The Wheel of Life

walked with Trent in the direction of Broadway. "Do you walk up, by

usiasm. A light icy drizzle had turned the snow upon the pavement into sloppy puddles of water, but to

d, without replying directly to the question. "And yet how sim

rely a beautiful promise, a flower in the bud," he said. "Her genius-if she has genius-has not found itself, and the notes she strikes are al

of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be vulgar. "For she,

upon the other a glance as

r beauty?" he asked in a ton

" protested T

eard K

let him, let him. Would you hand out one o

ed his remark with a sudden change of subject. "I am int

done nothing,"

s say, I understand that y

n't bad," replied Trent, blushing over all his fresh,

r new blood. Perhaps you wouldn't mi

his voice shaking. "Why, I can't te

d. "I'd like to walk up to Thirty-fifth with you," he added, "but my mother is expecting me and it makes her nervous when I stay out after dark. She's just from t

shortly," responded Adams. "How do

y to sparkles. "Ah, well, it's rather lonely for her. She m

l sympathy of manner there had been no mention of Mrs. Adams. Where was she? and what was she? questio

d his slight, delicate emaciated, yet dauntless, figure was in itself the expression of a resolute will to endure as well as to resist. When a man has faced death at close range for fifteen years he is, in a measure, bound to become either indifferent satyr or partial saint, and even in the extremity of his first revolt his personal ideal had stood, like the angel with the flaming sword, between Adams and the quagmire of bodily materialism. He was not, perhaps, as yet even so much as a deficient stoic, but he ha

gotten the rain, had forgotten even the cold which pierced his chest, and, suddenly remembering the directions of his physician, he fastened his overcoat more closely and hastened across the street, passing rapidly in and out among the moving vehicles until he gained, over the sloppy

ed eyebrows. She was very vivacious, but, as Gerty Bridewell had observed, it was a vivacity that was hardly justified, since possessing neither the means nor the manner exacted by the more exclusive circles, she had been compelled to compromise with a social body which made up in members what it lacked as an organism. Her dash and her prettiness sufficed to place her comfortably here, but beyond a speaking acquaintance with Gerty, who confessed that she was too charitable to be exclusive she had not as yet approached that small shining sphere whose inmates boast the larger freedom no less than the finer discrimination. The larger freedom, it seemed at times, was all of it that she was ever to a

lare before his festive wife they would have found neither ignorance nor indifference in his manner. He regar

his glance shot over her, "t

leaped instantly into view. There was a nervous irritation in her l

," she explained. "I knew you wouldn't come

my dear," he

itation in her voice, "and as we're all going to the theatre afterward I

peared in the drawing-room doorway, "How are you, Mr. Brady? Please don't let Mrs. Adam

cloak. His handsome wooden features possessed hardly more character than was expressed by his immaculately starched shirt front, but he was not

used to fill in gaps in conversation much as a distinguished virtuoso might

imes of a tempestuous March breeze shaking a fragile wind flower. It was unnatural, overdone, unbecoming, but it seemed at last to have got quite beyond her control, and the pretty girlish composure he remembered as one of her freshest charms, was l

in; "you've been rushing like mad t

till laughing, "and I honestly hope th

n Brady had slipped into his overcoat, Adams turned bac

ver like a filmy wind flower in a high wind, she was blown down t

will, and when her absence had begun to show as so incontestable a relief it seemed the basest ingratitude to force upon her reckless shoulders the odium of an entirely satisfying arrangement. After a day of mental and physical exertion the further effort of a conversation with her was something that he felt to be utterly beyond him, and the distant Colorado days when she had playe

serve. He had never, even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was content to call his friend-he hesitated to condemn himself almost because he feared to question-but whenever he entered alone his empty room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage from her pictured face. It was a face that had followed after the ideal beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm. Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection which dwelt in her art,

me associated with the society of women had been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in abeyance-the material effort of appearing always in one's best trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura-and his opinion was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic ignorance-that the female sex played the part in Nature which is performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy-that it shrilly voiced the horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference-and strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a material philosophy-toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit.