PS 3500 A6 A52 
 ... ;..:. r PRN A. SAN DIEG 
 
 3 1822 01096 1415 
 
 HIGH ROAD
 
 
 PS
 
 The 
 Highroad
 
 Ike 
 
 Highroad 
 
 BEING 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 OF AN AMBITIOUS 
 
 MOTHER 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY 
 MCMIV
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
 
 HERBERT S, STONE & COMPANY 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 PRKSSOF 
 
 STROMBERG, ALLEN & CO. 
 CHICAGO 
 
 12845
 
 PREFACE 
 
 They call me the most successful mother in 
 New York. This summer, with my tall Jane in 
 her honeymoon, I am left alone, and I am 
 taking a holiday in the house where I was born, 
 in West Virginia in the hills. As I walk 
 through the fields, poor, grown up in ragweed 
 and the white boneset that I used to gather for 
 "bitters" when I was a child, and realize that I 
 am the mother-in-law of an Ambassador, an 
 Earl with old Elizabethan houses mellowing in 
 the English sunshine, a brilliant New York 
 lawyer who may become anything and is now 
 rich and well born and one of the greatest of 
 American heiresses, my sense of humor is 
 aroused. 
 
 I am on the sunny side of fifty. Once I 
 walked barefoot in the furrows of the very field 
 where I am writing this, and dropped potatoes 
 before my father's hoe! Sometimes in these 
 late years when I have read the newspaper 
 accounts of my "old Virginia family," it was 
 hard to keep my face straight. But I did. 
 
 In this world the successful always keep their 
 faces straight. I have heard people who have 
 not the power to do so at the important 
 5
 
 Pref; 
 
 ace 
 
 moment, bitterly declare that success comes 
 only to those who lack a sense of humor. It 
 sometimes comes to those lacking that best 
 sense, that complement of the other five, but 
 rarely. The true secret of power is to see your 
 actions in every light and then to choose the 
 point of view which you will stand by and from 
 which you will cause others to see you. 
 Success does not consist altogether in seeing, 
 but in being seen. 
 
 But I will confess that I never encouraged a 
 sense of humor in my girls. They never knew 
 that we and our pretensions were altogether 
 comical. They were real inasmuch as they 
 believed in themselves at least while they 
 were very young. Sometimes I have wanted a 
 confidant until I ached. I have wanted to go 
 to some level-headed, "broad-minded" person 
 and tell the story and laugh. 
 
 I have read a clever story now and then in 
 which an Abbe figured. I have 'always had an 
 ideal of an Abbe in my mind. If I had ever 
 run across him I should have become a convert 
 to Rome 'for no reason on earth except that I 
 wanted a confidant. I could have been happy 
 if my lot had been thrown with that Father 
 Forbes, of whom Harold Frederic gave a bril-
 
 Preface 7 
 
 liant picture in Theron Ware. I am sure we 
 should have been the best of friends. 
 
 Having now no children of my own to settle, 
 I would throw out as a hint to other mothers 
 that there is a wonderful career for a poor, 
 clever, ambitious boy in the Church. If my 
 own boy had not early shown that the way of the 
 world was his way, I should have put him there. 
 
 The idle class in America is made up of 
 women, and of men who think along feminine 
 lines. They want a confidant. The woman 
 does not dare make one of her husband. In 
 the first place, he would refuse to understand, 
 or he would be worried to death over a "hys 
 terical wife" if he did understand. The priest 
 or the clergyman who can fill this want is a 
 "made" man. He must be a celibate. Some 
 women find a confidant in a judiciously selected 
 doctor. 
 
 It is in the final and complete lack of an 
 "other self," as the sentimental old maids say, 
 that I am writing this. And then, I wish to 
 see how the story looks when it is all finished. 
 It will give me exactly the same sort of pleas 
 ure that one has in looking at her own photo 
 graph. I want to see how I look to my own 
 critical eyes.
 
 8 Pref; 
 
 ace 
 
 I here disclaim any idea of making a moral 
 story, or a sentimental story, or any sort of 
 story save a true story. If I neglect sometimes 
 to write down the good in people and call 
 attention to the bad that, too, is part of the 
 portrait I am making of myself. What I see 
 reveals my character also. 1 should be a fool 
 to "fake" the story of my struggles to present 
 a more pleasing picture, to paint a portrait of 
 myself after the manner of Chartran. I believe 
 in truly good people, but I do not hold as an 
 article of that belief that they are the only 
 happy people. The successful are the happy 
 they and those who haven't the power to real 
 ize that they are unhappy. I should not 
 "rather be good than be happy." Would 
 you? I am happy; and in this narrative I 
 have not hidden my faults nor tried to explain 
 them. 
 
 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any 
 one could write one interesting novel by tell 
 ing the plain unvarnished tale of his own life. 
 This narrative is made after that formula, and 
 I can only hope that he told the truth, for I 
 might say with Montaigne, "All the world 
 knows me in my book."
 
 The Highroad 
 
 i 
 
 A Mother 
 
 My father was the son of a hard-shell Bap 
 tist preacher who wandered up and down the 
 Ohio River preaching from a flat-boat. My 
 grandmother was reported to be the daughter 
 of a Kentucky farmer somewhere near Mays- 
 ville, who was fascinated by my grandfather's 
 tongue, and eloped with him. She died when 
 my father was born, and he, a physically weak 
 little creature, was brought up in careless fash 
 ion among the people of the country who 
 listened while my grandfather preached and 
 took him home to dinner. I have sometimes 
 thought that my grandfather, educated and in 
 another environment, might have been that 
 priest of whom I have dreamed. 
 
 My father never spoke of this period of his 
 life to me, but he talked to my mother, and she 
 has told me something of it. 
 
 He had no education whatever, as education 
 is known to-day. He learned to read and 
 o
 
 IO The Highroad 
 
 write, and, a little later when he began to 
 "trade," to keep rude accounts. I believe it 
 was horses at first, and then anything, until he 
 had acquired the farm here. 
 
 I have often thought that had my father mar 
 ried an ambitious woman, or even an ordinarily 
 "smart" woman, he would have reached out 
 into the world and become a man of substance 
 and it may be wealth. But my mother was 
 simply a rather stupid, pretty daughter of a 
 farmer. It is from her that the Countess of 
 Truesdale, who is my youngest daughter, in 
 herits her delicate blonde beauty, which causes 
 the English aristocracy to look heavy and 
 overfed. 
 
 Northern people, and even southern people 
 of the present generation, have no idea of the 
 position of the southern farmers of the non- 
 slave-holding class before the Civil War. They 
 were more surely outcasts than the negroes 
 themselves. In the Virginia and Tennessee 
 mountains 'their position was less noticeable 
 than in the great plantation countries, but even 
 there, "the quality" was a caste apart. 
 
 It was to these outcasts that my father 
 nelonged. My mother's people, by virtue of 
 a dozen slaves (one family of negroes) were a
 
 A Mother it 
 
 little higher in the social scale, and notwith 
 standing the fact that my father was infinitely 
 their superior in every possible way, my 
 mother's people held themselves aloof. This 
 attitude was very convenient to me later, as it 
 freed me from the clog of their presence and 
 blood claims. I have noticed this often in 
 other families. Unless relatives are very good, 
 a distinct advantage anywhere, they hamper. 
 As Mr. Kipling says, "He travels fastest who 
 travels alone." 
 
 I was born just before the Civil War, and was 
 old enough as it passed away to see that my 
 father's sympathies were with "the Union," 
 and my mother's with "the Rebels." I was 
 taught by my father to sing: "Hang Jeff Davis 
 on a Sour Apple Tree," and I knew that my 
 mother treasured in the first place in her 
 "album" a photograph of Wilkes Booth. I 
 have that photograph still. It is part of our 
 "local color," as southerners. 
 
 But they did not quarrel. My father did as 
 he pleased, and my mother resented nothing 
 that was done by anybody. 
 
 After the war the schools in our part of the 
 country were improved, and by the time I was 
 old enough to attend school, there were two
 
 12 The Highroad 
 
 sessions a year, making in all seven months, 
 and I was sent there. 
 
 The school house was of logs heated by a 
 big iron stove in which wood was burned, and 
 the teachers who came to us were the rawest of 
 men, some of them men who had served in the 
 war, and were seeking a way to fortune through 
 the new state of West Virginia. 
 
 When I was fifteen the man who became my 
 husband came to the Bethel school. He was 
 then a lank, shy, red-haired young man from 
 Pennsylvania, with what my father called a 
 "wonderful head fer figgers." 
 
 After the school term was over for that year 
 he stayed and opened a country store, giving 
 groceries to the farmers for produce. They 
 brought their crops and then their pork to him 
 in exchange for coffee and tea and sugar, dry 
 goods and "town-cured" hams. Then in the 
 spring and early summer they would buy their 
 own pork back at a slight increase in price, 
 giving a lien on the coming crop. This 
 method brought profits of about seventy-five 
 per cent, but our customers did not discover it. 
 It was that sense of seeing something which 
 those about us did not see that first drew us 
 apart from our neighbors, and caused us to look
 
 A Mother 13 
 
 upon ourselves as aloof from them. It was 
 that more than our prosperity. We sometimes 
 talked of the people and my husband wondered 
 why the public <=chools did not teach them 
 more. We finally came to the conclusion that 
 they are not really taught anything but surface 
 book-knowledge. They can add, multiply and 
 subtract figures but not facts. There appears 
 to be a wall between their learning, such as it 
 is, and their actual living. The relation 
 between the two, which is education, is un 
 known to them. 
 
 My husband in those early days talked to 
 me of everything. There was one man who 
 amused us very much. He had a piece of what 
 is known as wild land, covered with heavy 
 walnut timber. This was before the day of 
 lumber companies in West Virginia. As he 
 could produce nothing on his land (so he said) 
 he wanted to sell it. My husband, in bargain 
 ing, said that the land certainly could not be 
 worth much to anybody, and the man finally 
 accepted the offer that was made for it. Then 
 my husband employed the late owner and his 
 two sons to clear the land. The timber taken 
 off more than paid for the labor and for the 
 land, leaving my husband with the great tract
 
 14 The Highroad 
 
 of new land absolutely free of any cost what 
 ever. Neither the man nor his sons saw any 
 thing unusual in the transaction. 
 
 By this perfectly legitimate method of carry 
 ing on his business, it was not long before my 
 husband owned large tracts of land. He was 
 doing a banking and loan business in a small 
 way, although his customers had no idea of it, 
 nor do I believe had he. 
 
 New York is always wondering at the coun 
 trymen who come into the "street" and man 
 age it "without previous experience." As 
 a matter of fact, there are hundreds of men all 
 over this country who are playing Wall Street's 
 tricks every day of their lives, and never know 
 it. When they discover it they come to town. 
 The games have a different name in the 
 country. 
 
 Undoubtedly had my husband lived, my boy 
 and girls would have been very rich, and it 
 would not have been necessary for me to make 
 the efforts through which I struggled for so 
 many years. But I cannot call them anything 
 but happy years. I was like a strong man shoot 
 ing rapids. I might go to pieces any minute, but 
 then it was all exhilarating sport, and if I 
 came out into clear, deep water, it would be a
 
 A Mother 15 
 
 haven. I touched bottom and I touched rocks. 
 Sometimes my boat swung in an eddy. Once 
 it was all but capsized. A cold chill goes over 
 me when I remember! I never expected to 
 get out alive socially alive, that is. 
 
 My two eldest girls, Lucile and Genevieve, 
 are nearly the same age as nearly as they can 
 be. Robert, my boy, is more than a year older. 
 They belong to my more or less romantic 
 period when I was beginning to read books. 
 I called novels books, and I never thought of 
 trying to read anything else. 
 
 I cannot read novels now, but in those days I 
 read Augusta J. Evans, Sir Walter Scott some 
 times (I found him too remote, although inter 
 esting at times), Disraeli, G. P. R. James, and 
 any other book which told of people of wealth 
 and position. They were text books to me. I 
 have sometimes wondered why I did not find 
 "Vanity Fair" a great book. I always thought 
 Becky Sharp a fool. Clever people hold their 
 own. They make the world respect them, and 
 they are seldom found out. I had no advantages 
 of education, not even Dr. Johnson's Diction 
 ary, but I could teach Becky Sharp things 
 that neither she nor her creator ever dreamed 
 of. Of all of them I liked Disraeli best. He
 
 1 6 The Highroad 
 
 wrote of high life that he had actually seen. 
 For every crumb of information concerning it 
 I was eager and hungering. 
 
 At the time the children were born we were 
 living on the farm in a house my husband built 
 soon after our marriage. It had four rooms 
 and a kitchen. There was a wash house out 
 side. I "did my own work," as they say in 
 the country, with a deaf and dumb woman who 
 was a sort of dependent of my father's to come 
 in and do the washing. I made my children's 
 clothes on the sewing machine that my hus 
 band gave me on our first wedding anniversary, 
 and as a matter of course my own clothes. 
 
 Our sitting-room had an ingrain carpet on 
 the floor, a rug with a lion in plush in the cen 
 ter, a "set" of cane-seated chairs with a rocker, 
 a coal stove. A Lady Washington's reception 
 engraving (considered very grand), a "what 
 not" with some vases and shells, and a bracket 
 or two decorated the walls. We called it the 
 parlor. 
 
 My own bed-room was our real sitting-room. 
 Here was a thick, and I know now, a beauti 
 ful rag carpet, white curtains, an open fire, 
 my sewing-machine, my bed, the trundle bed 
 and the crib.
 
 A Mother 17 
 
 We had besides a "spare room" for chance 
 visitors, a dining-room and the kitchen. A 
 bath-room? There isn't a West Virginia farm 
 er's family in this year 1904 that bathes every 
 day. Not one, unless it is some "crank" who 
 is considered crazy by his neighbors. There 
 are not a dozen bath-rooms outside of the 
 towns. 
 
 A few years ago, I went back there to attend 
 to some business, and an acquaintance of mine 
 in Fowlersburg took me to see her daughter's 
 new house, a modern "Queen Anne," not yet 
 completed. Fowlersburg is now a town of 
 fifteen thousand inhabitants. 
 
 "Here," said my friend, "is the place the 
 book said" (it was a house out of a builder's 
 book) "to put a bath-room. But Mamie said 
 she would rather have a sewing-room. In the 
 summer time they could take their Saturday 
 baths in the wash-house, and in the winter they 
 wouldn't need them." 
 
 And Mamie was a good girl and a good 
 housekeeper. 
 
 I have kept my friendship for a few of the old 
 people in Fowlersburg, particularly those of 
 the old families. Of course my children have 
 never been there since early childhood. The
 
 1 8 The Highroad 
 
 ideals they have concerning the place and the 
 people are perfectly beautiful. Let me beg all 
 mothers who wish to be successful, never by 
 any chance to wreck a child's ideals. If they 
 once truly know, what they are talking about 
 they must be geniuses to make other people 
 see the ideal. I myself am something of a 
 genius, but I never brought one into the world. 
 My children thought they always told the 
 truth. At least all but one, and her lapses 
 could hardly be called keeping up an ideal.
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 19 
 
 II 
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 
 
 I like to linger on the days when I was learn 
 ing, and day by day coming out of the general 
 into the special. 
 
 The town is interesting to me as the scene 
 of my earliest attempts to live after the fash 
 ion of the world to which I longed to belong. 
 I wanted to be a part of it. 
 
 I often think of the crowds of humanity and 
 of how few of us there are who do more than 
 jostle along and elbow our neighbors. When 
 Shakespeare says, "All the world's a stage and 
 all the men and women merely players," he is 
 not exactly right. There is a stage, but only 
 a few of us are the players. The rest make up 
 the gaping audience. Sometimes a clown or a 
 columbine sets up a booth at the street corner, 
 but they are the tawdry "notorious. " Some of 
 us are artists and play on the world's stage, 
 strutting to heroics (too often) in the glare of 
 limelight. We know that there is a place, often 
 dingy and dark and unpleasant, where we put 
 aside our splendors and sit down to solitude.
 
 2O The Highroad 
 
 It is our solace there to believe that the audience 
 at least thinks us real. 
 
 How many of us realize that the visible 
 world about us is no measure of what is, but 
 merely of what we are capable of seeing and 
 understanding? Ghosts may walk for aught we 
 know. Our poor little five senses are inade 
 quate for our best uses, nature's grudging dole 
 to us, mere pitiful tools to enable us to exist 
 and work for that vague end she has in view so 
 far beyond the limits of our vision. 
 
 Your real novelist has something like second 
 sight. He sees the realities behind the trivial 
 little happenings which divert the common 
 place minds. Life is a sleight-of-hand magi 
 cian who plays her tricks while she fastens your 
 attention somewhere else than on her object. 
 The novelist, like Balzac or Hardy, smiles 
 grimly and points out the machinery. 
 
 I had from the beginning the wish to be one 
 of those who played. I am not a remarkable 
 woman to look at. I have always tried not to 
 be. In those early years in Fowlersburg it was 
 my ambition to win a solid foundation of re 
 spect and a place. I did not want one woman 
 ever to remember that her husband's eyes had 
 rested upon me with the sort of admiration that
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 21 
 
 all women love for themselves and hate for 
 another; but I wanted to be known. 
 
 When we decided to leave the farm and go 
 into town to live, I thought the matter over 
 very carefully. My husband said that he 
 wanted to go because he intended to open a 
 general store there to dispose of the country 
 produce that came in. By this time he had a 
 chain of country stores through what are 
 known as the "back counties" in West Vir 
 ginia. And he also wanted to send the chil 
 dren to school as they grew a little larger. 
 "Give them advantages," he said. 
 
 Lucile and Genevieve were five and six, 
 Robert was seven, and Jane a baby. 
 
 I lay awake a good many nights turning over 
 in my mind this change of residence. I knew 
 absolutely nobody in Fowlersburg. It was this 
 which finally caused me to go there this, and 
 the fact that I was little hampered by relatives. 
 My father had no kinfolk that I knew. My 
 mother had plenty, but they were, like her, 
 quiet, shy people, who bothered nobody, and 
 least of all my father's family. In these days 
 my father and mother had acquired a taste 
 which made them happy and contented alone. 
 The old New York Ledger was then edited by
 
 22 The Highroad 
 
 Robert Bonner, who published every week 
 installments of novels by Mrs. E. D. E. N. South- 
 worth, Mrs. Harriet Lewis and other romance 
 writers of that school. Four of these stories 
 were published weekly. Besides, there were 
 editorials by Henry Ward Beecher and James 
 Parton, a correspondence column, and some 
 short stories. It is impossible to tell this 
 generation anything about the fascination of 
 the old New York Ledger. 
 
 My father and mother found sufficient amuse 
 ment in keeping four intricate plots in their 
 heads from week to week. I believe that not 
 half as many farmer's wives went to the insane 
 asylum in the days of the Ledger. 
 
 I remember once going up home (my father's 
 house was always "home") and finding father 
 churning, with half the Ledger in one hand 
 while he worked the dasher up and down with 
 the other, and mother kneading bread, with the 
 other half of the paper propped up behind the 
 bread board. They always cut it in two when 
 it came, and drew straws which should have the 
 part containing Mrs. Southworth's story. 
 When they had finished it I borrowed it and 
 read it myself. 
 
 I did not tell my husband why I hesitated
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 23 
 
 about going to Fowlersburg. There are some 
 things a man cannot understand. I told him 
 that I loved the country and my little home 
 which was true. I had my work and my dreams. 
 
 I hardly know whether it was in the Ledger 
 or in some of the English novels in cheap edi 
 tions that I was beginning to get my hands on, 
 that I learned that a "tradesman" was not a 
 social personage. To me a tradesman meant 
 one thing: a storekeeper. I was trying to fig 
 ure out some way in which we could slip away 
 from that odium. Naturally I did not tell my 
 husband that. 
 
 Finally, one night, I had an idea. It was 
 never my way to give my husband a joggle, 
 waken him out of a sound sleep and expect 
 him to discuss matters. He was a good hus 
 band, but I doubt if there is any man suffi 
 ciently perfect to enjoy that. But I felt that I 
 must talk about it now. I arose from my bed, 
 put on a pair of knitted slippers and a blue 
 quilted dressing gown which I kept for slight 
 illnesses, lighted the lamp and sat down by the 
 fire. By this time, naturally, my husband was 
 awake. 
 
 "What is it, Mary?" he asked anxiously. 
 "Are you sick?"
 
 24 The Highroad 
 
 "I have a suffocating feeling, " I said. "It 
 hurt me to lie down." 
 
 By this time he was over the side of the bed 
 inquiring if I wanted the doctor. I was seldom 
 ill, and it frightened him thoroughly awake. 
 
 I said I was not ill. It was but a passing 
 unhappiness, and he must go to sleep. In the 
 effort to keep me from thinking I was ill, he 
 began to talk and in five minutes I was mak 
 ing my suggestions. He was in the humor to 
 agree with me on any subject. Like all men 
 whose whole happiness lies in their homes, a 
 fear of illness in the wife is potent. Silly 
 women, learning that, wear it out. 
 
 In an hour we had agreed that instead of 
 having a general retail store in Fowlersburg, 
 we were to have a wholesale house, principally 
 for tobacco, barrel staves and "ties" (the 
 blocks of wood on which railroads are laid). 
 I proved to my husband that his brain was so 
 great that he should use it in making other 
 men do the petty detail of work. 
 
 When we went back to bed my suffocation 
 was gone and my husband had a new set of 
 ideas and a warm glow at his heart because his 
 wife understood him. 
 
 There was one point upon which I was firm.
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 25 
 
 My husband wanted to build a new house in 
 town. He told me he could now afford a home 
 which would cost five thousand dollars, and he 
 had talked to Mr. Gallison, the chief carpenter 
 in Fowlersburg who built all its houses, about 
 making a plan. But I begged that just now 
 he would not take five thousand dollars from 
 his capital. With his cleverness that five thou 
 sand dollars would increase faster than it would 
 in real estate. 
 
 The fact was, I knew that when a man buys 
 a home or builds one, he is reluctant to move. 
 I meant to know the town before I settled in 
 one spot for a long term of years. 
 
 In going to Fowlersburg there was another 
 question the Church. My people naturally 
 went to the Baptist church when they went 
 anywhere. There was, however, no Baptist 
 church in our neighborhood. Once a month 
 there was preaching in the school house by a 
 Methodist circuit rider. My parents had all 
 the scorn for "sprinklers" that a Scotch Pres 
 byterian has fora "Romanist." My husband's 
 family in Pennsylvania had been Dunkards, 
 but he kept no traces of it nor ever mentioned 
 it. 
 
 When I was twelve years old, my grand-
 
 26 The Highroad 
 
 father, who died the following year, took me 
 two counties away to a Baptist Association. 
 This is something like a Methodist Conference. 
 Delegates are sent from all the churches round 
 about, and as many other people come as wish 
 to have a change of scene. The people in the 
 place where the Association meets entertain 
 them. I believe they still hold these meet 
 ings, and I fancy in some parts of this my 
 native state, the entertainment is as crude now 
 as it was then. 
 
 In this place where my grandfather and I 
 went, there was but one house large enough to 
 hold many guests, and it consisted chiefly of 
 one big room and an enormous "porch." We 
 ate on the "porch" and we all slept in that one 
 big room. The farmer's wife, who must have 
 been a very clever woman, sewed all her sheets 
 and her neighbor's sheets together until she 
 made one as big as the room. She had straw 
 brought and put down on the floor a foot deep, 
 then she made one enormous bed. The sleep 
 ers lay in tiers. Have you ever seen the paint 
 ing called "The Conquerors"? It represents 
 the great captains of the world riding through 
 Inferno, their way bordered by rows of the 
 dead slain on victorious fields. It was in such
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 27 
 
 tiers that we slept on Mrs. Daggett's floor. In 
 the center of each row a man and his wife 
 would lie side by side. From his other side 
 would go out a row of men, from hers a row of 
 women. I didn't like it. After we were all 
 settled one night, I called out to my grand 
 father. Isaid: 
 
 "Grandpap, were they sleeping like this 
 when Ruth got up and lay at the feet of Boaz?" 
 
 He reached over two ladies and a husband 
 and slapped me. 
 
 I had read of nothing like this in mysteries, 
 and I imbibed the idea that Baptists were vul 
 gar. As I grew a little older I knew that all 
 "dissenters" were outcasts. What a dissenter 
 was I didn't know only that he was something 
 that did not belong to the Established Church. 
 I thought we had an Establishment in Amer 
 ica, and I believed it to be a sect. Naturally 
 when I found we had nothing of the kind, my 
 impulse was toward the Episcopalian church. 
 A church is a club that any man can force his 
 way into. But I was cautious, I did not want 
 to make any mistakes. 
 
 We went to Fowlersburg presently, taking a 
 little house on the one central street. My 
 husband had begun his business, and already
 
 28 ^he Highroad 
 
 knew all the business men. As he was pros 
 perous and a little better educated than most 
 of the men there, he became very speedily a 
 leading citizen. The town was small then, with 
 one paved sidewalk and about three thousand 
 inhabitants. 
 
 Socially it was fit for Mr. Thomas Hardy's 
 consideration. The leading family was named 
 Jones. Its founder was still alive; he was 
 the illegitimate son of a roystering blade 
 who was said to have had sons enough on the 
 right and left hands in his congressional dis 
 trict to send him to Congress when he was 
 fifty. He use'd to acknowledge any that were 
 brought to his notice, provided they were 
 good looking or "smart." He always declared 
 that he had brought no "lunk heads" into the 
 world. 
 
 The Fowlersburg Jones was acknowleged, 
 and as his mother died at his birth he was 
 adopted by his father's wife. Now and then 
 the story of a woman's doing such a thing is 
 told as though it were the unique act of self- 
 sacrifice. In fact it happened hundreds of 
 times before our civilization became so com 
 plex. Mrs. Benjamin Franklin adopted her 
 husband's illegitimate son. It is an American
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 29 
 
 habit to furnish the generations behind with 
 the same set of ideas that controls this one. 
 It is folly to say that an American woman will 
 do that thing to-day, although I have heard 
 men call it "a womanly thing to do." 
 
 This man at this time was very old and had 
 a large family of children and grandchildren. 
 He had been educated, studied law, and had 
 educated his children. They seemed to have 
 a conviction that nobody knew of old Colonel 
 (of militia) Jones's parentage. Heaven knows! 
 They may not have known it themselves. If 
 they did they had unusually thick skins. I 
 have always much admired the idea of the old 
 Colonel, coming back to the very county in 
 which he was born to make his fight against his 
 birth. The story couldn't follow him, because 
 he met it on its own doorstep. But his family 
 made itself an object of ridicule by the high 
 and mighty airs affected. And yet, such is the 
 power of assurance and audacity, it became 
 the leading family of the town, although there 
 were people there of gentle birth. 
 
 The story of that one family would fill this 
 book many times. Old Colonel Jones married 
 a farmer's daughter, who was clever, and her 
 sons were clever men; yet it is a curious
 
 30 tfhe Highroad 
 
 study to see how the original pair, the royster- 
 ing grandfather and the weak farm girl have 
 marked the generations. One of them caused 
 me a bad half hour years ago by- suddenly 
 claiming my acquaintance. She was yellow 
 wigged and painted and perfumed and dia 
 monded. There is a grandson in the peniten 
 tiary, they tell me now. After all, there is 
 something in having your blood honest. 
 
 There was another family, very intimate with 
 this one in a surface fashion, that was equally 
 amusing to the lover of comedy. Do not 
 imagine that my sense of humor was suffi 
 ciently cultivated in those days to appreciate 
 the situation at its true value. It took years 
 and experience for me to get my glass adjusted. 
 But it was there all the time for the seeing eye. 
 
 The name of this second family was Lossing, 
 and it was what my father would have 
 called "chief cook and bottle washer" (to 
 think of the grandfather of my girls saying a 
 vulgar thing like that!), in the Episcopal 
 church. This made another example of the 
 power of assurance. 
 
 Then there were two women, sisters they 
 said, and the meek little husband of one of 
 them who kept books while his womenkind
 
 Early Days in Fowlersburg 31 
 
 taught music and disseminated gossip. He 
 was a bookkeeper for my husband for a time, a 
 position which he lost very suddenly after I 
 had heard the reading of my character which 
 the music teacher gave. Poor things! Fow 
 lersburg made the appalling discovery one day 
 that instead of being Berlin Protestants as they 
 were supposed to be, German born, they were 
 Baltimore Jews who had dropped their religion 
 as unprofitable. Never shall I forget the pall 
 which fell that day upon the church which they 
 had deceived. I shared in it, for I naturally 
 became an Episcopalian.
 
 32 'The Highroad 
 
 III 
 
 We 'Take a House 
 
 According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, each of 
 us is the result of environment. I suppose I 
 am one of the exceptions which proves the rule. 
 Otherwise, I should give a careful study of 
 Fowlersburg society at this time that the stu 
 dents of human nature (myself included), for 
 whose pleasure and enlightenment this history 
 is written, might see the forces which created 
 me. These people taught me little except what 
 to avoid. 
 
 I used to look at the women who had grown 
 old in contentment in Fowlersburg and won 
 der. They were, some of them, women of 
 beauty, with small but certain incomes, with 
 fairly good families. They had a chance I 
 had never had, and yet they had been content 
 to live all their lives in a little round of gossip 
 and housekeeping. They felt satisfied when 
 their daughters married the first young man 
 who presented himself. Of course I had done 
 the same thing, but I had no choice and 
 looked far beyond for my own children.
 
 We Take a House 33 
 
 My ignorance was such in those days that I 
 actually expected the people who made up the 
 little society in Fowlersburg to live like the 
 people in my English novels. These novels 
 were my text-books and my only ones. Natu 
 rally, I tried to form my own simple household 
 upon their models. It was a little while before 
 I realized how different it was from the ways 
 of other people and how fortunate for me. 
 They, dear simple souls, could not conceive of 
 anybody doing anything, particularly anything 
 so simple as the ordering of a household in any 
 other manner than the manner in which she 
 had been brought up. 
 
 I had two servants now one was a nurse for 
 the children and the other the general servant 
 that was customary in the town. The wages of 
 a "girl," as this general servant was called, 
 ranged from a dollar and a quarter to two dol 
 lars a week. I didn't know that. I had never 
 had a servant, but only a woman to work by 
 the day. I had given her fifty cents a day. 
 Naturally I concluded that this was the proper 
 wage. My husband paid his men by the month. 
 I consequently told the first servant who applied 
 that I paid fifteen dollars a month. This may 
 sound most trivial, but I discovered later that
 
 34 The Highroad 
 
 no circus which came to Fowlersburg with bands 
 and posters and parades ever so successfully 
 advertised as I did by that simple statement. 
 
 This move might have made me most un 
 popular except that I was following my text 
 books. I asked for a recommendation from 
 the last mistress and I would not take a servant 
 without it. This effectually prevented my com 
 mitting that unpardonable sin, known in Fow 
 lersburg as "coaxing off other people's girls." 
 
 I finally by this means secured two sisters, 
 the daughters of a respectable farmer. In 
 deed, they were of about the same origin as my 
 own, a fact which I did not then acknowledge 
 even to myself. I knew how to cook, and with 
 the aid of a cook book I managed to teach the 
 really intelligent elder girl ways which not only 
 filled her with awe but sent her about proudly 
 proclaiming that she didn't live with "common 
 people." 
 
 I had of course supposed that society in 
 Fowlersburg, which seemed to me then like a 
 metropolis, ate its dinners in the evening 
 according to my English novel standards. I 
 didn't quite dare ask my husband to do that. 
 But as a country breakfast, dinner and supper 
 are almost identical in constituents, I had no
 
 We Take a House 35 
 
 difficulty. The servants simply called the 
 dinner "luncheon," and the supper "dinner." 
 My husband thought (if the innovation gave 
 his busy brain a thought at all) that it was the 
 servants' peculiarity instead of mine. 
 
 It was the same with another thing which 
 seems too trivial to mention, and yet its prac 
 tice made a difference. That was the "Papa" 
 and "Mamma" by which my children ad 
 dressed us. I had said "Pap" and "Mother," 
 but I had the children say Father and Mother, 
 because the French Papa and Mamma would 
 have been impossible of pronunciation to me in 
 my country home. With the coming of the 
 new servants the change was easy. They un 
 consciously taught the children what I told 
 them to say. Does this seem too trivial? 
 Believe me, it is of trifles that life, or at any 
 rate, social life is made. 
 
 At this time we had a regular income of 
 about seven thousand dollars a year but we 
 spent about twenty-five hundred and were rich. 
 
 How I struggled over that little house in 
 which we lived! We went into the house at 
 the period of black wall paper and shaded 
 rooms. I wonder if the memory of anyone else 
 goes back to that time. I believe they called
 
 36 'The Highroad 
 
 it Morris paper, and it was supposed to have 
 something to do with sunflowers and aestheti- 
 cism. Living in the country and on old fash 
 ioned English novels, this movement escaped 
 me. I had not even a friend to tell me of it. 
 I never read a newspaper, seldom a magazine. 
 I could only follow the lines of the English 
 "cottages" I read of, and work in chintz. 
 "The ladies' morning room" was always chintz 
 with "bunches of roses" in my novels. 
 
 Entering now into a place where I could let 
 myself "go," I also had a morning room, and 
 it was done in chintz with bunches of roses. 
 
 In some of the early reprints of English 
 books, were copied the good English illustra 
 tions by men like Frederick Leighton and Fred 
 Walker. When these represented interiors I 
 pinned my faith to them. Low book shelves, 
 wicker chairs and a tea table, wide couches 
 with chintz flounces, draped dressing tables 
 I had them all. 
 
 Nobody will ever know the bitterness of my 
 mortification at discovering, when I went to 
 return my visits, that I was all out of fashion, 
 that I ought to have had black wall paper and 
 a dark carpet, and dingy curtains. But I had 
 the chintz and wicker and I couldn't afford to
 
 We Take a House 37 
 
 change them, so I made the best of them. 
 Like anything else you make the best of, other 
 people came in a little time, to copying them 
 and envying me the possession of them. They, 
 too, most of them, had read an English novel or 
 two (there seemed to be nothing else to read in 
 those days), and "morning room" and "draw 
 ing-room" finished in chintz sounded as ele 
 gant to them as the "lark rising to meet the 
 sun" sounded poetic when they read it in 
 newspaper verses. That every room in my 
 little cottage was morning room and afternoon 
 room, too, was as unsuspected by them as that 
 America has no lark. 
 
 Again 1 must call attention to that curious 
 lack of application by the majority of peo 
 ple of what they know. My new acquaint 
 ances looked upon me as a superior sort of per 
 son because I had possessions of which they had 
 read. Even the fact that my children wore 
 white pinafores like those in English illustra 
 tions and had their pretty fair hair brushed down 
 their backs, made them in a sense superior. 
 There was not a woman in the town who could 
 not have done what I did, who had not my 
 information. What she lacked was the con 
 nection between information and action.
 
 38 The Highroad 
 
 I shall never forget the sensation when I 
 gave some callers afternoon tea, from my 
 "drawing-room" tea table. My servants told 
 me how they heard of it everywhere and people 
 wanted to know if' it was a regular meal and if 
 we had anything after it. That was long before 
 the day of wrought-iron tea kettles and the 
 souvenir spoons which became in 1888 as gen 
 eral as upright pianos. 
 
 But these things were not funny to me in 
 those days. I was blundering along after the 
 only model I had. I knew these village 
 women to be far above me in breeding, educa 
 tion, everything. I was humble before them. 
 I had come there believing that "society" in 
 one place was exactly like society in another, 
 and I was trying my best to take my place 
 by behaving as nearly like a respectable 
 English duchess as circumstances would per 
 mit. I even had the conscience of the good 
 Duchess in those days. I used to search my 
 soul and dream of the higher life. Oh, how 
 the comedy of it has come like a sharp scent in 
 my nostrils since, half a pleasure and half a 
 pain, poor ignorant me truckling to the 
 Joneses and the Mendals!
 
 I Become the Head of the Family 39 
 
 IV 
 
 / Become the Head of the Family 
 
 I wish that I could keep this narrative in 
 Fowlersburg a little longer. There were so 
 many people there that I should enjoy writing 
 about telling even to myself, if this story is 
 never read by another what I saw below the 
 surface they believed themselves to present to 
 the world. 
 
 There was Mr. Bliss, the clergyman. He 
 was, I heard later, the son of a Methodist book 
 agent up in Pennsylvania somewhere. He had 
 infinite tact and a "beautiful manner." Some 
 times he took afternoon tea with me and talked 
 about the age of confirmation, or neatly demol 
 ished heresy. He was as easy in his acquired 
 theology as I in my own new manners. We 
 each had the air of inheritors. We played the 
 game as solemnly as two children who are 
 "dressing up." 
 
 We lived in Fowlersburg for seven years. I 
 have heard since, many times, in many a 
 roundabout way, that the people in the town 
 who knew me "cannot understand" my sue-
 
 4O 'xbe Highroad 
 
 cess. They call it luck. They remind them 
 selves and each other what an "ordinary, quiet, 
 plain little woman" I was. They give my 
 children credit for having developed a wonder 
 ful talent for social conquest, and they speak 
 of the remarkable influence of a foreign educa 
 tion and the opportunities for meeting men of 
 title and fortune in the old world. I believe 
 myself to be responsible for the breaking up of 
 several respectable and ambitious Fowlersburg 
 families whose fathers toil at law office or 
 "store" while the wives and children live in 
 pensions in Rome or Paris waiting for my 
 "luck." It is pitiful, isn't it? 
 
 They have no sort of conception that to be a 
 "plain, quiet little woman" was my success in 
 Fowlersburg. 
 
 My husband died. 
 
 His death came after one of the journeys 10 
 the hills he had been taking very frequently 
 lately, and the typhoid pneumonia, which 
 strikes so swiftly in West Virginia, had waited 
 for a moment of extra fatigue in his hard-work 
 ing life to find him defenseless. 
 
 It is the custom in West Virginia to bury the 
 dead within thirty-six hours but I couldn't. 
 By delaying the funeral four days, I uncon-
 
 I Become the Head of the Family 41 
 
 sciously added another instance to my record 
 of doing everything "in style" (as they said). 
 They all knew that in the east (everything 
 beyond Harper's Ferry is "the east") they 
 delayed funerals. 
 
 My husband had been caught by death at an 
 unlucky moment. He had made moves which 
 he alone understood for his methods of doing 
 business had become swift, and it was impos 
 sible to consult me on every transaction. He 
 had purchased wild land. He had planned to 
 build railroads through the back counties of 
 West Virginia where there was then not a 
 church nor a school house, and where the in 
 habitants were as wild as the Scotch in the days 
 of James I. 
 
 Mark Twain has accused Sir Walter Scott of 
 creating the southern feuds by setting up a 
 false idea of chivalry a generation or two ago, 
 which has degenerated with the people. He 
 leaves out of consideration the fact that these 
 people are the actual descendants of the blood 
 of which Walter Scott wrote. They have de 
 generated in some instances, and in some have 
 remained simply stationary, giving the appear 
 ance of degeneration in the light of the present 
 day.
 
 42 The Highroad 
 
 I have heard old border ballads sung at a 
 back county "play party' ' where they danced to 
 the tunes they sang themselves instead of to a 
 fiddle. They called the dances "plays. " One 
 of the popular ones is called "Over the Water 
 to Charlie." They have not the faintest idea 
 that such a person as Charlie Stuart ever lived, 
 but the children know the song even to-day. 
 
 Like Queen Victoria, I date my later life 
 from the beginning of my widowhood. It was 
 an event that had never entered into our calcu 
 lations. My husband was so strong, so certain. 
 When in those early days I looked forward, it 
 was to becoming the great lady of West Vir 
 ginia. After a while we should have a place 
 somewhere in the mountains, a great game 
 preserve, and we should be the important 
 people, spending our winters in Washington. 
 I am sure that had I kept a diary then and 
 recorded my day dreams, I should find on turn 
 ing the leaves that I had destined one of my 
 girls for a President's wife, and one for a Sen 
 ator's wife. My boy was to have been a Sen 
 ator himself. That was before the days when it 
 came to be so generally understood that a 
 Senatorship is sometimes for sale. Now I 
 know that my husband would probably have
 
 I Become the Head of the Family 43 
 
 had one had he lived, and 1 suppose in that 
 case Fowlersburg would have pointed him out 
 as another wonderful genius with a poor idiot 
 for a wife. 
 
 These plans were too great for my carrying 
 out, although everything was left to me. My 
 husband trusted me. As for the executors of 
 my husband's will, one a bank cashier named 
 Less, and the other one an honest conservative 
 old lawyer who had once been the governor of 
 the state, they gave me to understand that they 
 feared that my husband's illness had been corn 
 ing on for some time and that his brain had 
 been affected, judging by his investments. 
 They told me that I could count upon noth 
 ing from these wild lands. It was impossible 
 to sell them at any price. 
 
 This worthless land became my most valu 
 able asset. Everything depends upon the use 
 to which you put a thing. The Kohinoor would 
 not save a man from starving if nobody knew he 
 owned it, while one could live for a long time 
 on a few paste diamonds that people believed 
 to be real. 
 
 After my husband was buried I insisted upon 
 having the stores sold and everything put into 
 safe securities, so that I knew my income ex-
 
 44 2^<? Highroad 
 
 actly. I found that I had from that source 
 thirty-two hundred dollars a year. That was 
 all. I had expected to have at the very least 
 twelve thousand; and had not the wild lands 
 and certain railroad concessions (if that is what 
 they are called) been purchased, I should have 
 had that. Outside of this income was the life 
 insurance policy for forty thousand dollars, for 
 my sole benefit. 
 
 In the early days I made my plans. * would 
 go abroad and educate the children. 
 
 I could cry now at the pathos of my belief in 
 the things I read. One of these that was re 
 peated so often that I never thought of ques 
 tioning it, was that living on "the continent" 
 was cheap. Whenever my English families in 
 the novels became hard up, they always went 
 to the cheap places abroad to economize. I 
 have never discovered any place on the globe 
 any cheaper than Fowlersburg, West Virginia. 
 They say there are some villages in Virginia 
 and Georgia that are cheaper, places where you 
 can buy a broiler for ten cents, and have a 
 large washing done for twenty-five. In Fowlers- 
 burg a day's washing cost fifty cents in those 
 days. I believe they ask seventy-five in these. 
 
 We had never built a house, so I sold my
 
 I Become the Head of the Family 45 
 
 furniture and we went away to Baltimore, 
 where we took a small steamer for Bremen. 
 
 My forty thousand dollars added another fif 
 teen hundred a year to my income for the pres 
 ent. I made up my mind, however, that when 
 the time came the forty thousand dollars should 
 be spent to launch my girls.
 
 46 The Highroad 
 
 V 
 
 Seek a Wider Life 
 
 Ignorance is the most foolish thing in this 
 world, but the proverb maker who said, "A 
 little knowledge is a dangerous thing" was a 
 genius. We are a good deal like bread. As raw 
 dough we are promising. Until we get so old 
 that we sour, we may be manipulated into good 
 loaves at any time; but put us in the oven, 
 take us out half-baked and allow us to cool in 
 that state and we are done for. As for me, 
 I was below the "little knowledge" state. I 
 had been only near enough to the fire to rise a 
 little. 
 
 If we had gone to Europe by way of a 
 Cunarder, with its crowds of travelers, I doubt 
 if we should have reached my destination at 
 all. I think I should have developed an ill 
 ness which would have brought us back to 
 Fowlersburg. But on the little ship that took 
 us out in late August was a German scientific 
 man from Jena. I had not so much as a maid 
 with me, only four children, ranging from eight 
 to sixteen years. Fortunately, they were as
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 47 
 
 healthy as little animals and none of us was at 
 all seasick. 
 
 There were but five passengers besides our 
 selves, and the four were ill the first days, 
 allowing Dr. Helmholz to become friends 
 with us. It was he who told me bluntly that 
 Germany was not the place for us, but Lau 
 sanne; it was he who made out the lessons for 
 the children; it was he who told me that places 
 like Lausanne were filled with ignorant Eng 
 lish, of the stupidest class "to be let alone." 
 (How I have blessed him since for keeping me 
 out of the middle-class, although that was so 
 far from his object!) He finally gave me a let 
 ter to a man who "might give me some advice 
 for my boy," and headed me for Lausanne. 
 
 The "advice," when I reached it, was from 
 a man whose original home had been in Hun 
 gary. He was a nobleman who had resigned 
 his titles and given himself up to scientific 
 pursuits in a villa on Lake Geneva. He had a 
 wife somewhere. Dr. Helmholz knew him 
 only as a learned man, and had no thought of 
 his position otherwise. That he knew man as 
 well as his origin was a matter of no moment 
 to Jena. 
 
 Monsieur Prolmann, as he was known.
 
 48 The Highroad 
 
 became, most inconspicuously, my friend. He 
 was a man of fifty-five, who sometimes enter 
 tained distinguished guests. The English and 
 Americans who gossiped in the pensions around 
 Lausanne and Geneva hardly knew his name. 
 His life was lived in the beautiful walled gar 
 den where presently my children played. 
 
 Instead of settling in a pension, as had been 
 my intention, I took a tiny cottage, on his 
 advice. Being in heavy mourning, I did not 
 visit at all which was fortunate, as I made 
 a reputation for reserve which was most use 
 ful. The woman who was the social arbiter 
 of Lausanne in those days is the mother-in-law 
 of the steward of my youngest son-in-law's 
 Devon estates. It would be rather awkward if 
 we had ever been on visiting terms and she 
 could speak of Jane's childhood as one of its 
 monitors. 
 
 The next year my girls went to Paris to a 
 famous convent, and it was my only regret that 
 they had not gone earlier. A girl should come 
 out at seventeen. The "new woman" may talk 
 nonsense and higher education and all that sort 
 of thing, but the fact remains that between 
 sixteen and twenty-two, a well-brought-up girl 
 has her best chances to marry. Men of sense
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 49 
 
 want to marry a girl of that age. They want 
 to teach her what to know. If I were a man 
 there is nothing on earth that would induce me 
 to marry a girl past twenty-one. A widow 
 perhaps. She has been taught by another man. 
 But the majority of women are bad teachers for 
 their sex. I can give one instance. A mother 
 almost invariably tells her daughter (when she 
 begins to see that she is going to need advice) 
 that indifference is the way to a man's heart. 
 Nothing was ever so utterly absurd. A man is 
 a human being, and it is the law of human na 
 ture that we should like those who like us. A 
 man craves sympathy, understanding, sweet 
 ness, trustfulness. Naturally he despises a 
 fool, or what he is capable of recognizing as a 
 fool. We instinctively admire ourselves, be 
 cause we try to be, and we flatter ourselves we 
 succeed in appearing to be, the thing we admire. 
 When another finds us admirable we at once 
 pay tribute to his sense and taste. 
 
 My eldest girl would not be ready for society 
 for two years. In Continental society of the 
 best class, it is necessary for a woman not only 
 to speak French, but to speak it elegantly. 
 The suppressed smiles I have seen on the faces 
 of foreigners when some American women
 
 50 'The Highroad 
 
 attempted French, have made me ashamed. 
 Many of them speak fluently and confidently 
 servant's French. They have had nurse maids 
 in their childhood and dressing maids after 
 wards, who have all described themselves as 
 "Parisian." 
 
 In most cases the servants are from the prov 
 inces. In all cases they speak a tongue impos 
 sible to an educated Frenchman. As well 
 might a French lady enter a New York draw 
 ing-room and chatter "h'aints" and "his'ns" 
 or Boweryese. 
 
 The nuns in the convent where I sent my 
 little girls were ladies not very clever ladies, 
 some of them, but bound by the cast-iron 
 mould of their religious and social order. I 
 have heard Americans say that they feared that 
 their girls might become Catholics, and have 
 hesitated at this convent on that account. 
 
 A nun who educates girls never teaches them 
 anything which will interfere with a marriage 
 to anybody except a cad. 
 
 Monsieur Prolmann, kind in those early 
 days, with the grave kindness of a great man 
 whose word I little dreamed of disputing, had 
 given Robert his own secretary for some 
 studies. For others he went to a private school
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 51 
 
 where German boys come for French. Prol- 
 mann had suggested a lady he knew of in 
 Geneva as a governess for the girls. I found 
 that my little income was stretched by my ex 
 penses, living even in this way. 
 
 The first summer we made an excursion to 
 the Italian lakes, taking the governess with us. 
 Quite by chance we encountered Mr. Prolmann 
 in the little hotel where we were stopping. I 
 do not know why a chance encounter like this 
 seems to give an intimate air to a casual 
 acquaintance, but we all know that it does. I 
 had allowed the children to play in the great 
 garden of his home on the lake, had my 
 self once or twice had tea on the terrace with 
 the children and governess, and had once gone 
 in informally after dinner to hear a great pian 
 ist who was staying at the villa. I had learned 
 many things from Prolmann, many that I felt 
 sure he was unconscious of having taught me. 
 
 I had spent that first winter in a feverish 
 study of French and I had succeeded in at least 
 speaking carefully and grammatically. One 
 can make few mistakes in conduct when one 
 does nothing, but still I followed suggestions. 
 
 This night, after our meeting in Italy, the 
 moon had come up gloriously, and the elderly
 
 52 'The Highroad 
 
 governess and the dry middle-aged secretary 
 had taken the children for a walk to a famous 
 view. It was early and Prolmann and I sat on 
 a balcony of the hotel. I had found crepe a 
 trifle heavy for travel, and I had on a thin 
 gown of black gauze and a little white cloak 
 belonging to Lucile. 
 
 Suddenly Prolmann spoke. I had been con 
 scious for some time that he was looking at 
 me, instead of the ripple of the moon on the 
 lake with a scrap of a chateau showing be 
 yond, the whole looking quite like the painted 
 views with mother-of-pearl high lights which 
 one sees on old fashioned work boxes. 
 
 He was a most distinguished-looking man, 
 with thin white hair and waxed moustache, 
 thick black eyebrows accenting the pale lined 
 face of an ascetic. It was the first time I ever 
 had sat alone in the evening with any man ex 
 cept my husband and seldom with him. He, 
 dead a year now, had usually gone to his 
 office or to bed immediately after the evening 
 meal, leaving me alone. And in any case he 
 was by no means a romantic figure. He wore 
 a chin beard. I am a creature of imagination, 
 and I suppose it was because it was the first 
 time that I so well remember every detail of
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 53 
 
 that evening over the lake. I even remember 
 that the chair in which I sat was a Moorish one 
 made of rushes which gave me a long slender 
 look, like a tall willowy woman. I admired 
 myself in it as though I were somebody 
 else. 
 
 "You are very young to be the mother of two 
 tall daughters," Prolmann said. He waited as 
 though he expected me to speak and then he 
 went on: "It will be a pleasant but an arduous 
 task to put them into the world they should 
 adorn." 
 
 "It is concerning their lives that I need 
 advice," I said. 
 
 Prolmann leaned over and took my hand in 
 a fatherly fashion. "It is wrong for so young 
 and so attractive a woman to lack an adviser. 
 I am going to ask that I may put my expe 
 rience at your disposal. Had you always lived 
 in this country, I should doubtless have been 
 your husband's friend. (I wondered even then 
 if Prolmann believed that. The thought 
 causes me to smile now.) I should probably 
 have been god-father to your children. Allow 
 me to take that position which distance denied 
 me." He was still holding my hand, and 
 pressing it gently. Then he said softly: "I
 
 54 The Highroad 
 
 might have been god-father and guardian to 
 you." 
 
 I did not speak for a minute. I have always 
 found that silence needs no explanation. I 
 had two replies and I wished to choose between 
 them. The first was a light sentence saying 
 that careful parents did not choose children for 
 god-parents, and as he must have been a child 
 when I was christened, he could not have been 
 mine. That would have done for some men 
 most men. They like to be called young when 
 youth has past, however bold the flattery. But 
 not this one. I chose my second. 
 
 "Oh, that you had!" I said softly. "You 
 would have saved me so much." 
 
 And my sense of humor did not twitch a 
 muscle of my face. But imagine, if you will, 
 this finished worldling, this scientist, this 
 courtier, as the god-father of my parents' child 
 in the wilds of West Virginia! Yet actually, 
 there in the moonlight, lying in the Moorish 
 chair, I felt my part of an interesting young 
 widow who had suffered. 
 
 In his role of adviser, Prolmann suggested 
 sending the girls to the great Parisian convent. 
 I told him frankly that to do so would make 
 serious inroads upon my capital, as the school
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 55 
 
 was a very expensive one. My income was a 
 little over four thousand dollars. The convent 
 would demand a thousand apiece for the girls. 
 But even to Prolmann I did not betray any 
 thing. It was at this time that I began to make 
 an asset of the wild land. 
 
 I told him that our estates were unremunera- 
 tive and that sentiment would not allow me to 
 sell them. They comprised an area that was 
 astounding in acre numbers. Considering how 
 the ownership of the utterly worthless land put 
 me into the class of great land owners in 
 Europe, I have often wondered why such a pos 
 session has not been oftener used by clever 
 Americans with small capital. There are miles 
 of desert lands in Arizona and California that 
 would sound just as well as the most cultivated 
 farms and a clever person can always let in 
 formation get about. In Europe, where every 
 decent American and some indecent ones 
 are sized up and labelled, a little matter of a 
 hundred thousand acres looks just as well as 
 the title of an Italian prince looks over here. 
 I think those acres impressed even Prolmann. 
 He looked at me gravely and then puffed his 
 delicate lips. 
 
 "Those prices at the convent are for the
 
 56 'The Highroad 
 
 bourgeoisie and foreigners only; not for my 
 god-child." 
 
 He went up to Paris and arranged matters. 
 A little later I thought it probable that he paid 
 the bills out of his own pocket. If he did, 
 that was his own lookout. He could never 
 know that I suspected it. Consequently we 
 were in exactly the same position as though it 
 were influence instead of money that he used. 
 
 I was enabled to send the girls to the con 
 vent for one thousand dollars payment for the 
 three. I took a lease of my little house in 
 Lausanne for another year, and settled down 
 with Robert. 
 
 The house had been altered for an American 
 invalid who came to Lausanne to be near the 
 famous Dr. Roux, and it was actually comfort 
 able. An open fire and a bath-room were its 
 distinguishing features. Ah! I enjoyed that 
 winter! 
 
 In some subtle way I seemed to be more of a 
 girl than I had ever been in my life. Girlhood 
 is a matter of education with many. Some 
 have it by genius, but the majority of the 
 female young of the human species are simply 
 raw, unripe women who need to be as carefully 
 looked after as other unripe fruit. Unfortu-
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 57 
 
 nately a good many are of such a poor species, 
 or are so stung by insects or spoiled by wind 
 and rain and handling, that the proportion of 
 well-flavored, handsome, sweet women is 
 small. 
 
 I was a widow with four children, but when 
 the girls were safely in the convent, and Rob 
 ert was away with his tutors, I was as- free as 
 air and my nature seemed to be awakening. 
 
 I arose in the mornings and put aside my 
 curtains for a view of the beautiful mountains. 
 I had my coffee in bed in the French fashion 
 with an end of delicious French bread and 
 sweet, saltless butter. After that, I supposed 
 (in my tale of the day) I went for a walk; in 
 reality I generally threw myself on a broad 
 couch before my open fire and read the French 
 books Prolmann sent me as well as some I 
 purchased myself. Prolmann would have dis 
 approved of some of my literature I am afraid. 
 I remember his saying once that a woman 
 might do almost anything, but that she must 
 never hear or speak a word that was not deli 
 cate. 
 
 My little cottage adjoined Prolmann's gar 
 den, so that his visits to me were not the sub 
 ject of comment to the little band of big-footed,
 
 58 The Highroad 
 
 badly-dressed English and their American 
 imitators, who called themselves the "English 
 Colony." My servants even had been supplied 
 by Prolmann. 
 
 Every day he came and had dejeuner with 
 me Robert had his luncheon with the tutor in 
 the villa above and we talked about every 
 thing in the universe. I wonder if I can ever 
 explain how I felt toward him. He was the 
 first man who is what the world calls a gentle 
 man, that I had ever known in my life. 
 
 The training, the understanding of civiliza 
 tion, society and the rules of comfortable liv 
 ing which are crystallized into the gentleman 
 create a charm which can never die. It is all 
 the more potent to one unaccustomed to it. 
 Even Prolmann' s manners at the table were 
 charming to me. 
 
 I have since discovered that not all gentle 
 men on the continent of Europe know how to 
 eat even though they be most accomplished in 
 recognizing what to eat. I have seen a Grand 
 Duke whose table manners would disgrace a 
 motherless school boy in West Virginia and 
 the majority of his friends did not know it. 
 
 In West Virginia we sat down to the table 
 for the primary purpose of obtaining nourish-
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 59 
 
 ment and our whole attention was directed 
 toward that end. Our food was good, but it 
 had no more "rhythm," as Prolmann would 
 have said, than the hay and oats in the horses' 
 mangers. I was learning now that each dish 
 should complement the other; that a meal was 
 a composition intended to appeal to two senses 
 besides that of taste. We thought in West Vir 
 ginia, that a "course dinner" was "stylish" 
 simply as a certain cut of skirt might be styl 
 ish, but I learned now that the element of har 
 mony in dining would prevent serving all the 
 dishes at once, as it would prevent all the keys 
 on a piano being played at once, or all the 
 instruments in an orchestra. 
 
 To be put into a gay humor, to be awakened 
 to the zest of life, and to share your joy and 
 play it in talk against the moods of others, is 
 the art of dining as Prolmann taught it; other 
 wise it were best to feed alone. 
 
 Sometimes in the early days of our success I 
 used to wonder what I should have been with 
 out Prolmann, and I shuddered, thinking of 
 myself as one of the poor, silly mothers who 
 drag their girls about Europe and expect them 
 to make chance acquaintances of Dukes as 
 described in the novels. They imagine that
 
 60 'fbe Highroad 
 
 the aristocracy of Europe marries after that 
 loose fashion. Sometimes it does, but not the 
 daughters of those mothers. In the rare cases 
 where it happens the daughters do their own 
 fishing. We see it over and over again; we 
 read of it every day in the newspapers. The 
 popular comment upon the Marquis who mar 
 ries a music-hall singer is "Fool" ! Not at all.. 
 All men are exactly like that, only they have 
 not run against the attractive bait and the ex 
 pert fisher. 
 
 Now I know there was no real need for my 
 shudders. If I had not learned Prolmann's 
 lesson I should have learned another. That, 
 however, does not lessen my gratitude to him. 
 
 There was one object lesson that came to 
 me under his auspices, which I very probably 
 never should have seen otherwise. 
 
 He told me one day that he was expecting 
 some visitors. It was late in the winter and 
 fashionable people were on their way to the 
 South, to Cape Martin after the Queen, to Pau 
 and Nice. Prolmann never spoke of men and 
 women with adjectives which defined their sta 
 tions in life. He had never found it necessary. 
 But I classified in my own mind. So it was 
 with a real thrill in my provincial heart, which
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 61 
 
 has always kept the habit of thrilling notwith 
 standing the contempt of my head, that I dis 
 covered that his cousin and old playmate from 
 England was the famous Duchess of Belcourt 
 whose photograph, wearing her necklace of 
 pearls the size of cherries, I had long admired. 
 I was asked to the villa to luncheon on one of 
 the two days she spent with Prolmann, and my 
 girls' old governess was pressed into duty as 
 my companion. Actually, until Prolmann tact 
 fully suggested her in that capacity, I had no 
 idea that I stood in need of such an appendage. 
 I found the Duchess walking on the terrace 
 with Prolmann and another man, a tall, 
 stooped, slovenly creature with tired, bored 
 eyes. The Duchess wore a dress of cheviot, 
 badly made to my eyes, and her lined, dis 
 agreeable face was smeared (there is no other 
 word for it) with cosmetics, over which a 
 veil was tightly drawn. Her figure was laced 
 in, but with the thickness finding its distorted 
 way into evidence. I think she was utterly 
 indifferent to my presence, and I doubt if she 
 had any clear idea who I was. But the man 
 with her remembered me in after years when 
 he was her husband and a little more tired, a 
 little more bored than in those days.
 
 62 The Highroad 
 
 When I joined them, Prolmann coming for 
 ward to meet me, she was lecturing him upon 
 some appointments he had made and some 
 policy pursued not to her liking, for he was a 
 Cabinet Minister of England, and she was an 
 English Duchess who was supposed by an ad 
 miring country to be his adviser, one of those 
 women behind the throne of which even Peck- 
 sniffian England boasts. 
 
 They were traveling together as they often 
 had done in the twenty years since they had 
 been friends. 
 
 At luncheon she paid no attention to me, but 
 kept on with her talk of people and events and 
 theories concerning which I knew nothing. 
 Lord Hastings now and then spoke to Prol 
 mann or to me, always upon subjects far from 
 the line of thought carried on by the Duchess. 
 She called him by his Christian name, and 
 seemed to me to speak at times almost with 
 rudeness. She looked years his senior, as I 
 afterwards discovered she was. I knew the 
 story of their devotion to each other. I had 
 read it as one reads the chronicles of royalties, 
 and I had to pinch myself to realize that I was 
 sitting here facing two people who figured to 
 those who saw them from afar as a sort of mod-
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 63 
 
 ern Abelard and Heloise. Could these be 
 they? As I looked at the heavy old face of 
 the woman, with the untidy masses of dyed and 
 false hair above it, the eyebrows marked on 
 above contemptuous old eyes, and at the man 
 the ancestral legislator, I almost laughed aloud. 
 I went frantically back over my opinion of my 
 own belongings, and for at least a moment, 
 revised them. My husband had been some 
 thing like this man, beard and all, only more 
 intelligent. The woman, in Fowlersburg, 
 West Virginia, would have been considered a 
 type of cheap lodging-house keeper. And 
 then I lashed myself for a fool. Was I to go 
 through life with the standards of Fowlers- 
 burg? That was provincialism with a ven 
 geance. 
 
 This was a great party leader of the greatest 
 nation on earth. What was I? I, without 
 traditions, who knew nothing whose eyes 
 were blind, who had not the key of under 
 standing to enter in and judge. The glamour 
 of their great position took me. At least if it 
 did not entirely take me, it was no fault of my 
 volition. This friendship I told myself, was 
 historic. It was of consequence to the nation. 
 "Nice customs to great natures bow," I found
 
 64 The Highroad 
 
 myself saying. And then that envy of the 
 world I was born outside of, came to me. 
 What must it mean to be in that rare world 
 above the laws of conventionality, laws, 
 which I saw in that hour, are created by those 
 above them that those beneath may stand solid 
 and uphold the structure upon which the great 
 disport themselves. 
 
 I tried to express something of this to Prol- 
 mann the day after they left. We sat at 
 dejeuner in my sunny little sitting-room, with 
 the white-topped Swiss mountains outside. 
 He gave one of his unusual smiles, which was 
 like a breaking up of his face, so much of the 
 humorous man of the world did it show behind 
 the impassive mask which he usually carried 
 like a blank wall against curiosity. Prol- 
 mann's teeth were beautiful, and I realized at 
 times like these that at some time, some 
 woman might have passionately loved that 
 man behind. It was with my reason I knew 
 this, however. He never struck the hour of 
 my heart. Now he leaned over my little round 
 table, glistening with the beautiful light silver 
 and glass, most of which he had given to me. 
 
 "Catherine is my cousin. We are friends 
 from youth. A shrewder bargainer and a less
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 65 
 
 intelligent human being never lived. Poor 
 Hastings." 
 
 "But," I said, "She seems such a remark 
 able help to him. She has such a knowledge 
 of affairs." 
 
 "She has not even the wit to repeat to him 
 what she has heard him say. Most women 
 know as much as that." 
 
 "But ?" I stammered over my next ques 
 tion. 
 
 . "But why does he still attach himself? 
 Because he would be cut if he did not. 
 Because he wants to continue in office. He 
 would not be forgiven if he dropped away. 
 In this world a man must be true to some 
 thing." He hesitated a moment and the smile 
 faded. "They allow more latitude to a 
 woman. Hastings is paying a debt of honor 
 contracted twenty years ago and he must pay it 
 until the Duke of Belcourt is dead. Then he 
 will be free." 
 
 I suppose my eyes were puzzled. 
 
 "Then he may marry her and go his own 
 way. ' ' 
 
 In that winter I used to walk as high up on 
 the mountains as I dared to go. It seemed to 
 me that I could not breathe as long as there was
 
 66 The Highroad 
 
 anything above me. I must climb even into 
 dangerous places. It was with delight that I 
 realized my own sure-footedness, my coolness 
 of head. 
 
 The following summer Prolmann told me 
 that he was growing old (as a matter of fact he 
 was younger in every way than when I had first 
 known him), and that his physician had ordered 
 him to take a long yachting trip to Norway and 
 the Hebrides. He asked that, in the capacity 
 of his god-daughter, I would come with him. 
 Robert would go for a tour with the secretary, 
 and I, with a new maid (my old one was sub 
 ject to seasickness), went. This plan was car 
 ried out for another summer, and then I found 
 myself a little bored. 
 
 Prolmann had taught me much which I de 
 sired to use. What was the need of longer 
 spending my days in idle dreaming and in as 
 idle practicing upon my teacher? And I was 
 a little bored. I exulted in the feeling when I 
 discovered it in myself. This wonderful, bril 
 liant man of the world had brought me to the 
 stage where he could teach me nothing more, 
 and he bored me. 
 
 One day near the end of our second summer, 
 he told me that he was negotiating with his
 
 We Seek a Wider Life 67 
 
 wife's people for a divorce. I thought rapidly. 
 Undoubtedly a marriage with Prolmann would 
 give me a large fortune, but was it worth 
 while? Would I not be considered somewhat 
 in the light of an adventuress? 
 
 An unknown woman is always considered to 
 have been an adventuress when she marries a 
 conspicuous man. And while Prolmann had 
 discarded his title and was living in retire 
 ment, any act of his, such as a marriage fol 
 lowing a divorce, would bring up his whole 
 history and mine. And he bored me. 
 
 I told him that to me divorce seems the 
 violation of a sacrament, and I begged him for 
 the sake of his soul to reconsider the matter. 
 
 The next remark he made was wide of the 
 subject, and that autumn I went to Paris to be 
 near the girls and prepare the way for Lucile's 
 debut into the world. He gave me many let 
 ters and the arrangement at the convent went 
 on as before. We carried on a correspondence 
 of a semi-formal character with long lapses. 
 
 I was foolish to let Prolmann get away from 
 me then. His arm would have saved me much 
 in the succeeding years, but it was the first time 
 I had ever been truly bored and I was fasci 
 nated by the experience and inclined to in-
 
 68 'The Highroad 
 
 dulge it. I had practically saved two years' 
 income also, and my "god-father" had pre 
 sented me with some magnificent jewels. 
 
 He showed his spirit by sending each of the 
 elder girls a pearl necklace on her marriage 
 and keepi'ng an eye on Robert's early educa 
 tion.
 
 In Paris 69 
 
 VI 
 
 In Paris 
 
 My first idea in going to Paris was to stay a 
 while in the convent where my girls were. But 
 I thought better of that. I did not want the 
 nuns to be too explicit concerning the cost of 
 their charges. They were paid through my 
 bankers in Paris, and I had nothing to do 
 with it. 
 
 I could not go to a pension. I had learned 
 by this time how it marked a woman, gave 
 her undesirable acquaintances, and was alto 
 gether the wrong road to the goal I had set out 
 to reach. I lived at a quiet little hotel with 
 my maid for a week, and then set about reap 
 ing the harvest of the letters Prolmann had 
 given me. I had no scruples whatever in 
 opening them, but they told me nothing. 
 They were of the most formal description. 
 But my first visitor gave me a clue to what 
 Prolmann had sent out privately. 
 
 She was a Viennese, an old woman with a 
 sad face, more like an old hound's than any-
 
 7o 'The Highroad 
 
 thing else I can think of. The old-fashioned 
 way in which she wore her hair carried out the 
 idea. The mouse-colored wings on her cheeks 
 were like a hound's ears. But in the lobes of 
 her ears were beautiful rubies of enormous 
 value, and on the delicate old hands, encased in 
 lace mitts, were stones in dim, worn, deep set 
 tings that made the flashy shallow diamonds 
 we see nowadays seem like vulgar paste. Her 
 gown was made with an overskirt and her bon 
 net had wide strings. 
 
 She rose and bowed stiffly when I entered, 
 and said in beautiful French: 
 
 "It gives me pleasure to welcome the 
 daughter of my cousin's old friend to Paris." 
 
 For an instant I was bewildered, and later I 
 was confused as I realized that the old brown 
 eyes that looked out so pathetically had seen 
 my hesitation. The "cousin" was Prolmann 
 and he had claimed me as the daughter of an 
 old friend. He was a man of spirit. 
 
 "I, too, am suffering from an unproductive 
 estate," she said. 
 
 I flushed. It seemed to me that Prolmann 
 need not have flaunted my poverty all at once. 
 But I have learned since then that the great of 
 the world hasten to speak of their limitation of
 
 In Paris 71 
 
 fortune that nothing may be expected of them 
 which they cannot perform. 
 
 In a moment I was matching fortunes with 
 this old lady, telling her of the hundreds of 
 thousands of acres which were "tied up" until 
 my children were all of age. Actually as the 
 years went by I came to believe in these acres 
 as a fortune. Who knows? It may be true 
 that there is nothing in the world but what we 
 ourselves create, that everything is in our own 
 minds. We all, who think, have had expe 
 riences which would seem to corroborate such 
 a theory. 
 
 Madame Vestrine was a distant cousin of 
 Prolmann. A Hungarian by birth, who had 
 passed a brilliant youth at many courts with 
 her father, a famous diplomatist. She had 
 married against her father's will, making a 
 marriage, which she told me with entire sim 
 plicity had been most disastrous. She had 
 one child, a son, who was content to let the 
 world slip by while he lived on his Hungarian 
 estates, forever out of the world. I gathered 
 from Madame that she considered him also in 
 the light of a disaster. She hoped that my son 
 would not so disappoint me. 
 
 I had left Robert in Lausanne to be prepared
 
 72 The Highroad 
 
 for college. It was Prolmann's advice that he 
 should go back to America to college. A man 
 should be educated in his own country, he said. 
 In no other way could he understand his people. 
 
 Madame Vestrine invited me to her house, 
 or rather her apartment in the Rue Miromesnil, 
 the following Thursday, when she would have 
 some of her old friends between the hours of 
 four and six. 
 
 I'went, and here it maybe interesting to tell 
 of the manage of this old aristocrat, whose birth 
 gave her access to the Vienna court circle, and 
 who, I learned later, had been one of the great 
 ladies who had snubbed the young Empress 
 and added so much to the misery of her un 
 happy life. One could not understand so sim 
 ple and kind a creature hurting any one at 
 first. Later I came to see that presumption 
 was the one thing which found her inflexible. 
 It was always more or less a source of amuse 
 ment to me that she did not always recognize 
 it. She knew the ways of her caste, as all true 
 aristocrats, but what she did not know were the 
 ways of the casteless. 
 
 Sooner or later some queer people found 
 their way into her little salon, and it was I who 
 weeded them out.
 
 In Paris 73 
 
 This first afternoon, I was a trifle early, and 
 1 discovered Madame talking to a curious pop- 
 eyed Belgian, who was quite frankly relating 
 an anecdote concerning the supposed claimant 
 of the Bonapartist party. It was not a pleasant 
 anecdote. 
 
 "The worst of it was," the Belgian said, "it 
 took place before his innocent children. The 
 man is impossible." 
 
 And then I made one of my early blunders. 
 
 "His children?" I asked, as innocently as 
 one of them. "I did not know that the Prince 
 was married?" 
 
 "Nor is he," was the reply. "Not even 
 morganatically, I believe. He has put his 
 children in a very unpleasant position and 
 there was no necessity for it. It is impossible 
 to vitiate the blood of the Bonapartes." 
 
 This gentleman's card was on a table near 
 me and I saw it then and many times later. 
 His name was followed by the Roman numbers 
 IV. They puzzled me then, but later I learned 
 that an ancestor of his had been a friend of 
 Henry IV. of France. The reason of the 
 friendship would have supplied Mr. Stanley 
 Weyman's readers with a long novel, had he 
 ever had as free access to it as he had to
 
 74 The Highroad 
 
 Sully's diary, out of which his best tales are 
 made. It was a gay mixture of intrigue, com 
 edy, farce and tragedy. It smelled of blood 
 and musk and garlic after the fashion of all 
 intimate things of Navarre. When it was over 
 and I suppose the lady was done with and 
 safely out of the way (married to the friend after 
 the fashion of the day, for aught I know), 
 Henry in his love and gratitude gave part of 
 his name to the friend, and his children wear it 
 to this day. 
 
 I could but think how surprised Henry would 
 be to see that the strain hadn't lasted better. 
 But then there are the Bourbons! 
 
 The apartment of Madame Vestrine might 
 have been a little corner of one of the new 
 apartment houses in New York, except that 
 the conveniences were lacking. It consisted 
 of a tiny salon, two bed-rooms, and in the 
 place where a bath would be in New York was 
 a tiny kitchen. The antiquated maid slept in 
 the kitchen. 
 
 The walls of the salon were covered by 
 splendid tapestry woven in the Louvre before 
 the days of the Gobelins. Gold threads as 
 brilliant as if of to-day enriched the soft, 
 old colors. Lace fit for a museum draped the
 
 In Paris 75 
 
 mantle, on which stood alone an alabaster 
 bust of Marie Antoinette, given as a souvenir 
 to Madame Vestrine's great-grandmother, who 
 had been the Queen's maid of honor before her 
 marriage to Louis. 
 
 On top of a writing-desk painted by some 
 romanticist in garlands and fetes and varnished 
 by the Martins, stood an old miniature, waxy, 
 yellow, faded, of a young woman, that I knew 
 must have been Madame in her youth. 
 
 In half an hour the place was crowded to 
 suffocation and we were given some dry sweet 
 cakes and a glass of wine. 
 
 There were few young people. Here and 
 there was a young girl with her mother, but 
 these did not stay long. They were chiefly the 
 old-fashioned sort of young French girls. One 
 I recognized as a girl I had seen at the convent, 
 and I ventured to speak to her. She scarcely 
 lifted her eyes from the floor and said only 
 "Out," and "Non." 
 
 Her mother gave me a half-suspicious glance 
 and before my face walked the two or three 
 steps to Madame Vestrine and asked her quite 
 audibly who I was. I heard Prolmann's name, 
 and the Marquise (I discovered she was that) 
 came back and greeted me very affably.
 
 76 The Highroad 
 
 "Do you know Madame 's daughter?" 
 
 she asked her child. 
 
 The girl gave her a quick upward look from 
 her black eyes, and then satisfied of the correct 
 answer, said: 
 
 "Unpeu, Maman." 
 
 When I asked Lucile concerning this girl, 
 she said carelessly, "Oh, Lili! She is Gene- 
 vieve's friend. They are inseparable and they 
 plan all the mischief in the convent. She is a 
 petit (liable, that Lili! I tried to keep her away 
 from Genevieve, but there is no parting them." 
 
 Lucile, I was beginning to see, had some of 
 the elements of a prig. That makes a girl easy 
 to manage in some ways, but difficult in others, 
 and it is nearly always accompanied by a bit 
 ter obstinacy. 
 
 "She has a beautiful mother," I said. 
 
 I repeated the story of the beauty of the 
 Marquise to Genevieve, sure that it would 
 reach the ears of her friend and certain also 
 that Lili would place the remark in her turn 
 where it would do the most good. The Mar 
 quise's beauty had reached that stage where 
 she would like to have it corroborated. 
 
 You can buy almost anything in Paris, and 
 when I went about furnishing my own apart-
 
 In Paris 77 
 
 ment I used a hint that Madame Vestrine's 
 room had given me. 
 
 I could not afford to have so tiny a place. 
 I was not great enough to suffocate people, 
 nor could I hang priceless tapestries and lace 
 on the walls. I found an apartment in the 
 rue Marbeuf, and was about to take it when I 
 discovered that I had alighted in the midst of 
 the American Colony. I fled as from a pesti 
 lence. At last, Madame Vestrine came to my 
 rescue and established me on the second floor 
 of a walled house in the Faubourg St. Germain. 
 There were four rooms besides the kitchen and 
 a hole under the roof for my servant. 
 
 There was a little graveled court where a car 
 riage could drive in, and altogether it was 
 gloomy and correct. I was obliged to take a 
 lease for two years, and then I was allowed to 
 put in a bath-room (at a ridiculous expense) 
 on the condition that when I left I was to tear 
 out all the pipes and leave the walls as I found 
 them. 
 
 Madame Vestrine tried to persuade me to 
 give up the mad project of a bath. She ex 
 plained to me that the weekly bath could be 
 brought in from the street (linen, soap and all) 
 foi three francs fifty. But I explained that I
 
 7 8 ^he Highroad 
 
 wanted my daughter to preserve her complex 
 ion and the doctor had said daily baths 
 would do it. She bowed to that. 
 
 "I have heard," she said in her tired, meek 
 way, "that some of the Americans and the 
 actresses use baths of milk. Certainly it pays 
 to keep the complexion." 
 
 I made up my mind that as I could not fur 
 nish my rooms magnificently, I would do the 
 next best thing and furnish "temporarily" 
 never forgetting that I was an American of 
 the colonial school. 
 
 I went to chintz and comfortable chairs and 
 soft rugs for my foundation. I have discov 
 ered that Frenchmen like comfort as well as 
 anybody. I have sometimes thought that it is 
 for this reason that they so often seek the 
 society of the half-world tired of formal 
 chairs at home. 
 
 Then, in the old shops, and later at Hotel 
 Druot, I bought anything that antedated 1865, 
 candlesticks, some pictures, china, a minia 
 ture or two all English. I even purchased a 
 number of old English books. These were 
 my treasures which were supposed to have fol 
 lowed me from America. I even allowed 
 Lucile to think so.
 
 In Paris 79 
 
 My mother died the last year I was in Lau 
 sanne, and my father wrote me a letter and 
 sent me a crayon portrait he had had "en 
 larged" from an old photograph. It was a 
 dreadful thing, but it could not quite destroy 
 my mother's maiden prettiness and gentleness 
 of expression. 
 
 I took the paper out of the hideous plaster 
 and gilt frame in which it arrived and I care 
 fully wiped out all of the drawing except the 
 face, and that I smirched. Then I took it to a 
 clever young artist in Paris, and told him that 
 my only portrait of my mother had been de 
 stroyed. I asked him to paint a portrait from 
 this remnant. I brought to him an old-fash 
 ioned silk gown, a lace fichu smelling of rose 
 leaves, and a tiny satin shoe, all of which I 
 purchased in a shop on the hill leading up to 
 Montmartre. I told him that these were 
 hers, "showing the delicate character of my 
 mother, which I knew that his art could repro 
 duce." 
 
 He created a lovely creature sitting meekly 
 behind the frame, which made Lucile start and 
 cry out when she saw it: "Grandmamma!" 
 
 I told her that her grandfather had sent me 
 the picture. She looked at it a Long time, and
 
 8o The Highroad 
 
 - * 
 
 then turned to me with something almost 
 pathetic in her face and voice. 
 
 "I am so glad he did. I never understood 
 before I think I must have dreamed things." 
 
 I never asked what she had dreamed. I 
 knew that she could remember the simple 
 country life of my parents. I had glorified it 
 for her by showing her this vision of her grand 
 mother's youth which was not the less true to 
 her that it was altogether false to fact.
 
 I Bring Lucile into View 81 
 
 VII 
 
 / Bring Lucile into View 
 
 Lucile was at this time eighteen years old, 
 and, if the truth be told, a perfectly common 
 place girl. Her only gleam of beauty was in 
 the red shade her hair had caught from her 
 father's, but that was not a real point. Her 
 features were small, her teeth fairly good, her 
 figure was acceptable. Had she been left in our 
 native land and town she would have been 
 conservatively happy with never a longing. 
 She would have belonged to a literary club 
 where the members sewed on commonplace 
 "art work," while one of them read good litera 
 ture something "solid," and watched the 
 clock for tea time. 
 
 I went to a meeting of one of those clubs in 
 Fowlersburg not long after Lucile's marriage. 
 I was being entertained with some awe, which 
 I could see was not a little mixed with wonder. 
 They all looked hard at me as if to discover 
 my "trick," and I think they were disappointed 
 that I did not talk about Lucile and her hus-
 
 82 'The Highroad 
 
 band. They all remembered (to me) what a 
 beautiful, interesting child she had been, and 
 some of them, hoped to see her if they ever 
 went to London or Ludovika, where her hus 
 band resides as Ambassador. I hoped they 
 might, but I doubted it. Lucile is not demo 
 cratic. The wife of the new clergyman of 
 Fowlersburg was president of the club. She 
 was a large woman, reconciled to her figure 
 because it resembled that of the late Queen 
 Victoria. She came from eastern Virginia, 
 the offspring of an English tobacco merchant 
 of before the war and a Richmond woman. 
 On the English side she was more than cordial 
 to me as the mother-in-law of one of England's 
 famous men and a Lord. On the Richmond 
 side she was a little resentful that any Fowlers- 
 burg woman from the looked-down-upon West 
 Virginia should have achieved such glory. 
 
 But she could and she did assert her English 
 parentage. She finally said that a monarchy 
 was the only proper form of government. As 
 nobody else seemed likely to deny this asser 
 tion, and as I myself thank the Fates hourly 
 that I was born in a republic where I would 
 alone have been a possibility, I asked her, 
 
 "Why?"
 
 I Bring Lucile into View 83 
 
 "Because," answered she, "Heaven is a 
 monarchy." 
 
 Now that is exactly the kind of logic 
 which would have appealed to Lucile. I 
 wanted to tell those good souls how she would 
 have enjoyed herself with them, but I feared 
 they would consider that I was boasting of her 
 intellectuality, and I wished to leave no cor 
 ners for comment to hang upon. 
 
 Lucile's feet and hands, her neck and waist 
 were what the shops call "stock sizes," as well 
 as her mind and manners. 
 
 Many mothers would have considered her 
 hopeless but I knew better. The majority of 
 the world is itself commonplace and resentful 
 of anything out of the ordinary. 
 
 Nobody knows how I dreaded the coming of 
 Lucile, because I knew that she would bore 
 me. I had grown accustomed in these years 
 to my own society. I made plans and dreamed 
 dreams all day long, dreams and plans for my 
 children, but they were like counters to me. 
 
 I suppose at heart I am an extremely selfish 
 woman. I want everybody around me to be 
 contented, gratified in every sense, from appe 
 tite to vanity (vanity is the unnamed sense), 
 but I am conscious that it is because unhappi-
 
 84 The Highroad 
 
 ness jars and disturbs me. It is my instinct to 
 make people near me happy as it is my instinct 
 to keep my house clean. It is more comfort 
 able. I wonder how many people are like me, 
 and if they were to speak the truth would say 
 that a million Chinese might be tortured 
 without causing them a moment's pain, so the 
 sufferers were welh out of sight and hearing? 
 
 When the convent gate opened, I took up 
 my Stendhal, my Gautier, my Maupassant and 
 their companions and locked them away. 
 That was before I knew that Lucile would 
 never have read them in any case. Her favor 
 ite author was Mrs. Humphry Ward, after she 
 began to read at all, which was not until she 
 was safely married. Before that she looked at 
 the pictures in the English and American peri 
 odicals. She had a natural taste for The Ladies' 
 Pictorial and The Century. 
 
 I had a pretty salon by the time she came to 
 me, with an open fire, many shaded candles 
 and plenty of fresh flowers. We had a dress 
 ing maid in common, who slept out of the 
 house. This woman was rather high priced, 
 but she was most useful. She could do any 
 thing from trimming a hat to making a plau 
 sible excuse, and her manner toward Lucile was
 
 I Bring Lucile into View 85 
 
 that of an old servant to a young princess. 
 She gave an air to her charge. 
 
 I hesitated a long time about the gowning of 
 Lucile. (I wonder if these details are tedious. 
 I know they would not have been to me in the 
 days when I was seeking information. I am 
 trying to make this book as practical as a cook 
 book.) 
 
 This was all gone over and arranged before 
 she left the convent. For myself, I adore the 
 garments of Paquin and Walles and Callot, but 
 I have seldom had one. They are a little en 
 Evidence. I know that American girls gowned 
 by these people have achieved coronets, but 
 they were rich girls, not poor girls whose 
 mothers were feeling their way. 
 
 I never saw a well-bred French girl in one of 
 those beautiful toilets, I might say if I were 
 "making up," but the fact is I have seen well- 
 bred French girls in all sorts of horrors. They 
 were never models for my original spirit. I 
 made up my mind that Lucile should be a 
 "type," and I chose that of 1830. It was I 
 who made that radical change in the fashions 
 which came about when the designs became 
 known because Lucile was wearing them. 
 
 Of course there was no "coming out" or
 
 86 The Highroad 
 
 anything of that sort. I had made a few 
 friends, for Prolmann's letters had given 
 people to understand that I was one of them, 
 and they speedily discovered that I was not 
 like the usual American in Paris. Lili's 
 mother had become almost an intimate, and 
 she took me under her wing and allowed me 
 to share some of her expenses, although she 
 was a rich woman. Had I been childless, I 
 think that I myself might have had something 
 of a career at this time. Once I was tempted 
 to leave Lucile in the convent another year, 
 but I thoroughly comprehend the folly of that. 
 She must come out young and fresh, before 
 time and convent habits had made her into an 
 old child. And then, to be truly successful in 
 my role 'of mother, it must be the only one in 
 which I was known. 
 
 I succeeded in a little while in making Ma 
 dame Vestrine' our every-day companion, as I 
 am sure Prolmann intended. It was cheaper 
 for her to dine with us than at home, and still 
 more amusing for her to have us included in 
 invitations where we supplied the carriage. 
 And here, riding as I believed upon the wave 
 of social success, I made the first of my serious 
 blunders,
 
 I Feel My Way 87 
 
 VIII 
 
 / Feel My Way 
 
 The set in which the Marquise de Malpierre 
 (Lili's mother) disported herself was a gay one. 
 
 I have heard Americans speak of exclusive 
 French society as "stupid," "formal." Noth 
 ing could be farther from the truth, except the 
 middle class English belief that all French 
 great ladies have lovers. 
 
 As a matter of fact there are very few lovers 
 in the world. The connections between men 
 and women are generally those of mutual 
 interest of one sort and another. "Love" as 
 the world knows it, is confined to the awaken 
 ing to maturity in children and to some circum 
 stances or temperaments which are a little 
 abnormal. Habit can so delicately replace 
 love that nobody discovers the difference until 
 some crisis comes. These French women have 
 men friends to whom they talk freely and from 
 whom they hear much, but they give them 
 nothing but talk. They are the finished flowers 
 of modernity, they understand their own tem 
 peraments and they understand the men about
 
 88 The Highroad 
 
 them. And they have a lucid mother tongue 
 in which they can tell them so without offense. 
 
 After the weather became warm and all 
 Paris went away to the country, I longed for 
 my little house at Lausanne. 
 
 At this opportune moment came an invita 
 tion from the Marquise for me to spend some 
 time with her at Varriere, her chateau in Nor 
 mandy. She expressly asked that Genevieve 
 should come also as Lili was heart-broken at 
 leaving her. I hardly knew what to do. 
 There were Robert and Jane to consider. 
 
 I wrote to Prolmann and asked if the little 
 house in Lausanne could be rented for the 
 summer. 
 
 The answer was so long in coming that I had 
 an unpleasant feeling that I had received my 
 just deserts, but it finally reached me, post 
 marked Vienna. It was the letter of a sick old 
 man. He told me that his own villa was 
 empty, he should nevr return to it, and he 
 offered it to me for as long as I chose. The 
 housekeeper was there as caretaker. 
 
 I made a flying trip to Lausanne and in 
 stalled Madame Vestrine with the two younger 
 children and Genevieve. Then I begged the 
 Marquise to allow Lili to join them there.
 
 I Feel My Way 89 
 
 Madame Vestrine would have some visits to 
 make, but she was very glad of the villa. 
 
 I discovered a governess for the children, a 
 woman well recommended, as I believed that 
 Madame Vestrine would regard the children 
 simply as drawbacks to her enjoyment. In 
 that I was mistaken. She had grown old 
 enough to enjoy their society. Robert became 
 her darling, and I consider much of his success 
 in life due to her influence. Having seen the 
 necessity of making a boy properly worldly in 
 his youth, she impressed upon him, as she had 
 neglected to impress upon her son, the value 
 of living in the world. 
 
 The Marquise and her mother welcomed 
 Lili's departure. A grown girl who is not 
 entirely ready for society and marriage is an 
 anomalous thing. 
 
 The house party at Varriere was made up of 
 relatives and friends of the family, of whom 
 the most important to me was Comte Julien 
 Malpierre, the brother-in-law of my hostess. 
 
 During the winter I had decided that this 
 was the son-in-law that I coveted. 
 
 The husband of the Marquise was a heavy, 
 handsome man, who ate a great deal, talked a 
 little, and spent most of his time on board a
 
 9O 'The Highroad 
 
 yacht, where his companion was said to be a 
 very plain intellectual French woman, the 
 daughter of the physician in the village near 
 Varriere. The connection had lasted for 
 twelve years and nobody paid the slightest 
 attention to it. When anybody in the chateau 
 had a slight ailment, the doctor was called in 
 and was treated with respect. The Marquise 
 seemed to be unaware that he had a daughter. 
 
 The men of the Malpierre family were con 
 tradictions of the preconceived Frenchmen, 
 being pure types of the blonde Franks who 
 conquered the Gauls. They were tall, broad- 
 shouldered and full of vitality. They delighted 
 in all sorts of sport, and were like handsome 
 Englishmen with the addition of ideal man 
 ners. The Marquis talked with a deep rumble 
 in his voice which reminded me of the bumble 
 bees swinging home over the red clover in 
 these fields. 
 
 The Marquise's mother, a faded old doll 
 over-dressed, adored him. He seemed to be a 
 general favorite and there was mourning when 
 he and his companion went off to the North 
 Sea. 
 
 His going left Julien as master of the house. 
 I used to look at him and think that I could be
 
 I Feel My Way 91 
 
 as silly over him as the Marquise's mother over 
 his brother. 
 
 Everything seemed to be going the way I 
 desired it should. The Count treated me 
 with a deference which caused the other 
 guests to realize the situation was as I would 
 have it, even before I became aware that my 
 hopes were not in vain. 
 
 Lucile was a lovely product of my artistic 
 eye and the Paris dressmakers and her own 
 adaptability to the conditions surrounding her. 
 Any young thing cared for and at ease is 
 pretty. We had accented the red in her hair 
 by a wash which left it transparent, and every 
 night Emelie, our maid, spent an hour over 
 her complexion. My jewel wasn't of the first 
 water, but it made a brave showing in my 
 hands. 
 
 The gaieties consisted of coaching (automo- 
 biling was not yet in fashion), yachting (before 
 the Marquis departed), dancing and theatricals. 
 There were several other chateaux near by, and 
 when our large party was not making an occa 
 sion, the others were. 
 
 The young French girl who is conspicuous 
 and is not yet married, what somebody has 
 called the " ' demi-vierge ," was just coming into
 
 92 'The Highroad 
 
 vogue then, and there was more than one 
 about. But Frenchmen are not interested in 
 her as a possible wife unless she is an heiress 
 even now. Lili was destined to be one of these 
 a little later: the sort of French girl who has 
 plenty to talk about, and who goes in for 
 everything. But Lucile, even with her Ameri 
 can blood, had none of this. She had proved to 
 me that she was no fool, however, and that she 
 had a good serviceable working mind. My 
 grandfather used to talk a good deal about 
 horse sense, and Lucile has it. Her practical 
 turn has always been fairly well hidden, but it 
 is the framework on which her whole life is 
 built. And where is there a safer? 
 
 A good many people were constantly coming 
 and going at the chateau, and we had a succes 
 sion of visits. 
 
 Among others, came the Due and the 
 
 Duchesse de B . The Duchess I had long 
 
 wanted to meet, for she, too, was the product 
 of audacity. I had thought that we might be 
 friends. I saw later what a mistake that would 
 have been. Each of us needed to be rock 
 bound, to be bolstered by the solidest pillars of 
 society. We could only injure each other. 
 But I was learning then.
 
 I Feel My Way 93 
 
 The B 's had a chateau about fifteen miles 
 
 away, where they were said by the American 
 journals to live like two turtle doves. Little 
 as I even then believed the American journals, 
 I did believe that. The Duke had married the 
 Duchess practically with no dot at all because 
 he was in love with her, they said. The Amer 
 ican journals had been in the habit of printing 
 her entire family history (with photographs) 
 every time her name was mentioned. She was a 
 daughter of a United States Senator, who should 
 have come from Utah, but chose another state. 
 
 He had lived a respectable life in a country 
 village until he was the husband of a New Eng 
 land wife, and the father of several children, 
 when he suddenly took a fancy to elope with 
 the village school teacher. Being a loving 
 father, he took one of the children along. 
 That always seemed to me a particularly pleas 
 ing touch. 
 
 He deserted the school teacher presently, 
 changed his name and took up with another 
 lady whose father (he was practicing law now) 
 he was defending on a charge of stealing. 
 
 After some years and the birth of the 
 Duchess, they went through the formality of a 
 marriage, and lived happily (the story ran)
 
 94 The Highroad 
 
 until he was nominated for the United States 
 Senate. Then the discarded school teacher 
 told the whole story. And here comes the 
 marvel. He didn't deny it. He reconciled 
 his two families. The western state cheered 
 him and the legislature elected him as the re 
 markable man he was but "stuck-up" Wash 
 ington would have none of his daughter. So 
 she went to France and married into one of its 
 oldest families. How she did it, I do not 
 know; but after knowing her husband, I think 
 almost anybody might have done it. 
 
 They arrived at the chateau in their own car 
 riage an hour before dinner. The Duchess 
 with her maid went immediately to her apart 
 ment and the Duke joined us where we sat 
 after the teacups had been taken away. 
 
 I had been talking to Lady Flora Hastings, 
 whom I knew to be the daughter of a hundred 
 earls, but found as uppish and pretentious 
 as though her mother had been a housemaid. 
 As I had no English friends, and as Prolmann's 
 influence would hardly reach so far, I was try 
 ing not to neglect my opportunities, but Lady 
 Flora was giving me as disagreeable a time as 
 possible while allowing me to understand that 
 I was probably wasting my time.
 
 I Feel My Way 95 
 
 Now there is some demon of tenacity in me 
 which makes me hold on. I dislike being 
 snubbed. I am in reality very thin skinned, 
 I cringe from blows, but I simply cannot 
 leave a field unwon. Had Lady Flora been 
 fairly decent to me I should have forgiven her, 
 but she challenged my powers. Sooner or 
 later everybody will show you their weaknesses 
 if you stand and wait, and after they have 
 done that 
 
 When the Due de B entered the room 
 
 (a pale thin man with a dry, precise manner) 
 Lady Flora gave a start as though she would 
 rise to her feet, and then with a flush strug 
 gling under her cosmetics, she settled back 
 into her cushions again and actually began 
 talking to me in an amiable manner. 
 
 It is an open secret in England that the 
 Duchess of Strood in "The Gay Lord Quex," 
 was taken direct from Lady Flora, so she may 
 be better understood by those who have seen 
 or read that brilliant play. Mr. Pinero husked 
 her, as it were, just as Mr. Sargent husks a per 
 sonality when he paints it. 
 
 The shell was beginning to crack a little for 
 me, giving me a glimpse of the woman under 
 neath. I took myself out of the way and the
 
 g6 The Highroad 
 
 Duke and his old acquaintance had a little talk 
 together quite naturally. 
 
 It was all natural except that Lady Flora 
 seemed never to have met the Duchesse de 
 
 B , and even while they were inmates of 
 
 the same house declined the honor seemingly, 
 for the Marquise never found them together. 
 
 The Duchesse de B was almost as artificial 
 
 as Lady Flora, although of a very different style. 
 She was undeniably pretty, but it was the pret- 
 tiness of Queen Alexandra: the sort the pho 
 tographer has no need to retouch. Her hair, 
 arranged in such fashion as to give a similitude 
 of abundance, was tinted a chestnut, the skin 
 of the face and shoulders was as carefully 
 cured as a choice bit of superfine leather. 
 She was not old, she was comparatively young, 
 but she had gone into the business of preserv 
 ing herself while she was at her best. 
 
 "Ah, my lady," I said to myself, "you are 
 afraid!" 
 
 She was near me before we went into the 
 great dining-room, and the Marquise men 
 tioned our names to each other and said that we 
 were Americans. 
 
 The Duchess turned at once toward me. I 
 know that with her sharp intuitions she knew
 
 I Feel My Way 97 
 
 me and my little pretences. Probably with 
 her father's means of discovery she knew all 
 about my "estates." A woman going about 
 Europe with great estates "entangled" would 
 interest a countrywoman like the Duchesse 
 de B . 
 
 "You are a Virginian, I believe," she said in 
 a voice like honey. "Then you must know 
 Mrs. Carey Page." 
 
 Evidently the Duchess thought I was too 
 poor an antagonist even to play with. Mrs. 
 Carey Page was the cousin to everybody in 
 Virginia. She lived in Washington half the 
 year, where she chaperoned those girls who 
 had old families and pretty faces. Mrs. Carey 
 Page knew everybody. I had learned this 
 from the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was sent to 
 me by my father as a sweet reminder of home 
 and friends. 
 
 I was only to stammer a bit and be smiled 
 at the Duchess evidently believed. Oh, no! 
 
 "Mrs. Carey Page is my dear cousin," I said 
 suavely. "Have I ever met you at her home 
 in Washington?" 
 
 "Probably," the Duchess said, still in her 
 honey voice. 
 
 And then we looked into each other's eyes
 
 98 'The Highroad 
 
 with the deep seriousness of two cats facing 
 each other on a disputed boundary fence. 
 
 We retired with dignity, and the Duchess 
 came my way no more. The amusing part 
 came after Lucile's marriage, when we were 
 in New York. 
 
 Poor old Mrs. Carey Page with her frumpy, 
 frowsy "Southern Set" heard that I was her 
 cousin, and I was beset with letters from her, 
 written on perfumed paper and sealed with a 
 crest. 
 
 Every now and then, even to this day, a girl 
 who sings or recites begs to appear in my 
 drawing-room, and says that she, too, is a 
 "cousin of Mrs. Carey Page."
 
 I Am Asked for My Daughter's Hand 99 
 
 IX 
 
 / Am Asked for My Daughter s Rand 
 
 One afternoon I took a book (that looking 
 glass of human nature, Rouge et Noir) and went 
 into the old garden of the chateau. It was the 
 hour when every one had retired for a siesta or 
 for the particular form of work which they 
 carefully concealed from their friends, be it 
 beautifying their persons or keeping accounts. 
 It usually goes by the name of "writing let 
 ters." 
 
 The old garden of the chateau was one of the 
 things I envied with all my heart and soul. 
 Sometimes the longing to have it mine, to have 
 grown up with old marble satyrs and nymphs 
 grinning and simpering behind the bushes, 
 with old yellow marble seats on which my 
 ancestors had sat for my every-day compan 
 ions, sickened me so that I could not stay 
 there. Whatever the world might give me, 
 whatever my wits might acquire for me, I could 
 never, never have that. 
 
 I know that this feeling is impossible to the 
 healthy and sensible.
 
 zoo tfhe Highroad 
 
 Probably Mr. William D. Howells could dis 
 miss me in a clever sentence about sentimental 
 ists, but the sickness was as real as any realist's 
 sea-sickness. 
 
 My only pleasure was to sit and dream of the 
 time when my children's children might have 
 places like this. I revelled in the thought of 
 Lucile's little boys and girls playing perhaps 
 over these very formal paths, and talking about 
 their great grandfather who was a great and 
 gentle nobleman. Good birth brings a tran 
 quillity of spirit that is a precious heritage. It 
 is worth a millionaire's purchase for his de 
 scendants. 
 
 The Count came down one of these paths 
 and after a bow and a question seated himself 
 beside me. 
 
 I said to him some flattering things sug 
 gested by my reveries, although it may readily 
 be imagined that I kept the core of them in 
 my own heart. 
 
 "It is a beautiful old place," he said. "We 
 all love it. I wish there were more money to 
 keep it up." 
 
 "But I thought " I said before I reflected. 
 
 "That my sister-in-law, the Marquise was 
 very rich? That is true, but she has no son.
 
 1 Am Asked for My Daughter's Hand 101 
 
 It is a tradition that Verriere shall go with the 
 title. Naturally my brother and sister will 
 enrich their own daughter with their fortune. 
 I shall doubtless, or my children, come into 
 Verriere. 
 
 "I am sure," I said, "that there could be no 
 prouder task for a woman than to make this 
 place beautiful for her son." 
 
 The Count took my hand and kissed it in 
 quite the old manner. I had a rush of maternal 
 affection for him. He was handsome and he 
 seemed sincere. 
 
 There was a pause, during which we each felt 
 that we were drawing long breaths. 
 
 "Madame, lam sure that you will not mis 
 understand me when I say that I hope that it 
 will be the children of your beautiful daughter 
 who will inherit Verriere." 
 
 For an instant my cheeks burned. There 
 are some things which we Americans never 
 say. I wonder why. I suppose I would be 
 told that it comes from Puritanism in the early 
 settlers. But those Puritans were English, and 
 they were hard-headed, simple folk who had 
 large families and wrote down some curious 
 things in their diaries. As for the Virginians, 
 they were of a notoriously easy manner of
 
 IO2 T'he Highroad 
 
 speech, yet their descendants consider it in 
 delicate to mention posterity. Not only con 
 sider it, but feel it, indelicate. I had that 
 instant been thinking of Lucile's children until 
 I could almost feel their soft little hands, but 
 when Julien spoke I was almost resentful. It 
 hurried my words. 
 
 "I suppose," I said, "you are making a pro 
 posal for the hand of Lucile. " 
 
 "I am, Madame, on one condition. It is 
 best to be frank, is it not? It is necessary that 
 the bride who comes to Verriere shall be rich. 
 However much I love your daughter I should 
 be false to my race, to the trust of my ances 
 tors, if for my own selfish happiness during a 
 few years, I condemned my children to pov 
 erty. Were I so reckless I should not be 
 worthy to be the husband of your daughter. 
 Is it not so?" 
 
 His manner was winning, and his argument 
 was good. 
 
 "I am of the old families of France, Ma 
 dame. There are too few of us now. I am, as 
 my ancestors have been for two hundred years, 
 an agnostic. We are nominally Catholics 
 because it is necessary that the lower classes 
 shall have an example. But to me my im-
 
 I Am Asked for My Daughter's Hand 103 
 
 mortality means the immortality of my race. 
 I shall live again in my line, and I want them 
 to be people of the great world still holding 
 their lands and their peasants unto many 
 generations." 
 
 "You do my child a great honor." 
 
 "I love her. I want her for my wife. It has 
 always been my hope to be able to marry a 
 wife who would be not only the mother of my 
 sons, but my beloved. I am not like my 
 
 brother ' He threw out his hands in 
 
 more or less contempt. 
 
 "Let me think," I said, and we sat there in 
 the vine-hooded recess, the little stupid lizards 
 running over the hot stones, and a cicada call 
 ing out its news of coming autumn. There was 
 a lattice behind us matted with vines, and a 
 seat quite hidden from ours on the other side. 
 The way up to this seat was over the sod, and 
 therefore noiseless. It was with a start that I 
 heard voices coming from there. I put out my 
 hand involuntarily and touched that of Julien, 
 and made to rise. He held me and smiled. 
 Evidently they had stopped but to pick a rose 
 from the climber. 
 
 It was Lady Flora and the Due de B . 
 
 "This old garden is so neglected, that I am
 
 IO4 The Highroad 
 
 sure they will not mind our having a great 
 bunch. They will look so lovely on my white 
 gown at dinner." 
 
 Now surely that conversation sounded inno 
 cent enough, and as though en passant. It 
 seemed a pity for the Count and me to break 
 up our tete-a-tete at this stage. Smiling at 
 each other, we sat quite still. 
 
 "Oh, Henri!" were the next words, "How 
 can we bear it!" 
 
 "It must be borne. There is no other way." 
 
 I could see in my mental vision the dry little 
 shrug which went with the words. 
 
 "Oh, Henri, how can you say so? We are 
 both miserable. You with that American, and 
 I with a man old enough to be my grandfather. 
 Why should love and our own lives be denied 
 us? Why?" 
 
 "Because, my dear Flora," the Duke said, 
 "we are not in a position to elope. We must 
 make the most of it as it is. We see each 
 other." 
 
 "But how, how?" she interrupted passion 
 ately. "Like this, where I cannot even " 
 
 "But, my dear, you are " 
 
 At this I arose, but Julien drew me oack to 
 the seat.
 
 I Am Asked for My Daughter's Hand 105 
 
 "Impossible!" his lips framed 
 
 I looked a scarlet protest, but really I could 
 not clatter out over the stone walk and let 
 them know we had heard. If it had been only 
 I but Julien was in the place of a host to 
 them. It would not do. 
 
 I put my fingers up to my ears and sat side- 
 wise so that Julien might not see that the tips 
 of them did not very seriously impair my hear, 
 ing. 
 
 Lady Flora had not oeen kind enough to me 
 for me to wish to spare her, for one thing. 
 For another, I had never heard a real conver 
 sation of this sort and I was curious about it. 
 I wanted to know if they talked like the people 
 in novels. Lady Flora did. It was because 
 she did it so often to so many men that Mr. 
 Pinero caught her and made her into a type. 
 But of course in reality she lacked some of 
 the smartness of silliness with which the play 
 wright endowed her. 
 
 "What is this?' she asked. "I want again 
 the happiness of the old days in Ajaccio. I 
 want the rest of my life to be spent with you, 
 only with you in some spot sunshiny with our 
 affection." 
 
 "On what?" asked the Duke.
 
 io6 The Highroad 
 
 "Had you married nobody, or even a wife 
 with money, it could be done." 
 
 The utterly commonplace tone of this remark 
 of Lady Flora's following the high-flown non 
 sense of the other, almost made me smile 
 before I realized that Julien did not know that 
 I could hear. 
 
 He grinned. 
 
 They kept at it for half an hour, while we 
 sat there afraid to move. Lady Flora seemed 
 to be always urging the Duke to a divorce, to 
 desert his wife and come to England to do 
 anything so that she could be near him. To 
 her overtures he was cynical sometimes, polite 
 sometimes, and negative always. I fairly 
 gloated over that. He was almost snubbing. 
 
 After they had gone away, Julien took my 
 hands gently from my ears. I afterwards 
 found it extremely useful not to have heard 
 that conversation. Had Julien known that I 
 had done so he must have wondered at my sub 
 sequent conduct. If silence is the goddess of 
 the lucky, deafness is her cup-bearer. 
 
 "I feared I should recognize their voices," I 
 said 
 
 "It was that of a man who feels that he has 
 given his wife more than he receives. It is
 
 I Am Asked for My Daughter's Hand 107 
 
 right that a husband and wife should be equal 
 at least in France. A woman is foolish who 
 puts herself in the position of a dependent/' 
 
 I looked over the garden again, but the little 
 children of Lucile were not there any more 
 They had faded away like the rainbows we see 
 sometimes in reflections from quite common 
 bits of glass Already I was laughing at my 
 self for thinking that I could do it. And sup 
 pose I could? Would it be worth while? 
 
 "Let me tell you this to-morrow," I said. 
 "I am a little upset now. I am glad you have 
 been so frank with me. It is a strange idea to 
 an American parent, but you are right I am 
 quite sure you are right." 
 
 "Then you will tell me now that I may be 
 sure of speaking to Lucile to-morrow?" He 
 was holding my hand as we stood by the little 
 garden door. 
 
 "Oh," I laughed, "almost sure. I would like 
 first to tell you exactly her fortune. And do 
 you not want the family lawyers to verify it?" 
 
 "Why," he asked practically, "should you 
 deceive us? The family will ask that but that 
 need be only a last formality. I want to speak 
 to my lovely Lucile, my pretty white flower, 
 my dainty little bit by Nattier."
 
 io8 'The Highroad 
 
 He was quite the poet and lover. 
 
 I went into the house and I was wondering 
 how sure I was of Lucile and an idea that 
 was growing in my mind began to fill it. I felt 
 as wise as old Talleyrand.
 
 Lucile's Mind 109 
 
 X 
 
 Lucile s Mind 
 
 I had a task before me and I hardly knew 
 how to carry it out. I sat down before my 
 open window and looked across the country 
 which had suddenly ceased to be interesting to 
 me. Only a few hours before, it had been 
 almost my future home. My grandchildren 
 were to play and ride and perform the tasks of 
 life here, on this soil, in this air. In time they 
 would become part of it. In a thousand years, 
 I had thought, the lump of West Virginia clay 
 that was I, would be in thousands of French 
 men leavening them, I had hoped. The his 
 tory of France would be different because I had 
 been. Napoleon could say no more. 
 
 And now, thank heaven, I know where to 
 draw out of the game! But what was I to say 
 to Lucile? I intended, of course, that she 
 should refuse Julien. Nothing less would 
 leave the child her assurance. To be given up 
 and never to be told the reason might be 
 a tonic to some strong characters, but not to 
 Lucile. She was practical and not particularly
 
 no I'he Highroad 
 
 sensitive, but she was not a Damascus blade. I 
 knew her limitations. 
 
 At first I thought of telling her the truth, 
 but she would never be the same again if she 
 once knew that she was pretending that I was 
 pretending. It might, too, make a difficulty 
 in the future. I brushed my hair and thought. 
 Anyway, I need do nothing to-night. 
 
 But I did. 
 
 We went down to dinner and ate the daily 
 French dishes, which are stale and stupid 
 enough. The English have given the French 
 a reputation for being wonderful cooks 
 because they know how to make bread and 
 mayonnaise, and have the wit to keep fresh 
 olive oil in the house. In reality French cook 
 ing is only really fine when it is done for 
 Americans. The French are too economical 
 in their kitchens. 
 
 The talk was smarter than usual. The 
 Count in particular was brilliant of eye and 
 ready of tongue. Lady Flora was full of the 
 sort of mildly vicious epigram which she had 
 learned from the various men she had known 
 not wisely, but too well. You can always see 
 how men regard a fool by the reflections of 
 them the fool gives out.
 
 Lucile's Mind 1 1 1 
 
 "I heard some one say once," Lady Flora 
 said, "that a diplomatist did not need to know 
 the secret of his adversary. He need only 
 pretend that he knew it. Everybody has 
 one." 
 
 "Do you think, then," I asked, "that it is 
 fair to use a knowledge of another's secret for 
 your own end?" 
 
 "In diplomacy, as in love and war, all is 
 fair," she said with an air of being original and 
 witty. 
 
 Two hours later I sat beside Lady Flora on 
 the sofa where fehe had spread her white lace 
 gown, and I wasted little time coming to my 
 point. 
 
 "I expect to bring my daughter to England 
 next season." I spoke as though I were sure 
 that this was the piece of information she had 
 been waiting for. 
 
 She put up her lorgnette and looked at me. 
 It was a beautiful jewel. The handle was a 
 stem of roses worked in diamonds, emeralds 
 and rubies. I took time thoroughly to exam 
 ine it. 
 
 "I wonder," I said, "if I shall meet the 
 
 Due de B there. I hear that he is an old 
 
 friend &*, v ur husband."
 
 H2 The Highroad 
 
 "My husband," she began, and she put 
 down the lorgnette. 
 
 "You must sometimes find it very lonely 
 with no young people near you. I suppose it is 
 for that reason you are away from England so 
 much." 
 
 My tone was full of sympathy. I took the 
 lorgnette out of her hand in a quite familiar 
 fashion. We were like two dear friends chat 
 ting there together on the tete-a-tete. It was a 
 long conversation and most impersonal. I 
 spoke more freely to Lady Flora than to any 
 one I had known since Prolmann. I told her 
 how I pitied women whose husbands were jeal 
 ous and disagreeable, and how I would always 
 stand by my friends. A woman who was tied 
 for life to a man like that had enough to bear 
 without the censoriousness of the world. I 
 kept moralizing. It happened that few women 
 were happy enough to spend their lives in 
 some of the earth's sunny spots with those 
 they loved. I was almost eloquent over that. 
 Lady Flora became a little pale, but she was 
 agreeable, and we arrived at something like a 
 sudden intimacy, which culminated in an invi 
 tation to Lucile and me for a house party in 
 Scotland that autumn at Lady Flora's magnifi-
 
 Lucile's Mind 113 
 
 cent place. "I suppose," she said, "I must 
 ask Comte Julien also." 
 
 "I do not know," I answered frankly, "Lu- 
 cile has the American girl's privilege; I shall 
 not try to influence her in any way. And, 
 from all I hear, I doubt the advisability of 
 American girls marrying Frenchmen. And 
 the Frenchmen, too, would be happier with 
 women more like themselves." 
 
 Actually the woman was so stupendously silly 
 that she brightened at that as though I had 
 paid her a compliment. She had been thor 
 oughly frightened when she understood that I 
 knew her intrigue. I could see her moistening 
 her lips, and she had at once begun to placate 
 me, to take me into her circle, to make herself 
 too valuable to me to be ruined by me. She 
 was even weaker and sillier than I had thought 
 her; but she loved to hear the suggestion that 
 
 de B would be happier with a woman of 
 
 his own sort. She wanted somebody to notice 
 (what was not entirely true) that he was un 
 happy with his wife. She did not quite believe 
 de B . 
 
 After Lucile had gone to her room I followed 
 her in my negligee, and discovered her on her 
 knees saying her prayers. I have often won-
 
 H4 The Highroad 
 
 dered how long a modern woman keeps up that 
 habit. It is one that was never taught to me. 
 Am I vulgar as I laugh at the remembrance 
 that my childish nightly formality was washing 
 my bare feet? I gave that up when I began to 
 wear shoes. 
 
 I waited respectfully until the praying was 
 over, and Lucile, looking very demure and pretty 
 in her lace-trimmed gown with her reddish hair 
 in two smooth braids, was between the sheets. 
 
 "Is it anything, Mamma?" she asked. 
 "Didn't you like the way my hair was done? 
 The Duchess's maid taught it to Emelie." 
 
 "I think you will never care to have it 
 dressed so again, when I tell you what I have 
 come to say," I said gravely. 
 
 Lucile sat up. 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 "My dear," I said as I took her hand. "I 
 have tried to keep all knowledge of the evil of 
 the world from you, but unhappily it cannot be 
 altogether shut out of any life." 
 
 Lucile did not look frightened, but puzzled, 
 and then her face cleared. 
 
 "Isn't the Duchess altogether comme ilfauf?" 
 she asked, "Do you know, Mamma, I thought 
 so!"
 
 Lucile's Mind 115 
 
 It was my turn to gasp. 
 
 "To begin with they told stories about her 
 at the convent. You know she was educated 
 there. Girls said their aunts and sisters had 
 said that in their day she was always toadying 
 to girls who were a little silly and would invite 
 her home with them. They said her mother 
 was quite uneducated, and used to pick at her 
 teeth r 
 
 Oh these innocent children of ours! 
 
 "Was that all?" I asked meekly. 
 
 "No," said Lucile, "of course, Mamma, I 
 should speak of this only to you. They said 
 she got herself called 'the rich American' and 
 in that way made some friends and came to 
 know the Duke, and he was attracted by her 
 had had" Lucile looked away and blushed 
 "kissed her, and not like a lady at all you 
 know." 
 
 "You wouldn't care to be married like 
 that?" 
 
 "No, oh, no!" she said with horror. "Of 
 course one would like to care a great deal for 
 the man one married, but to have him care for 
 you like that oh, that is so disrespectful. I 
 like everything comme il fout" Lucile fin 
 ished loftily.
 
 n6 The Highroad 
 
 "And you certainly would not wish to marry 
 a man who had that sort of "caring" for an 
 other woman?" 
 
 "Never!" 
 
 "Then, my dear, I must tell you some 
 thing. I have discovered that the Count 
 has been attracted by the Duchess. It is 
 a thing no young girl should know, but I tell 
 you because before discovering it, I had told 
 Julien that he might propose for your hand.. 
 Of course you will not tell him that you know 
 this." 
 
 Lucile looked positively ugly. Her nostrils 
 flared flat, and her complexion became a dull 
 red. I held my breath. What blood had I 
 called out? What was there back behind us 
 that made a woman look like that? Presently 
 the blood went back. 
 
 "I'll not tell him," she said. "Do you 
 think I would let him know that I knew my 
 self the rival of an old married flirt? And 
 
 what can you expect? Her mother " 
 
 Lucile threw out her hands in an expressive 
 gesture. 
 
 What do girls speak of as they pace the 
 peaceful garden walks in their sheltered 
 schools?
 
 Lucile's Mind 117 
 
 "My dear," I said, "the Count is our host. 
 You will remember les convenances?" 
 
 "I am an American. I do not care for him. 
 An American can always say that." And then 
 she turned over in bed. 
 
 I drew a long sigh of relief.
 
 n8 The Highroad 
 
 XI 
 
 A Glimpse of England 
 
 I actually do not know in what terms Lucile 
 refused to become the wife of Julien. I only 
 know that I felt I could trust her to make her 
 refusal graceful and as the result of her own 
 wish. When it was over, I spoke to Julien in a 
 shocked and sorry way. I think there were 
 tears in my eyes. I did feel it. I had wanted 
 him, and I had wanted that beautiful and 
 charming place for mine. We were sympatica, 
 Julien and I, and it was with a nervous heart 
 ache that I relinquished him. It was not so 
 much to Lucile. Talk, you romancers, as 
 much as you like. Love is not paramount in 
 the heart of the average girl. Her pride had 
 been wounded and she was angry, but the con 
 vent years had given her a peaceful mask. 
 She seemed distressed in a well-bred way dis 
 tressed that she could not love the man who 
 loved her. It was admirable. And I? I lay 
 awake at night almost knowing what hysterics 
 meant in my balancing between tears over the
 
 A Glimpse of England 119 
 
 lost opportunity and laughter over the comedy 
 of it all. 
 
 Julien behaved admirably but I saw that we 
 must go. The Marquise could not understand 
 us, and she said so. She felt that I was giving 
 Lucile too free a rein. It frightened her. She 
 said she thought she must bring Lili home. If 
 the American ideas permeated my entire fam 
 ily, there would be no means of judging to 
 what extent Lili was already contaminated by 
 them. I sorrowfully agreed with her. I was 
 not in a position to make enemies anywhere, 
 but I mentioned that Madame Vestrine was not 
 an American, and as having Lili at home would 
 have seriously put her out, the child was 
 allowed to remain, thus giving me a continued 
 hold upon the family. I could see by the 
 shrewdness in the Marquise's eyes that she was 
 holding me also. Genevieve might be more 
 amenable to reason, and after the American 
 fashion, one girl would be as great an heiress 
 as the other. 
 
 I could see the curiosity all about us when 
 we took our departure for Homburg. Those 
 of the party who had been inclined to think us 
 nobodies had changed their minds. To refuse 
 the Count was a thing that only those sure
 
 I2O 'The Highroad 
 
 of themselves could afford. After all my 
 defeat became triumph. 
 
 We went to Homburg because Lady Hastings 
 was going there. Being two women alone, we 
 did not go to the great hotel where the then 
 Prince of Wales stayed, except for a day and 
 night. He had already arrived and Homburg 
 was filling up with the few friends who accom 
 panied him and the many who wished to 
 appear to have done so. Besides, there were 
 the Americans. 
 
 A number of years ago, a certain cousin of 
 Queen Victoria was a gay young soldier. It was 
 hard to realize it that autumn at Homburg, for 
 his lined, wrinkled, rather foolish old face had 
 little suggestion of either beauty or gallantry. 
 It is probable that had he not been surrounded 
 by the glamour of royalty he would have been 
 like dozens of his race, only a thick-headed, 
 thick-skinned, middle class young man in that 
 long ago. But he was the grandson of that 
 puissant king, whom our ancestors derided, 
 George the Third. At any rate he had all the 
 privileges of gallantry and bravery and beauty, 
 and he fell in love with a rather heavy young 
 actress in a minor role at one of the London 
 theaters. She almost died with delight. Vic-
 
 A Glimpse of England 121 
 
 toria had not been long enough on the throne 
 then for the traditiori of the splendor of being 
 a king's favorite to have died away. Of course 
 the young soldier wasn't a king, but he was 
 near enough for a poor young actress. He had 
 a suite of rooms in the old St. James palace, 
 where his widowed mother also lived, and with 
 the delicacy which has always distinguished his 
 race he took the actress there. Nobody 
 thought much of it. William had made Lon 
 don pretty well acquainted with the train of 
 ladies whom he honored with his attentions, 
 and George the Fourth had preceded him. 
 Even Queen Victoria probably considered it a 
 necessary whiling away of the Royal Duke's 
 time until some princess came out of the school 
 room. It was just as her own father had spent 
 his time before it became necessary to marry. 
 But one day the Duke's mother wanted to go 
 to drive, and the actress had taken her car 
 riage. She sent for her son and she said things 
 that hurt his feelings. He went out and told 
 everybody about it, and drank a great deal, 
 and then he went up to talk to the actress. 
 She told him that he could make it all right by 
 allowing her to call herself Mrs. Fitz and going 
 through a marriage ceremony. Of course it
 
 122 'The Highroad 
 
 would not be legal because he was a royalty, 
 but it would serve. "So by this time," old Gen 
 eral Steyn who told me the story said, "the 
 Duke being oblivious to all except the fact that 
 he wanted his boots off and peace, the lady, 
 who had prepared for just this, married him." 
 
 The strong-minded lady kept him married. 
 She was the man of the family and even defied 
 the Queen herself, when that stern moralist 
 wished to break up her rapidly increasing 
 home circle. The son of the actress was a 
 colonel in the English army, and he followed 
 royalty about and gave some Americans a taste 
 of the bliss of shaking his hand and pour 
 ing wine for the great-grandson of a king. 
 They seemed to find it thrilling that season at 
 Homburg, although the king was a poor old 
 lunatic and the great-grandson was ill-born. 
 One can see photographs of Americans taken 
 with the Royal Duke's son, at the Homburg 
 photographer's even now. They probably send 
 them home as a proof that they are in the really 
 smart English set. The colonel's wife massages 
 faces on Bond Street in London now, I believe. 
 
 Poor funny old English royalty! It always 
 has been funny since the Stuarts left, and 
 nobody knows it better than some of the
 
 A Glimpse of England 123 
 
 English nobles. But I didn't know it when I 
 reached Homburg that autumn. When we 
 went into the hotel I saw a man in scarlet liv 
 ery standing by a little table on which lay H. 
 R. H.'s Visitor's Book. He had been keeping 
 it since early spring in Copenhagen. It must 
 be confessed that the names in it were not all 
 distinguished; one or two weic frankly Jewish. 
 Sometimes an old friend had written a line or 
 two. I looked at it, hesitated as though I 
 would write my name, and then decided not, 
 for the benefit of the servant. But I have writ 
 ten my name since on bits of paper which are 
 actually read by the Royalties themselves. 
 
 When I saw the Americans at Homburg, I 
 almost ran. Many of them were people of 
 position in New York. There was one woman, 
 who had endured there in the long ago some 
 thing almost like bellehood. Her father had 
 been a famous hotelkeeper. She had married an 
 Englishman of good family, not very well off, 
 and they were among those who are asked 
 about to be amusing, but whose real position is 
 one which the newspaper writers who keep her 
 photographs before the public could never 
 understand. She is an "American," and that 
 is practically her entire distinction.
 
 124 We Highroad 
 
 But how ignorant I was of all this then! I 
 felt that these people could annihilate me, 
 could tear my pretensions to flimsy rags which 
 would never cover me. So they could, if they 
 had known enough. My very shakiness kept 
 me well balanced Like a tight-rope walker, 
 I could not afford to make the slightest blun 
 der. Consequently Lucile and I were hardly 
 seen until Lady Flora arrived. Then we went 
 over to the hotel and lunched with her on the 
 veranda. 
 
 "It is not quite the thing to do, ' Lady Flora 
 said shrugging her shoulders, "'but I can do it. 
 I like to see the people when I come to a place 
 like this." 
 
 "I hope," I said almost timidly, "that 
 people will not hear that Lucile has just re 
 fused Comte Julien Malpierre. It would sur 
 round us with gossip, make us conspicuous. It 
 would be very unfortunate." 
 
 Lady Flora opened her mouth as though to 
 speak. I saw a gleam of relief in her eyes. 
 At last her stupid brain had caught an excuse 
 for having us. If we were a bad bargain, she 
 did not want her world to discover it. After 
 all we were presentable. 
 
 A dozen men and one or two women came
 
 A Glimpse ^England 125 
 
 up to speak to Lady Flora. Sometimes she 
 introduced one or two shortly, English man 
 ners not requiring that she should do so. But 
 I could hear quite audible inquiries concerning 
 us, and Lady Flora's invariable answer that 
 we were "some of those Americans who had 
 lived in Europe for a generation or two, inter 
 married and all that, ye know. Some connec 
 tions of old Madame Vestrine's. Millionaires. 
 They have just refused Julien Malpierre." 
 
 "Evidently tired of the continentals," one 
 astute gentleman said. "That shows good 
 taste." 
 
 Now when a family has rejected a particu 
 larly good match, it seems to show that they 
 have a treasure that they are in no hurry about 
 disposing of. Lucile was talked about at once, 
 examined, criticized. She looked like a piece 
 of Dresden china because she was artistically 
 complete, but everybody agreed that there 
 was nothing so tremendously wonderful about 
 her personally, so it must be the fortune that 
 made her so valuable. 
 
 A fortune is more valuable any time than 
 a delightful personality, whatever novelists 
 may say. Why do we value the personality of 
 another? Simply and only for the pleasure it
 
 126 I'be Highroad 
 
 can give us. A great deal of money without 
 any drawbacks can give more pleasure than 
 anything else. Beauty has no place in the 
 running against it. Of course, a monstrosity 
 and a fool are drawbacks which no money can 
 really overcome, but Lucile was neither of 
 these. 
 
 Our manner was good, and within a week I 
 was serenely unconscious of Americans. We 
 moved in that charmed set which had hardly 
 been touched by America in those days. We 
 were, according to Lady Flora, people who 
 had lived abroad for a generation or two. I 
 even spoke to one of the great whom I came 
 to know, of my "Godfather" Prolmann, giving 
 him his discarded title; and I did laugh a little 
 when I ventured to tell of the summers I had 
 spent on his yacht. I found one old nobleman 
 very much interested when he heard that Ma 
 dame Vestrine was with my other children at 
 Lausanne. He had known her as a girl in Vienna 
 when he was a young attache* there. 
 
 Actually, within two weeks people were 
 wondering a little why a person of so much 
 importance as I should be about with Lady 
 Flora Hastings. Lady Flora was fashionable, 
 but hardly the friend one would have expected
 
 A Glimpse of England 127 
 
 a woman of my evident character and position 
 to have chosen. It was finally put down to 
 Lucile's youthful taste. But I clung to Lady 
 Flora. Nothing better was in sight. We 
 might have done a great deal for ourselves now 
 had we really had the fortune, but a few pitiful 
 hundreds of pounds a years was all we had for 
 everything. 
 
 I had not yet seen Lady Flora's husband, but 
 I knew that he was old, and I gathered from 
 Lady Flora's conversation that he was a man 
 with many interests separate from hers. She 
 spoke of him as being jealous, but that, I 
 already knew, was the purest fiction. One of 
 the most amusing things in my amusing life 
 has been the contemplation of the casual liar. 
 Somebody has said that a liar needs a long 
 memory. More than anything else, a liar needs 
 to be a thorough artist in human nature. The 
 common liar takes a character built on firm 
 lines, and gives to it an attribute or an act 
 which would be as impossible to that particular 
 person as song would be to a crow. 
 
 I gathered a fairly correct idea of Mr. Her 
 bert (he had no title) from his wife, and during 
 all our stay in Homburg I was carefully learn 
 ing the way into his regard. He was old
 
 128 The Highroad 
 
 according to Lady Flora, almost seventy. 
 Whether or not that is age depends upon cir 
 cumstances. 
 
 We did not meet the Great Personage who 
 has made the Homburg of to-day. We were 
 not conspicuous enough for that, although I 
 suppose we are the only Americans above the 
 tourist class who ever went to Homburg who 
 did not come home and give that as one of 
 their experiences. 
 
 Homburg is a hot, not very pretty, little 
 place, and there was none of the gay, romantic 
 air which always surrounds a Latin resort. We 
 made some good acquaintances, and before 
 Lucile became in any sense an old story I sent 
 her and Emelie, our old maid, over to Lau 
 sanne, and I went to London. There were 
 some things I wanted to arrange. 
 
 If there is a more forlorn and lonely place 
 on earth than London in August, I do not 
 know where it can be. The pavements are 
 torn up, the streets small, the people hide 
 ous. There is never, never, a time when Paris 
 is not delightful. In the summer in the dullest 
 days, if you are the possessor of but a handful 
 of copper sous, you may take one of the little 
 boats and go up the Seine and be amused all
 
 A Glimpse of England 129 
 
 the way. A little vine-clad balcony at a river 
 restaurant will be like a scene in a theater. 
 A girl in a white frock with a red hat will lean 
 over a table to talk to a young man. The 
 French are artists from the highest to the 
 lowest. If I am ever an outcast, with not a 
 soul to speak to in all the world, I shall go to 
 Paris, and be comparatively happy in the con 
 templation of joyous, cynical, artistic life. 
 But London is as stodgy as her putty-like 
 bread. 
 
 I went to a boarding-house near Kensington 
 Gardens because I wanted to save every 
 penny. I wish I could stop long enough to 
 describe that manage. The landlady deserves 
 a long character study. She was the widow of 
 a fishmonger "in the city," she always said, 
 and she had an imagination that was truly re 
 markable. She attended auctions, and her 
 house was filled with plunder of the most re 
 markable description. She declared that this 
 was made up of heirlooms from her uncle, who 
 had died in India and left a great fortune which 
 she had been cheated out of. Her pretences 
 were so transparent that they hurt me. After 
 all she was something like me. I wondered if 
 people could see through me as easily.
 
 130 I'he Highroad 
 
 There was an old couple who had lived in 
 Canada for some years and thought it the 
 America of to-day, there were too an Arme 
 nian, who was devoted to the cause of his people 
 (we heard a good deal of Armenia in those 
 days), and a negro from the French Islands 
 who was studying in London at the expense 
 of his government. 
 
 I laughed at myself as I sat by this colored 
 man every day at dinner, and realized that I 
 had no feeling of repulsion for him at all. We 
 conversed quite amiably. And yet even in 
 Fowlersburg I should have left a table in hor 
 ror at the thought of eating with a negro. 
 Here of course I said nothing about my na 
 tionality; I was a simple meek little woman, 
 and I think they believed me a governess out 
 of employment. 
 
 One day I put on my most governess-like air 
 and went down to the office of one of the big 
 illustrated weeklies. This was long, long before 
 the day of the exploiting of women through 
 the press, as we now know it in America. In 
 those days it was only royal or criminal women's 
 faces which were common in print. I fancy 
 sometimes that that is one of the things which 
 the world owes to me.
 
 A Glimpse of England 131 
 
 I took with me a large and most beautiful 
 picture of Lucile, which had been made by a 
 young Parisian photographer who has since 
 become famous. It gave her all the charms 
 she lacked and accented those she pos 
 sessed. I represented to that weekly news 
 paper editor that I should like to supply 
 him now and then with society notes. I 
 offered my wares very cheap. I had here 
 a photograph of Mademoiselle Lucile, the 
 god-daughter of all of Prolmann's titles, a 
 great heiress, whose father had been an 
 American, and who had recently rejected 
 Comte Julien Malpierre 
 
 The editor of the paper almost laughed in 
 my face. It seems that he had a correspond 
 ent at Homburg who had casually mentioned 
 the Malpierre story. He said he knew it 
 all. He gave me ten shillings for the photo 
 graph. 
 
 When I saw the stupendous, amazing story 
 of our wealth and glory which accompanied its 
 publication I was frightened. Lucile was said 
 to have half a million acres in the "fertile 
 tobacco lands of Virginia." She was an 
 "American Princess." 
 
 I dreaded a contradiction from Fowlersburg.
 
 13 2 'The Highroad 
 
 But I doubt much if a copy of the English 
 paper ever reached there, and if it had, the in 
 habitants were of the order of mind that 
 believes what it sees in print even when it is 
 known to be untrue.
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 133 
 
 XII 
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 
 
 The photograph of Lucile made a mild sen 
 sation. In launching a young girl advertising 
 of the right sort undeniably is of advantage. 
 Those who cannot get into the newspapers 
 or have better ways of reaching the public 
 they wish to impress argue differently, but I 
 know of what I speak. As a matter of course, 
 for a woman who is a nobody to have her pic 
 ture labelled "society woman" in the columns 
 of the yellow journals means nothing. It is 
 sometimes a distinct disadvantage to a woman 
 who is hovering on the outer edge of the inner 
 set. And a bad picture, one which shows her 
 in an unattractive fashion, is worse than none 
 at all. But advertising of the right sort pays. 
 After all what is fashion? It exists entirely in 
 the minds of the world. If the world agrees 
 that you are famous or fashionable, you are so, 
 and most decidedly if it ignores you you are 
 not. You can become that intangible thing 
 fashionable only by impressing the public in
 
 134 tte Highroad 
 
 one way or another. It is surprising to me 
 that the use of personal photographs was so 
 long in coming. It was very lucky for Lucile 
 that it was so, as to-day or even a year or two 
 after my experiment, her picture would have 
 been lost in the crowd of "beauties" that 
 adorned the pages of all the weeklies and the 
 cheap monthlies. Naturally when I saw the 
 picture I was indignant to all my friends, thus 
 calling their attention to it. To the Mal- 
 pierres I was fairly humble, and I begged them 
 to believe that neither Lucile nor I had had the 
 bad taste to mention the affair. It was at 
 Breck Castle that I saw the effect of it. We 
 were regarded with curiosity. There was no 
 quiet slipping-in for us. 
 
 Mr. Herbert having married late in life (and 
 a fool) considered all women poor creatures, 
 and he rather enjoyed what he considered the 
 fact. It took them out of the realm of serious 
 things with claims to being considered seri 
 ously. He went about his affairs almost as 
 though his wife had no existence. She was 
 indulged in every way, but she knew that if she 
 gave him any cause, his treatment of her would 
 be absolutely free from sentiment. She lived in 
 a sort of nervous terror that some day he might
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 135 
 
 find a pretext to divorce her, because she had 
 not fulfilled expectations in providing him with 
 an heir. He hated his cousin's son who would 
 succeed him, while believing firmly in primo 
 geniture and the rights of the family name. 
 This fear of a divorce actually seemed at times 
 to drive Lady Flora into doing questionable 
 things. I suppose the great danger she ran 
 fascinated her, just as physical danger some 
 times fascinates. 
 
 Mr. Herbert and I became friends after a 
 fashion. I am a very conservative, modest, 
 unassuming woman who can take a fairly intel 
 ligent interest in almost anything; consequently 
 I always get along with men. There is noth 
 ing about me to dislike. I ask nothing of them 
 and I make them comfortable when they are 
 near me. 
 
 It was at Breck Castle that we met Lord 
 Horton. 
 
 Lord Horton was at this time under a tem- 
 f porary cloud politically and he had leisure to 
 go a-visitingas it were, something he had had 
 little time to do during the years he was mak 
 ing the reputation which brought him his Vic 
 torian title. 
 
 He often stayed at great houses during those
 
 136 The Highroad 
 
 years, but I doubt if he had ever gone any 
 where in all his life except for some other pur 
 pose than that of enjoying himself. It was not 
 altogether pleasure that brought him to Breck 
 Castle. 
 
 There had always been titles and money in 
 the Horton family, but this one, a younger son, 
 had earned his own by way of a political 
 career, beginning as secretary to an austere 
 statesman. Poor Horton! He had had a dull 
 life of it! And the saddest part of it is, he 
 never knew it. He always typifies middle 
 class England to me. It is quite a mistake to 
 imagine that the English people of title are all 
 true aristocracy. 
 
 By no means. There have never been many 
 families in Britain who were truly of the haut, 
 in spirit or tastes. The present royal family is 
 most distressingly middle class. Queen Alex 
 andra's favorite amusement is copying por 
 traits of her family on teacups very badly 
 and taking photographs of her daughters (very 
 bad) with their heads on their husbands' 
 shoulders. 
 
 They have a portrait of Horton's mother at 
 Rutherford, done about 1870, when she was in 
 the forties. She wears a headdress and a look
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 137 
 
 of extreme virtue. I know that they had 
 boiled mutton, brussels sprouts and rice pud 
 ding for dinner five times a week, followed by 
 a supper of spiced meats, cheese, whiskey and 
 water. It is easy to tell what they did, so 
 many of Horton's kin are now doing the same 
 thing every day. 
 
 I can imagine poor Horton's youth. He is 
 fifty. I know that at Eton he was a serious 
 lad, who pointed out to his fag that obedi 
 ence was a duty, and would have said his 
 prayers in the face of the whole school. At 
 Oxford he was called a "serious and promising 
 young man," who scorned frivolities. It is a 
 certainty that frivolities never sought him out, 
 for a less amusing person never lived. What 
 a number of people scorn the lives they could 
 never have lived! 
 
 The general company at Breck was a gay 
 one. It is only people of position who can 
 afford to be truly gay and let such wit as they 
 have show itself. They are like artists who 
 know their technique thoroughly and can 
 afford to paint in bold dashes I do not 
 know in all the social world anything more 
 pitiable than the poor imitators of society. 
 In England particularly they make a sad and
 
 138 The Highroad 
 
 woeful band, waiting to see what "they" will 
 do. 
 
 It settled down into a cold and rainy autumn. 
 Mr. Herbert had once let Breck to an Ameri 
 can family and they had fitted it with steam. 
 He declared that he never would have thought 
 of it himself, but that it doubled the value of 
 the property to him. 
 
 In these days, sometimes too bad even for 
 shooting, with long evenings in the house, 
 Lucile shone. She was not forward, but she 
 was always good tempered, always prettily 
 dressed, always ready for any amusement, and 
 best of all always comme ilfatit. How I con 
 gratulated myself that I had arranged it that 
 she should reject Julien! There is nothing 
 truer than that the world is inclined to accept 
 us at our own valuation. Lucile felt herself of 
 value, and a princess royal could not have 
 taken homage and consideration more as a 
 matter of course. 
 
 I mentioned one day that I had found a 
 trunk among those which had come 'with us 
 which I supposed in France. It contained 
 Lucile's costume worn in the little play that 
 had been given at Verriere. I took a stupid 
 day, when everybody was yawning and the
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 139 
 
 men were aimlessly knocking billiard balls 
 about, to tell of the stupidity of my maid in 
 bringing this trunk. As I had anticipated, the 
 news was received with interest. "Yes, the 
 manuscript copy of the play was there also." 
 
 In an hour we had the play-book down and 
 were giving out the parts. As I had seen the 
 play at Verriere I was called upon as an 
 authority, and to the amazement of everybody 
 I gave to Lord Horton the part which had 
 been taken at Verriere by Julien. Of course 
 Lucile played the companion part to it. 
 
 At first Horton hesitated in accepting it, 
 although I could see that he was tremendously 
 flattered. It had been a pure piece of audacity 
 on my part, but I believed then, and I believe 
 now, that there is not a soul on earth, however 
 stupid and unsocial it may be, who does not in 
 day dreams see itself shining as a social light. 
 Flattery is potent just because we believe our 
 selves the real standard of excellence. We 
 know that there are people handsomer and 
 cleverer, according to the world's standard, 
 but that standard is movable, and a truly en 
 lightened world would come around to see in 
 us the model. Of course we know we lapse, 
 but we could be everything if we wished, and we
 
 140 The Highroad 
 
 should be, we say to ourselves, if the world 
 were taking notice. 
 
 As I had shown no sort of preference for 
 Lord Horton's society, and as I was frank and 
 sincere in all my other assignments, the rest of 
 the party, after a clack of wonder, conceded 
 that I knew my business and tried to see in 
 Horton the characteristics I assured them he 
 possessed, which were revealed in the dialogue 
 and action of the little play. For one thing, 
 it was in French, and that necessarily was a lan 
 guage with which he was entirely conversant. 
 
 I concluded that those delicate lover-like 
 speeches which he must make to Lucile would 
 be easier for him to say in French, for I 
 guessed that lover-like speeches were not at 
 home on Horton's tongue, which made me all 
 the more certain that I had found in him one 
 who would make a good husband. The foun 
 dation virtues of a good husband do not in 
 clude gallantry. 
 
 After the play Horton followed Lucile 
 about, fascinated as I had felt sure he would 
 be. 
 
 Once when I was a little child a traveling 
 preacher visited my grandfather. He was an 
 uneducated man, but with an unusually original
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 141 
 
 mind. According to his faith he continually 
 tried to convert me. I liked him very much 
 and spoke to him with entire freedom. I told 
 him that I couldn't cry over my sins, which he 
 invited me to do, because I hadn't any. I 
 couldn't think of any sins then but lying and 
 stealing. I couldn't steal, because I never saw 
 anything on the farm which I couldn't have if 
 I wanted it, and why should I lie when my 
 father and mother allowed me to do exactly as 
 I pleased? 
 
 The preacher assured me that we were all 
 sinners and told me a story of a child who 
 was in my "state. " She was told to pray every 
 night, "Lord, show me that I am a miserable 
 sinner," and in a few short weeks she was 
 "crying at the mercy seat. " That story made 
 a profound impression upon me. I carefully 
 refrained from making such a prayer because I 
 had no desire to "cry at the mercy seat," but 
 I thought about it and I reasoned out in my 
 little mind that she told herself she was a sin 
 ner until she believed she was one, and in doing 
 so I unconsciously touched a point in mental 
 science on which much is built. 
 
 After Horton had rehearsed lines telling 
 Lucile she was a paragon of beauty and virtue
 
 142 The Highroad 
 
 and that he loved her, his mind began to accept 
 it as a fact. He could not do it mechanically 
 as another accustomed to the trick would have 
 done. His mind was not adjusted to the say 
 ing of lover-like things which he did not mean. 
 
 I was not at all surprised when Horton came 
 to me and told me that he had asked Lucile to 
 marry him and as was natural had been re 
 ferred to me. 
 
 I became agitated at once, and a good deal 
 of it was real. Horton was not only charmed 
 by Lucile's youth and sweetness, but he felt 
 that he was making a brilliant match from a 
 financial point of view. 
 
 No need to undeceive him now. If we got 
 him to the shadow of the church he would not 
 face back. He was English. He might sulk 
 a little and even say some plain impolite 
 things, but he would not desert Lucile and 
 make a scandal when he discovered that she 
 was practically penniless. 
 
 I asked him if he loved my daughter or if 
 he were taken by the charm of simple girlhood, 
 and then he told me some things which sur 
 prised me. He said that Lucile was much 
 more than a simple child. She thought deeply 
 upon serious subjects. I discovered later that
 
 We Visit Lady Flora Hastings 143 
 
 the nuns at the convent in Paris prepare the 
 girls for this sort of emergency. Many of the 
 girls educated at that convent are expected to 
 marry statesmen, and they are given a thin 
 wash of general information, or what looks like 
 information. They have a patter of phrases, 
 which they can use for the amazement of a 
 man. 
 
 Horton told me seriously that he expected 
 Lucile to be a "helpmeet" to him, and that he 
 had dared ask her to marry him because her 
 mind was so mature. 
 
 Considering all things, Horton was a much 
 better husband for Lucile than Julien would 
 have ever been. But when was a "better" 
 thing too attractive? Lucile, now that girl 
 hood is gone, is a cold practical woman. I 
 am always wondering what she might have 
 been, and all my life I shall miss Julien Mal- 
 pierre and my vision of French history. Yet 
 Horton is a faithful and I believe an admiring 
 husband.
 
 144 c Tb e Highroad 
 
 XIII 
 
 The Settling of Lucile 
 
 We Americans acquire some curious ideas of 
 England from books. Among others, is a 
 belief that in winter London is practically 
 deserted by everything that could be called 
 society. "The season" in early summer was 
 supposed by me to constitute the only time 
 when anybody above the middle class was seen 
 in London. Really nowadays those of the 
 aristocracy who can afford it keep their town 
 house open the greater part of the year. 
 
 Now that Lucile was engaged my first im 
 pulse was to go back to Paris for the winter, 
 let her marry there, and save the expense of a 
 London establishment. But this plan had dis 
 advantages. In the first place, the Malpierres 
 were the best people I knew in Paris, and they 
 could hardly be expected to take a great inter 
 est in Lucile's marriage. I even doubted if 
 they would come in from the country for it. 
 I could not drive Lady Flora to the point of 
 rebellion by insisting that she should give Lucile
 
 Settling of Lucile 145 
 
 her wedding. There was nothing for it but to 
 take a furnished house in Mayfair by dipping 
 into my reserve fund. I considered this from 
 every side and then took a good house while I 
 was about it. Genevieve was now ready for 
 the world. With her sister well married she 
 would of course have a tremendous advan 
 tage and would stay with her a great deal of 
 the time. If necessary, I would even go into 
 debt a little to get my second daughter settled. 
 I looked at the jewels Prolmann had given me. 
 At the worst I could do something with them. 
 If I could marry Genevieve well and quickly, 
 the two girls could take care of Jane. 
 
 In watching families I have noticed that the 
 first marriage usually settles the status of a 
 family of girls. If the first marries badly or 
 rests a long time in the family nest, it has a 
 bad effect upon the prospects of the rest. Men 
 are apt to wonder if there is something wrong 
 that has warned off other men. They grow 
 suspicious. And whatever we women say, 
 men believe that an unmarried woman has 
 lacked opportunities, and justly so gener 
 ally. 
 
 If it can be avoided it is not well to show 
 two marriageable daughters at the same time.
 
 146 'The Highroad 
 
 Two hot-house peaches are not so rare as one 
 hot-house peach. I know that to say this is in 
 very bad taste. The romantic and those who 
 take what they call a "serious" view of mar 
 riage will call it a vulgar and deplorable state 
 ment. Oh, I know the patter of the romantic 
 and the "serious." 
 
 Many, many times have I said, and saying, 
 believed, the most beautiful and conventional 
 things concerning the relations of men and 
 women. But here I am allowing myself the 
 privilege of telling the truth. I have discov 
 ered that a man's nature changes not at all in 
 acquiring a wife unless, perchance, he has a 
 very undisciplined "nature. In that case he 
 will make a very bad husband. 
 
 I considered myself a model of diplomacy 
 when I was able to secure Lili de Malpierre as 
 one of Lucile's bridesmaids. Lili's mother 
 was a clever woman in some ways. She 
 believed the story of our fortune, and believ 
 ing saw in Genevieve a more desirable heiress 
 than Lucile, for Lucile had not an elder sister 
 who was the wife of an English Lord. Then 
 too the Marquise was progressive. France is 
 a republic, and say what you will, a title in a 
 republic has not the same value as in a mon-
 
 'The Settling of Lucile 147 
 
 archy. Who could say what advantage Lili 
 might not derive from visits to England? The 
 Marquise could trust me to ward off the inel 
 igible. Added to this were the facts of the 
 independent nature of Lili which makes her 
 to-day one of the most conspicuous women in 
 France, her fondness for Genevieve, and her 
 determination to come. 
 
 Lucile's wedding was a fairly brilliant one. 
 The bad half-hour with Horton was over. I 
 actually made him see Lucile as a rich girl to 
 the end, and we went as formally about settling 
 part of those wild West Virginia lands upon 
 her and her children as though they had been 
 located in Kent and Surrey. Lucile has two 
 nice little boys, and I am fond of them, but 
 they do not laugh up into my eyes as Julien 
 Malpierre's children would have laughed. 
 Had I only known, had I only dreamed of the 
 future, I might have managed some way. I 
 comfort myself with the reflection that it would 
 not have been best for Lucile. She is the 
 proper wife for Horton. She likes her life, 
 but I want my darling little French grand 
 children playing about the yellow and green 
 old marbles at Verriere. 
 
 It was at the time of Lucile's wedding that I
 
 148 The Highroad 
 
 first came into contact with the Kensington 
 Palace crowd, and some others. 
 
 Kensington Palace and Hampton Court are a 
 sort of royal alms houses, places to keep poor 
 relations and the widows and orphans of those 
 who have a claim of some sort upon the royal 
 family. The late Queen was born at Kensing 
 ton when her parents were very poor relations, 
 and so I believe was the present Princess of 
 Wales. At any rate, the family of the Prin 
 cess May lived there and it was there that the 
 famous auction took place which scattered so 
 many of the royal heirlooms. A red flag was 
 hung out of the palace window and the Tecks 
 were "sold up" that tradesmen might be paid. 
 And I suppose the sons and daughters of these 
 same tradesmen tremble and shed tears when 
 they see "royalty, " like the rest of their 
 kind, and see nothing humorous in the situa 
 tion. 
 
 I have a work-table, once the property of 
 Queen Adelaide, which came from that sale. 
 
 There are some frumpy old ladies living in 
 Kensington Palace who are not above taking 
 in "paying guests." These are often Ameri 
 cans, who pay handsomely for the introductions 
 that come their way through their hostesses.
 
 'The Settling of Lucile 149 
 
 As Lord Horton was not to be ignored as a 
 political factor and as his family itself was 
 entitled to recognition, we of course had a 
 sprig of royalty at the wedding. But Horton 
 had besides a second cousin who lived in Ken 
 sington Palace, so we were thoroughly adver 
 tised in that abode of court gossip. 
 
 A bishop's widow, resident there at that 
 time, had a California girl as her guest, and 
 she arranged with Horton's cousin that her 
 American should receive an invitation to 
 Lucile's wedding. 
 
 I should have had a fellow feeling for that 
 American girl, and have done what I could to 
 give her a lift. Up to that time the only intro 
 ductions she had achieved were to the Princess 
 Christian and Miss Marie Corelli. But I had 
 long ago made up my mind that I could not 
 stand one grain of handicap. Good-nature, a 
 fellow feeling, kindness of any sort were ex 
 pensive luxuries which it was impossible for me 
 to afford. And I rather enjoyed snubbing that 
 girl. My mind ran ahead. I saw the possi 
 bility of her name being cabled to America as 
 one of the Americans at the wedding, and I 
 knew she was a nobody or she would not be 
 where she was. I declined to give any reason
 
 150 The Highroad 
 
 for refusing the invitation, but I refused it, 
 even in the face of a demand for it from Hor- 
 ton's mother. 
 
 "Poor Lucia (the cousin) had promised this 
 invitation," Horton's mother said. "Poor 
 Mrs. Beamish (the bishop's widow) must live, 
 and if she cannot secure good invitations for 
 her guest she will leave her. As it is, they 
 have had no desserts but milk puddings for two 
 years. Of course you rich Americans do not 
 understand poverty." 
 
 But I smiled and declined to be moved even 
 by milk puddings. I wondered what Horton's 
 mother would have thought could she have 
 known that "dessert" was almost unknown to 
 my youth. 
 
 So Lady Caulfield (Horton is a younger son 
 of Baron Caulfield), unable to realize that I 
 could refuse her anything except for some very 
 good reason, took the usual Victorian idea that 
 the girl's character was not good, and pro 
 ceeded to drop a word at Kensington Palace 
 which sent her home ruined so far as England 
 was concerned. 
 
 But there were some Americans at the 
 wedding. They were New Yorkers with 
 whose family history I am sure I was just a
 
 "The Settling of Lucile 1 5 1 
 
 trifle better acquainted than they were. They 
 belonged to the rich new set which was just at 
 that time coming into some vogue. In that 
 day the old Knickerbocker families still con 
 sidered that they led New York society. 
 What a little while ago that was! I confess 
 that I was green enough then to ignore the 
 certain rise into prominence of the tremen 
 dously wealthy. Had I been able to do so, or 
 had it been demanded of me, I should very 
 readily have put myself on the side of the old 
 families. Fortunately I had not to choose. 
 I realized that to know Americans at all, I 
 must be introduced somehow. It was very 
 easy, going about London as the mother of 
 Lord Horton's fiancee, to make what acquaint 
 ances I chose there. Everybody by this time 
 accepted us as enormously rich people who had 
 lived abroad for generations; Lady Hastings 
 had arranged that. Lucile and I had week's 
 ends at the best country houses, and many din 
 ners and evening parties in London. 
 
 It was in the midst of all these festivities 
 that I heard of my father's death. Poor 
 father! A pang struck my heart as I thought 
 of his loneliness. I had not even written often. 
 There was so little to say to him. After
 
 152 *fbe Highroad 
 
 mother died he had lived on the farm all alone, 
 even doing his own cooking. He had not a 
 relative in the world that he knew, and he and 
 mother's family were not friends. The lawyers 
 who had charge of my property wrote after the 
 funeral sending the letter to the bankers. 
 
 For a little while the vision of good-tem 
 pered, indulgent "pappy" sent me into hys 
 terical sobs. They had found him one day 
 where he had fallen by the stove, with some 
 cornmeal mush in a pan beside him. He had 
 been dead a day. < 
 
 For a little while I was unreasonable. It 
 seemed my fault. I was sure that the gossip 
 of Fowlersburg would say that it was my fault! 
 But when I saw that he had left me almost 
 fifty thousand dollars in this farm and in 
 money, I knew that he would simply be called 
 eccentric. 
 
 The question now was what I was to do 
 about the wedding. It seemed best to let it go 
 on. Later I could say that father had known 
 of it, had spoken of his illness, and begged 
 that nothing should stop it. I was sick with 
 remorse, I knew that I should have gone to 
 him had I known. It hurt me with a real 
 physical pain. If I had had only myself to
 
 'The Settling of Lucile 153 
 
 think of how differently I should have behaved. 
 
 Madame Vestrine and the children did not 
 come over until the last minute. 
 
 Lucile's wedding dress was made with a 
 simple long satin train covered by a magnifi 
 cent web of a lace veil as its chief feature. 
 That veil was hired from a French house, and 
 it figured in the descriptions as an heirloom. 
 I believe that Lucile thought that it was an 
 heirloom. She asked me where I had kept it 
 all these years. I told her that her grand 
 father had sent it to me with her grandmother's 
 portrait, and I gave her the idea that it had 
 belonged to her grandmother. Why not? If I 
 could not produce it again it could easily be 
 stolen as the annals of the family ran on. 
 
 The wedding was beautiful. It was Decem 
 ber, just a little before Christmas, but the air 
 was crisp and the sun bright, for London. 
 "St. George's, Hanover Square!" How many, 
 many times had I read those words in my 
 English novels in the old days! How many 
 times had I thrilled at the thought of being 
 the heroine who was married there! And here 
 was my daughter being married in St. 
 George's, Hanover Square, to an English 
 Lordl
 
 154 The Highroad 
 
 Who shall say that we do not create condi 
 tions by thinking and dreaming of them? Cer 
 tain it is, and I defy any to deny it, that had I 
 never seen a copy of the old New York Ledger 
 away back in the beginning, and followed it 
 up by Harper's cheap editions and "Seasides," 
 my daughter would never have stood at the 
 altar in St. George's and promised to love, 
 honor and obey a Lord. 
 
 I wonder what conventional mothers think 
 about when their daughters marry. I wish I 
 could have another life in which to feel the 
 reality of conventional living, conventional 
 thinking. As it is, I have never had anything 
 but the shadow. Behind the active me is 
 always the woman who must plan and move 
 the springs by which I move. I can no more 
 "let myself go" than an actress on the stage 
 can be natural. To be natural is not art in her 
 case, nor in mine. It would bring the play to 
 an end. 
 
 I am always letting my imagination tell me 
 how the woman that I seem to be would feel 
 under certain circumstances, and then I try to 
 act as though I felt like that. 
 
 At Lucile's wedding I was not tearful, but I 
 was very serious and a little wistful. Mr.
 
 'The Settling of Lucile 155 
 
 Herbert gave the bride away. The papers all 
 announced that "until the last moment" it had 
 been expected that Prolmann (by his titles) 
 would perform that office, bul illness had pre 
 vented. As a matter of fact I wrote to Prol 
 mann and told him that Lucile had asked that 
 he would come. But he declined, and sent the 
 pearl necklace. 
 
 I thought once of having the American Min 
 ister. The Minister at that time was a man 
 whose father had been a great American, but 
 he had had no training in social usages. 
 Everybody used him for any purpose, and it 
 would have been no trouble at all to secure 
 him as an assistant at Lucile's wedding. But 
 I wisely decided that he could be no advan 
 tage like most things easily acquired. 
 
 As I saw Lucile come down from the altar 
 on her husband's arm, I had a touch of what 
 we call sentiment. Had it been possible I 
 should have put my head down and cried like 
 a child. But I knew better. I was acting the 
 better bred mother. And all through the after 
 ceremonies, the breakfast and the going away, 
 I was thinking, thinking, "Will Lucile begin 
 right?" 
 
 How thankful I was that the child had noth-
 
 156 The Highroad 
 
 ing to reveal, for she knew nothing. She 
 could be natural, I said to myself. And then 
 I wondered. Had she forgotten Julien, or did 
 his big figure and sweet heavy voice seem alive 
 about her? After all she was a woman now 
 and must take up and bear a woman's burden 
 which must always be borne in silence and 
 secrecy if she is a successful woman.
 
 My Second Daughter 1157 
 
 XIV 
 
 My Second Daughter 
 
 It was after Lucile had gone away to Italy 
 with her husband that I was invited to take 
 Genevieve and Lili to a week's end in the 
 country to meet the then Prince of Wales and 
 his wife and daughters. We were asked at the 
 very last minute and I never knew exactly why. 
 
 The Prince was in the habit of naming the 
 guests he wished to meet, and it was in those 
 days his one sincere hope that he might find 
 somebody who would amuse him. Now I was 
 not, am not, and never shall be amusing. I 
 never said a witty or a clever thing in my 
 life. I am not beautiful, nor particularly well 
 dressed. I confess that I did not want to go 
 to that house party. We could not afford to 
 keep up in any way with the people who made 
 the so-called "Prince of Wales Set," nor I 
 confess did I court the position of belonging 
 to it. 
 
 There has been now and then a strange idea 
 in America that there exists an English set
 
 158 The Highroad 
 
 that did not care to be friends with the King 
 when he was Prince of Wales. There never 
 was an Englishman nor an Englishwoman who 
 did not always remember that here was the 
 country's future king, of necessity the very 
 head of English society. 
 
 The strange idea came in some manner from 
 the Duke of Richmond's action in once declin 
 ing to entertain the Royal party at Goodwood. 
 I am in no position to know the facts of that 
 affair nor is any one else who is at all likely to 
 tell them; but the family history of the Duke 
 of Richmond does not make it likely that he 
 would slight a king. Nor has he ever done so, 
 the English people are very sure. 
 
 I was nervous over this visit, and I took my 
 self to task because of it. What was the use 
 of all my work, my ambition, my contriving, if 
 I could not meet the realization of my hopes, 
 fill the role to which I aspired? I always look 
 with contempt upon the women and men who 
 "do not care for society." They are adver 
 tising themselves as poor things, lacking in 
 some vital nerve, some sense of equality with 
 their kind, for we never shun the places where 
 we are comfortable and pur vanity is soothed. 
 Nature is inexorable, and an understanding of
 
 My Second Daughter 159 
 
 her methods is philosophy. The man who 
 falls out of the race for any reason is simply 
 making way for one stronger than he, one more 
 to nature's mind, and is illustrating the rule of 
 the survival of the fittest. 
 
 The recluse does not realize that he is simply 
 a discarded building-stone in the structure of 
 civilization, who puts himself out of the way, 
 not by free will, but according to a law, 
 because his weaknesses make him useless. 
 
 I discovered that the visiting with Royalty 
 was very simple. The Royalties often did not 
 appear until noon and some days not then. 
 It was at dinner and in the evening that the 
 other guests most often saw them, and each 
 evening only a few of us were brought into 
 actual contact with them. 
 
 They were very simple and unostentatious, 
 and the Princesses seemed almost anxious to 
 please, which is natural, as royalty exists in 
 England by sufferance. The then Princess of 
 Wales reminded me, in her evening dress, of a 
 mechanical doll. She has a high, affected, 
 musical voice, a stiff figure, a painted face, 
 and a very well made, light-brown wig. She 
 sat on a sofa in the center of one of the draw 
 ing-rooms, and said pleasant things. Her large
 
 160 The Highroad 
 
 and truly beautiful eyes give the only expres 
 sion to a face from which every line has been 
 eliminated by stretching the skin. A frown is 
 a physical impossibility to her, which sounds 
 like the story of a gift to a princess from a fairy 
 godmother instead a "plastic surgeon." Roy 
 alty comes too near to us in these days. Who 
 knows? that long-ago princess who couldn't 
 laugh, and inspired so many romantic folk-tales 
 of poor young adventurers who broke the curse 
 and ascended the throne, may have had a sim 
 ple paralysis of the facial muscles! 
 
 They have some pathetic reserves, these 
 poor figureheads. One day our hostess 
 brought out an album to show the Princess of 
 Wales. It was silver bound and carefully 
 locked. It contained "private photographs" 
 of the royal family. In other days, when his 
 sovereign wished to compliment a subject, he 
 sent for the best painter in the country and 
 ordered a portrait for his friend. The walls of 
 this very house held portraits of sovereigns 
 from Queen Elizabeth down to the end of the 
 Stuart line. In those days a good portrait cost 
 about ten pounds. Nowadays, except in rare 
 instances, the best Victoria's family can do is 
 to offer a "private photograph," one which the
 
 My Second Daughter 161 
 
 public has not been allowed to see. The 
 young princesses were tremendously amused by 
 this collection and spent a whole evening over 
 it; but the Princess of Wales, to the visible 
 annoyance of her hostess, slipped out two or 
 three of her own old photographs. "You will 
 give me these, will you not?" she said sweetly. 
 "I have no duplicates." I did not see them, 
 but I heard two women laughing a little later; 
 "They had looped-up skirts and showed her 
 feet. She has destroyed almost all of them. 
 They are awful." 
 
 "The Princess should have busts made of 
 herself, like those of the ancient Roman 
 ladies," Colonel Cameron said to them. 
 "They had a sort of marble wig that could be 
 changed with the fashions." 
 
 "A very good idea, but you made it up in 
 this instant," one of the women said. 
 
 "I did not. I saw them in the British 
 Museum." 
 
 "I have never been there," one of the 
 women said smartly, "I never have occasion 
 for clandestine interviews. I shall keep a 
 watch on any friend of mine who knows about 
 those Roman ladies." 
 
 This Colonel Cameron was a close friend of
 
 1 62 'The Highroad 
 
 the Prince, and a man whose vicinity I found 
 vaguely unpleasant. 
 
 We were presented to the Prince the first 
 evening. He said some polite things to us and 
 graciously remembered Lili's parents. I think 
 he was disappointed in me. I was so common 
 place. He had looked at me with some curi 
 osity, and said rather bluntly that he was 
 surprised to see Horton's mother-in-law so 
 young. He asked me a question or two about 
 Prolmann, showing that he had heard our so- 
 called history. Prolmann had entertained him 
 once on his Hungarian estate long years 
 before. 
 
 The Prince found the girls more amusing, 
 although generally girls bore him after he has 
 given them a little of that patronizing advice 
 which, like all men of his type, he prefaces 
 with "My dear." The Prince at this time had 
 the boldest eyes I ever saw. He is a short, 
 stout man, with a thick German tongue in 
 speaking, and it must be confessed in eating 
 also. Genevieve made me nervous. Had 
 Genevieve been brought up differently, she 
 would have made a most attractive milliners' 
 saleswoman. I never deceive myself, and she 
 always reminds me of a superior sort of shop
 
 My Second Daughter 163 
 
 girl. She has the same haughty manner, style 
 in dress and undercurrent of blague. Her 
 waist (that was before the day of "straight 
 fronts") was seventeen inches around, and her 
 shoulders were forty. Naturally, her dress was 
 as simple as white muslin could be made, and 
 her slippers were even bowless, but she looked 
 like . a fashion-plate, or an illustration by 
 "Mars." 
 
 Before I had been in that house twenty-four 
 hours I knew that between her and Lili I 
 should have my hands full. 
 
 I have no idea what they talked about to the 
 men who found their society so absorbing; I 
 only know that the subject was obviously 
 changed whenever I came within hearing dis 
 tance. It was Colonel Cameron who fright 
 ened me. He was the middle-aged heir to a 
 Dukedom, a man who had married an heiress 
 when he was barely twenty-one, and had since 
 used his opportunities. He followed Gene- 
 vieve about from morning until night, but in 
 such a way that I could formulate no objec 
 tions, even to Genevieve. This was not the 
 society, nor were mine the methods which said, 
 "Beware of a married man." If Genevieve 
 could not be trusted to think of a man except
 
 164 I'be Highroad 
 
 as a possible husband, it were better to send 
 her back to West Virginia, where they are still 
 in that era. 
 
 But I was afraid. I did not want my peach 
 handled, although this one had not the reti 
 cence and bloom of innocence which had made 
 Lucile's charm. As for Lili, she was past my 
 control altogether. She smoked cigarettes 
 openly at tea time, and discussed Anatole 
 France's latest novel with the old Duchess of 
 Lawrence. She ridiculed his knowledge of real 
 French society, calmly contradicting the 
 Duchess when her argument demanded. 
 
 "I have not visited in France for twenty 
 years," the Duchess said. "I remember your 
 grandfather. A charming man." 
 
 "Society has changed since then," Lili said, 
 putting one slender arm behind her head and 
 lolling in the deep velvet chair she had chosen. 
 One might have imagined from her assurance 
 that she had known all about the life of that 
 day, instead of being unborn. "Even in the 
 old nobility there is a respect for money, which 
 we have learned from you money-mad English. 
 Papa married for money, you know, and I can 
 not say I am sorry. It saves me the annoyance 
 of doing so."
 
 My Second Daughter 165 
 
 "And you, I suppose, you young girl of the 
 convent, will marry for love?" the Duchess 
 asked with some sarcasm. 
 
 "I shall not marry at all," Lili said non 
 chalantly. 
 
 Now these new ideas might do for Lili, but 
 I could not afford them for Genevieve, and as 
 soon as we were again in London, I arranged 
 for Lili's return to her mother. She and Gene 
 vieve arranged, I vaguely understood, finally 
 to have an establishment in Paris where they 
 were to live together in the utmost freedom, 
 entertaining what they called "interesting 
 people," who were, so far as I made out, any 
 body who had been talked about. Poor young 
 fools! They were grievously disappointed that 
 the Prince was only a fat, bold-eyed, oldish 
 man. I think he had stood high on their list 
 before that visit. 
 
 There was nothing subtle about Genevieve. 
 All her goods were in the window. She morti 
 fied me. Much prettier and showier than 
 Lucile, I could make no effects with her. She 
 would never attract a conservative Englishman 
 like Horton. I had cherished some hope that the 
 rather fast stupid young eldest son of some 
 noble family might be taken by her as he
 
 1 66 'The Highroad 
 
 might have been taken as so many of them 
 are by a music hall singer or an actress. And 
 I found that they were attracted at first by that 
 curious atmosphere of sex which women like 
 Genevieve throw -about them, but they were 
 stupid in her eyes, and she would have none 
 of them. She wanted the hero of a French 
 novel, and the nearest approach to it that she 
 had seen was Colonel Cameron. His face 
 was pale, his eyes brilliant, and his upcurled 
 and pointed mustache showed large sound 
 teeth. 
 
 His wife and the Duchess of Lawrence left 
 cards when we were all returned to town. The 
 Duchess of Lawrence had spent the early 
 years of her married life going about from one 
 court to another, while her husband went in the 
 other direction. And then, tired out, they had 
 come home in middle age to discover, seem 
 ingly to their surprise, that their youth was 
 gone and there was no heir except the son of 
 a cousin. 
 
 "All of us are prone to overlook some de 
 tail," the Duke is said to have remarked to a 
 friend. "And, come to think of it, I believe 
 I'd as soon an enemy inherited my debts." 
 
 Cameron had married an heiress who wanted
 
 My Second Daughter 167 
 
 to be a Duchess. He awaited the title with 
 equanimity, going his devious ways, very sure 
 that so long as he was a prospective duke his 
 wife would never divorce him. 
 
 A month later, a little after the New Year, I 
 went to Genevieve's bed-room after she was 
 supposed to have gone to bed. It was not a 
 habit of mine, but that evening we had been 
 rather dull at home and had retired early. I 
 remembered something I wanted to say to her 
 concerning our plans for the next day. 
 
 Jane and Robert had gone back to school. I 
 would have kept Jane in London, but the rates 
 which I paid at Paris in the beginning still 
 held, and necessarily I could get nothing as 
 advantageous in England. 
 
 Robert was a manly boy now, not too tall, 
 but broad and square, with a clean, frank, 
 well-bred face. He had naturally courteous 
 manners. Madame Vestrine was in love with 
 the boy, and decided to spend the winter in 
 Switzerland to be near him. 
 
 Genevieve and I were alone in the London 
 house. 
 
 When I opened Genevieve's door I saw that 
 she was not there. The bed was untouched, 
 and a wrap or two was thrown hastily aside as
 
 1 68 The Highroad 
 
 though she had tried two or three before she 
 had found one to her mind. 
 
 I had met with some difficulty in opening the 
 door, as it was locked. It was only after I had 
 knocked and called and felt my heart stand 
 still at no response that I remembered the 
 housekeeper's keys (I was the housekeeper 
 here now) and opened the door with one from 
 that bunch. 
 
 Genevieve had very plainly gone out. No 
 body will ever know what I felt then. I have 
 no ability to express the feeling that went 
 over me. I hardly expected her to return, and 
 except for the wreck and ruin it would have 
 been for all of us, I would have wished that 
 she might never come back. Could I have 
 wished her dead and buried, how gladly I 
 would have done so. How I despised her, and 
 how I pitied her! I remembered her as a little 
 chubby red and white baby whose gay laugh 
 and romping ways made her her father's dar 
 ling. How little she knew! what a fool she 
 was! 
 
 I knew that she had gone out with Cameron. 
 A sudden thought sent me to the box where 
 we kept the latch key. It was gone. Then 
 she intended to come back.
 
 My Second Daughter 169 
 
 I detest scenes, and I do not know how to 
 manage them. I went into my own room, put 
 the door ajar and waited for my child to come 
 home. 
 
 She came in, stealing up the stairs in the 
 dark, and slipped into the corridor which led 
 to her own apartments. The door of her bed 
 room was locked as she had left it. I heard it 
 close and then I went to bed. 
 
 The next morning I engaged passage from 
 Liverpool for the following week. I told 
 Genevieve that I was going to put Robert in an 
 American college next year, and thought it 
 well to have him prepare for his entrance the 
 next autumn. He came hastily from Switzer 
 land, and we started for New York.
 
 170 'The Highroad 
 
 XV 
 
 We Return to America 
 
 I came up New York bay with mixed emo 
 tions. If I had made my way in England and 
 France, I kept reminding myself, I should 
 have no difficulty in conquering here. But 
 underneath the bravado by which I endeavored 
 to keep up my own spirit was an undercurrent 
 of doubt. Here Prolmann could only be a 
 serious disadvantage; here I was practically 
 stripped of my wonderful estates in Virginia, 
 but here, I said to myself, I was Lady Hor- 
 ton's mother. The Americans I had met in 
 London had let me see that that was fairly 
 potent, at least over there. But what would it 
 do for me here? I knew that there were 
 people who had been graciously received even 
 by Victoria who were not received in the New 
 York set for which I was ambitious. I could 
 not imagine, either, that the mother of the 
 
 Duchesse de B was received in New York. 
 
 And I had almost no money. 
 
 We went at once to a small hotel on Union
 
 We Return to America , 171 
 
 Square, which we had heard of as the stopping- 
 place of some English people. And even 
 there we could not afford to stay long. We 
 must get something "quieter" which would 
 yet have the appearance of choice instead of 
 necessity. 
 
 It was a terrible March day when we landed. 
 The dirt in the unclean streets was blowing in 
 clouds. The sharp clear air was as unbecoming 
 as the light from a hospital window. I looked 
 at my children, and my boy seemed raw and 
 commonplace and my girl entirely vulgar. 
 
 It was one of the few times in my life when 
 I lost heart, when the struggle seemed impos 
 sible. All my plans turned tawdry and trans 
 parent. How I wanted help! How I wanted 
 to turn to my children and say, "Help me! I 
 am doing everything I can for you. We must 
 work together to keep up appearances, to be 
 able to go along at all." But my common 
 sense told me the absurd folly of that. If 
 either of them had known that keeping up ap 
 pearances was what we were doing they would 
 have lost the ability to do it. 
 
 They did know, of course, that our income 
 was limited and that they could not spend 
 much money, but their training had taught
 
 1 72 fhe Highroad 
 
 them that it was no disgrace, simply a tem 
 porary inconvenience in their case, not to be 
 spoken of purely for financial reasons. 
 
 I had come to America before I desired to, 
 absolutely forced here by Genevieve. Later 
 we might have come as guests on somebody's 
 yacht and made our first appearance at New 
 port. I thought of all these things. I wished 
 that I had put Genevieve back into the con 
 vent while I brought Robert over. I wished 
 that I had done everything but what I had 
 done. Dozens of times I have dreamed of 
 finding myself at entertainments in my night 
 clothes. Well, that March morning in New 
 York I had exactly the same feeling. How I 
 wished I had stayed in Europe! 
 
 Robert was polite and Genevieve was sullen. 
 She sneered at the hotel, she sneered at the 
 profusion of American food. She listened with 
 contemptuous ears to the American voices in 
 the hotel dining-room, and viewed with dis 
 dainful eyes the garments upon the speakers. 
 I must confess that the voices distressed me. 
 For the first time I understood what foreigners 
 mean by our nasal voices. 
 
 We walked up Fifth Avenue the second day, 
 the dirt whirling into our faces, and then we
 
 We Return to America 173 
 
 crossed over into famous Broadway. I wonder 
 if there is anybody else who remembers the 
 Fifth Avenue and Broadway of only a few 
 years ago? To us, aliens, without a tie in 
 America, setting our feet for the first time in 
 New York, it seemed on the surface ridiculous 
 to have come. And had I lived only from day 
 to day, taking what came to me, had I been the 
 woman I was when I went to Europe, I should 
 have turned and left it, so little did it seem 
 worth while. And yet I knew that this was 
 America, and we were Americans. Never 
 could our position be sound before the world 
 until this was conquered. A nobody in his own 
 land is a nobody in all the world. And my 
 boy must make his own life. If he were to 
 marry a rich wife and achieve riches in that 
 way, which I confess was the best I hoped for, 
 it must be an American wife. No rich woman 
 of any position in any other country would 
 consider him for an instant. But to do that 
 he must have some place in the world, some 
 thing to stand upon. I had given his career a 
 good deal of thought. The church and medi 
 cine were the only professions which I thought 
 possible for him. I laughed at my own 
 thoughts sometimes as I lay in my bed at
 
 174 The Highroad 
 
 night. I imagined myself as the tactful mother 
 of a parish, hunting through old books for ser 
 mons to rewrite. Robert could have written an 
 average sermon, neat and didactic, but that 
 never would have satisfied me. Still I feared I 
 should have trouble to induce him to let me 
 lead him into the church. I was sure as I 
 looked into his handsome sunny face, unaggres- 
 sive, agreeable, a little slow, much like my 
 mother's, that he would make a successful 
 physician. He would bolster up his patients' 
 spirits, -employ a good nurse, and let nature 
 alone. But he shrugged his shoulders over its 
 disagreeable features, and sweetly asked to be 
 given other work to do. 
 
 "My son," I asked, "what do you want to 
 do?" 
 
 He laughed easily and bowed in a little 
 foreign fashion that he had learned from Prol- 
 mann. 
 
 "My dear mamma," he said in French, "I 
 would be a duke." 
 
 "But, alas," I returned, "I am not a fairy 
 godmother." 
 
 To my amazement his frank eyes took on a 
 suddenly shrewd expression. He looked at 
 me with almost a beam of real intelligence, of
 
 We Return to America 175 
 
 understanding. "That is not so sure," he 
 sard. 
 
 For an instant fright possessed me. Was it 
 possible that he knew, could see, could under 
 stand all I had done? Had that beam rested in 
 his eyes an instant longer, perhaps I should 
 have broken down the wall between us. But a 
 second later it had disappeared and I could not 
 convince myself that it had ever been there. 
 
 "You have always indulged us in our de 
 sires," he said in a commonplace polite 
 manner. 
 
 I took him over to Boston and put him 
 under a tutor to prepare for Harvard the next 
 year. I found that he could enter as a sopho 
 more, and that he was unusually well grounded, 
 particularly in languages. I left him then, 
 having given no sign that he was preparing to 
 be anything but a duke.
 
 ij6 'The Highroad 
 
 XVI 
 
 We Look About Us. 
 
 New York had no literature, as England and 
 France have, to teach me the habits and ways 
 of the people with whom I wished to associate. 
 Of course New York supposed itself then, and 
 supposes itself now, to be exactly like London. 
 But this is not altogether true. There has 
 never been a novelist who has thoroughly pic 
 tured American society, so that you may use 
 the record for a guide-book to find your way 
 about. 
 
 There are one or two women who belong to 
 what is known as society who write, but they 
 color their narratives with personal feeling. 
 Most of the stories of society are written by 
 young men and women whose imagination is 
 whetted by the sight of carriages on Fifth 
 Avenue and the possession of an admission 
 ticket to the horse show. Sometimes they secure 
 an opportunity to see the inside of a million 
 aire's house, for most of them are reporters on 
 the papers. As smart society is fundamentally
 
 We Look About Us 177 
 
 like any other, human nature being exactly the 
 same everywhere, they cannot make tremen 
 dous mistakes except in detail. People eat, 
 sleep, quarrel, make up, lie and cry, whether 
 they are Esquimaux or Americans, and they are 
 moved by ambition, envy, spite, avarice or 
 passion on Central Park East and Henry Street. 
 But few of these stories had been written 
 then. Mrs. Burton Harrison and Mr. Edgar 
 Fawcett were about all I had. I have often 
 wondered if Mrs. Harrison ever suspected that 
 the great vogue of her "Anglomaniacs" was 
 due to the desire on the part of outsiders to 
 know about the "real thing." Mr. Clyde 
 Fitch, even, had not risen to show that the 
 "smart set" is made of paper. I believe the 
 out-of-town people who make up the greater 
 part of our theater audiences believe Mr. Fitch 
 to know all about the people he depicts. He 
 probably does, but they are not New York's 
 society people at all. Nor is Mr. Richard 
 Harding Davis in a position to tell us how to 
 behave in the houses of smartness. As with 
 the rest of them, the jargon of the class that 
 seems only seems to be living simply for 
 amusement is not my mother tongue; but I 
 have gone a little below the skin of "society"
 
 1 78 The Highroad 
 
 in New York. I have a son-in-law, whom I 
 know well, who was born in that class. I have 
 a daughter-in-law who is an amiable, rather 
 domestic woman, -who has known no other 
 class and who has never discovered that her 
 husband is a parvenu. And I have learned the 
 rules with the care with which one studies a 
 foreign language. 
 
 Yellow journals to the contrary, the "so 
 ciety" class of New York is not made up of 
 butterflies entirely. The flower garden of 
 pleasure attracts butterflies, but they only live 
 a few days at the best, and they never truly 
 play the game. No, it isn't all amusement. 
 It is the eternal struggle to have the best. 
 
 Philosophers, men who sit in college li 
 braries, novelists who were brought up on 
 Ohio farms, descendants of Puritan families 
 that failed to take and keep the lead in the 
 colony, the editorial writer who wants to sell 
 the workingman his penny paper, and the sheep 
 who follow the last speaker, may cry out at the 
 thought of the society man or woman having or 
 seeking for the best. When you ask those teach 
 ers what the best is, they give you answers ac 
 cording to their minds. But what are they all 
 struggling for? To be free to go where they
 
 We Look About Us 179 
 
 please, to see what the world has to offer, and 
 to reach out their hands and take what they 
 want of it. They all agree that that is what 
 they want. (Maeterlinck has shown us how low 
 our ideals are, how selfish, compared even with 
 the bees, but it does not make us less selfish to 
 deny the fact.) Who gets that opportunity 
 except the people who make and keep money, 
 the people whose manners are polished until 
 they do not offend, who have a free masonry 
 of fair play in social intercourse? Whatever 
 lies are told, those are the necessities of a per 
 manent social position. 
 
 Some of the "sociologists" will indignantly 
 deny that this is what they want. They say that 
 they want to "uplift mankind." To what do 
 they want to lift him? To what does he want 
 to be lifted? I will tell you, because he can 
 only feel. To be free to go where he pleases, 
 to see what the world has to offer and to reach 
 out his hand and take what he wants of it. 
 The clever ones learn that it can come only 
 through wealth and civilization, through so 
 ciety. How many heads of the families who 
 make the real "smart set" in New York are 
 not superior men? 
 
 Suppose they do play. How many of the
 
 180 The Highroad 
 
 great middle class would love to break the 
 stupid monotony of their lives by playing if 
 they only knew how! Did you ever see a man 
 or woman, who was not a fool, who did not 
 respond to gaiety? If you think the "smart 
 set" is all play you are much mistaken, and 
 show that you have only seen it from the out 
 side. 
 
 It, too, has its fools, its wickedness, its 
 absurdities, being purely human. 
 
 It was with one of its women, a woman born 
 in it, whose nature was sweet but inclined to 
 folly, that my lot was cast for a little. 
 
 I spent some time looking for an apartment. 
 A hotel was too expensive. And of course a 
 boarding-house, where we should be obliged to 
 meet all sorts of curiosities and become known 
 to them, was quite out of the question. 
 
 I finally discovered an apartment house 
 which had all of my requirements. It was in a 
 quiet street, was owned by a woman who had 
 imbibed some of the "art ideas" which had 
 been gradually making their way in America 
 since the "Centennial Year," and had con 
 verted her old home into apartments. She had 
 succeeded in turning out something which to 
 the American idea was "French," although I
 
 We Look About Us 181 
 
 never saw anything in France like it. The old- 
 fashioned brownstone steps had been taken 
 away and a portico built over the basement 
 door, which became the rez-de-chauss^e. The 
 strip in front was asphalted, and a high iron 
 fence separated it from the street. Balconies 
 and latticed bow windows were thrown out at 
 the front and back of the house and the walls 
 of the rooms wainscoted. Open fire-places 
 with brass fittings and high colonial mantle- 
 pieces were put in as a compensation for dark 
 middle rooms and tin bath-tubs. 
 
 I was fortunate in securing a furnished apart 
 ment here, which we made tasteful by the dra 
 peries and knick-knacks we had brought with 
 us. We paid one hundred and thirty dollars a 
 month for it. 
 
 I was actually so ignorant of New York ways 
 that I did not know how foolish I was to rent a 
 furnished apartment in April. To my mind 
 New York was in the north and consequently 
 cool, and I did not realize that the whole 
 world of people whom I wished to know was 
 already away or going. I discovered this after 
 I had settled and sent my cards to the Ameri 
 cans I knew. Not one of them was in town. 
 
 There was not so much to amuse one in New
 
 1 82 'The Highroad 
 
 York as there is now. There were not so many 
 theaters and those that were open were not lively. 
 When 1 look back upon the audiences of those 
 days it is with a smile. Every woman wore a 
 hat, and she was not far from the black silk 
 era. One of the pretty evening frocks which 
 are so common in our audiences now would 
 have created a sensation and usurped the atten 
 tion usually given to the stage. 
 
 We found it terribly dull, and Genevieve 
 was at no .pains to conceal her disgust. I think 
 that I was in danger of losing all hold of her 
 at this time. She would have been quite 
 capable of finding the money in some fashion 
 and buying a ticket back to England had a 
 diversion not arrived. 
 
 I came home one day, warm, tired, fancying 
 that my judgment was a thing of the past; it 
 had seemed to desert me lately. I wondered if 
 I could touch Genevieve's heart by letting her 
 see that I loved her. It seemed to me that 
 here was the place for me to "show my heart." 
 In a novel she would have found me some day 
 with "a look in my eyes" which would have 
 "broken down reserves" between us. We 
 should have been mother and child. Her 
 heart would have softened to me.
 
 We Look About Us 183 
 
 Those are -the climaxes of imaginary stories. 
 The magazines teem with them. I wonder if 
 the people who write them ever knew people 
 like that. I used sometimes to think that I 
 might do that if it ever seemed expedient 
 until I saw Genevieve again. It was in me to 
 pretend to be sentimental, but I realized when 
 I faced her that never for an instant was it in 
 Genevieve. 
 
 I came home this afternoon and wearily 
 climbed the narrow gas-lighted stairs that led 
 to our apartment. The art burlap on the wall 
 and the thoroughly original treatment of the 
 niche on the turn of the stairs which marks 
 every old New York house, did not compensate 
 me for an elevator this day. I was physically 
 and mentally tired and realized that we had 
 spent too much money. We had spent so 
 much that it was going to be impossible for us 
 to go away properly for the summer without 
 danger to our capital. What a bad manager I 
 had shown myself! All at once a thought 
 struck me. Had I passed the climax of my 
 powers? With chills running over my shoul 
 ders and tingling along the backs of my hands, 
 I remembered my kinfolk. My mother was an 
 old woman at thirty-five. All ill-bred things
 
 184 The Highroad 
 
 grow old early. It is a law. It is the sure 
 mark of inferiority. And as we grow old we 
 return to our race to its characteristics. 
 
 Was I going to become one of those silent, 
 wizened women, going through the tread-mill 
 of existence, never thinking, marching to the 
 end of life in a tired indifference? My aunts, my 
 mother's sisters, and my cousins passed before 
 me. I felt for that moment as Dryope must 
 have felt when she knew herself turning into a 
 tree, the bark growing stiff about her; only 
 instead of weeping I wanted to shriek a pro 
 test, to push the enlacing bark aside. With an 
 effort of will I ceased to plod wearily up the 
 stairs and went up like a girl, bounding into 
 the "hall" of our apartment (which was a con 
 verted hall bed-room). 
 
 I had put on a pretty little pearl gown that 
 morning and a toque of violets, and as it was 
 the day of dowdy street dressing in New York, 
 had felt myself ridiculous in my simple Paris 
 frock as I saw the looks of the fat women I 
 passed. But I met a different glance now. 
 
 As I entered two young men arose. They 
 had been sitting together on a couch facing 
 Genevieve, the lattices of the bay-window 
 behind them. One of them was so magnifi-
 
 We Look About Us 185 
 
 cent that he left the other colorless and insig 
 nificant. 
 
 When I think of the good-looking men I have 
 known in my life, my mind always goes back 
 to Chester Ward as not only the handsomest 
 man but the most absolutely beautiful human 
 being I ever saw. His mother told me once 
 that she had heard the old tale of ./Esop's wife 
 and had marked her child with beauty, and she 
 showed me the engraving which she had kept 
 ever facing her eyes before Chester's birth. 
 It was a banal portrait of Wilkes Booth! But 
 surely the gods themselves had waited on the 
 marking of Chester. He had the form of 
 Apollo and the ox eyes of Juno. 
 
 I knew him at once, although when I had 
 last seen him he was a lank, curly-haired boy, 
 bringing in wood and water for his mother, 
 who had lived next door to us in Fowlersburg. 
 In my surprise at seeing him and asking how 
 he had found us I almost forgot the small 
 square clever-eyed young man who waited 
 politely by his side. 
 
 He was presently introduced to me as Mr. 
 Babcock, a college friend of Chester's whom 
 he had met in New York only that day. Ches 
 ter, he told me, was living in Washington,
 
 1 86 'The Highroad 
 
 where he was practicing law. He was over in 
 New York for a week and had taken the occa 
 sion to call upon us, as he had heard from 
 Fowlersburg that we were living here. Ches 
 ter talked staccato in a charming voice: 
 
 "I suppose you will be going down soon. 
 They are going to put a railroad through your 
 place, they tell me. Property is advancing in 
 price around Fowlersburg. You will be sell 
 ing your farm for town lots in a few years. 
 Mother talks about you all the time. She told 
 me, if I saw you, to be sure and tell you to 
 come down and spend the whole summer with 
 her, and you could talk over old times." 
 
 Of course I said that I would never sell the 
 old place, town lots or no town lots. The 
 town has never grown out in this direction, so 
 I have kept that promise, but the prospect of it 
 at that moment put new life into me. 
 
 Babcock, whose eyes were fastened on Gene- 
 vieve, let us talk on, but I could see my 
 daughter casting backward glances toward the 
 wonderful young man whose magnetic pres 
 ence and caressing voice seemed to fill the 
 whole room. 
 
 Through all the Fowlersburg gossip, the 
 story of how this or that girl had married, of
 
 We Look About Us 187 
 
 how the tale of Lucile's marriage had fairly 
 awakened the town, my mind was working. 
 Was this beautiful creature available as a hus 
 band for Genevieve? I knew that his family 
 was among the best in the state. They were 
 not rich, but if he were a lawyer in Washing 
 ton he might make money. He bore every 
 sign of prosperity, and not one of struggle. 
 And then the young man with him, I knew by 
 his name to belong to a famous New York 
 family. 
 
 I turned to Mr. Baocock presently and told 
 him that I thought that I had met his cousin, 
 Mrs. Dodds, in London. 
 
 I had hesitated over this at first. I was 
 making a complete chain by which ail my pre 
 tensions could be exposed to New York, If 
 Chester wished, he could tell the story of our 
 pretensions to this young man. But something 
 very tangible told me that Chester would do 
 nothing of the sort. 
 
 I, Lady Horton's mother, was very useful to 
 him. It is one thing to belong to an old We,st 
 Virginia family, and another to reach New 
 York society. And in Chester's eyes we had 
 always been unusual people. He had seen the 
 wicker chairs and chintz roses, those wonders
 
 1 88 The Highroad 
 
 of his day. From the way he accented the old 
 friendship for his mother, and led the talk to 
 France and England, I could see that he had 
 brought Babcock to us that we might impress 
 him; and so ungrateful was I, that that one 
 thing decided me that Chester would not do. 
 He did not ring sound. 
 
 It was luncheon time presently, and we in 
 sisted that the young men should stay for a 
 "woman's luncheon." 
 
 "Old-fashioned West Virginia manner," I 
 said to Babcock, and we all took the remark 
 seriously. 
 
 We had the French servant I had brought 
 with me, and I knew that the soup pot was full, 
 as always, and that a salad, a bottle of wine 
 and informality would go a great way with 
 young men. 
 
 They, in their turn, asked us to go out to 
 dinner with them at Delmonico's that even 
 ing. 
 
 As we went down the stairs in the evening's 
 dusk, we passed our upstairs neighbor, who 
 had already begun to excite my curiosity. She 
 looked at Chester with frank admiration, but 
 she nodded with a smile which lowered her 
 eyelids and drew up one side of her mouth
 
 We Look About Us 189 
 
 whimsically when she saw Babcock. He 
 greeted her with formality. 
 
 Chester walked along for a moment in 
 silence. 
 
 "Wasn't that Mrs. Wallingford?" he asked. 
 
 "I think that is her name." 
 
 "Do you mean to say you never heard of 
 her?" 
 
 "Never. There is no need to pretend that 
 I know New York. I do not." 
 
 "Ever see the great William B. about 
 here?" 
 
 "William B.?" 
 
 "Large man with a slight limp." 
 
 "Oh, you mean I thought isn't that her 
 father?" 
 
 "He is here then!" 
 
 "What do you mean?" I asked impatiently. 
 
 "I'll come around some day and tell you," 
 Chester said. 
 
 "She seemed to take an interest in you," I 
 said, "but I suppose you are accustomed to 
 that." 
 
 "I don't believe I care to encourage any 
 interest on the part of Mrs. Wallingford. Wil 
 liam B. is said to stop at nothing. I might find 
 myself dead some evening."
 
 190 The Highroad 
 
 He walked along with me for a moment and 
 then he laughed again. "I have just treated 
 myself to Burton's Arabian Nights," he said. 
 "A wonderful book which ladies of course 
 never read." 
 
 "It contains a good deal of human nature 
 which is western as well as eastern," I said 
 absently. 
 
 "Oh you have ?" Chester began. 
 
 "I was speaking of the usual edition. The 
 Burton, of course, never gets into general cir 
 culation," I said. 
 
 "Conversational or otherwise?" Chester ven 
 tured. 
 
 But Mr. Babcock asked me a question and I 
 made no reply.
 
 My Neighbor 191 
 
 XVII 
 
 My Neighbor 
 
 Babcock had fallen in love with Genevieve. 
 It was one of those passions which astonish us 
 when they come to sober clever men and 
 seemingly change every taste and habit of 
 their lives. We have all seen men in the thrall 
 of such a fascination. 
 
 The women of the Babcock family had been 
 generally pretty and always commonplace, 
 well born and bred, and doing in the appointed 
 time the things which were expected of them. 
 
 Genevieve's caprice, her foreign education, 
 her cheap cynicism played upon Elwin Bab- 
 cock's nerves. She was a bit of gaudy color, 
 and he had lived in a family life which was 
 colorless. He had not gone into Bohemian 
 society because that was outside his taste. He 
 was ambitious to make a name for himself at 
 the bar. He and Chester had fallen together 
 at college because Chester lacked the means to 
 keep up with the fast set. They had met on
 
 192 be Highroad 
 
 the common ground of athletics; for while 
 Babcock was small, he was sturdy and a cap 
 ital football player, with the virtues and the 
 hardness of that particular pastime, as one 
 could figure out by looking at him. 
 
 I went frankly about ascertaining his for 
 tune, by going to an agency which put me in 
 possession of the bare facts. He had fifteen 
 thousand dollars a year income from his grand 
 father, would have more when his mother died, 
 and was making between four and five thousand 
 dollars a year as the law partner of a relative. 
 
 Twenty thousand dollars a year was a better 
 income in New York then than it is now, and 
 he belonged to the best people in the town. 
 I wanted Genevieve off my hands. I was 
 afraid for her. I wondered if she would marry 
 Babcock and I did not dare to ask her, 
 although no motives of delicacy hindered me, 
 as with Lucile. 
 
 I had thought of my children always as 
 pieces on my chess-board that could be moved 
 about as I wished, but here was one that I 
 could not count upon one who might ruin 
 us all. 
 
 Two days after the two young men called, 
 Genevieve spent the whole afternoon out.
 
 My Neighbor 193 
 
 When she came in I asked her where she had 
 been. 
 
 "To walk," she said, shortly. 
 
 "I do not wish you to go out alone, my 
 dear," I said gently. 
 
 "This is not Paris nor yet London," she 
 returned indifferently. "When are we going 
 away for the summer? It is suffocating here 
 now." 
 
 I had been awaiting this moment and I was 
 actually afraid to say outright that it was im 
 possible for us to go at all. Indeed, I began 
 to think it might be possible. I used to won 
 der what people meant when they talked about 
 the influence of a strong will. I never remem 
 bered having been influenced by a strong will, 
 but Genevieve taught me that in the case of a 
 daughter it is worked like a species of black 
 mail. If I did not do what she wished, she 
 would most certainly do something I did not 
 like. 
 
 I had had every drawer and box which be 
 longed to Genevieve fitted with keys of my 
 own, and I went through them for letters every 
 time she went out. I had discovered nothing 
 from London, and from her attitude I con 
 cluded that the affair I had nipped in the bud
 
 194 *rbe Highroad 
 
 had been merely a passing amusement on both 
 sides. I found a locket with some diamonds 
 on the outside, but nothing within. 
 
 "They say," Genevieve went on, "that a 
 cottage at Newport is the best thing over here." 
 
 "We cannot afford that." 
 
 "You might send for old Prolmann and get 
 him to take one." She did not look at me, 
 but sprinkled paprika on her salad with an 
 ostentatious care. 
 
 My heart stopped beating for a moment and 
 then went heavily on. I had control of my 
 voice by the second beat. 
 
 "He would doubtless do that to give his old 
 friends pleasure, but he is very ill. You know 
 he could not come to Lucile's wedding." And 
 I looked straight into her insolent face. 
 
 The question of the summer was settled 
 before long. Mrs. Dodds was going to Paris 
 for a week or two, to come back on a yacht 
 which her husband had leased from an English 
 man. To please her cousin Elwin and to meet 
 the Malpierres and have Lady Horton's sister 
 as a guest, she asked to take Genevieve with 
 her, and bring her back for the Newport 
 season in August. It is expensive to stay with 
 people of wealth like the Dodds, but there was
 
 My Neighbor 195 
 
 nothing else to do. Mr. Dodds was one of 
 the new rich men who had married rather late 
 in life into an old family. Robert and I would 
 stay in the New York apartment and nobody 
 would know the difference. But naturally we 
 did not speak of that to Mrs. Dodds in all the 
 hurry of her departure. 
 
 It was Mrs. Dodds who introduced me to 
 Mrs. Wallingford. We met in the big square 
 hall which had been the basement dining-room 
 of the old house from which our apartment 
 house had been converted. 
 
 The two ladies greeted each other with a half 
 indifferent smile which lifted the corner of her 
 soft mouth on the part of my fellow tenant, 
 and something like embarrassment in the man 
 ner of Mrs. Dodds. We were going for a drive 
 in Central Park in the Dodds's carriage. 
 
 When we were seated in the victoria Mrs. 
 Dodds said almost apologetically, "I went to 
 school with Lily Mainwaring and she was 
 always an agreeable girl, Her marriage was 
 most unfortunate. Of course I never knew 
 the facts," she added hastily. "My husband 
 will never have her at the house even for the 
 largest affairs. He does not feel that the old 
 family ties hold." Mrs. Dodds waited for
 
 196 'The Highroad 
 
 questions. She evidently had an impression 
 that as she had introduced me to my neighbor 
 she must tell me all about her. The introduc 
 tion had been part of the embarrassment of the 
 moment of meeting, something that her con 
 fusion had not known how to avoid. "Her 
 husband is dead. He spent all of her fortune, 
 and it is said" more hesitation "that he 
 borrowed a great deal from her friends." 
 
 "Surely she was not to blame for that," I 
 ventured. 
 
 "She was to blame for even marrying the 
 man in the first place. She was at school in 
 Paris when she met him. He was an officer in 
 the English army, and a great deal older and 
 married." 
 
 "Married?" 
 
 "Yes. Imagine a girl ever thinking of a 
 married man!" I saw that I must give Gene- 
 vieve a word of warning for this visit with 
 Mrs. Dodds. She might listen to advice con 
 cerning a thing which was going to affect her 
 pleasure, as Mrs. Dodds's displeasure could 
 do. 
 
 "I cannot," I said. 
 
 "Well, maybe she didn't. It may have been 
 only himself. At any rate, he went back to
 
 My Neighbor 197 
 
 England, persuaded his wife to get a divorce 
 or made her do so, changed his name, and 
 came over here and married Lily Mainwaring. 
 People accepted him before they knew all the 
 story and it is very difficult to drop people 
 after they have been taken up. Then he 
 spent her money, and well, entertained a 
 good deal." She stopped. 
 
 "Isn't her father living?" I asked inno 
 cently, and then before Mrs. Dodds could 
 answer, I went on, "I see him going up every 
 day almost. A tall old man with a limp." 
 
 Mrs. Dodds's face expressed excitement 
 but she was not a gossip. "That is Mr. Wil 
 liam B. Clancy. He is he was an old friend 
 of her husband. But you must be mistaken 
 in thinking that he goes up there every day?" 
 There was a distinct interrogation at the end 
 of the sentence. 
 
 "I doubtless am," I laughed. "See how 
 one may hypnotize oneself, and what human 
 testimony is worth. I thought he was her 
 father, and when I saw him once or twice, I 
 imagined he came every day." She looked at 
 me keenly. I knew that he came almost every 
 day, that he stayed to dinner often, that a 
 caterer's man came at seven o'clock with the
 
 198 'The Highroad 
 
 elaborate meal and stayed to see that it was 
 sent into the dining-room. One hears a great 
 deal in the shaft of a dumb waiter. But there 
 is an old proverb which says that "Silence is 
 the god of the lucky."
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 199 
 
 XVIII 
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 
 
 After Genevieve had sailed away with advice 
 as plain as I could give, I went up to Cam 
 bridge and Robert came home with me. 
 
 I found him much more agreeable than I had 
 expected. Prolmann and his secretary and 
 Madame Vestrine had done wonders for the 
 boy. He was still a boy, of course. In that 
 lay his charm. 
 
 There were no complaints from him when 
 the smothering heat of July came upon us. 
 Some days we would take the boat to Long 
 Branch, on others we would go up to the casino 
 in the park or to Claremont for dinner. But our 
 own little cold dinners in the negligee of home 
 and in the half dusk were more comfortable. 
 
 I grew fond of Robert then. He had a sweet 
 nature too sweet a nature, I felt sure, to make 
 his way in the rough and tumble of the financial 
 world. And yet he had no real mind for a 
 profession. I thought a good deal of Robert's 
 future. 
 
 It was in July that we became friends with
 
 2oo The Highroad 
 
 Mrs. Wallingford. For some days I had not 
 seen "the Great William B." limping up the 
 stairs, nor had I heard the sounds of gay 
 laughter and the popping of champagne corks. 
 One morning I read in my Herald that Mr. 
 Clancy had gone west upon an important rail 
 road matter. He would go on to the north 
 west and be gone a month. I was sure from 
 the sounds above that Mrs. Wallingford was 
 still in the house. Tire caterer came as usual, 
 but with no such elaboration of equipment. I 
 could open the door of the dumb waiter and 
 see what went up, as well as the champagne 
 bottles and pati terrines that came down in the 
 mornings. Sometimes there had been broken 
 china and glasses after a particularly lively 
 supper. 
 
 Mrs. Wallingford seemed to have few 
 women visitors and most of them came in the 
 morning. In the evenings and afternoons of 
 the first month we came, there had been three 
 constant visitors. Usually they came sep 
 arately, but sometimes they happened in 
 together. They almost never all dined there, 
 but sometimes I heard all three voices at sup 
 per. There was a delightful big bow window 
 in each back room of the apartments. I used
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 201 
 
 this room for my bed-room, but evidently Mrs. 
 Wallingford used hers for a dining-room, for I 
 could hear the sounds of supper in the window 
 on warm spring nights. I could hear very few 
 words, but enough to know that the big, ath 
 letic, highly-colored clergyman who was so 
 often a guest, was not leading Mrs. Walling 
 ford and her friends in prayer. 
 
 This clergyman I once went to hear preach 
 later, simply to become accustomed to the 
 cadences of his powerful voice. I sat in a pew 
 in his well-filled church and heard him preach 
 practical life. His text was from Habakkuk: 
 "Woe is him that giveth his neighbor drink, 
 that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him 
 drunken also." 
 
 His congregation was made up of all sorts of 
 people, as the pews were free and he had ad 
 mirers in all classes, but I doubt if any of them 
 enjoyed that sermon as much as I did. 
 
 Church had grown to be a habit with me, and 
 it was not until the next autumn that I discov 
 ered that Mr. Bliss Mr. Bliss of Fowlers- 
 burg had charge of the most fashionable 
 church in New York. When I heard it I 
 laughed, and I made one comment to myself: 
 "You cannot keep us down!"
 
 2O2 'The Highroad 
 
 It came to my ears later that Mr. Bliss was 
 now exercising his tact toward a very rich, 
 very stupid man, whose temper had been 
 soured by the social successes of a sister-in- 
 law who was then in the act of leading the 
 family into the giddy heights of "society." 
 This sister-in-law, as a matter of fact, created 
 the "new" society in New York, the society 
 which is founded upon money. She had a 
 sense of humor and no bump of reverence. 
 When her heavy brother-in-law asked for rever 
 ence, as the head of the family, she gave him 
 the sort of laughter which he furiously likened 
 to the crackling of thorns under a pot. She 
 asked "society" to go to the great house he 
 had built and see how funny he and his wife 
 were. She entertained guests with stories of 
 the economies of a man whose income was 
 three millions a year. 
 
 Mr. Bliss soothed the baited one's sore 
 nerves by showing him how he could distance 
 her by becoming a great philanthropist. Inci 
 dentally, Mr. Bliss became his almoner and a 
 part of his church. Mr. Bliss had first been a 
 mission worker in New York. He left Fow- 
 lersburg because in a moment of a return to 
 nature he married the paid organist. I went
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 203 
 
 to Mr. Bliss' church. He welcomed me with 
 solemn joy. I was the mother-in-law of Lord 
 Horton. Like Chester, he needed friends of 
 his youth who were presentable in his new 
 field of action. 
 
 This story has no coherence, I see. I digress 
 like any other old woman. 
 
 The third friend of Mrs. Wallingford was a 
 mystery to me for a long time. I should 
 never have dreamed of asking questions of the 
 janitress, and it would have done no good had 
 I done so, as Mrs. Wallingford' s visitors were 
 more than freehanded. But one day I saw his 
 picture in the Herald and recognized it, with a 
 tingling shock. He was one of the greatest of 
 financiers, a man whose projects were world 
 wide greater even than "the great William 
 B." He was a thin, spare, active-looking 
 man, with brilliant eyes set very close to 
 gether. I studied his face with curiosity. 
 These men made Mrs. Wallingford very inter 
 esting to me. 
 
 My admiration for her was acute at first, and 
 then what a fool she was to risk her reputa 
 tion! Both of these men were married. So 
 was the clergyman, but I left him out. What 
 was she doing? What was she going to do?
 
 2O4 Tbe Highroad 
 
 The situation lay there before me like a puz 
 zle, and the great question finally became, 
 what was I going to do? To let this situation 
 alone was impossible. I needed too much. 
 Do not imagine that I put it to myself like 
 that. But rich men, men who juggled with 
 the finances of the world, were valuable friends, 
 if one knew how to use them. That Mrs. Wal- 
 lingford did not know. 
 
 The hall of the apartment house was simply 
 the old basement front room. (The janitress 
 pigged along in a room or two behind.) It had 
 been made pretty with stained glass, an open 
 fire-place and soft couches. It was an easy 
 place to linger for a moment before mounting 
 the stairs, and one day I was there waiting 
 for Robert to come downstairs, when Mrs. 
 Wallingford came in. She looked pale from 
 the heat and sat down hastily, almost strug 
 gling for breath. Robert came down the stairs 
 and faced her, as she sat there pale and ex 
 hausted. He gave a soft little exclamation of 
 concern at the sight of her suffering, and tak 
 ing up a palm leaf fan, which lay on the table, 
 began fanning her. 
 
 "May I get you a glass of water, some 
 wine anything?" he asked. His manner was
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 205' 
 
 perfect. He had never seen her before. She 
 looked at him gratefully with her pretty, one 
 sided smile which showed a dimple in her 
 cheek. . She was almost as old as I, but there 
 was an indefinable girlishness about her, some 
 thing sweet, appealing, tender. 
 
 I joined my solicitude to Robert's. She 
 assured us that it was a momentary faintness 
 due to the heat. She had not been well of late. 
 She ought to get out of town. 
 
 Robert (whom I had introduced as my son) 
 went upstairs with her. 
 
 The next morning I mounted to her apart 
 ment to ask about her health. I found her in 
 a bed-room which should have been preserved 
 in a museum as typical. 
 
 She had taken the dark middle room just 
 back of the "parlor" as her bed-room. The 
 bed was on a dais which jutted out into the 
 room, the head coming against the wall. At 
 first in the dim rose-shaded lights this bed 
 looked like something very handsome, and 
 then I saw what it was. An old-fashioned four 
 poster bedstead had been painted old ivory 
 color and set against the wall. Between the 
 posts at the head had been hung a high relief 
 of Delia Robbia's singing boys in plaster with
 
 206 fbe Highroad 
 
 an ivory finish. From the ceiling swung a 
 canopy of rose-colored tarlatan in full folds, 
 enveloping the bed and the dais. The walls of 
 the room had first been covered with pink and 
 then hung in full folds of the tarlatan. Folds 
 of the thin stuff draped the dressing-table, 
 which glittered with ivory and gold. A cheval 
 glass, and a six-fold screen of mirrors, set in 
 gilt garlands, enlarged the room and reflected 
 all this soft rosiness, which was full of the 
 scent of orris and carnation, making a peculiar, 
 pungent combination which took my nerves. 
 Hot as it was, there were a half dozen candles 
 lighted under pink shades. Mrs. Wallingford 
 lay on the wide bed in a nightgown (if you 
 could imagine so wonderful a creation as made 
 for darkness) which showed her neck and arms. 
 Across her feet was a spread of lace lined with 
 pink, each fold as exact as though it had been 
 drawn by a rule and compass. She did not 
 seem to be reading. There was no light suffi 
 cient for reading. She was simply lying there 
 like a great white rose in her pink nest. Even 
 the lace handkerchief in her hand seemed to 
 be arranged as part of the picture. 
 
 She was most agreeable, almost cordial in a 
 languid way. And with a childish naivett she
 
 My Neighbor's Ways 207 
 
 asked about Robert, and told me to ask him 
 to come and see her. 
 
 "He was so kind," she said. 
 
 As I went downstairs I met Van Nest, the 
 great financier, with his bright eyes glancing at 
 me curiously, coming up the stairs. I did not 
 wonder how long Mrs. Wallingford kept him 
 waiting, he, whose time was so precious, while 
 she dressed for a visitor.
 
 208 'The Highroad 
 
 XIX 
 
 / Plant a Seed 
 
 In the days which followed, we came to 
 know Mrs. Wallingford very well, and I think 
 she felt that we were a godsend to her indolent 
 life. She of course knew something of us, or 
 thought she did, and like all women in her 
 position, she may then have dreamed of hav 
 ing some friends who might make her inde 
 pendent of the society which was bit by bit 
 drawing away from her. 
 
 She was almost simple-minded, disarmingly 
 so, almost lovable in her ingenuousness, 
 although love for her was inhibited in me by 
 the contempt with which she filled me. She 
 seemed to have no will-power at all, no re 
 serves except the reserve of indolence. She 
 gave of herself out of her sweetness, as a 
 flower gives perfume. It was a sensuous per 
 fume, something that troubled. I could recon 
 struct her marriage. I could picture to myself 
 that young girl who met the admiration of 
 everybody with kindness and who had no
 
 I Plant a Seed 209 
 
 hardness anywhere with which to rebuff. The 
 older man had simply taken what she had no 
 power to refuse and history was doubtless 
 repeating itself. 
 
 Nature is never more blandly oblivious of 
 our frantic civilization than in a woman like 
 this. Is she a weed or a flower? What is a 
 flower except a weed that appeals to some one 
 of our senses. Our scheme of civilization is 
 utilitarian, founded on the inheritance of 
 property, and this woman will never keep in 
 line. The women who do are quite right in 
 condemning her, in pushing her out of the way. 
 
 I knew that Mrs. Wallingford had no money. 
 Every one possessed that bit of information, 
 and yet she spent money lavishly. She seemed 
 to have no idea of its value. I saw very soon 
 that the expenditures of the little apartment 
 would serve to keep up a house. I doubt not, 
 in fact I know, that the portfolio in her gay 
 little Louis XV. desk grew packages of pink 
 bank notes, that her debts were paid by a 
 "secretary." She gave ways and means no 
 thought at all. She rested upon life as tran 
 quilly as she rested on her rosy bed. 
 
 It was through an accident that I met Mr. 
 Van Nest.
 
 2io 'The Highroad 
 
 I too was a little bored. New York was 
 very dreary and depressing, and sometimes 
 when the silence above told me that my neigh 
 bor was alone, I would go up in the evening 
 with Robert. The boy must have some one 
 upon whom to practice his social graces, and 
 Mrs. Wallingford was thirty-five. 
 
 One evening we had gone upstairs about 
 nine. We found the lattices of the drawing- 
 room wide open to catch the air, the pink- 
 shaded candles few and dim, and Mrs. 
 Wallingford a fluff of white lace lying idly in 
 a long chair. We came in without disturbing 
 her, and sat and talked of the heat, of the 
 nothings which make up so much of social con 
 verse that it seems wonderful that we should 
 take the trouble to speak. 
 
 Robert told her of some old French songs 
 which Madame Vestrine had given him, and he 
 went downstairs and brought them up. They 
 lighted the candles at the piano and tried them 
 over, the quaint music, written for a spinnet, 
 the sentimental old words sounding strange in 
 their full rich voices with the piano. 
 
 Mrs. Wallingford's maid opened the door 
 and a man came in. Mrs. Wallingford turned 
 her face over her shoulder, smiled, and with-
 
 I Plant a Seed 211 
 
 out other greeting mentioned Van Nest's 
 name and mine, and went on with her song. 
 No proof of intimacy could have been more 
 complete. 
 
 He sat down beside me in the window and 
 presently we talked. After the song was fin 
 ished Mrs. Wallingford came over with Robert, 
 and I would have gone, but they begged us to 
 stay and I found in Van Nest an attitude 
 which puzzled me then. He seemed glad that 
 we were there and he wanted to keep us. He 
 spoke to me frankly of Mrs. Wallingford' s 
 loneliness, and showed that he knew that we 
 had lightened it. He said that she would not 
 go away. And there was that in his voice, 
 gratified vanity, whatever it may be, which 
 gave me to understand that she would not go 
 while he remained. 
 
 It was late when we left them, and I would 
 have given anything to have sat downstairs 
 and gone over that affair with some intelligent 
 human being. When Henry and William 
 James gossip, how delightful they must find it! 
 
 We saw as much of Van Nest during the 
 next ten days as though he had been a friend. 
 My "ignorance" of New York stood me here. 
 I knew nothing from gossip, of course; how
 
 212 The Highroad 
 
 could I? And I am sure that in Van Nest's 
 eyes I was too innocent, too stupid, to see any 
 thing for myself. It has been my lot to under 
 stand why men like fools of women. They 
 have shown it to me, because they have so 
 often done me the honor to consider me half- 
 fool. Men love to talk, to pose before a mirror, 
 as it were, and they want the mirror to be shal 
 low and really to hold no permanent reflections. 
 They do the posing for their own pleasure and 
 want to leave no records. 
 
 Here and now, as many other times, I ached 
 to be my own self. How I wanted to show 
 myself that I understood this man, whose 
 mind was considered so great that kings and 
 emperors had sought his society that they 
 might learn some of his secrets for their 
 people. Truly to interest is so easy that I 
 wonder why any woman is uninteresting, if that 
 is her chief care. All that is necessary is to 
 know what is in the mind of a man at the 
 moment and throw a new light on it, or play 
 with it, so that he has a chance to bring it out 
 into the open. Nobody on this earth cares for 
 any truly new thing that has not a vital asso 
 ciation with (not the present) his personal pres 
 ent. Wit only reaches its point when it is a
 
 I Plant a Seed 213 
 
 new light upon what we already love or hate. 
 And what trivial things were in the mind of 
 this "great" man! It did not take me long to 
 realize that his greatness consisted simply in 
 seeing the world small. It was as though he 
 had a world in miniature before his eyes, like a 
 living map like a game. Here was a line of 
 steamships, and here a railroad, so much corn 
 grew in this section, the population yonder 
 consumed so much. Some other man who 
 owned something which this man wanted had 
 no map, and was like a blind man going over a 
 path which he vaguely knew from having been 
 led over it by some predecessor. It was easy 
 for the man with the map in his head to be 
 wilder that blind man, put him in a new path, 
 alter his goal, and take his business. 
 
 But something which this man with the vi 
 sion of the earth did not see small was himself. 
 I could see how all at once in his later years 
 there had come to him a ,sudden feeling of 
 fright that there was something he had 
 missed. It was something that all the poets, 
 the painters, the historians even, had agreed 
 was the greatest thing in the whole universe, 
 the thing which gave savor to everything else. 
 And he, like thousands of other men married
 
 214 The Highroad 
 
 in their youth, had never felt it. I could imag 
 ine how Mrs. Wallingford's one-sided smile, 
 her tender eyes, her air of "I am kind, let me 
 love you I ant kind," had first made him believe 
 that this was still possible for him. It was 
 something that she could not help, for which 
 she was in no sense morally responsible, if 
 after all, anybody is morally responsible for 
 anything. Why is a too soft heart, a desire to 
 be held and protected and sheltered, different 
 from a soft complexion? Do we create our 
 selves? In his very dignified Gifford lectures, 
 Prof. William James of Harvard tells of a 
 woman who said she "loved to cuddle up to 
 God." To some women the understanding of 
 God is not given, although the instinct to 
 "cuddle" is there. 
 
 I saw much in this week, and the chief thing 
 was that I must get away. I was growing too 
 intimate with the great Van Nest; and the 
 thought that I, with my ambitions, should be 
 flying from that possibility gave me smiles. 
 But I was on the wrong road, and if I went 
 farther I should be hopelessly lost. Mrs. Wal- 
 lingford would not do. I suppose had I at this 
 time ventured one hint to Van Nest he would 
 have given me a "tip" on the market or even
 
 1 Plant a Seed 2 15 
 
 made some investments for me and despised 
 me forever after. As I have clearly seen many 
 times, money may be purchased too dearly. 
 The bare possibility of money is so often the 
 lure which ruins. But then ^Esop, who pic 
 tured most things, gave us that too in the long 
 ago in his dog and stream story. 
 
 One evening Mrs. Wallingford brought Mr. 
 Van Nest downstairs to us, and he asked Rob 
 ert and me to go off for a cruise in his yacht 
 with Mrs. Wallingford. 
 
 I thank God for presence of mind. I pro 
 duced a telegram calling me to West Virginia 
 the next day, but there was no reason why 
 Robert should not go. I had many thoughts 
 over the situation. I had waited late at night 
 for Robert to come bright-eyed down the 
 stairs. The boy was not a fool and he had 
 attracted Mrs. Wallingford in a way which had 
 probably never come to her before. I let my 
 fancy go as to the effect this sudden intimacy 
 of theirs, the woman whose ties seemed to be 
 so many and the boy whose ties were all to 
 make, would have upon those who claimed 
 her attention. In the necessities of the case 
 there could be no violence of any sort. If 
 Robert was to be eliminated it would most
 
 216 The Highroad 
 
 naturally be by that method known as kicking 
 him upstairs to bed. His reluctance to be 
 take himself to innocuous rest would doubtless 
 measure the distance to which he was elevated. 
 
 Two days after my talk with Mr. Van Nest, I 
 went down to Fowlersburg, leaving Robert 
 behind. 
 
 We sat in the window the last evening, my 
 only son and I, and talked of many things of 
 the letters from Lucile, of little Jane at school, 
 of Madame Vestrine. 
 
 "I am gratified that you had the association 
 with a woman of the world," I said to him. 
 
 "She made me see life a little more broadly," 
 he answered. 
 
 "She had been disappointed in her own 
 son." 
 
 "I think," Robert said hesitatingly, lighting 
 a new cigarette, "that he was what she should 
 have expected. She married a man she should 
 never have married for love, so called. Her 
 son was born of that union." 
 
 I sat there gasping. I think I almost blushed 
 at these words from the boy. 
 
 "What could she expect except a lapse from 
 the highest civilization? a return to nature?" 
 
 "I am beginning to think," I allowed my-
 
 I Plant a Seed 217 
 
 self to say, "that the rule does not hold good. 
 I married your father for love." 
 
 "But, would you if he had been a laborer 
 on your father's farm?" 
 
 Truly, I felt that in my son Robert there 
 might not be great force, the great energy 
 which is but another name for righting instinct, 
 but there was more insight than in most. I 
 might even, in time, take him into my confi 
 dence. As a matter of fact I never have. 
 Our manner to each other is, however, one of 
 complete understanding.
 
 218 The Highroad 
 
 XX 
 
 Fowlersburg 
 
 My visit to Fowlersburg interested and 
 amused me more than any experience I had 
 ever had in my life. Now it was that I thor 
 oughly realized what an education the passing 
 years had been to me, what new vision and 
 understanding was mine. How sorry I felt for 
 those who, seeing, saw not. When I left Fow 
 lersburg I had had nothing real with which to 
 compare people. I valued them wrongly, 
 sometimes too high and sometimes too low. 
 Here on one little canvas was the drama of 
 life, all within one's vision, not partly hid 
 den as in larger places. I do not wonder that 
 it is the men from small towns who go to cities 
 and control them. It is a simple problem as 
 soon as they learn, as Van Nest had learned, 
 that great concerns follow exactly the same 
 laws as small ones. Society is necessarily 
 much the same everywhere, being made up of 
 individuals of the human family. Again, here 
 in Fowlersburg I thought how little the ma-
 
 Fowlersburg 219 
 
 jority of the world sees. When I went out to 
 "tea" (it was "supper" when they were not 
 entertaining) or to the various forms of enter 
 tainment to which they invited me, almost 
 every one expressed surprise that I did not 
 find it dull in Fowlersburg. "Why?" I some 
 times asked. 
 
 "Oh, but you must miss society. Although," 
 they would often add, "I suppose you realize 
 its hollowness." (I wonder who was the first 
 person to call society "hollow.") "But even 
 so," they would go on, "there are all the ad 
 vantages of music and the drama." 
 
 And I used to answer politely, and look at 
 the speaker and fairly ache to tell her that she 
 was a character in a drama, that the stage could 
 never produce anything so interesting. 
 
 Isn't it strange that people will die of ennui 
 in the midst of a life and people that would 
 thrill them with interest if it were shown to 
 them through the eyes of another? 
 
 Fowlersburg fairly reeked with characters 
 and they lived stories, too, which are worthy 
 of an artist in narrative. One woman down 
 there possessed my mind. Often I have seen a 
 landscape which for an instant developed itself 
 through an atmosphere which made my. heart
 
 220 'The Highroad 
 
 ache because I was not Corot that I might 
 record the fleeting Mona Lisa smile of mys 
 terious nature. So Mrs. Cavendish tormented 
 me. She was old, old in body, and her spirit 
 was young and hated her old body and tried to 
 hide it. She came to "tea" with us one even 
 ing when Mrs. Ward had invited a number of 
 her old friends, and she sat there gay of voice, 
 youthfully dressed, wigged, scattering the wit 
 ticisms, the theories of life, the anecdotes that 
 she had taken from years of reading but which 
 her audience accepted as original, her poor, 
 lined, parchment-like old face covered by a 
 heavy veil hanging from a "picture hat," 
 which she lifted for each mouthful of food. Is 
 there anything in fiction, in drama, if you will, 
 stranger than this woman? How Thackeray 
 would have loved her! 
 
 Mrs. Ward came to take me home with her 
 the day I reached the town, which I had found 
 greatly changed. The hotel was a new one, 
 rejoicing in its modern improvements of 
 fringed napkins, blue glass finger-bowls and 
 red brussels carpets. The food in that land of 
 plenty was tough or canned, and to me, a little 
 dainty about what I ate in these latter years 
 since the flavor of the pickled pork which was
 
 Fowlersburg 221 
 
 my husband's favorite dish had gone from my 
 palate, it was impossible. When my old 
 acquaintance came to see me, I rejoiced at the 
 prospect of being asked out to supper, and my 
 joy shone in my face. 
 
 Mrs. Ward was noticeably nervous. She had 
 put on her best dress, which was a black gros- 
 grain silk trimmed with jet, and a new pair of 
 shoes. The yellow soles of those new shoes, 
 and the tight strings to the black lace bonnet 
 which sat, narrow and assertive, on the tightly 
 crimped hair above the pretty forehead, gave 
 me my first hint of what an important person I 
 had grown to be in Fowlersburg. 
 
 "Chester said he had seen you in New York, 
 and that you were just like old times" she 
 held me away from her and looked at me with 
 real affection. "I couldn't believe that you'd 
 come back just the same old neighbor that 
 used to pass cake over the fence." I had for 
 gotten the cake-passing episode because it was 
 never a habit of mine, but it had evidently 
 become part of my history since my daughter 
 had married a lord, and I was ready enough to 
 accept it. Mrs. Ward belonged to one of the 
 real old blue-blood families of the state. 
 Quite unconsciously she was taking me into an
 
 222 I'be Highroad 
 
 intimacy which, with all the respect we had 
 had in Fowlersburg in those old days I had 
 never enjoyed. I had never been really one of 
 them. 
 
 "And now," she went on, "if you can put up 
 with us, won't you bring your trunk and come 
 up and stay? Now Chester has gone, I'm all 
 alone. Sometimes it seems to me I can't 
 stand it." 
 
 "I should think," I ventured later, when I 
 had put on my bonnet (I had put on mourning 
 for my father down here) and gone home with 
 her, "that you would go to Washington and 
 make a home for Chester." 
 
 "I would in a minute, but he doesn't think 
 it best. You know his friends are 'all very 
 wealthy people, and he has to make as good a 
 show as anybody. If you do not, Chester 
 says, people will think you are nobody, and if 
 that happens he never will get any business, 
 Chester says." 
 
 The refrain to every sentence was, "Chester 
 says." Chester was the heart of her life, and 
 like many another mother she sat at home 
 and economized that her son should have "his 
 chance." I wondered what my children would 
 have done had that been my ideal of duty. I
 
 Fowlersburg 223 
 
 suppose the sort of teachers of ethics who 
 preach in pulpits or newspaper editorials would 
 assure me that they would have made good 
 Americans, that the iron of self-reliance would 
 have developed in them as it had in their 
 father and in me, that I had dwarfed their lives 
 by having miserable snobbish ideals myself 
 and educating them, forcing them, into false 
 positions. That may be, but unfortunately I 
 notice that the young men and women, and 
 even the older ones, who were educated in all 
 of these strong American ideals consider the 
 finest flower of their success an admission into 
 the society where my children live, of which 
 they are a part. Lucile, my good narrow 
 Lucile, who in her natural environment would 
 have read papers on "The Influence of Byzan 
 tine Architecture on Russia," to Fowlersburg 
 women who have never seen a Russian in their 
 lives, is a figure of importance even in her own 
 world of English political and social life, just 
 as she would have been in the small world of 
 Fowlersburg; the big world of England being 
 made up of precisely the same sort of people 
 with a different education. 
 
 This is not a oopular theory, it is simply the 
 truth.
 
 224 fbe Highroad 
 
 I grew very fond of Mrs. Ward. I was not 
 only approved by Chester, but I was a constaat 
 source of pride to her. She took excited 
 pleasure from reading in the grimy little even 
 ing paper which was thrown over the fence at 
 supper time every day, that the mother of 
 Lady Horton, who was an attractive addition 
 to the English peerage, was the guest of Mrs. 
 Sarah Canfield Ward of Tenth Street. There 
 followed the usual spread-eagle account of 
 Lucile's beauty and accomplishments which 
 made her "the pride of royalty," the paper 
 said. 
 
 Mrs. Ward used to sit up half the summer 
 nights to ask me questions concerning the 
 habits of the Queen of England and her fam 
 ily. To my amazement I discovered that there 
 was not a sixteenth cousin of a royalty in 
 Europe whose history was unknown to my 
 hostess. She had had a Virginia uncle who 
 was a traveled young man, and in his youth 
 had once come across that adventurer who 
 eloped with the Prince Consort's mother, and 
 after her death carried her embalmed body 
 about Europe in his luggage until Queen Vic 
 toria persuaded him to bury it. Mrs. Ward 
 enjoyed scandals, but her kindness of heart
 
 Fowlersburg 225 
 
 prevented her from believing or repeating the 
 stories of laxity which are always rife in a town 
 like Fowlersburg, where the people grow into a 
 liking for coarse intellectual flavors through a 
 lack of education in the finer. Few of those 
 who repeat scandals concerning their friends 
 believe the stories. They go on receiving and 
 visiting, in these small towns, ladies concern 
 ing whom tales are told, whose shocking coarse 
 ness is the invention of the lowest minds. 
 Mrs. Ward, a little sentimental, truly sweet, 
 would have none of this; but undoubtedly she 
 revelled in the "romances" of royalty, and she 
 listened breathless to the story of the Duchess 
 of Belcourt. I had actually seen this heroine 
 of romance. 
 
 I had a pleasant summer down there and I 
 grew very, very fond of Mrs. Ward. Chester 
 made a flying visit home, and would have given 
 me some of the attentions due a young woman, 
 but I grew suddenly old and almost frumpy 
 during his stay, and closer than ever to his 
 mother. I could not afford to have the one 
 servant in the house carrying tales of "Chester 
 Ward and the widow." I was a quiet, black- 
 clad, head-achey little figure during his stay, 
 which was not long.
 
 226 The Highroad 
 
 It was during this visit that my trustees 
 kindly offered to relieve me of my "wild 
 lands." But a word front Mr. Van Nest had 
 fallen on my ear, and something of his way of 
 looking at this earth we live on had been for an 
 instant possible to me. "West Virginia," Van 
 Nest had said, "is the most interesting and 
 curious state in this Union. It is practically a 
 virgin state, rich in mineral as anyone of the 
 western states, and right here at the markets 
 for its coal and iron." At any rate I could 
 add this opinion to my assets. 
 
 I gently, timidly, mentioned this (quite as 
 an original opinion) to Mr. Less, and was met 
 with a slight lifting of the eyebrows and a 
 superior smile. 
 
 "There is, I believe, coal on the land, is 
 there not?" This was pure guess work upon 
 my part, from Mr. Van Nest's remarks. 
 
 "It may be a little," Mr. Less said, "but it 
 is quite undeveloped and far from markets. 
 There is no possible chance of the Pennsyl 
 vania coal fields allowing West Virginia coal to 
 take any place for another hundred years, and 
 by that time your land will be eaten up by 
 taxes. You had much better give it away. I 
 advise you to take any offer for it."
 
 Fowlersburg 227 
 
 "But," I said, more and more tirmdly, "my 
 husband must have had some reason for buy 
 ing it, and I think I should keep it for the chil 
 dren. " Then I met with some of that bullying 
 which, had I been really the weak, gentle, 
 almost tearful little woman I seemed, would 
 have certainly been successful. Less assured 
 me that as an executor of my husband's will 
 he must insist upon my taking his advice. 
 "Your children will never forgive you. You 
 have a duty to perform toward them. When 
 your husband left you everything, he left it as 
 a trust, with me as adviser to you." 
 
 "He must have wanted the children to have 
 it," I said obstinately. Mr. Less even sent the 
 clergyman to remonstrate with me, and Mrs. 
 Ward, through a sense of duty, told me that 
 Mrs. Less had told her that my obstinacy had 
 caused Mr. Less sleepless nights. But even 
 for him I could not give up my "estates," and 
 his "sleepless nights" made me certain of 
 what I had begun to suspect that somewhere 
 in the future there might be something. 
 
 I slipped through that summer enjoying the 
 social spectacle of Fowlersburg and as always, 
 everywhere, learning, learning. Somebody 
 has said somewhere, that there is no book so
 
 228 The Highroad 
 
 stupid, so banal, that it does not contain some 
 scraps of information. Surely there is no com 
 munity of people which is not teeming with 
 illustrations of success and failure and the 
 roots thereof. Psychology is the most inter 
 esting study in the world, and now that I have 
 time I shall search out its rules as formulated 
 by the wise. But there are no new examples to 
 present to me; I have seen them all. 
 
 Robert did not write me full letters, merely 
 notes from here and there. He spent much of 
 his time on the yacht of Van Nest. 
 
 By the papers I saw that "the great William 
 B. Clancy" was again in the social world, enter 
 taining magnificently at Newport. Mrs. Wall- 
 ingford never went to Newport, though some 
 times to Narragansett; but wherever she went 
 Robert was in her train. That he did not get 
 into the newspapers was to me an evidence of 
 infinite tact. Every Sunday's edition I took 
 up with the fear of seeing his frank smiling 
 face looking out in a "half-tone." 
 
 It was not long before Genevieve appeared 
 in the accounts of Newport. She had spent a 
 great deal more money than we could afford, 
 while in Paris, and the results seemed to be 
 showing at Newport. How I prayed that one
 
 Fowlersburg 229 
 
 of the young or old millionaires would take 
 her off my hands! She seemed to be having a 
 success with what was in those days known as 
 "the Brass Band" set. Genevieve was past- 
 mistress of the art of insolence, and in that 
 company there were plenty of glass houses. 
 This caused her to "get along," but it did not 
 marry her off. In any set a man wants some 
 thing more intimate than a battering ram for a 
 wife. When one like Genevieve is chosen it is 
 usually because she has been idealized. No 
 man ever really knows a woman even after he 
 marries her. It is not because she is difficult 
 to understand, or indeed different from a man 
 of the same type. It is simply that he must 
 see her through the film of sex. 
 
 To most people Genevieve was antagonistic. 
 Underneath even her best manners men felt her 
 contempt for them, the contempt born of a 
 friendship for Lili, a contempt that I knew was 
 in the beginning born of me, but which I had 
 almost always succeeded in hiding even from 
 myself. Through Genevieve's short letters 
 there was always a strain which "rubbed me 
 the wrong way." I was angry that even I was 
 shown her unpleasantness. A woman of wis 
 dom, a safe woman, hides her worst traits.
 
 230 'The Highroad 
 
 Sometimes I answered these letters in a man 
 ner which made my cheeks burn as I put the 
 words on paper. And then I destroyed what 
 I had written. I did not intend to have any 
 thing in my family save sweet peace. 
 
 How I writhed under Genevieve's vulgarity! 
 All the more because some of it came to her 
 through me. We talk a great deal of mother- 
 love. It is truly the passion of my life. What 
 have I lived for, save my children? They are 
 my immortality. They have in them Me with 
 a new start. And yet how well I understand a 
 cruel parent! It is their own sins, their own 
 vices, their own tendencies born again, that 
 they are crushing. How I pitied and hated 
 Genevieve's ignorance! Pity is the feeling to 
 give those who are called "bad." These 
 "New Thought" people have stumbled into a 
 truth or two. "Goodness" means nothing ex 
 cept the element of growth, the thing which is 
 "good" for us, for our bodies, our minds, our 
 general happiness, and "bad" is degeneration, 
 decay. That is why codes of morals are 
 different in different civilizations. Polygamy 
 was right and "blessed of God" when a vast 
 new land must be peopled, but when we are 
 confronted with, a greater population than the
 
 Fowlers burg 231 
 
 earth can comfortably feed nothing can be so 
 "bad." The "bad" in this world those who 
 grow ugly with sin are those who do not know 
 how to extract the sweetness from the world, 
 to live in harmony with their place and time. 
 
 For Genevieve personally I could be said to 
 have no love, for myself I had a great deal, 
 and I sacrificed much that her way should be 
 easy. I kept up a constant correspondence 
 with Mrs. Dodds, and I asked Lucile to write 
 to her also. I wished to surround Genevieve, 
 to soften by the cushions of our convention 
 ality, our correctness, the angularities of her 
 nature. She must not be just for self, but also 
 for Lucile and me. 
 
 And while I was bolstering Genevieve, her 
 triumphs at Newport were assisting me. I 
 smiled sometimes at the flattering attentions 
 given me by the young girls in Fowlersburg. 
 Each of them saw herself, in fancy, sharing 
 our life in New York. They were insistent 
 that I should bring Genevieve down and allow 
 them to give her a "good time." 
 
 It was in the middle of August that Mrs. 
 Van Nest died and I saw by the papers that 
 Mr. Van Nest had taken his two daughters 
 and gone abroad.
 
 232 I'be Highroad 
 
 Mrs. Wallingford went somewhere on the 
 Maine coast, and when next I heard from 
 Robert the letter was written at her cottage 
 there.
 
 I Add to My Income 233 
 
 XXI 
 
 / Add to My Income 
 
 There seemed to be nothing for me to do but 
 to take a house in New York. The apartment 
 had been a blunder. Mrs. Wallingford was an 
 acquaintance I could not afford to have, nor 
 could we afford to be hidden in an apartment. 
 Our vintage required the bush. 
 
 After infinite worry and trouble I found a 
 house on Gramercy Park. It was too large, 
 too expensive, but I would risk one year of it. 
 I was forced into it. Genevieve drove me. 
 She fancied that it was entirely by her brutal 
 will and I was indifferent concerning her 
 thought. I wanted to do what I could for her 
 ultimate happiness, that she might be at least 
 no disadvantage to the rest of us. To do the 
 best for her was instinct with me simply 
 because she was my child. It had nothing to 
 do with my heart or head. It was primitive. 
 
 I was terribly anxious now about money. 
 Some nights my fears caused me to see myself 
 building a fire of my last possessions, this
 
 234 The Highroad 
 
 using of money like millionaires when we had 
 almost nothing. I determined that when we 
 reached the bottom of the forty thousand dol 
 lars of life insurance which my husband had 
 left me I would stop. And then what would 
 Genevieve do? 
 
 But the problem of finding a larger income 
 somewhere, somehow, was ever before me. 
 If I had been left alone I should probably have 
 made a fair business woman, but my mind was 
 developed in another direction. My income 
 must come from something which I could do 
 secretly. Those advertisements in the news 
 papers offering ladies "occupation at home" 
 must have been started by a student of social 
 conditions, but I was not sufficiently stupid as 
 to try that avenue to fortune. 
 
 The time I chose to come to New York 
 marked some sharp changes. For example, 
 what is known as "yellow journalism" was first 
 sufficiently conspicuous among intelligent 
 people to acquire the name. All sorts of 
 replies have been made to the question as to 
 why it was named "yellow." It really came 
 from an editorial by Charles Dudley Warner, 
 \n Harper's, I think. He wrote apropos of "The 
 Yellow Book" which was then new and said
 
 I Add to My Income 235 
 
 that literature was "getting the yellows" like 
 a sick peach-tree. But did you ever stop and 
 think that there is some nerve-irritating force 
 which flows from the color yellow? I wonder 
 if the critic who will grow sarcastic over that 
 statement doubts that red inflames the bovine 
 nature? The French, those experts in the 
 study of nerves, first discovered its peculiar 
 quality, and put yellow outside their novels as 
 a cryer of the wares within. It was at this 
 time that a publisher brought out a cheap 
 magazine in yellow yellow outside and men 
 tal spoon-food within and promptly discov 
 ered how many ignorant people there were in 
 America who were pathetically in need of pre- 
 digested information upon all subjects. The 
 yellow called them and they rejoiced at finding 
 "easy reading" within. I speak of this phase 
 of New York life because I used it. 
 
 That picture of Lucile which had appeared 
 in England had taught me something; in the 
 first place, how easy it is to get into print, and 
 in the second place, that here was a powerful 
 weapon if one knew how to make it serve. 
 But then all phenomena are but tools to the 
 wise. 
 
 After we were settled in Gramercy Park, I
 
 236 T'be Highroad 
 
 went to a branch post-office and secured a box 
 in the name of "Mary Clay. ' I wrote a meek 
 little letter to the editor of the newest of the 
 sensational journals and told him that I had 
 many opportunities for hearing the stories of 
 "society" both in New York and Europe and 
 that I should be very glad to sell this informa 
 tion to him secretly. My first idea was to place 
 my own name continually before the public in 
 the best manner. We are like wax, all of us, 
 ready for impressions. If we repeatedly hear 
 a thing, we end by believing it. They say now 
 that there is a physical reason for it, that every 
 thought makes a little channel in the brain like 
 a crease in a sheet of once-folded paper. If 
 the same thought runs along its channel many 
 times it ends by changing the very structure of 
 the brain. I wanted to be a part of the world's 
 idea of fashionable life. 
 
 I found the pursuit of newspaper writing not 
 only informing to the public upon my own 
 standing, but profitable and exquisitely amus 
 ing. Out of pure caprice I made and unmade. 
 My "stories" became so popular presently 
 that they were to be found almost every Sun 
 day occupying a full page in the paper I had 
 chosen. Sometimes the photographs were
 
 I Add to My Income 237 
 
 genuine and sometimes not, the stories cor 
 responding. As Mr. Whistler has suggested, 
 nature is inartistic and must be dressed up a 
 little. I made the heroes and heroines of my 
 tales better, and I made them worse as the 
 exigencies demanded, and many a girl has 
 headed into fame as an heiress and a beauty 
 because I could put my hands on a handsome 
 photograph of her. As I am not the only 
 shrewd American woman, this idea fell into 
 the minds of many others. 
 
 About this time the new magazine, whose 
 editor was entirely untrammeled by traditions 
 of any sort, and who was unable to see why a 
 monthly magazine should be less frivolous and 
 enlivening than a daily, began to publish a 
 department called, 'The American Beauty," 
 and I was one of its most useful contributors. 
 They used to pay me five or ten dollars apiece 
 for those photographs, according to their 
 rarity. Alas! How few of them were rare! 
 Photographs and cheques "for my trouble," 
 came upon me in an avalanche. The originals 
 protested to their friends, sometimes even to 
 me in my own person, when the very photo 
 graph they had pressed upon "Mary Clay" was 
 published. And they used to say very unkind
 
 238 tfbe Highroad 
 
 things about the owner of the magazine for his 
 impertinence in presenting their faces to the 
 public. 
 
 The Sunday newspapers published almost 
 anything I sent. What did they care for the 
 truth or falsity of a story, so it was sensational 
 or amusing? 
 
 When I could get no American photographs 
 I bought them from foreign photographers by 
 many devious ways. Naturally, that there 
 might be no libel suits, the American stories 
 were fairly innocuous, vulgar to the last de 
 gree but not libellous. But the royalty and 
 nobility of Europe could have any sort of 
 story told of them, limited only by my imagina 
 tion. And when, after one of my tales about 
 royalty that touched the English common 
 people on the raw, the very heir of the throne 
 changed his plans and went to visit the family 
 concerning whom the story was told, I grew 
 reckless with my new power, and took a seri 
 ous chance. I saw in a foreign paper that a 
 certain well-known peeress was about to add a 
 new bulwark to her husband's family. In an 
 other part of the paper was a notice of that 
 Vienna physician who announced his power to 
 change the sex of infants before their birth. I
 
 I Add to My Income -239 
 
 wrote a rapid account of this peeress' desire to 
 have a son, and said that the doctor had sent a 
 young assistant to England to prepare the food 
 of the mother. I sent this story to my former 
 maid in Paris and asked her to mail it there. I 
 gave a Paris address. The paper published 
 the story, and the peeress, luckily, gave birth 
 to a boy. The story was reprinted in almost 
 every newspaper in the world, and the czar of 
 Russia sent for the Vienna doctor! And I 
 alone of all the world could laugh/ 
 
 I was and am ashamed of the newspaper 
 connection. It was tawdry and cheap and 
 undignified. I despised myself when I did 
 that work, and I come so near despising my 
 self when I tell of it, that it is with an 
 effort that I write it down. It is as though 
 I were painting my own portrait in oils and 
 found myself compelled to put in some vul 
 garity of feature or expression. My only 
 excuse is (if I made excuses, which I do not) 
 that I needed the social help of newspaper 
 notice at first and after that the money that was 
 paid for my articles. I earned in this way 
 what would have been the yearly income upon 
 almost thirty thousand dollars; for the yellow 
 journals and magazines paid very handsomely
 
 240 The Highroad 
 
 for pictures and gossip in those days, before 
 everybody went into the business of supplying 
 them. 
 
 I even sometimes wrote book reviews. 
 Everybody has some vanities. I think I know 
 a good book when I read it, and I think I can 
 tell why it is good. But I wrote only one 
 good review for my papers. After that I con 
 fined myself to personal anecdotes of the 
 authors. The authors themselves are gener 
 ally happy to give an "illustrated interview" to 
 anybody and to have photographs made of 
 themselves and their most intimate surround 
 ings. I did none of this interviewing. I sug 
 gested authors and poses to the papers and 
 then rewrote the interviews. I am sure that 
 many novels owed much to my artistic 
 "reviews." 
 
 Naturally, I immediately saw a field here for 
 myself. I would write a novel and advertise it 
 by sensational 'articles. I fairly shivered with 
 nervous delight as I thought of it. I felt as a 
 scientific man must feel when he sees approach 
 ing a beautiful but unexpected end of an ex 
 periment. But like the scientific man more 
 often than not, I had made a slight error in my 
 calculations.
 
 I Add to My Income 241 
 
 Primarily, of course, I had no message for 
 the world which pushed me toward pen and 
 ink. After the fact, authors who really say 
 anything are always supplied by their solemn 
 admirers with a preconceived plan to add to 
 the world's knowledge. I have never discov 
 ered any of these. All artists produce their 
 wares for money. That rule has been so gen 
 eral that the few exceptions merely prove it 
 and these exceptions are generally working for 
 fame and doing mediocre work because it is 
 affected work, "over the heads of the people." 
 To do a thing professionally means to do it for 
 the criticism of buyers. But after I had the 
 idea, I went to my store of understanding and 
 I took of my best material to make my book. 
 I would write a real book. I had no beauties 
 of style, but I had seen, and I knew that the 
 coherent mind cannot express itself inco 
 herently. What I knew I could say. I had 
 wanted a real story of New York. Why 
 should I not write one? I remembered Flau 
 bert and Balzac. I will follow in the wake of 
 these great ones, thought I. 
 
 As I look back, I enjoyed something in those 
 months that should have warned me even then. 
 When I closed my door and sat down at my
 
 242 T'he Highroad 
 
 desk, I ceased to act. I became myself. I 
 wrote down not the expedient thing, but what 
 I actually knew. 
 
 My book was the story of Mrs. Wallingford. 
 I loved every page of the manuscript because 
 on every page was something I knew to be 
 true. And 1 even descended to the sentimen 
 tality of dreams. "Mary Clay" would not 
 only advertise it, but the great critics must 
 understand it and some day I might even 
 claim it as my own. 
 
 , Ah, but I was inexperienced! I believed 
 that the first publisher who saw it must 'take it. 
 He must recognize that here was a study of 
 a present condition of our civilization, a 
 pound of real living flesh cut from the social 
 body. 
 
 After all my experience of men, after all my 
 experience of the world, I still had that rag of 
 superstition that publishers and juries are 
 different from other people, and I, believing 
 myself intelligent, expected understanding. 
 But publishers are only Oh, Unenlightened 
 Ones! a collection of business men whose 
 constant effort it is to supply the public with 
 what they know they want. To look at a new 
 thing and choose it, guessing that the public
 
 I Add to My Income 243 
 
 will want it, is the part of the psychologist, the 
 genius, or the bankrupt. 
 
 I sent my story to a publisher who kept it 
 seven weeks. Then I wrote a note and asked 
 about it. He returned it. The enclosed let 
 ter said that it was original and clever, but 
 there was not enough story. Mrs. Walling- 
 ford neither married nor died, and she was 
 hardly sufficiently young to make a heroine. 
 If I could introduce a sweet young girl as a 
 contrast, make the young girl the heroine and 
 show her against the shadowed background of 
 Mrs. Wallingford, I might have a story. 
 
 The next publisher said that it was "clever." 
 (They all know that useful word.) But it was 
 not moral. The better class of American 
 people would not stand a book in which im 
 morality was not used as a lesson. They could 
 see no lesson in the story of Mrs. Wallingford. 
 She did not suffer. She pointed no moral. 
 Then it was that I discovered that to the 
 average human being and a publisher who 
 has not at least half his brain in sympathy 
 with the average could not make a living 
 physical well-being and a fair place in society is 
 success. That a fine nature goes astray through 
 circumstances and loses its fineness is no tra-
 
 244 fbe Highroad 
 
 gedy to the public so long as the body is 
 clothed and fed and of fairly good repute. 
 This publisher said that he thought the story 
 would work harm. It might have a sort of 
 success but it could not be permanent. 
 
 I was growing meek now, and I studied the 
 publishers. There was then a new publishing 
 house made up of young men, one of whom 
 had a reputation as a critic. They had pub 
 lished a number of commonplace books, but 
 one of late whose vulgarity was startling. It 
 was so bad in every way that the critics had 
 hardly touched it, but it was selling because 
 the author did not know it was vulgar, and 
 consequently gave his readers no clue. They 
 read as ingenuously as he wrote. Here, 
 thought I, is a publisher who cannot say that 
 this book is immoral. At least he cannot 
 object to it upon that account. And this critic 
 who is in the firm, this man who knows, surely 
 he can see what Mrs. Wallingford means. He 
 can see that she is no more immoral than life 
 itself, because she is actually true to life. 
 That she is a reality is a pity, and that she is 
 to be pitied. That she does not suffer that 
 she has no tears for herself is the core of the 
 tragedy. Surely he can see.
 
 I Add to My Income 245 
 
 He did. He wrote me that they would 
 accept the book, but that my "frank treatment 
 of the relation between the sexes would cut my 
 book off from a market that it would reach if 
 more heed were paid to the American point of 
 view." And they must ask me to omit those 
 passages that would thus give offense. I was 
 impatient for publication now, and I agreed. 
 They returned the manuscript with the objec 
 tionable passages marked. I am wondering 
 still what principle the editor used in making 
 his corrections. Then and there I saw how 
 absurd a task he had given himself and I saw 
 how many a promising book becomes inco 
 herent. Suppose an art critic, a good one, 
 were to object to a picture, say one of Ru 
 bens' or Sargent's, because it had lines of bru 
 tality. What would the world say if the critic 
 undertook to paint out the objectionable lines 
 and shadows? And yet this same thing is 
 done in publishing houses every day. 
 
 I smoothed over the rough places, and let 
 the manuscript go back to them. The book 
 was accepted and was to be brought out in a 
 month. The only reason a contract had not 
 been signed was because I was wondering how 
 I was to sign it. And then one day I had a
 
 246 The Highroad 
 
 humble letter from the firm asking me to allow 
 them to return the manuscript. They had de 
 cided after all that it was not the sort of book 
 they wanted. 
 
 My curiosity simply my insatiable curiosity 
 to understand motives caused me to risk a visit 
 to that publishing house. I presented myself 
 as the friend of the author, not giving my 
 name, and asked for an explanation. I discov 
 ered that the business man of the firm had 
 finally read the book and declined it. The 
 critic, whom I saw, paid the tale compliments, 
 and every compliment he paid it damned it in 
 my own eyes. He thought it a remarkable 
 book. But he gently told me that it was too 
 much like life. In it I was being natural 
 real and the world no more wants the naked 
 truth than it wants uncooked food. The busi 
 ness man was a citizen of the world as he found 
 it, he hinted. 
 
 I saw life like that, too, I remembered, ex 
 cept for a curious blunder now and then. This 
 had been one of my blunders. I took the 
 manuscript home and reread it, and I laughed 
 aloud. 1 reminded myself of that ridiculous 
 creature who thinks she can do anything by 
 intuition. Judge Grant has since shown her
 
 I Add to My Income 247 
 
 in Selma White. My theme was good enough, 
 and it was true, but the trouble was that I had 
 not had the technical ability to do an original 
 thing and do it well. How many people have? 
 How many novels, readable novels, do you 
 know that are not built on conventional lines? 
 The unconventional ones are generally so 
 badly made that they fall to pieces. And 
 after all, isn't conventionality morality? Most 
 people are unable to distinguish between them. 
 As Robert Louis Stevenson reminded us, "Man 
 lives not by bread alone, but mostly by catch 
 words." 
 
 I took the manuscript over which I had 
 dreamed, into which I had put what I knew of 
 life, and laid it away. I had put what I knew 
 of life into it of a certainty, but I had put it in 
 so that it was unable to express itself to others. 
 And with experience, I set about producing 
 a book which the public would want which a 
 publisher, a piece of the public, would want. 
 
 Mr. Stanley Weyman had discovered Sully's 
 Memoirs not long before this and was making 
 historical novels fashionable. Mr. Anthony 
 Hope had a moment's inspiration and put a 
 modern Englishman into a setting of romance. 
 I did not wish to be too obvious, and yet I had
 
 248 The Highroad 
 
 learned to build my next house by an approved 
 plan. If I had not the skill to be original, I 
 must find a type to imitate. And then an 
 idea came to me. Suppose I were to take a 
 well-known writer's style, even some of his 
 well-known stock incidents (they all have 
 them) and make an anonymous story which 
 would seem to be too intimate a revelation of 
 a woman's heart (it must be a woman, people 
 have no sympathy with a man with a "heart" 
 unless he be a poet) to allow her to sign her 
 name to it. I could probably gather about my 
 "heart experience" all of the author's readers, 
 and some others. The anonymity, with my 
 newspaper advertising, my scientific probing of 
 the authorship, would attract attention. I 
 spent days hunting for a writer who might have 
 a "heart experience," and at last I discovered 
 her. It was a painful, intimate story, but one 
 which was known to many, one upon which 
 she had always kept a dignified silence. I 
 bought every one of her books and studied 
 them carefully and then I blocked out my tale 
 her tale and wrote it in a high key. It was 
 eminently respectable, and yet there was a 
 suggestion all through it that the conventions 
 might be broken. Sometimes when I finished
 
 I Add to My Income 249 
 
 a page that raved like a respectable Zaza, I 
 almost felt as though I meant it, as though 
 those sad, sad experiences had been mine. 
 Some astute critics have questioned since if the 
 story was real. Here and there they have 
 caught a gleam of humorous exaggeration; but 
 never the buying public. 
 
 The story was accepted at once by one of the 
 great magazines which was seeking some way 
 to keep even with the more vulgar journals, and 
 coming under such auspices the art was ac 
 cepted as good art. I saw to it that public 
 curiosity was whetted by full pages in the Sun 
 day papers, and the author's sorrows were 
 presently discussed by the ladies' reading club 
 in Fowlersburg. Many things, however, hap 
 pened before that came to pass.
 
 250 I'he Highroad 
 
 XXII 
 
 W 'e See Something of New York Society 
 
 I had sublet my little apartment, and I had 
 allowed my acquaintance with Mrs. Wallingford 
 to become more and more formal, although Rob 
 ert kept it up, I felt sure. I am also sure she 
 never missed me and hardly had an idea that 
 I had dropped her, although she had enjoyed 
 my society. Her hold on women friends was 
 lax and indolent. I had reason to believe that 
 Robert saw her frequently. 
 
 Through Mrs. Dodds and other introduc 
 tions, we began to go out more and more. My 
 first move after I was settled in New York had 
 been to unite myself with Mr. Bliss' church, 
 and to take Genevieve there with me when I 
 could. Mr. Bliss was excessively proud of our 
 old friendship, and spoke of me often to the 
 members of his fashionable congregation. I was 
 always at his church on Sunday mornings, listen 
 ing with an approving intelligence to ideas which 
 I often recognized. Sometimes they were my 
 own; but oftener they were Stendhal's or
 
 Something 0/*New York Society 251 
 
 Kenan's or Tourguenieff's, first made into a ra 
 gout by me, and rechaufft by Mr. Bliss. 
 
 Itwas very seldom that I could take Genevieve 
 with me. I could influence her in no ways except 
 the most primitive. She was headstrong and 
 unreasonable to the point of maliciousness, it 
 would seem, but rather, it was to the point of 
 ignorance. A cigarette, a French novel of the 
 most abominable type were her Sunday morn 
 ing relaxations. Sometimes I comforted my 
 self with the reflection that she felt the 
 antagonism for me which I felt for her, and 
 that with the folly of youth and ignorance she 
 was flaunting her worst self before me, out of 
 a silly desire to hurt and annoy me. Surely 
 she had not behaved like this with Mrs. Dodds. 
 When I saw that the friendship between them, 
 while not intense, was not broken, I knew that 
 at least Genevieve knew how not to be entirely 
 impossible. I discovered, too, that Mrs. 
 Dodds had been wonderfully impressed, as are 
 all Americans, by our titled friends, and 
 probably Genevieve owed some toleration to 
 that. Is it not quaint that the world, literally 
 the whole world will call a man by a certain 
 name and then grow cold with awe before him 
 because he is known by it? "Duke," "Lord,"
 
 252 The Highroad 
 
 "Prince" what are they, anyway? Simply a 
 gift from the tongues of the people. 
 
 It is a part of human nature to make a god 
 of some sort and worship it. If a people has 
 nothing better it will take the mud from under 
 its feet and fashion it into something to bow 
 before. But all the time, underneath, we all 
 know that when we get ready to cry out alto 
 gether that the fetich is merely clay, the 
 godship will disappear. Who cares now for 
 the thunders of mighty Jupiter? One can blas 
 pheme only the God that is behind the high 
 altar of to-day. You may spit upon yester 
 day's god unrebuked. 
 
 Lucile had been gracious enough, but not 
 too ready, to her sister's new acquaintance, 
 and Mrs. Dodds had been impressed. 
 
 I discovered that there were just now two 
 women whom it was necessary to know, to 
 bring to my house, before I was firmly estab 
 lished in New York society. 
 
 One, Mrs. Etten, was a woman of enormous 
 wealth who had climbed up to her present 
 place over old prejudices and who was insolent 
 with the power that had come to her. She was 
 vulgar in her appearance, with a short un 
 graceful body and an animal-like nose. Her
 
 Something of New York^ Society 253 
 
 hair was dyed a shade of dark red to hide the 
 gray that had begun to appear in it, and she 
 was maquiltie. 
 
 The other woman was the sister of William 
 B. Clancy, married to a man her equal in 
 wealth and with children who had married into 
 the old and influential families in Boston and 
 Philadelphia as well as New York, and one 
 daughter still with her. Mrs. Thomas was a 
 woman not unlike the late Queen Victoria, 
 not very clever, obstinate, sure of herself, 
 vain, and conventional. She was, I plainly 
 saw, invincible because invulnerable. She 
 utterly ignored us seemingly never seeing us. 
 Genevieve was of a type which she had plainly 
 shown many times was distasteful to her. And 
 although I was the last person to blame her for 
 that, it made my task infinitely harder. 
 
 Mrs. Etten was easy to approach, because 
 she had in her daily existence what she 
 believed to be a secret. She was something 
 like Lady Flora Hastings, with a difference of 
 less breeding. Feeling insecure (it was that 
 psychologist of forty-two years before the birth 
 of Christ, Publius Syrus, who wrote down: "A 
 guilty conscience never feels secure"), she 
 was ready to give way anywhere.
 
 254 be Highroad 
 
 Character is destiny, and it did not require 
 a seer to see that Mrs. Etten was not solid in 
 her place. I had, by chance, the opportunity 
 to precipitate the scandal which came upon her 
 a few years later, but I did not take it. Why 
 should I ? I have no time to waste upon idle 
 spite, no time to cease rolling my stone up hill 
 to cast down another. She was to me already 
 off the board and one for whose favor I cared 
 not at all. 
 
 With Mr. Clancy's sister it was different. I 
 must have her acquaintance at least. 
 
 To be seen at her house was to have a sort 
 of cachet of social respectability. I never was 
 quite able to discover why she, in all New 
 York, had this dignity, but so long as every 
 one agreed that it was hers, it was. Notwith 
 standing she knew all about Lucile's position 
 in London, we were not asked to her house at 
 once. And as the winter went on I began to 
 fear that we were, through Genevieve's folly at 
 Newport, I felt sure, to rest just on the edge of 
 what is known as real New York society. 
 That was a situation which I felt that I could 
 not tolerate. 
 
 Studio receptions were just becoming fash 
 ionable, and there was talk of "American art."
 
 Something o/*New York Society 255 
 
 American art just then consisted in taking up 
 some portrait painter who was socially eligible 
 and having him make pretty presentments of 
 ladies in evening dress. The sitters generally 
 selected the gowns and poses, and patronized 
 the artists. It has always been so. Romney 
 and Sir Joshua Reynolds went through the 
 same experience. In the studio of Romney all 
 the sitters insisted on looking like Emma, and 
 Sir Joshua plaintively complained that after he 
 painted Nellie Farren all the duchesses desired 
 to be portrayed with roguish eyes. 
 
 I had an idea. I wrote to the young artist 
 in Paris who had painted my mother's portrait 
 from that old crayon, and told him that I 
 thought there was a field for him in New York. 
 I might be mistaken, but I thought that here 
 was something I could add to my forces. 
 
 He came, and painted Genevieve, and he did 
 for her exactly what he had done for my 
 mother's picture. He idealized her. He 
 kept, in some intangible way, that physical 
 force which was her only possession, but he 
 seemed by some necromancy (the beautiful 
 necromancy of his art!) to make it into a 
 classic thing. The Helens, the Cleopatras, 
 not of reality, but of tradition, might have had
 
 256 The Highroad 
 
 an allure such as this. He painted Mrs. 
 Dodds, and me. I let him have his way with 
 my portrait, because I was curious to see what 
 he would do with it. He painted me in a plain 
 white satin gown, sitting on a marble seat, 
 something like those in the garden atVerriere. 
 That portrait has never had a frame, and it 
 reposes in swathings in the house here in West 
 Virginia. I think it is the woman who sits 
 there on that bench who incited this narrative. 
 No one has seen it except the artist and my 
 self. And yet it represents a much more 
 beautiful and intelligent woman than I ever 
 was. 
 
 After it was finished, I asked for it, and sug 
 gested that the artist do something for exhibi 
 tion. Tears came into his eyes. "It is the great 
 est thing I shall ever do," he said. "And it will 
 delight me if posterity says so." I returned: 
 "But I want something for New York. Do 
 not mistake New York of to-day for the voice 
 of Fame." 
 
 I appeared on a canvas at his exhibition in a 
 violet velvet gown, and the portrait was chiefly 
 gown, a sublimated still-life. 
 
 One of the old magazines reproduced the 
 portraits with an article upon the talented
 
 Something of New York Society 257 
 
 artist. The editor of the magazine was of the 
 class which was just then scorning "The 
 American Beauty" department of the cheap 
 magazine, and loudly deploring the "vitiating 
 of taste," the "lowering of the standards" of 
 the public, as exhibited by its popularity. 
 But as no magazine was ever published for 
 any other purpose than to produce a revenue, 
 the "popular" methods were grasped at, and 
 the editor waS glad of an excuse to reproduce 
 the portraits of "society" under the pretence 
 of art. My artist was really so clever that the 
 women who wished to appear at their best em 
 ployed him, and my portrait appeared facing 
 that of Mrs. Thomas. 
 
 Another one of my advantages came in my 
 dinners. 
 
 Americans, generally, have never cared much 
 about dinner giving for two reasons: a dinner is 
 almost as expensive as a dancing party, and at 
 that time very few of even the wealthiest 
 people had servants who were able to carry a 
 dinner to a triumphant conclusion. It has 
 been within a comparatively short time that 
 the brisk short menu has taken the place of 
 that old, strained, elaborate dinner which no 
 body but Mr. Ward McAllister ever enjoyed.
 
 258 The Highroad 
 
 Certainly not a hostess who sat in fear and 
 trembling of what the next course might bring 
 forth. 
 
 The second reason for not enjoying a dinner 
 was that they didn't know what to talk 
 about. For all our present-day smartness, 
 American society is not so very far from the 
 Christmas and Thanksgiving turkey feasts 
 where husbands went out with their wives. 
 And neither is England! Old people in Eng 
 land have told me of the dinners at Windsor 
 Castle in the Queen's youth that were as bour 
 geois as anything social New York was show 
 ing. The Queen, in those days, used to sit at 
 a table after dinner and play solitaire, and it 
 was considered sufficient entertainment to her 
 guests to see her do it. 
 
 It was no wonder that Mr. McAllister be 
 came a sort of social mentor in New York. 
 He came from a part of the country where 
 gaiety at least was considered well bred, and 
 they had been entertaining in some fashion 
 ever since they had four walls. 
 
 In France and in England I had learned to 
 dine and so had Genevieve. She had the 
 technique of the game. The things she said 
 might be a trifle impertinent, but she talked,
 
 Something of New York Society 259 
 
 and she did not devote herself to the man who 
 took her out. And I knew, thanks to Prol- 
 mann, how to give a dinner. I never learned 
 how not to, for I had gone from Fowlersburg 
 to Prolmann. It was I who first threw aside 
 the half-dozen silly wines, and clung to cham 
 pagne after the soup, and it was I who banished 
 pastry trash. When I came, chicken salad was 
 still a dinner dish in New York. And it was at 
 my house in Gramercy Park that an opera singer 
 first sang after one of my dinners, and after 
 another two distinguished French actors gave 
 a little dialogue. The opera singer I had 
 known a long time. He had been a guest on 
 Prolmann' s yacht one year. The French ac 
 tors had met a ba dseason in America and were 
 willing to advertise themselves. It is impos 
 sible to get even "coon" songs on those terms 
 now, but that sort of entertaining was new 
 then and it created a sensation which my 
 newspaper made much of. I was supposed to 
 have paid all of these artists incredible sums. 
 How I should have loved to have done so! 
 Mean economies never appealed to me. It 
 has always been my wish to pay more for a 
 thing than it is worth, because I despise an 
 obligation.
 
 160 The Highroad 
 
 I acquired a reputation for having an in 
 comparable chef whom I had brought from 
 abroad (such was the rarity of delicious, 
 hot, appetizing courses quickly following each 
 other), and for an atmosphere of smartness. 
 The last came from the fact that my son, my 
 daughter and myself knew what sort of con 
 versation to serve with the food. And it became 
 a house to which men, business men, did not 
 have to be dragged in chains, because they 
 were well fed and amused. 
 
 There was one mistake I almost made about 
 this time. I had thought that I might bring into 
 New York the English and French fashion of 
 entertaining celebrities, literary, political or 
 scientific. Fortunately, before I had the op 
 portunity to meet them I learned what a mistake 
 it would have been. To belong to the 
 "Literary Set" in New York is to be hopeless 
 to be forever cut off even from Mrs. Thomas' 
 largest balls. And, anyway, even in Eng 
 land and France, literature is indulged in sel 
 dom. Most writers are impossible. Their 
 energies have gone into another channel than 
 that of what I might call bodily expres 
 sion. They do not know how to dress, they 
 are seldom pretty to look at, and I have met
 
 Something of New York Society 261 
 
 very few who have any idea of conversation. 
 They despise "society" because it makes them 
 uncomfortable. It doesn't seem worth while 
 to them; they have no key to its meanings. 
 For life and literature are reality and arti 
 ficiality. Art to be art must be a symbol. But 
 that is something it takes experience to dis 
 cover. 
 
 Bit by bit I crept into the eye of the world. 
 There was never a moment when I could have 
 been said to "push." I suppose when a 
 mushroom pushes up a paving stone, the slab 
 considers that it lifted itself out of politeness 
 to a thing so tender and helpless. 
 
 I saw as little of Genevieve as she could 
 arrange, but one day she came to me of her 
 own accord. It was almost the first time she 
 had done such a thing since she had left the 
 convent since her intimacy with Lili. 
 
 "Do you know that Bob is being talked 
 about with Mrs. Wallingford ?" she asked 
 abruptly. 
 
 "I am sure you are mistaken," I answered 
 gently. "How absurd a story! Mrs. Walling 
 ford is old enough to be Robert's mother." 
 
 "Baby-snatching is not unknown even in 
 New York. They say she is infatuated with
 
 262 'The Highroad 
 
 him and is throwing off even Clancy on his 
 account, that she intends to marry Bob." 
 
 "I shall believe no such ridiculous tale." 
 And I took up my book again. 
 
 "Cela rriest tgal!" Genevieve said, and then 
 she turned to me swiftly, "I suppose the young 
 fool knows that he hasn't a penny?" 
 
 "That is a fact you must all know," I said, 
 and we looked at each other squarely in the 
 face for a fraction of a second, curtains up. 
 Then I went on. "Of course what I have is 
 yours, and in time will be valuable. But Mr. 
 Less, who was one of our executors, tells me 
 that it may be many many years before our 
 coal lands will be valuable." 
 
 "I thought it was tobacco," the girl sneered. 
 "It used to be tobacco." 
 
 "It was always coal," I said patiently. 
 
 After Christmas my boy came to me and told 
 me that he did not care to go back to college. 
 He said he wanted to go into business. 
 
 "But where? How?" I asked. 
 
 "I do not know. But college here seems 
 young after Europe. I do not feel like a boy, 
 and many of the studies there seem absurd to 
 me. I have already read, for my own enter 
 tainment, many of the books they study, and I
 
 Something o/'New York Society 263 
 
 have read a good many of the books our lec 
 tures are made out of. I am making good 
 friends and all that sort of thing but I am not 
 preparing for the life I want and we cannot 
 afford it." 
 
 This was the time to ask if he wanted to take 
 up new responsibilities, but I did not. Some 
 how I understood Robert. He soothed my 
 nerves as no other child of mine ever did. In 
 some vague way I felt that he was to be trusted 
 with his own destiny. And I trusted my own 
 instincts. Given certain premises, certain 
 results are bound to follow. This is no hap 
 hazard world. 
 
 I did not mention the story Genevieve had 
 told me to him, but she did. He met it with a 
 laugh, and a "Who knows? Mrs. Wallingford 
 is a charming woman, but she wouldn't look at 
 a chap like me." 
 
 "If she did," said my daughter, "you would 
 both starve to death. You couldn't very well 
 p live on a fire-escape even if it were twined with 
 morning glories." 
 
 One morning soon after, I heard Gene 
 vieve say that she had received a message from 
 Mrs. Dodds and was going to join her for a 
 restaurant dinner. She drove away in the han-
 
 264 The Highroad 
 
 som she had sent for, looking very sophisti 
 cated and like a fashion-plate in her black cloth 
 gown with an enormous bunch of violets pinned 
 to the plain corsage. It went through my 
 mind idly that the violets must have come 
 from somewhere, because it was quite outside 
 of character for Genevieve to buy flowers. 
 Heredity is a curious thing. Genevieve was 
 masterful in many ways, but she had some 
 small, mean economies, and she was intensely 
 practical. She saw no reason for having a 
 fresh napkin at every meal, nor a fresh towel 
 at every bath. Nor was it possible for me to 
 insist upon a bath for her every morning. 
 They had not demanded that at her convent, 
 and there was no inherent daintiness in her 
 that required it. But Genevieve was in the 
 back of my mind now. 
 
 Robert and I sat down to dinner alone, and 
 I let him talk on in his gentle well-bred way 
 of the new pictures at Durand-Ruel's, of the 
 dozens of light scraps of nonsense which he 
 heard, heaven knows how, for he went out 
 very little and belonged to no clubs. He had 
 devoted himself almost exclusively to Mrs. 
 Wallingford. 
 
 We took our coffee cups and went into the
 
 Something of New York Society 265 
 
 library and I enjoyed the pleasure of look 
 ing at the light falling on his handsome blonde 
 head with its good contour, its carriage of assur 
 ance. I was at work on the story of Mrs. 
 Wallingford then, and I wanted to talk to him 
 about it but that 1 did not dare. 
 
 Suddenly he stopped stirring his coffee and 
 put it down untasted. 
 
 "How about Genevieve and Babcock?" he 
 asked abruptly. "Does he truly want to 
 marry her?" 
 
 "I do not know," I said. "It may be; it 
 doubtless is one of those affairs in which a man 
 will do anything to gain a woman, but if he 
 fails he will pretend to himself that he never 
 was truly in earnest. He isn't a continental. 
 He is very much American New Yorker. He 
 will never tell me he wants to marry Genevieve 
 until he has told her and it is all arranged. I 
 do not believe either that Babcock cares to be 
 rejected." 
 
 "Where is Genevieve?" 
 
 "With Mrs. Dodds." 
 
 "Do you mind telephoning up there and dis 
 covering if she is?" 
 
 I sat up straight in my chair. "What do 
 you mean?"
 
 266 'The Highroad 
 
 "I mean that I saw Ward in town this after 
 noon, and he avoided me." 
 
 "Why should he?" 
 
 "That's it, why should he?" 
 
 "Robert," I said, "you do not mean to in 
 sinuate that Genevieve and Chester Ward 
 would meet anywhere? Why should they? 
 Chester can come here." 
 
 "He may not care to." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 Robert shrugged his shoulders. "I am sure 
 I do not know. But I imagine that a man and 
 woman like Genevieve and Ward would be 
 happier unrestrained." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "I hardly know what I mean, but when he is 
 here you plainly show that you do not care to 
 leave those two together, and it seems to me 
 that they like to be together." 
 
 "Why shouldn't they say so? I should 
 rather that they married each other I suppose 
 it will come to that than to meet like this." 
 
 "I am not at all sure that they want to marry 
 each other. Does Genevieve seem to you the 
 sort of girl to whom marriage, particularly mar 
 riage to a man like Ward, would appeal? Can 
 you imagine Genevieve living in a Washington
 
 Something tf/'New York Society 267 
 
 third-class hotel with two or three children, or 
 down in West Virginia?" 
 
 "But Chester is getting along in the world" 
 I stopped. What was the use of arguing with 
 Robert concerning his sister. I went to the 
 telephone and asked to speak with Mrs. 
 Dodds. She had gone to Lakewood that 
 morning, one of her servants replied. 
 
 I hesitated at the telephone, wondering 
 whether or not to tell Robert. Could it do 
 any good to ruin all his faith in his sister? 
 Would he be clever enough to stick to her even 
 though he knew that she was what? A liar 
 anyway. 
 
 When I came back into the library Rob 
 ert was walking up and down, his hands in his 
 pockets. The expanse of white in his even 
 ing dress was very becoming to him. 
 
 "My dear," I said, "I fear that you are in a 
 bad atmosphere." 
 
 "And why?" 
 
 "You are generalizing going too readily 
 from the special example you happen to 
 know " 
 
 "Was she with Mrs. Dodds?" 
 
 "Certainly," I answered. 
 
 "I beg her pardon," he said.
 
 268 'The Highroad 
 
 I debated also whether or not I should tell 
 Genevieve what I knew. I hated the thought 
 of it. But here was something we could not 
 run away from. As a matter of fact running 
 away is always useless. A character cannot 
 be run away from. We carry the weaknesses 
 which make new failings along with us. 
 
 Genevieve came in after eleven o'clock, and 
 I followed her into her bed-room. I knew 
 that anywhere else she would leave me. I 
 opened the conversation at once. She was a 
 little flushed, her violets faded and sagging 
 from her corsage, shadows under her eyes. I 
 wonder how many mothers have faced that 
 aspect in a daughter. 
 
 "I allowed Robert to believe that. you were 
 with Mrs. Dodds, " I said. She started and 
 then she laughed. 
 
 "That was good of you if it made any sort 
 of difference." 
 
 "If you want to see Chester Ward, why do 
 you not see him here?" 
 
 She sat down, crossed her knees, scratched a 
 match on the sole of her shoe and lighted a 
 cigarette. 
 
 "Because I wanted to dine out with him, 
 without discussion, I suppose."
 
 Something 0/~New York Society 269 
 
 "And why do you suppose " 
 
 "Oh, pshaw, what's the use! Chester and I 
 suit each other. You do not want him here; 
 you show it plainly. He isn't the sort you 
 want around." 1 could feel myself growing 
 cold. 
 
 "Do you want to marry him?" 
 
 "Ah that's a different thing. I am not sure 
 that I care to marry anybody." 
 
 "But" I spoke as reasonably and calmly as 
 I could "it is necessary that you should 
 marry. It is not a pleasant thing to call your 
 attention to that necessity, but then marriage 
 is the natural, the happiest destiny for a 
 woman." 
 
 Genevieve looked at me oddly through the 
 smoke that wreathed her face. 
 
 "Do not believe it. Not one woman in a 
 million wants to be married wants a husband. 
 She marries for freedom and I fancy you 
 have heard the other theories on the subject." 
 She leaned down and unfastened her shoes, 
 kicking them off, and showing her well-shaped 
 foot in its open-work stocking. 
 
 "Genevieve," I said gravely, "we are poor, 
 and it is necessary for us to understand each 
 other. I cannot let you make a wreck of vour
 
 ijo 'The Highroad 
 
 life. If you do not care for a conventional life 
 let us give up trying. If you want to marry 
 Chester Ward if it is your ambition to spend 
 the rest of your life in boarding-houses with 
 him, marry him and be done with it. I shall 
 send for him to-morrow and tell him so." 
 
 To my amazement, Genevieve sprang up, 
 her face scarlet. "That you shall not do. I 
 will not be flung at any man's head. We are 
 not in France." 
 
 'Oh, then," I said, "he has not done you 
 the honor to ask you to marry him? It is for 
 that reason he does not come here. I think 
 there is all the more reason for my seeing 
 him." 
 
 "I tell you, if you speak to Chester Ward 
 about me I shall leave this house, and you 
 will be sorry the last day you live." 
 
 "You have given me reason for being that 
 already," I said. I am sure I was not wise. 
 There must have been a way to approach my 
 child. But I did not know it. I was astounded 
 at the turn affairs had taken, and running 
 through my mind was a wonder at Chester. 
 Genevieve became a poorer thing than I had 
 thought her, when he did not want to marry 
 her.
 
 Something 0/"New York Society 271 
 
 I wrote to Chester the next day; I asked him 
 over to dinner. He came, and watching them, 
 I could but believe that these two felt a strong 
 attraction for one another. Genevieve was un 
 like herself. I could see that she wanted to 
 keep me away from him. And continually 
 between them were those glances, those move 
 ments which betray the closest intimacy. 
 
 It was with dismay that I realized our situa 
 tion. What possibility had I of extricating 
 ourselves? There is no combination of circum 
 stances which can ruin a human being unless 
 they have their inception in his own person 
 ality. Genevieve was, practically speaking, 
 my own personality. It was for her I worked. 
 Her success was mine; her failure and dis 
 grace were my failure and disgrace. I suppose 
 I hated her as a drunkard hates his uncontrol 
 lable vice. And yet I must save her.
 
 272 'The Highroad 
 
 XXIII 
 
 / Make a Discovery 
 
 Chester's attitude toward Genevieve puzzled 
 me. I know that there are some men who 
 have so little respect for themselves that when 
 a woman begins to admire or love one of them, 
 he immediately despises her, considers her of 
 poor taste and judgment for setting up in her 
 heart what he knows to be so poor a thing. 
 But after seeing Genevieve and Chester to 
 gether I could not believe that this was true of 
 him. There was something else. Chester 
 seemed to be fond of Genevieve, to have an 
 affection, a friendship for her. There is a 
 reason for every departure from the normal, 
 the usual. A brook does not alter its current 
 unless there is an obstruction in the way. If 
 one could only know, how often we should 
 change our feelings toward some sinner! A 
 little sin away back in the beginning may change 
 the current of a life. 
 
 There was, too, something apologetic in 
 Chester's attitude toward me. And Genevieve 
 loved him I could see that she did. Whatever
 
 I Make a Discovery 273 
 
 her flippancy of speech might be, I saw that 
 here, if ever, was the solvent for her hard 
 nature; because it is the truth that our own 
 feelings, our own emotions are what, save us or 
 undo us. The inspirers of our moods have 
 little to do with it. Hate is as corrosive to the 
 spirit when the object is bad as when it is good. 
 Love true affection when by chance it is 
 found, expands even such a nature as Gene- 
 vieve's. 
 
 I felt sure, too, that Genevieve had not told 
 Chester of my discovery. Her reluctance to 
 do so, the difficulty she must have found in 
 doing so, was the first womanly trait I had 
 ever seen in her. 
 
 But, how long would it last even though the 
 obstacle could be removed? And what was 
 that which made them hide their affection 
 instead of flaunting it? Genevieve was surely 
 not so worldly wise. 
 
 Naturally, in this crisis (and it was a crisis 
 I had spent money which I could not afford; I 
 was handicapping us for all time) I thought of 
 the newspaper as a weapon. I had something 
 to work upon in Genevieve's affection for 
 Chester. It was necessary to kill that if I 
 could. It was a luxury we could not afford.
 
 274 Tbe Highroad 
 
 I sighed sometimes with sorrow for her, and 
 sometimes with relief that she had had it. 
 Kill it once, and the barren soil of her heart 
 would never grow love again. Love was, I 
 reasoned, with a woman like her, but a short 
 lived thing at best, and it would die, as it dies 
 in many a woman after her life is ruined. 
 This is the wrong view to take, of course, but it 
 is so full of reason that at least one great 
 philosopher reduced it to rule and formula. 
 People who read novels are seldom acquainted 
 with the writings of Schopenhauer, but I think 
 some of the great novelists must have had great 
 respect for his theories. Reason is so seldom 
 romantic. 
 
 My first idea was very crude. I would write 
 a newspaper article about Chester, connecting 
 his name with that of another woman. Gene- 
 vieve was of the cheap temperament that is 
 easily inflamed and would be full of jealousy. 
 
 And then, rejecting that, I saw presently 
 what to do. I wrote a letter to one of the 
 newspapers and told them that Chester Ward 
 of Washington, "a club and society man," 
 the nephew and cousin of various distinguished 
 Virginians, was secretly meeting a well-known 
 Washington woman of international reputation.
 
 I Make a Discovery 275 
 
 There was "a story in it," which I was pre 
 pared to write, if their clever young men in 
 Washington would substantiate my "tip." I 
 signed this "Mary Clay," and as I had given 
 them so much "good stuff," they were very 
 glad to do this. They were to watch his apart 
 ments, bribe servants, find out the last detail 
 of his life by any means. 
 
 For ten days I heard nothing. I concluded 
 that I had been mistaken, that there was noth 
 ing tangible to discover. And then the story 
 came. 
 
 Since then I have ceased to be astonished. 
 I have discovered that you may take almost 
 any human being and after you have watched 
 him for days you will find something eccentric 
 enough to make anewspaper story by judicious 
 patching here and there. 
 
 Here was poor foolish Chester's wrecked 
 life spread out before me. 
 
 According to the newspaper's lurid-seeing 
 young men in Washington, Chester was keep 
 ing a gambling-house. As a matter of fact, 
 young men met at his rooms for very high 
 play, and cases of wine were sent there for 
 their consumption. 
 
 And Chester had married a chorus girl from
 
 2j6 'The Highroad 
 
 comic opera circles during his first year in 
 Washington, and when she was "off the road," 
 she sometimes assisted in receiving the guests. 
 No wonder he could not marry Genevieve! 
 Nobody knew that the girl was his wife. The 
 paper's young men discovered that. 
 
 When I took those facts and made them in 
 a page shocker for a sensational Sunday paper, 
 I trembled as with a chill. My pen would 
 hardly travel across the sheet of white paper. 
 When Robert was a baby, he looked at the 
 primer words they were trying to teach him, 
 and said, "Writing is just pictures of the words 
 we say." The writing I put into that story 
 seemed alive, seemed to look up at me with 
 suggestions of horror. 
 
 I thought of Mrs. Ward, and of her sweet 
 ness and kindness. She would never say an 
 unkind word of any one, not even a dissi 
 pated son of royalty. As I wrote a picture came 
 before me of a summer night in Fowlersburg 
 last year. I sat in the unlighted window in 
 Chester's bed-room the evening after he had 
 left, and his mother lay on the narrow white 
 bed where he had slept through all his boy 
 hood. The moon was full, flooding the quiet 
 street outside, and the yellow honeysuckle that
 
 I Make a Discovery 
 
 covered the porches filled the air with a senti 
 mental, old-fashioned sweetness. A half dozen 
 negro boys came by and stopped at the street 
 corner to sing, as they are wont to do in the 
 southern towns. Their plaintive boyish voices 
 went through the lament of "Massy's in th' 
 col', col' groun'." When they went away I 
 found Mrs. Ward weeping as one weeps with a 
 friend. 
 
 "I am very much alone" sne said, her usually 
 cheerful voice broken. "I have only Chester, 
 but he is so good. It is compensation for 
 loneliness; it keeps me happy to think of the 
 full happy life he is having. Some women 
 have sorrow with their boys." 
 
 Could I do it? I said to myself that I could 
 not even as my hand went across the paper, 
 making shameful a story of weakness. 
 
 At heart I am a sentimentalist, but I did not 
 dare sacrifice my child to save hers. Why 
 should I? 
 
 There was this one chance of saving mine 
 from a present peril, but all my hopes seemed 
 tumbling about me even as I wrote. What can 
 one do with stupidity?
 
 27 8 'The Highroad 
 
 XXIV 
 
 A Business Interview 
 
 I was terrified, and yet there was something, 
 some sense of tranquillity, deep below my sur 
 face disturbance which told me that the day 
 was not lost. What is that sustaining force 
 which holds some of us fast to a course of con 
 duct even when it seems hopeless? Is it our 
 reliance upon the universal plan? It is we to 
 whom the day finally turns always People 
 say "a fool for luck." Have you ever seen a 
 lucky fool? I never have. 
 
 Sunday morning brought the story of Ches 
 ter's marriage in naked type, with his picture 
 and that of his wife in the center of the page 
 surrounded by the emblems of chance. The 
 hideousness of it nauseated me. I hid the 
 paper away at first, and then I allowed it to 
 be carried up to Genevieve with the rest of 
 her Sunday morning literature. What it meant 
 to her I shall never know. She came down 
 stairs dressed for the street and went out, only 
 coming in to dress and go to a dinner. There is 
 a wall between my child and me which can
 
 A Business Interview 279 
 
 never be pierced; I have no insight into a na 
 ture such as hers. I cannot think her thoughts. 
 Sometimes when I have been in the midst of 
 despising a personality, a wave of humility 
 has swept over me, and I wonder. I try to 
 have a clear vision, to be honest, to see the 
 real. But I must see through my eyes with my 
 brain and nerves. I have so often verified my 
 judgment of people that I have grown to 
 accept it. Like everybody else I admire my 
 own point of view my own opinions. There 
 is no mind which deserves the name which 
 does not; for if we did not like our own opin 
 ions we should change them and get another 
 set. But after all, understanding is much a 
 thing of tranquil nerves. There is some aura, 
 some vibration, some electrical force, perhaps, 
 from one person we each know, which dis 
 turbs us. When that comes it dazzles our vi 
 sion, and we love or hate for the same reason 
 that we love or hate at any time; for that we 
 are supremely comfortable or supremely un 
 comfortable. Some unfortunates cannot dis 
 tinguish the difference between the two states. 
 My daughter Genevieve made me supremely 
 uncomfortable. I could not penetrate her 
 mind because I was turned back at its very
 
 280 'The Highroad 
 
 portals. She was all outside to me. I pene 
 trated her nature as I might have peeled an 
 onion, finding always an outer skin. 
 
 The next day found me undecided I 
 seemed waiting. I looked at Robert and won 
 dered if he, too, was to disappoint me. Sup 
 pose my judgment of him were wrong and he 
 was after all only a young man whose fancy 
 was taken by an older woman? Suppose all my 
 plans should come to the cheap end of my son 
 being the husband of a woman like Mrs. Wal- 
 lingford. And my daughter I shuddered to 
 think of my daughter's possibilities. 
 
 For two days she was hardly in the house. 
 Whether or not she saw Chester Ward in that 
 interval I never knew. 
 
 On Wednesday morning she came to me. 
 There was a hard look in her eyes and around 
 the corners of her mouth, and she was deadly 
 pale. 
 
 "I want to go to Europe leave here," she 
 said. She seated herself on a small chair by 
 my desk, and made her request as one might 
 ask possibilities of a lawyer. 
 
 "My dear," I began. She brought her 
 tight fist in its walking glove down upon the 
 corner of my desk with force.
 
 A Business Interview 281 
 
 "Don't 'my dear' me!" she said furiously. 
 "You hold the family money. I want enough 
 to take me to Paris." 
 
 "And what will you do there?" 
 
 She looked at me for a moment with some 
 thing like malice trying to break through the 
 tragedy in her face. "Enjoy myself," she said 
 finally. 
 
 "Genevieve," I said, "as soon as I can I 
 will dispose of this house and we shall go. 
 But there is no money to-day." 
 
 "You can always get whatever you want. 
 Get it," she said. 
 
 A few moments later I heard her go out. I 
 sat in my own room and my thoughts were not 
 pleasant thoughts. 
 
 An hour afterward Emelie came in with a 
 card. I read the neat unostentatious script as 
 though "Mr. William B. Clancy" called upon 
 me once a week. It was only at the drawing- 
 room door that fear came. 
 
 I found him sitting in the easiest chair in 
 the room, a pair of eyeglasses, which were on 
 a black ribbon around his neck, held in a hand 
 which was too dainty and long-fingered for a 
 man of his bulk. That imaginative hand was 
 a traitor which told secrets.
 
 282 'The Highroad 
 
 When I entered, slipping in, he arose and 
 balanced himself so that his lameness was not 
 visible. 
 
 "I shall ask you to pardon my unannounced 
 visit," he said with ceremony, "I hope my 
 reasons for coming may be my excuse." 
 
 I shivered. Could it be possible his repu 
 tation for boldness was unparalleled that he 
 was going actually to speak of Mrs. Walling- 
 ford? Was he going to threaten? There are 
 some things that seem almost romantic as long 
 as they are covered in roses, but held up to 
 view, defined in words, they become ghastly, 
 miserable. I drew into a shell of reserve, I 
 shrunk, I was a timid little woman. I made 
 him no reply, but simply a little bow with what 
 Prolmann once called my "pathetic smile." 
 
 "You have, I understand, large tracts of 
 West Virginia coal land," he said abruptly, 
 "and a railroad concession leading to it." 
 
 I almost laughed in my relief. "I have a 
 large tract of land which I believe contains 
 coal." 
 
 "It is a well-founded belief. Do you wish 
 to sell it?" 
 
 "I do not." 
 
 "Good I" he said. "I had heard that you
 
 A Business Interview 283 
 
 desired to hold it, and in any case I should 
 have advised you to do so. The property will 
 be very valuable when it is developed. A 
 syndicate, of which I am a member, is about to 
 open up that part of West Virginia, although 
 the project has not yet been made public. It 
 is for that reason that I have asked to speak to 
 you personally. I felt that we could rely upon 
 your discretion." 
 
 "You can," I said, and as I said it I realized 
 that this- man's agents had sifted my story 
 from beginning to end. And I exulted in it. 
 At any rate, here was one person who did not 
 believe me altogether a fool. Tears of self- 
 pity tried to find their way to my eyes, while I 
 despised myself that I was so feminine a thing. 
 
 "We wished to propose an arrangement by 
 which we could take over your property and 
 develop it upon a basis of profits. The coun 
 try is greatly depressed now, but this condition 
 cannot last. The pendulum goes so far in one 
 direction and then comes back again. When 
 the moment comes it will have an enormous 
 impetus, and it is rational to prepare for it." 
 
 "What do you propose?" I asked. To the 
 bottom of my consciousness I was disturbed. 
 Why? Why was this man going so far from
 
 284 The Highroad 
 
 his usual methods? Nothing gives me such 
 impatience as a lack of understanding. When 
 I have read the fairy stories of people who had 
 three wishes, or even one wish, magically 
 gratified, it has always been a wonder to me 
 that nobody ever begged for perfect under 
 standing. Think what it would be to know! 
 
 Could it be that he was bribing me to take 
 Robert away putting me upon my honor? 
 It was to Robert that I had expected advances 
 to be made, and never anything like this. 
 
 I know that those who are instructed in life 
 by sentimental novels will say that naturally 
 Mr. Clancy would lose interest in Mrs. Wal- 
 lingford when she showed that she no longer 
 cared for him, that she was infatuated with a 
 boy which only goes to show how little histor 
 ical novelists know their history. It was Mrs. 
 Wallingford that he was fighting for, that he 
 was using his diplomacy, his power, to bring 
 back to himself, I felt sure. 
 
 He gave me a plan for the development of 
 the property. He would pay me a percentage 
 upon all the coal taken out, and would agree 
 to take out so many tons a year for a term of 
 fifty years. I hardly heard what he said. I 
 was waiting for what came at last.
 
 A Business Interview 285 
 
 "I suppose you would like to have an agent 
 of your own upon the premises?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 "Your son? Has he finished college?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "If you will ask him to call upon me, I 
 should be -glad to talk the matter over with 
 him. The development of that property is a 
 great opportunity for a young man." 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 I bowed to him in his formal departure, and 
 sat down with my head in my hands. I was 
 not ready to comprehend. 
 
 When Robert came in I sent for him at once. 
 I felt that the bargain was not concluded until 
 he had given his consent to go. I saw that he 
 held an evening paper in his hand, with a look 
 of gravity in his face, but after I had spoken 
 for a moment he put down the paper and rang 
 the bell. 
 
 "Bring me a carafe of water and some 
 whiskey," he said to Emelie. I looked at 
 him astonished. He, who hardly touched a 
 glass of claret at dinner. 
 
 "It is not for me," he said when it came. 
 "It is for you. You have looked like death 
 for days."
 
 286 The Highroad 
 
 But I pushed the stuff away with disgust. I 
 loathe the sight of it. 
 
 "Do you not think it would be well to go 
 down there and develop the property?" I 
 asked after I had told the story. 
 
 Robert poured out some whiskey and drank 
 it, and smiled at me. 
 
 "Genevieve wants to go to Europe," I 
 began. 
 
 "I wonder," he said gaily, "if Clancy would 
 put me up at the Union Club." 
 
 "There is a long waiting-list there," I said 
 stupidly. I wondered if the boy were a fool, 
 after all. 
 
 "And, I wonder, my dear mother, if he will 
 not ask us to dinner." 
 
 "But it is a question of your going to West 
 Virginia. I will go down with you and" my 
 mind was working slowly "stay with Mrs. 
 Ward." 
 
 Robert reached for the paper he had brought 
 in. 
 
 "It would be too bad to bury oneself in West 
 Virginia when one may enjoy the advantages 
 of New York." He smiled at me. "I hear 
 that Mr. Van Nest is coming home." 
 
 "But," -1 tried to expostulate.
 
 A Business Interview 287 
 
 Robert looked at me suddenly with a flash of 
 understanding in his face that I had seen there 
 once before. 
 
 "You think Clancy is giving you money. 
 Mother, that property is worth millions. It is 
 necessary to their plans. Father must have 
 been a prophet to see so far ahead. Let me 
 arrange the details of the working of the prop 
 erty. We shall all be millionaires, and I do 
 not believe you want to go to West Virginia. 
 Mrs. Ward killed herself yesterday on account 
 of that story about Chester." 
 
 And then, for the first time in my life, I lost 
 control of my senses and fainted dead away
 
 288 The Highroad 
 
 XXV 
 
 We Arrive 
 
 The rest of the story is entirely commonplace. 
 We were really rich. No more lies, no more 
 mean ways. I took Genevieve abroad, and 
 Babcock followed and married her. It has 
 been as happy as most marriages. Robert 
 stayed behind and managed our affairs, and 
 married Mr. Clancy's niece, Mrs. Thomas' 
 daughter. A month later Mr. Van Nest mar 
 ried Mrs. Wallingford, with the result that one 
 of his daughters never spoke to him again, but 
 all the rest of society remembered that it had 
 always loved her. What comedy was played 
 before these things came about, only Robert 
 could tell. 
 
 Jane, young, an heiress, brought up abroad, 
 with the best connections, naturally married 
 into the nobility. She needed none of my 
 offices. 
 
 Chester Ward divorced his wife, and, seem 
 ingly without the least difficulty, married a 
 western girl with great wealth. They were at
 
 We Arrive 289 
 
 Kiel on their yacht this summer, enjoying the 
 usual Imperial attentions. 
 
 And as I sit here, there is just one thing 
 that my heart aches over. The money was 
 there all the time! Lucile might have married 
 Julien, and those little French children might 
 have played among the old marbles atVerriere. 
 There was where my faith and heart failed me, 
 and I can never forgive myself. 
 
 You may not be able to forgive me else 
 where. My road has not always been flower- 
 strewn, nor always free from mud. But I am 
 here! 
 
 Some of you will put down this page with 
 expressions of disgust, and yet, you have fol 
 lowed me! The best proof that I am not alto 
 gether alien to you is the fact that we are here 
 together.
 
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