his thin, tight little smile, "does he, as a general practi- tioner, find his cases a great strain on his sympathies? "Oh, he hasn't enough cases to find them a great strain of any kind." "So?" Daniel lifted his pale eyebrows. It was, then, inherited wealth, he reflected, that maintained this luxurious home, and if so, this Miss Berkeley, probably, shared that inheritance. His heart began to thump in his narrow chest. His calculating eye scanned the girl's figure, from her crown of dark hair to her shapely foot. Now it is necessary to state just here that Daniel's one vulnerable spot being his fondness for young pets of any species and especially for children, together with his deep- seated aversion to the idea of his money going to the offspring of his brother Hiram (for, of course, he would never will a dollar of it away from the Leitzel family), this shrewd little man never appraised a woman's matrimonial value without considering her physical equipment for successful motherhood. He had even read several books on the subject and had paid a big fee to a specialist to learn how to judge of a woman's health and capacity for child-bearing. The distinguished specialist had laughed with his amante afterward at the way he had "bluffed and soaked the rich little cad." "I certainly did make him pay up!" he had chuckled. [71] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "And as he'll never find just the combination of physical and mental endowments I've prescribed for him, I've saved some woman from the fate of becoming his wife! Money-making is his passion a woman will never be and his interest in it is matched only by his keenness and his caution. He's a peculiar case of mental and spiritual littleness combined with an acumen that's uncanny, that's genius!" It was, in fact, Daniel's failure to discover a maiden who answered satisfactorily to all the tests with which this specialist had furnished him, together with his sister's helpful judgment in "sizing up" for him any possible candidate for his hand, that had thus far kept him un- married; that had, he was sure, saved him from a mat- rimonial mistake. As to his view of his own fitness for fatherhood, had he not always led a clean and wholesome life? Was he not expensively educated, clever, industrious, honest within the law, and eminently successful? What man could give his children a better heritage? Yet the day came when the wife of his bosom wondered whether she committed a crime in bearing offspring that must perpetuate the soul of Daniel Leitzel. "This estate," Daniel cautiously put out a feeler to Miss Berkeley, "belonged to your grandfather?" "To several of my grandfathers. It came to us from my uncle." "A lawyer?" "Dr. Osmond Berkeley, the psychologist," Margaret said, thinking this an answer to the question, for she had [72] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE never in her life met any one who did not know of her famous uncle. "My goodness!" she exclaimed as she saw that Mr. Leitzel looked unenlightened, "you don't know who he was? He's turning in his grave, I'm sure!" "I never heard of him," said Daniel sullenly. Margaret smiled kindly upon him as she said confi- dentially: "Between ourselves, I don't myself know just exactly what a psychologist is. I've been trying for nine years to find out though my uncle earned his living by it and a good living, too." "Didn't he ever explain it to you?" "Oh, yes. He told me a psychologist was 'one who studies the science which treats inductively of the phe- nomena of human consciousness, and of the nature and relations of the mind which is the subject of such phe- nomena.'" Daniel looked at her uncertainly. Was she laughing at him? "It's just mental science, you know," he ventured. "I studied a little mental science at college. It was com- pulsory. But I studied it so little, I didn't really know very much about it." "If you had studied it a lot, say under William James or Josiah Royce, I'm sure you'd know even less about it than you do now. My own experience is that the more one studies it, the less one knows of it." "Are you a college graduate?" Daniel asked with sharp suspicion; he didn't care about tying up with an intellectual woman. The medical specialist had said they were usu- ally anaemic, passionless, and childless. "No," Margaret admitted sadly. "I never went to [73] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE school after I was sixteen." Daniel breathed again and beamed upon her so approvingly that she hastened to add: "But I lived here with Uncle Osmond, so I could not escape a little book-learning. I'm really not an ig- norant person for my years, Mr. Leitzel." "I can see that you are not," Daniel graciously allowed. "Are you fond of reading?" he added, conversationally, not dreaming how stupid the question seemed to the young lady he addressed. "Well, naturally," she said. "Yes, I suppose so, with such a library as this in the house. It belongs to to you?" "What? The books?" she vaguely repeated. "They go, of course, with the house. Do you accomplish much reading outside of your profession, Mr. Leitzel?" "No." "Not even an occasional novel?" "I never read novels. I did read 'Ivanhoe' at Harvard in the freshman English course. But that's the only one." Margaret stared for an instant, then recovered herself. "I see now," she said, "why you have done what they call 'made good.' You have specialized, excluding from your life every other possible interest save that one little goal of your ambition." "'Little goal?' Not very little, Miss Berkeley! The law business of which I am the head earns a yearly in- come of " But he stopped short. If this girl were destined to the good fortune of becoming Mrs. Leitzel, she must have no idea of the size of his income. Nobody had, not even his [74] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE sisters. He often smiled in secret at his mental picture of the astonishment and delight of Jennie and Sadie if suddenly told the exact figures; and certainly his wife was the last person in the world who must know. It might make her extravagant. "The annual earnings of our law-firm," he changed the form of his sentence, "are sufficient to enable me to invest some money every year, after paying the twenty-five lawyers and clerks in my employ salaries ranging from twenty-five hundred dollars a year down to five dollars a week. So you see my 'goal' was not little." "I suppose even your five-dollar-a-week clerks have to be especially equipped, don't they?" Margaret asked, with what seemed to him stupid irrelevance, since he was looking for an exclamation of wonder and admiration at the figures stated. "Of course, we employ only experienced stenographers," he curtly replied. "This specializing of our modern life, narrowing one's interests to just one point; one can't help wondering what effect it's going to have upon the race." "Eugenics," Daniel nodded intelligently. "You are interested in eugenics?" he politely inquired. "It's quite a fad these days, isn't it, among the ladies, and even among some gentlemen, if one can believe the newspapers." "It's not my fad," said Margaret. "You like children, I hope?" he quickly asked. "Do I look like a woman who doesn't?" she protested, not, of course, following his train of thought. She rose, as she spoke, and went across the room to turn down a [75] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE hissing gas-jet. Daniel's eyes followed her graceful, leisurely walk down the length of the room, and as she raised her arm above her head, he took in the delicate curve of her bosom, her rather broad, boyish shoulders, the clear, rich olive hue of her skin. The specialist he had consulted years ago had said that a clear olive skin meant not only perfect health, but a warm temperament that loved children. "Anyway," thought Daniel with a hot impulse the like of which his slow blood had never known, "she's the woman I want! I believe I'd want her if she didn't have a dollar!" It w r as upon this reckless conclusion that, when she had returned to her seat, he suddenly decided to put a question to her that would better be settled before he allowed his feelings to carry him too far. "But," thought he as he looked at her, "I've got to put it cautiously and and delicately." "Miss Berkeley?" "Yes, Mr. Leitzel?" "I've been thinking of buying myself an automobile." "Have you?" "A very handsome and expensive one, you know." "Ah!" "Yes. But now I'm hesitating after all." "Are you?" "Yes. Because there's another expense I may have to meet. I'm going to ask you a question. Which, in a general way, do you think would cost more to keep an automobile or or a well, a wife?" [76] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Oh, an automobile!" laughed Margaret. Daniel grinned broadly as he gazed at her; evidently she suspected the delicate drift of his idea and was ad- vising him for her own advantage. Nothing slow about her! "Wives are cheap compared to automobiles," she insisted. "You really think so?" He couldn't manage to keep from his voice a slight note of anxiety. "Living here with your married sister, you are in a position to judge." Margaret began to wonder whether this man were a humourist or an idiot. But before she could reply, their t6te-a-tete, so satisfactory to Mr. Leitzel, was interrupted. Mr. and Mrs. Eastman returned to the library. Now as the formality of chaperoning was not practised in New Munich, Daniel, with all his "advantages," hadnever heard of it. When, therefore, the Eastmans settled them- selves with the evident intention of remaining in the room, their guest found himself feeling chagrined, not only be- cause he preferred to be alone with Miss Berkeley, but because the conclusion was forced upon him that he must have been mistaken in assuming that they had designedly left him with her after dinner. This conclusion was confirmed when Miss Berkeley, quite deliberately leaving the obligation of entertaining him to her elders, changed her seat to a little distance from him, and in the conversation that followed took very little part. She even seemed, in the course of a half- hour, rather bored and Daniel couldn't help seeing it [77] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE sleepy. Could it be, he wondered with a sinking heart, that she was already engaged to another man? How else explain this indifference? But as the evening moved on, and the married pair, in spite of some subtle hints on his part, still sat glued to their chairs, though he could see that they, too, were tired and sleepy, he surmised that their "game" was to hinder Miss Berkeley's marriage! "They'd like to keep her money in the family for their children, I guess!" he shrewdly concluded. The easy indifference to money that was characteristic of the whole tribe of Berkeleys would have seemed an appalling shortcoming to Daniel Leitzel had he been cap- able of conceiving of such a mental state. With a mind keen to see minute details, interpreting what he saw in the light of his own narrow, if astute, vision, and incapable of seeing anything from another's point of view, he came to more false conclusions than a wholly stupid and less observant man would have made. When after another half-hour Miss Berkeley, evidently considering him entirely her brother-in-law's guest, rose, excused herself, said good-night and left the room, Daniel could only reason that Mr. Eastman had purposely with- held from her all knowledge as to who his dinner guest was. "I'll circumvent that game!" he concluded, opposition, together with the indifference of the young lady herself, augmenting to a fever heat his budding passion. "I'll let her know who and what I am!" Indeed, by the time he left Berkeley Hill that night, so [78] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE enamoured was he with the idea of courting Miss Berkeley, he did not even remember that in a matter so important he had never in his life gone ahead without first consulting his sisters' valuable opinion. That phase of the situation, however, was to come home to him keenly enough later on. [79] VII MARGARET was surprised next morning at break- fast when a humorous reference on her part to "Walter's funny little Yankee" met with no response. "But, Walter, he's a freak! Didn't you find him so, Harriet?" "Oh, I don't know. W T alter says he's a wonder in his knowledge of the law." "He has one of the keenest legal minds I've ever met," declared Walter, "though of course " He looked at Margaret uncertainly. " Well, Margaret, after your eight years with a highbrow like your Uncle Osmond, most other men must seem, by contrast, rather stupid to you. Even 7," he smiled whimsically, "must feel abashed before such a standard as you've acquired. But really, one can't despise a man who has reached the place in his profession that Leitzel has attained, even if he is a bit eh, peculiar." It never occurred to Walter to recommend Leitzel by mentioning that he was a millionaire, the man's prominence in his profession being, in Eastman's eyes, the measure of his value. "It's going to be rather rough on your husband, Mar- garet," Walter teased her, "to have to play up to the [801 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE intellectual taste of a wife that's lived with Osmond Berkeley." "But, Walter, other things may appeal to me: kindness and affection, for instance. My life, you know," she said gravely, "has been pretty devoid of that." There was a moment's rather awkward silence at the table, which Margaret herself quickly broke. "This Mr. Leitzel there's something positively uncanny in the way he seems to see straight through you to your back hooks and eyes; and I'm quite sure if there was a small safety pin anywhere about me last night where a hook and eye should have been, he knew it and disapproved of it. I'm certain that details like safety pins interest him; he has that sort of mind, if he is a great lawyer." " Not great," Walter corrected her. "I didn't say great. He's able and skillful; but, I must admit, very limited in his scope, his field being merely the legal technicalities involved in the management of a corporation. However, he's a nice enough little fellow. Didn't you find him so?" "I'm afraid I found him rather absurd and tiresome." "Take care, Margaret!" Harriet playfully warned her, "or else oh! won't you have to be explaining away and apologizing for the things you are saying about that man. He's smitten with you!" Margaret's eyes rested upon Harriet for a moment, while her quick intuition recognized just why her joking remarks about Mr. Leitzel had met with no response in kind : her sister was actually seeing in this queer little man a possible means of getting rid of her, and Walter was abetting her! [811 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE She turned at once to the latter, swallowing the lump that had risen in her throat. "Have you done anything, Walter, about securing me a loan on our property?" "I'm doing my best for you, Margaret." " Thank you. Any chance of success ? " "I think so." He looked at her with a smile that was rather enigmatic, and she saw that he was really evadingher. "You know, Margaret," spoke in Harriet, "I shouldn't consent for a moment to have a mortgage put on my prop- erty." "Tut, tut, Harriet," Walter checked his wife. "Leave it to me. Perhaps a mortgage won't be necessary." He rose hastily, made his adieus, and departed for his office. "Margaret, dear," Harriet began as soon as they were alone, "I assure you that to an unprejudiced observer, last night, the state of Mr. Leitzel's mind was only too manifest! You'd have seen it yourself if you weren't so inexperienced." "What are the signs, Harriet? I confess I'd like to be able to recognize them myself." "You sat almost behind him and he nearly cracked his neck trying to keep you in view. And when Walter drove him to the trolley line he talked of you all the way: said he liked your 'colouring' and your 'motherly manner/ and your hair and your voice and your smile and your walk! I'm not making it up he's simply hard hit, Margaret." "You'd like Mr. Leitzel for a brother-in-law, would you, Harriet?" [82] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "I shouldn't see much of him, living 'way up in Penn- sylvania." Margaret, who had not yet given up craving wistfully her sister's affection, turned her eyes to her plate and stirred her coffee to hide the sensitive quiver of her lips. "We'd see each other very seldom, certainly, if I lived in Pennsylvania," she found voice to say after a moment. " I'll go up to the baby, now, Harriet, and let Chloe come down." When later that morning a delivery wagon left at Berkeley Hill two boxes, one containing violets, the other orchids, and a boy on a bicycle arrived with a five-pound box of Charleston's most famous confectionery, all from Mr. Leitzel to Miss Berkeley, Margaret was forced to take account of the situation. Of course she could not know (fortunately for her ad- mirer) that the lavishness of his offerings had been care- fully calculated to impress upon her the fact which he suspected her relatives of concealing from her the all- persuasive fact that he was rich. A telephone call inviting her to go automobiling with him that afternoon was answered by Harriet, who at once accepted the invitation for her without consulting her. "I'm perfectly willing, dear, to give up Mattie St. Glair's auction bridge this afternoon and chaperon you," Harriet graciously told her after informing her of the en- gagement she had made for her. "Chloe will have to keep the children." Margaret made no reply. All these manifestations of Harriet's eager anxiety to be rid of her stabbed her miser- [831 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE ably. She went away to her own room, just as soon as her regular domestic routine was accomplished, and shut herself in to think it all out. The fact that she had, because of the secluded life she had led, reached the age of twenty-five without ever having had a lover, must account for her feelings this morning toward Daniel Leitzel, her sense of gratitude (under the soreness of her heart at her sister's attitude to her) that any human being should like her and be kind, to the ex- tent of such munificence as this which filled her room with fragrance and beauty. No wonder that for the time being she lost sight of the little man's grotesqueness in her keen consciousness of his kindness, and of the novelty of being admired by a man. Yes, her momentary blindness even saw him as a man. Not even the cards which came with his offerings the one in the candy box marked "Sweets to the Sweet," and that with the flowers labelled, Thou shall not lack The flower that's like thy face. SHAKESPEARE. gave her more than a faint, passing amusement. "The flower that's like thy face'; he should have sent me a sunflower or a tiger-lily," she ruefully told herself as she glanced at her dark head in a mirror. But she re- called something she had once said to her Uncle Osmond: " I'd be grateful even to a dog that liked me." It was Harriet, not Margaret, who was shocked that afternoon at the revelation of poor Daniel's "greenness" when he found that Mrs. Eastman expected, as a matter of course, to chaperon her young sister. [841 HER HUSBAND'S PURSE Daniel interpreted this unheard-of proceeding as another proof of his sharp surmise of the previous night the penurious determination of the Eastmans to keep Miss Berkeley unmarried. He resented accordingly the inter- ference with his own desires and the persecution of the young lady. He would show this greedy sister of Miss Berkeley that he was not the man to be balked by her scheming, and incidentally he would win the admiration and gratitude of the girl herself by his clever foiling of the designs of her relatives. " I'm very good to you and my sister, Mr. Leitzel," Harriet assured him as she and Margaret shook hands with him in the hall, both of them wrapped up for riding. "I am giving up an auction bridge this afternoon to go with you." "To go with us? But but you misunderstood my invitation, I invited only Miss Berkeley," explained Daniel frankly. "Oh, you have another chaperon then? If only you had told me so when you 'phoned this morning I needn't have given up my bridge party." "Told you what, Mrs. Eastman?" "That you already had a chaperon." "Had a what?" "Haven't you a chaperon, Mr. Leitzel?" "'Chaperon?' But this isn't a boarding-school, Mrs. Eastman!" Harriet turned away to hide her face, but Margaret laughed outright as she asked him: "Don't they have chaperons in Pennsylvania, Mr. Leitzel, to protect guile- less and helpless maidens of twenty-five from any breach [85] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE of strict propriety while out alone with dashing youths like you? " "If my sister went out alone with you in Charleston t Mr. Leitzel," explained Harriet with dignity, "she would be criticised." "But but," stammered Daniel indignantly, "I'm a trustworthy man, Mrs. Eastman! A perfectly trust- worthy gentleman!" "My dear Mr. Leitzel, I know you are! It's only a custom among us that oh, come on, let us start! I'm sorry, Mr. Leitzel, but I'm afraid you'll have to put up with me." "Yes, do let us start; we don't want to miss a minute of this lovely day!" said Margaret brightly, moving toward the door and drawing her sister with her. "I very seldom get a chance to ride, and I love it. You are so kind, Mr. Leitzel," she chatted as they went down the steps to the waiting car, "to give me this pleasure, besides the beautiful flowers and delicious candy!" And thus Daniel, though inwardly fuming, and wondering at Miss Berkeley's amiable submission to such unwarrantable meddling in her personal affairs, was forced to accept with what grace he could command the doubt cast upon his "trustworthiness." As he assisted the two ladies into the automobile, Harriet of her own accord took the front seat with the chauffeur; and Daniel, as he realized how entirely isolated with Miss Berkeley this arrangement left him, felt himself thoroughly puzzled by the whole incomprehensible pro- ceeding. [86] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE As on the previous evening Miss Berkeley's Southern cordiality of manner was interpreted by Daniel during this drive to be a gushing warmth of feeling for himself, which fanned the flame of his egotism no less than that of his passion. While the car moved swiftly through the picturesque roads outside of Charleston he discoursed volubly; for Daniel's idea of an enjoyable conversation was a prolonged, uninterrupted exposition, on his part, to a silently ab- sorbed listener, of his personal interests, achievements, excellencies of character, and general worthiness. He knew no greater joy in life than this sort of expansion before an admiring or envious companion. He fairly revelled this afternoon in the steady, monotonous stream of self -eulogy which flowed from his lips. It was meant to impress pro- foundly the maiden at his side, and it did. "People call me lucky, Miss Berkeley, but it isn't luck; it's deep thinking. Nobody could be lucky that didn't use his judgment and keep a sharp lookout for the main chance. To have the wit to see and seize the main chance," he reiterated with an accent that made Margaret see the words in large capitals, "that's the secret of success. Don't you think so?" "Yes, indeed the point of importance being not to confuse one's values material success and spiritual de- feat not always being recognized, Mr. Leitzel, as twin sisters. We don't want to miss the main chance to grow in grace and dear me!" she pulled herself up. "It sounds like Marcus Aurelius, doesn't it? Did you make his acquaintance at Harvard?" [87] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE "Who?" "The Roman Emerson." " Oh, but Emerson was a New Englander, not a Roman," he kindly set her right ;" known as the Sage of Concord , Mass- achusetts," he informed her, looking pleased with himself. Harriet in the front seat could not resist turning her head to meet for an instant Margaret's eye. "I had to read a 'Life of Emerson' in my Sophomore year at Harvard," continued Daniel. " Do you know that his writings never yielded him more than nine hundred dollars a year ! Well educated as he was, he never made good. A dead failure. Missed the main chance, you see. Now 7 have always turned every circumstance and oppor- tunity, no matter how trifling, to my own advantage. Why, from the time I first began to practise law, I refused to take any case that I didn't see I was surely going to win; so, in no time at all, I got a reputation for winning every case I took. See? I didn't take a case I didn't feel sure of winning. Good scheme, wasn't it? Well, that far-sighted policy reaped for me, very early in my career, a big harvest; for when I was just beginning to be known as the lawyer who never lost a case, there was, one night, a shocking crime committed in New Munich: a young girl, daughter of a carpenter, was supposed to have been foully and brutally murdered by her lover, the son of a petty grocer on one of our side streets. (My own residence is on Main Street, our principal resident street, a very fashionable street; house cost me twenty-five thousand! one of the finest residences in the town so considered by all.) Well, the evidence against the lover was over- [88] HER HUSBAND'S PURSE whelming (I couldn*t give you the details, Miss Berkeley, it would not be proper, you being a young, unmarried lady), and earl on the morning after the murder the grocer came to -see me on behalf of his son, begging me to take the cas e. He gave me all the facts and I saw very soon that tb e young man had not committed the crime. But I saw, also, that it would be very difficult to prove his innocen ce to a jury, and I knew the sentiment in the town to be furiously against the young man, especially among tha women, so that I'd be apt to make myself very unpopular if I took his case; and that even if I cleared him the ?re would be many who would continue to think him guilty and to think that I had simply cheated the law b.y my cleverness; cheated moral justice, too, and left a fou.lly murdered female go unavenged, all for the sake of TA fee. So I, of course, refused to take the case, though th'e grocer, believing me to be the one lawyer who could cl