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Book One

The Family

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I

The moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three stories in height, painted the colour of ashes—the front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps. As he walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantels with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places.

Certain wobbly stair treads, certain creaky boards in the upstairs hall, had made him wince many times a day View Image of Page 11 for twenty-odd years—and they still creaked and wobbled. He had a deft hand with tools, he could easily have fixed them, but there were always so many things to fix, and there was not time enough to go round. He went into the kitchen, where he had carpentered under a succession of cooks, went up to the bathroom on the second floor, where there was only a painted tin tub; the taps were so old that no plumber could ever screw them tight enough to stop the drip, the window could only be coaxed up and down by wriggling, and the doors of the linen closet didn't fit. He had sympathized with his daughters' dissatisfaction, though he could never quite agree with them that the bath should be the most attractive room in the house. He had spent the happiest years of his youth in a house at Versailles where it distinctly was not, and he had known many charming people who had no bath at all. However, as his wife said: "If your country has contributed one thing, at least, to civilization, why not have it?" Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, and didn't.

The Professor in pyjamas was not an unpleasant sight; for looks, the fewer clothes he had on, the better. View Image of Page 12 Anything that clung to his body showed it to be built upon extremely good bones, with the slender hips and springy shoulders of a tireless swimmer. Though he was born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on one side, and American farmers on the other), St. Peter was commonly said to look like a Spaniard. That was possibly because he had been in Spain a good deal, and was an authority on certain phases of Spanish history. He had a long brown face, with an oval chin over which he wore a close-trimmed Van Dyke, like a tuft of shiny black fur. With this silky, very black hair, he had a tawny skin with gold lights in it, a hawk nose, and hawk-like eyes—brown and gold and green. They were set in ample cavities, with plenty of room to move about, under thick, curly, black eyebrows that turned up sharply at the outer ends, like military moustaches. His wicked-looking eyebrows made his students call him Mephistopheles—and there was no evading the searching eyes underneath them; eyes that in a flash could pick out a friend or an unusual stranger from a throng. They had lost none of their fire, though just now the man behind them was feeling a diminution of ardour.

His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in water-colour, had once said:—View Image of Page 13 "The thing that really makes Papa handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown; it is quite the best thing about him." That part of his head was high, polished, hard as bronze, and the close-growing black hair threw off a streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was fullest. The mould of his head on the side was so individual and definite, so far from casual, that it was more like a statue's head than a man's.

From one of the dismantled windows the Professor happened to look out into his back garden, and at that cheerful sight he went quickly downstairs and escaped from the dusty air and brutal light of the empty rooms.

His walled-in garden had been the comfort of his life—and it was the one thing his neighbours held against him. He started to make it soon after the birth of his first daughter, when his wife began to be unreasonable about his spending so much time at the lake and on the tennis court. In this undertaking he got help and encouragement from his landlord, a retired German farmer, good-natured and lenient about everything but spending money. If the Professor happened to have a new baby at home, or a faculty dinner, or an illness in the family, or any unusual expense, Appelhoff cheer- fully waited for the rent; but pay for repairs he would View Image of Page 14 not. When it was a question of the garden, however, the old man sometimes stretched a point. He helped his tenant with seeds and slips and sound advice, and with his twisted old back. He even spent a little money to bear half the expense of the stucco wall.

The Professor had succeeded in making a French garden in Hamilton. There was not a blade of grass; it was a tidy half-acre of glistening gravel and glistening shrubs and bright flowers. There were trees, of course; a spreading horse-chestnut, a row of slender Lombardy poplars at the back, along the white wall, and in the middle two symmetrical, round-topped linden-trees. Masses of green-brier grew in the corners, the prickly stems interwoven and clipped until they were like great bushes. There was a bed for salad herbs. Salmon-pink geraniums dripped over the wall. The French marigolds and dahlias were just now at their best—such dahlias as no one else in Hamilton could grow. St. Peter had tended this bit of ground for over twenty years, and had got the upper hand of it. In the spring, when home sickness for other lands and the fret of things unaccomplished awoke, he worked off his discontent here. In the long hot summers, when he could not go abroad, he stayed at home with his garden, sending his wife and daughters to Colorado to escape the humid prairie heat,View Image of Page 15 so nourishing to wheat and corn, so exhausting to human beings. In those months when he was a bachelor again, he brought down his books and papers and worked in a deck chair under the linden-trees; break-fasted and lunched and had his tea in the garden. And it was there he and Tom Outland used to sit and talk half through the warm, soft nights.

On this September morning, however, St. Peter knew that he could not evade the unpleasant effects of change by tarrying among his autumn flowers. He must plunge in like a man, and get used to the feeling that under his work-room there was a dead, empty house. He broke off a geranium blossom, and with it still in his hand went resolutely up two flights of stairs to the third floor where, under the slope of the mansard roof, there was one room still furnished—that is, if it had ever been furnished.

The low ceiling sloped down on three sides, the slant being interrupted on the east by a single square window, swinging outward on hinges and held ajar by a hook in the sill. This was the sole opening for light and air. Walls and ceiling alike were covered with a yellow paper which had once been very ugly, but had faded into inoffensive neutrality. The matting on the floor was worn and scratchy. Against the wall stood an old walnut View Image of Page 16 table, with one leaf up, holding piles of orderly papers. Before it was a cane-backed office chair that turned on a screw. This dark den had for many years been the Professor's study.

Downstairs, off the back parlour, he had a show study, with roomy shelves where his library was housed, and a proper desk at which he wrote letters. But it was a sham. This was the place where he worked. And not he alone. For three weeks in the fall, and again three in the spring, he shared his cuddy with Augusta, the sewing-woman, niece of his old landlord, a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and very devout.

Since Augusta finished her day's work at five o'clock, and the Professor, on week-days, worked here only at night, they did not elbow each other too much. Besides, neither was devoid of consideration. Every evening, before she left, Augusta swept up the scraps from the floor, rolled her patterns, closed the sewing-machine, and picked ravellings off the box-couch, so that there would be no threads to stick to the Professor's old smoking-jacket if he should happen to lie down for a moment in working-hours.

St. Peter, in his turn, when he put out his lamp after midnight, was careful to brush away ashes and tobacco crumbs—smoking was very distasteful to Augusta—View Image of Page 17 and to open the hinged window back as far as it would go, on the second hook, so that the night wind might carry away the smell of his pipe as much as possible. The unfinished dresses which she left hanging on the forms, however, were often so saturated with smoke that he knew she found it a trial to work on them next morning.

These "forms" were the subject of much banter between them. The one which Augusta called "the bust" stood in the darkest corner of the room, upon a high wooden chest in which blankets and winter wraps were yearly stored. It was a headless, armless female torso, covered with strong black cotton, and so richly developed in the part for which it was named that the Professor once explained to Augusta how, in calling it so, she followed a natural law of language, termed, for convenience, metonymy. Augusta enjoyed the Professor when he was risqué, since she was sure of his ultimate delicacy. Though this figure looked so ample and billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness and rest safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most unsympathetic surface imaginable. Its hardness was not that of wood, which responds to concussion with livingView Image of Page 18 vibration and is stimulating to the hand, nor that of felt, which drinks something from the fingers. It was a dead, opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty, or tightly packed sawdust—very disappointing to the tactile sense, yet somehow always fooling you again. For no matter how often you had bumped up against that torso, you could never believe that contact with it would be as bad as it was.

The second form was more self-revelatory; a full-length female figure in a smart wire skirt with a trim metal waist line. It had no legs, as one could see all too well, no viscera behind its glistening ribs, and its bosom resembled a strong wire bird-cage. But St. Peter contended that it had a nervous system. When Augusta left it clad for the night in a new party dress for Rosamond or Kathleen, it often took on a sprightly, tricky air, as if it were going out for the evening to make a great show of being harum-scarum, giddy, folle. It seemed just on the point of tripping downstairs, or on tiptoe, waiting for the waltz to begin. At times the wire lady was most convincing in her pose as a woman of light behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his blind spots, but he had never been taken in by one of her kind!

Augusta had somehow got it into her head that these forms were unsuitable companions for one engaged inView Image of Page 19 scholarly pursuits, and she periodically apologized for their presence when she came to install herself and fulfil her "time" at the house.

"Not at all, Augusta," the Professor had often said. "If they were good enough for Monsieur Bergeret, they are certainly good enough for me.

This morning, as St. Peter was sitting in his desk chair, looking musingly at the pile of papers before him, the door opened and there stood Augusta herself. How astonishing that he had not heard her heavy, deliberate tread on the now uncarpeted stair!

"Why, Professor St. Peter! I never thought of finding you here, or I'd have knocked. I guess we will have to do our moving together."

St. Peter had risen—Augusta loved his manners—but he offered her the sewing-machine chair and resumed his seat.

"Sit down, Augusta, and we'll talk it over. I'm not moving just yet—don't want to disturb all my papers. I'm staying on until I finish a piece of writing. I've seen your uncle about it. I'll work here, and board at the new house. But this is confidential. If it were noised about, people might begin to say that Mrs. St. Peter and I had—how do they put it, parted, separated?"

Augusta dropped her eyes in an indulgent smile. "I think people in your station would say separated."View Image of Page 20 "Exactly; a good scientific term, too. Well, we haven't, you know. But I'm going to write on here for a while.

"Very well, sir. And I won't always be getting in your way now. In the new house you have a beautiful study downstairs, and I have a light, airy room on the third floor."

"Where you won't smell smoke, eh?"

"Oh, Professor, I never really minded!" Augusta spoke with feeling. She rose and took up the black bust in her long arms.

The Professor also rose, very quickly. "What are you doing?"

She laughed. "Oh, I'm not going to carry them through the street, Professor! The grocery boy is downstairs with his cart, to wheel them over."

"Wheel them over?"

"Why, yes, to the new house, Professor. I've come a week before my regular time, to make curtains and hem linen for Mrs. St. Peter. I'll take everything over this morning except the sewing-machine— that's too heavy for the cart, so the boy will come back for it with the delivery wagon. Would you just open the door for me, please?"

"No, I won't! Not at all. You don't need her to makeView Image of Page 21 curtains. I can't have this room changed if I'm going to work here. He can take the sewing-machine—yes. But put her back on the chest where she belongs, please. She does very well there." St. Peter had got to the door, and stood with his back against it.

Augusta rested her burden on the edge of the chest.

"But next week I'll be working on Mrs. St. Peter's clothes, and I'll need the forms. As the boy's here, he'll just wheel them over," she said soothingly.

"I'm damned if he will! They shan't be wheeled. They stay right there in their own place. You shan't take away my ladies. I never heard of such a thing!"

Augusta was vexed with him now, and a little ashamed of him. "But, Professor, I can't work without my forms. They've been in your way all these years, and you've always complained of them, so don't be contrary, sir."

"I never complained, Augusta. Perhaps of certain disappointments they recalled, or of cruel biological necessities they imply—but of them individually, never! Go and buy some new ones for your airy atelier, as many as you wish—I'm said to be rich now, am I not?—Go buy, but you can't have my women. That's final."

Augusta looked down her nose as she did at church when the dark sins were mentioned. "Professor." she said severely, "I think this time you are carrying a jokeView Image of Page 22 too far. You never used to." From the tilt of her chin he saw that she felt the presence of some improper suggestion.

"No matter what you think, you can't have them. They considered, both were in earnest now. Augusta was first to break the defiant silence.

"I suppose I am to be allowed to take my patterns?"

"Your patterns? Oh, yes, the cut-out things you keep in the couch with my old note-books? Certainly, you can have them. Let me lift it for you." He raised the hinged top of the box-couch that stood against the wall, under the slope of the ceiling. At one end of the up-holstered box were piles of note-books and bundles of manuscript tied up in square packages with mason's cord. At the other end were many little rolls of patterns, cut out of newspapers and tied with bits of ribbon, gingham, silk, georgette; notched charts which followed the changing stature and figures of the Misses St. Peter from early childhood to womanhood. In the middle of the box, patterns and manuscripts interpenetrated.

"I see we shall have some difficulty in separating our life work, Augusta. We've kept our papers together a long while now.'

"Yes, Professor. When I first came to sew for Mrs. St. Peter, I never thought I should grow grey in her service."

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He started. What other future could Augusta possibly have expected? This disclosure amazed him.,

"Well, well, we mustn't think mournfully of it, Augusta. Life doesn't turn out for any of us as we plan." He stood and watched her large slow hands travel about among the little packets, as she put them into his waste-basket to carry them down to the cart. He had often wondered how she managed to sew with hands that folded and unfolded as rigidly as umbrellas—no light French touch about Augusta; when she sewed on a bow, it stayed there. She herself was tall, large-boned, flat and stiff, with a plain, solid face, and brown eyes not destitute of fun. As she knelt by the couch, sorting her patterns, he stood beside her, his hand on the lid, though it would have stayed up unsupported. Her last remark had troubled him.

"What a fine lot of hair you have, Augusta! You know I think it's rather nice, that grey wave on each side. Gives it character. You'll never need any of this false hair that's in all the shop windows."

"There's altogether too much of that, Professor. So many of my customers are using it now—ladies you wouldn't expect would. They say most of it was cut off the heads of dead Chinamen. Really, it's got to be such a frequent thing that the priest spoke against it only last Sunday.

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"Did he, indeed? Why, what could he say? Seems such a personal matter."

"Well, he said it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a priest couldn't go to see a pious woman any more without finding switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was disgusting.

"Goodness gracious, Augusta! What business has a priest going to see a woman in the room where she takes off these ornaments—or to see her without them?"

Augusta grew red, and tried to look angry, but her laugh narrowly missed being a giggle. "He goes to give them the Sacrament, of course, Professor! You've made up your mind to be contrary today, haven't you?"

"You relieve me greatly. Yes, I suppose in cases of sudden illness the hair would be lying about where it was lightly taken off. But as you first quoted the priest, Augusta, it was rather shocking. You'll never convert me back to the religion of my fathers now, if you're going to sew in the new house and I'm going to work on here. Who is ever to remind me when it's All Souls' day, or Ember day, or Maundy Thursday, or anything?"

Augusta said she must be leaving. St. Peter heard her well-known tread as she descended the stairs. How much she reminded him of, to be sure! She had been most at the house in the days when his daughters wereView Image of Page 25 little girls and needed so many clean frocks. It was in those very years that he was beginning his great work; when the desire to do it and the difficulties attending such a project strove together in his mind like Macbeth's two spent swimmers—years when he had the courage to say to himself: "I will do this dazzling, this beautiful, this utterly impossible thing!"

During the fifteen years he had been working on his Spanish Adventurers in North America, this room had been his centre of operations. There had been delightful excursions and digressions; the two Sabbatical years when he was in Spain studying records, two summers in the South-west on the trail of his adventurers, another in Old Mexico, dashes to France to see his foster-brothers. But the notes and the records and the ideas always came back to this room. It was here they were digested and sorted, and woven into their proper place in his history.

Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were certainly no other advanView Image of Page 27tages. The furnace heat did not reach the third floor. There was no way to warm the sewing-room, except by a rusty, round gas stove with no flue—a stove which consumed gas imperfectly and contaminated the air. To remedy this, the window must be left open—otherwise, with the ceiling so low, the air would speedily become unfit to breathe. If the stove were turned down, and the window left open a little way, a sudden gust of wind would blow the wretched thing out altogether, and a deeply absorbed man might be asphyxiated before he knew it. The Professor had found that the best method, in winter, was to turn the gas on full and keep the window wide on the hook, even if he had to put on a leather jacket over his working-coat. By that arrangement he had somehow managed to get air enough to work by.

He wondered now why he had never looked about for a better stove, a newer model; or why he had not at least painted this one, flaky with rust. But he had been able to get on only by neglecting negative comforts. He was by no means an ascetic. He knew that he was terribly selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him delight, he got it, if he sold his shirt for it. By doing without many so-called necessities he had managed to have his luxuries. He might, for instance, have had a convenient electric drop-light attached toView Image of Page 27 the socket above his writing-table. Preferably he wrote by a faithful kerosene lamp which he filled and tended himself. But sometimes he found that the oil-can in the closet was empty; then, to get more, he would have had to go down through the house to the cellar, and on his way he would almost surely become interested in what the children were doing, or in what his wife was doing—or he would notice that the kitchen linoleum was breaking under the sink where the maid kicked it up, and he would stop to tack it down. On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when the lamp was empty—and that usually occurred when he was in the middle of a most important passage—he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb, sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn't dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.

If someone in the family happened to be sick, he didn't go to his study at all. Two evenings of the week he spent with his wife and daughters, and one eveningView Image of Page 28 he and his wife went out to dinner, or to the theatre or a concert. That left him only four. He had Saturdays and Sundays, of course, and on those two days he worked like a miner under a landslide. Augusta was not allowed to come on Saturday, though she was paid for that day. All the while that he was working so fiercely by night, he was earning his living during the day; carrying full university work and feeding himself out to hundreds of students in lectures and consultations. But that was another life.

St. Peter had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense. He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust—many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well—but his misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.

But he had burned his candle at both ends to some purpose—he had got what he wanted. By many petty View Image of Page 29 economies of purse, he had managed to be extravagant with not a cent in the world but his professor's salary—he didn't, of course, touch his wife's small income from her father. By eliminations and combinations so many and subtle that it now made his head ache to think of them, he had done full justice to his university lectures, and at the same time carried on an engrossing piece of creative work. A man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He had been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland,—and he had foretold.

There was one fine thing about this room that had been the scene of so many defeats and triumphs. From the window he could see, far away, just on the horizon, a long, blue, hazy smear—Lake Michigan, the inland sea of his childhood. Whenever he was tired and dull, when the white pages before him remained blank or were full of scratched-out sentences, then he left his desk. took the train to a little station twelve miles away, and spent a day on the lake with his sail-boat; jumping out to swim, floating on his back alongside, then climbing into his boat again.

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When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were certain human figures against it, of course; his practical, strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father, the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning, across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide.

When he was eight years old, his parents sold the lakeside farm and dragged him and his brothers and sisters out to the wheat lands of central Kansas. St. PeView Image of Page 31ter nearly died of it. Never could he forget the few moments on the train when that sudden, innocent blue across the sand dunes was dying for ever from his sight. It was like sinking for the third time. No later anguish, and he had had his share, went so deep or seemed so final. Even in his long, happy student years with the Thierault family in France, that stretch of blue water was the one thing he was homesick for. In the summer he used to go with the Thierault boys to Brittany or to the Languedoc coast; but his lake was itself, as the Channel and the Mediterranean were themselves. "No," he used to tell the boys, who were always asking him about le Michigan, "it is altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue, but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls, but—I don't know, il est toujours plus naif."

Afterward, when St. Peter was looking for a professorship, because he was very much in love and must marry at once, out of the several positions offered him he took the one at Hamilton, not because it was the best, but because it seemed to him that any place near the lake was a place where one could live. The sight of it from his study window these many years had been of more assistance than all the convenient things he had done without would have been.

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Just in that corner, under Augusta's archaic "forms, he had always meant to put the filing-cabinets he had never spared the time or money to buy. They would have held all his notes and pamphlets, and the spasmodic rough drafts of passages far ahead. But he had never got them, and now he really didn't need them: it would be like locking the stable after the horse is stolen. For the horse was gone —that was the thing he was feeling most just now. In spite of all he'd neglected, he had completed his Spanish Adventurers in eight volumes—without filing-cabinets or money or a decent study or a decent stove—and without encouragement, Heaven knew! For all the interest the first three volumes awoke in the world, he might as well have dropped them into Lake Michigan. They had been timidly reviewed by other professors of history, in technical and educational journals. Nobody saw that he was trying to do something quite different—they merely thought he was trying to do the usual thing, and had not succeeded very well. They recommended to him the more even and genial style of John Fiske.

St. Peter hadn't, he could honestly say, cared a whoop—not in those golden days. When the whole plan of his narrative was coming clearer and clearer all the time, when he could feel his hand growing easier View Image of Page 33 with his material, when all the foolish conventions about that kind of writing were falling away and his relation with his work was becoming every day more simple, natural, and happy,— he cared as little as the Spanish Adventurers themselves what Professor So-and-So thought about them. With the fourth volume he began to be aware that a few young men, scattered about the United States and England, were intensely interested in his experiment. With the fifth and sixth, they began to express their interest in lectures and in print. The two last volumes brought him a certain international reputation and what were called rewards—among them, the Oxford prize for history, with its five thousand pounds, which had built him the new house into which he did not want to move.

"Godfrey." his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an ironical hirn in some remark he made about the new house, "is there something you would rather have done with that money than to have built a house with it?"

"Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have bought back the fun I had writing my history, you'd never have got your house. But one couldn't get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures don't come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you.

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2

That evening St. Peter was in the new house, dressing for dinner. His two daughters and their husbands were dining with them, also an English visitor. Mrs. St. Peter heard the shower going as she passed his door. She entered his room and waited until he came out in his bath-robe, rubbing his wet, ink-black hair with a towel.

"Surely you'll admit that you like having your own bath," she said, looking past him into the glittering white cubicle, flooded with electric light, which he had just quitted.

"Whoever said I didn't? But more than anything else, I like my closets. I like having room for all my clothes, without hanging one coat on top of another, and not having to get down on my marrow-bones and fumble in dark corners to find my shoes."

"Of course you do. And it's much more dignified, at your age, to have a room of your own. "It's convenient, certainly, though I hope I'm not so old as to be personally repulsive?" He glanced into the mirror and straightened his shoulders as if he were trying on a coat.

Mrs. St. Peter laughed,—a pleasant, easy laugh withView Image of Page 35 genuine amusement in it. "No, you are very handsome, my dear, especially in your bath-robe. You grow better-looking and more intolerant all the time. "Intolerant?" He put down his shoe and looked up at her. The thing that stuck in his mind constantly was that she was growing more and more intolerant, about everything except her sons-in-law; that she would probably continue to do so, and that he must school himself to bear it.

"I suppose it's a natural process," she went on, "but you ought to try, try seriously, I mean, to curb it where it affects the happiness of your daughters. You are too severe with Scott and Louie. All young men have foolish vanities—you had plenty."

St. Peter sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward and playing absently with the tassels of his bath-robe. "Why, Lillian, I have exercised the virtue of patience with those two young men more than with all the thousands of young ruffians who have gone through my classrooms. My forbearance is overstrained, it's gone flat. That's what's the matter with me. "Oh, Godfrey, how can you be such a poor judge of your own behaviour? But we won't argue about it now. You'll put on your dinner coat? And do try to be sympathetic and agreeable tonight.View Image of Page 36

Halfan hour later Mr. and Mrs. Scott McGregor and Mr. and Mrs. Louie Marsellus arrived, and soon after them the English scholar, Sir Edgar Spilling, so anxious to do the usual thing in America that he wore a morning street suit. He was a gaunt, rugged, large-boned man of fifty, with long legs and arms, a pear-shaped face, and a drooping, pre-war moustache. His specialty was Spanish history, and he had come all the way to Hamilton, from his cousin's place in Saskatchewan, to enquire about some of Doctor St. Peter's "sources. Introductions over, it was the Professor's son-in-law, Louie Marsellus, who took Sir Edgar in hand. He remembered having met in China a Walter Spilling, who was, it turned out, a brother of Sir Edgar. Marsellus had also a brother there, engaged in the silk trade. They exchanged opinions on conditions in the Orient, while young McGregor put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and roamed restlessly up and down the library. The two daughters sat near their mother, listening to the talk about China.

Mrs. St. Peter was very fair, pink and gold,—a pale gold, now that she was becoming a little grey. The tints of her face and hair and lashes were so soft that one did not realize, on first meeting her, how very definitely and decidedly her features were cut, under the smiling infuView Image of Page 37sion of colour. When she was annoyed or tired, the lines became severe. Rosamond, the elder daughter, resembled her mother in feature, though her face was heavier. Her colouring was altogether different; dusky black hair, deep dark eyes, a soft white skin with rich brunette red in her cheeks and lips. Nearly everyone considered Rosamond brilliantly beautiful. Her father, though he was very proud of her, demurred from the general opinion. He thought her too tall, with a rather awkward carriage. She stooped a trifle, and was wide in the hips and shoulders. She had, he sometimes remarked to her mother, exactly the wide femur and flat shoulder-blade of his old slab-sided Kanuck grandfather. For a tree. hewer they were an asset. But St. Peter was very critical. Most people saw only Rosamond's smooth black head and white throat, and the red of her curved lips that was like the duskiness of dark, heavy-scented roses.

Kathleen, the younger daughter, looked even younger than she was— had the slender, undeveloped figure then very much in vogue. She was pale, with light hazel eyes, and her hair was hazel-coloured with distinctly green glints in it. To her father there was something very charming in the curious shadows her wide cheekbones cast over her cheeks, and in the spirited tilt of her head. Her figure in profile, he used to tell her, looked just like an interrogation point.

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Mrs. St. Peter frankly liked having a son-in-law who could tot up acquaintances with Sir Edgar from to Alaska. Scott, she saw, was going to be sulky because Sir Edgar and Marsellus were talking about things beyond his little circle of interests. She made no effort to draw him into the conversation, but let him prowl like a restless leopard among the books. The Professor was amiable, but quiet. When the second maid came to the door and signalled that dinner was ready—dinner was signaled, not announced—Mrs. St. Peter took Sir Edgar and guided him to his seat at her right, while the others found their usual places. After they had finished the soup, she had some difficulty in summoning the little maid to take away the plates, and explained to her guest that the electric bell, under the table, wasn't connected as yet—they had been in the new house less than a week, and the trials of building were not over.

"Oh? Then if I had happened along a fortnight ago I shouldn't have found you here? But it must be very interesting, building your own house and arranging it as you like," he responded.

Marsellus, silenced during the soup, came in with a warm smile and a slight shrug of the shoulders. "Building is the word with us, Sir Edgar, my—oh, isn't it! My wife and I are in the throes of it. We are building a View Image of Page 39 country house, rather an ambitious affair, out on the wooded shores of Lake Michigan. Perhaps you would like to run out in my car and see it? What are your engagements for tomorrow? I can take you out in half an hour, and we can lunch at the Country Club. We have a magnificent site; primeval forest behind us and the lake in front, with our own beach—my father-in- law, you must know, is a formidable swimmer. We've been singularly fortunate in our architect,—a young Norwegian, trained in Paris. He's doing us a Norwegian manor house, very harmonious with its setting, just the right thing for rugged pine woods and high headlands."

Sir Edgar seemed most willing to make this excursion, and allowed Marsellus to fix an hour, greatly to the surprise of McGregor, whose look at his wife implied that he entertained serious doubts whether this baronet with walrus moustaches amounted to much after all.

The engagement made, Louie turned to Mrs. St. Peter. "And won't you come too, Dearest? You haven't been out since we got our wonderful wrought-iron door fittings from Chicago. We found just the right sort of hinge and latch, Sir Edgar, and had all the others copied from it. None of your Colonial glass knobs for us!"

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Mrs. St. Peter sighed. Scott and Kathleen had just glass-knobbed their new bungalow throughout, yet she knew Louie didn't mean to hurt their feelings—it was his heedless enthusiasm that made him often say untactful things.

"We've been extremely fortunate in getting all the little things right," Louie was gladly confiding to Sir Edgar. "There's really not a flaw in the conception. I can say that, because I'm a mere onlooker, the whole thing's been done by the Norwegian and my wife and Mrs. St. Peter. And," he put his hand down affectionately upon Mrs. St. Peter's bare arm, "and we've named our place! I've already ordered the house stationery. No, Rosamond, I won't keep our little secret any longer. It will please your father, as well as your mother. We call our place 'Outland, Sir Edgar."

He dropped the announcement and drew back. His mother-in-law rose to it—Spilling could scarcely be expected to understand.

"How splendid, Louie! A real inspiration."

"Yes, isn't it? I knew that would go to your hearts. The Professor had expressed his emotion only by lifting his heavy, sharply uptwisted eyebrows. "Let me explain, Sir Edgar," Marsellus went on eagerly. "We have named our place for Tom Outland, a brilliantView Image of Page 41 young American scientist and inventor, who was killed in Flanders, fighting with the Foreign Legion, the second year of the war, when he was barely thirty years of age. Before he dashed off to the front, this youngster had discovered the principle of the Outland vacuum, worked out the construction of the Outland engine that is revolutionizing aviation. He had not only invented it, but, curiously enough for such a hot-headed fellow, had taken pains to protect it. He had no time to communicate his discovery or to commercialize it—simply bolted to the front and left the most important discovery of his time to take care of itself."

Sir Edgar, fork arrested, looked a trifle dazed. "Am I to understand that you are referring to the inventor of the Outland engine?"

Louie was delighted. "Exactly that! Of course you would know all about it. My wife was young Outland's fiancée—is virtually his widow. Before he went to France he made a will in her favour; he had no living relatives, indeed. Toward the close of the war we began to sense the importance of what Outland had been doing in his laboratory—I am an electrical engineer by profession. We called in the assistance of experts and got the idea over from the laboratory to the trade. The monetary returns have been and are, of course, large.

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While Louie paused long enough to have some inter- course with the roast before it was taken away, Sir Edgar remarked that he himself had been in the Air Service during the war, in the construction department, and that it was most extraordinary to come thus bi chance upon the genesis of the Outland engine.

"You see," Louie told him, "Outland got nothing out of it but death and glory. Naturally, we feel terribly indebted. We feel it's our first duty in life to use that money as he would have wished—we've endowed scholarships in his own university here, and that sort of thing. But our house we want to have as a sort of memo. rial to him. We are going to transfer his laboratory there, if the university will permit,—all the apparatus he worked with. We have a room for his library and pictures. When his brother scientists come to Hamilton to look him up, to get information about him, as they are doing now already, at Outland they will find his books and instruments, all the sources of his inspiration."

"Even Rosamond," murmured McGregor, his eyes upon his cool green salad. He was struggling with a desire to shout to the Britisher that Marsellus had never so much as seen Tom Outland, while he, McGregor, had been his classmate and friend.

Sir Edgar was as much interested as he was mystified. View Image of Page 43 He had come here to talk about manuscripts shut up in certain mouldering monasteries in Spain, but he had almost forgotten them in the turn the conversation had taken. He was genuinely interested in aviation and all its problems. He asked few questions, and his comments were almost entirely limited to the single exclamation, "Oh!" But this, from his lips, could mean a great many things; indifference, sharp interrogation, sympathetic interest, the nervousness of a modest man on hearing disclosures of a delicately personal nature. McGregor, before the others had finished dessert, drew a big cigar from his pocket and lit it at one of the table candles, as the horridest thing he could think of to do.

When they left the dining-room, St. Peter, who had scarcely spoken during dinner, took Sir Edgar's arm and said to his wife: "If you will excuse us, my dear, we have some technical matters to discuss." Leading his guest into the library, he shut the door.

Marsellus looked distinctly disappointed. He stood gazing wistfully after them, like a little boy told to go to bed. Louie's eyes were vividly blue, like hot sapphires, but the rest of his face had little colour—he was a rather mackerel-tinted man. Only his eyes, and his quick, impetuous movements, gave out the zest for life with which he was always bubbling. There was nothing SeView Image of Page 44 mitic about his countenance except his nose—that took the lead. It was not at all an unpleasing feature, but it grew out of his face with masterful strength, well-rooted, like a vigorous oak-tree growing out of a hill-side.

Mrs. St. Peter, always concerned for Louie, asked him to come and look at the new rug in her bedroom. This revived him; he took her arm, and they went upstairs together.

McGregor was left with the two sisters. "Outland. outlandish!" he muttered, while he fumbled about for an ash-tray. Rosamond pretended not to hear him, but the dusky red on her cheeks crept a little farther toward her ears.

"Remember, we are leaving early, Scott," said Kathleen. "You have to finish your editorial to-night.

"Surely you don't make him work at night, too?" Rosamond asked. "Doesn't he have to rest his brain sometimes? Humour is always better if it's spontaneous."

"Oh, that's the trouble with me." Scott assured her. "Unless I keep my nose to the grindstone, I'm too damned spontaneous and tell the truth, and the public won't stand for it. It's not an editorial I have to finish, it's the daily prose poem I do for the syndicate, for which I get twenty-five beans. This is the motif:

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'When your pocket is under-moneyed and your fancy is over-girled, you'll have to admit while you're cursing it, it's a mighty darned good old world.'

Bang, bang!"

He threw his cigar-end savagely into the fire-place. He knew that Rosamond detested his editorials and his jingles. She had fastidious taste in literature, like her mother—though he didn't think she had half the general intelligence of his wife. She also, now that she was Tom Outland' heir, detested to hear sums of money mentioned, especially small sums.

After the good-nights were said, and they were out-side the front door, McGregor seized his wife's elbow and rushed her down the walk to the gate where his Ford was parked, breaking out in her ear as they ran: "Now what the hell is a virtual widow? Does he mean a Virtuous widow, or the reverseous: Bang, bang!

St. Peter awoke the next morning with the wish that he could be transported on his mattress from the new house to the old. But it was Sunday, and on that day his wife always breakfasted with him. There was no way out; they would meet at compt.

When he reached the dining-room Lillian was alView Image of Page 46ready at the table, behind the percolator. "Good morning, Godfrey. I hope you had a good night." Her tone just faintly implied that he hadn't deserved one.

"Excellent. And you?"

"I had a good conscience." She smiled ruefully at him. "How can you let yourself be ungracious in your own house?"

"Oh, dear! And I went to sleep happy in the belief that I hadn't said anything amiss the whole evening." "Nor anything aright, that I heard. Your disapproving silence can kill the life of any company."

"It didn't seem to, last night. You're entirely wrong about Marsellus. He doesn't notice."

"He's too polite to take notice, but he feels it. He's very sensitive, under a well-schooled impersonal manner.

St. Peter laughed. "Nonsense, Lillian! If he were, he couldn't pick up a dinner party and walk off with it, as he almost always does. I don't mind when it's our dinner, but I hate seeing him do it in other people's houses."

"Be fair, Godfrey. You know that if you'd once begun to talk about your work in Spain, Louie would have followed it up with enthusiasm. Nobody is prouder of you than he.

"That's why I kept quiet. Support can be too able—certainly too fluent.

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"There you are; the dog in the manger! You won't let him discuss your affairs, and you are annoyed when he talks about his own.

"I admit I can't bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their con- founded place!) This calling it after him passes my comprehension. And Rosamond's standing for it! It's brazen impudence.

Mrs. St. Peter frowned pensively. "I knew you wouldn't like it, but they were so pleased about it, and their motives are so generous——"

"Hang it, Outland doesn't need their generosity! They've got everything he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn't. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee, please?"

She refilled his cup and handed it across the table. "Nice hands," he murmured, looking critically at them as he took it, "always such nice hands."

"Thank you. I dislike floridity when it is beaten up to cover the lack of something, to take the place of some. thing. I never disliked it when it came from exuberance. Then it isn't floridness, it's merely strong colour.

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"Very well; some people don't care for strong colour. It fatigues them." He folded his napkin. "Now I must be off to my desk."

"Not quite yet. You never have time to talk to me. Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners—that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn't say so, frankly?" Mrs. St. Peter spoke thoughtfully, as if she had considered this matter before.

"Oh, it goes back a long way. I rather think it began in the Age of Chivalry—King Arthur's knights. Whoever it was lived in that time, some feeling grew up that a man should do fine deeds and not speak of them, and that he shouldn't speak the name of his lady, but sing of her as a Phyllis or a Nicolette. It's a nice idea, reserve about one's deepest feelings: keeps them fresh."

"The Oriental peoples didn't have an Age of Chivalry. They didn't need one," Lillian observed. "And this reserve—it becomes in itself ostentatious, a vain-glorious vanity."

"Oh, my dear, all is vanity! I don't dispute that. Now I must really go, and I wish I could play the game as well as you do. I have no enthusiasm for being a father-in-law. It's you who keep the ball rolling. I fully appreciate that.

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"Perhaps," mused his wife, as he rose, "it's because you didn't get the son-in-law you wanted. And yet he was highly coloured, too."

The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland.

St. Peter had met his wife in Paris, when he was but twenty-four, and studying for his doctorate. She too was studying there. French people thought her an English girl because of her gold hair and fair complexion. With her really radiant charm, she had a very interesting mind—but it was quite wrong to call it mind, the connotation was false. What she had was a richly endowed nature that responded strongly to life and art, and very vehement likes and dislikes which were often quite out of all proportion to the trivial object or person that aroused them. Before his marriage, and for years afterward, Lillian's prejudices, her divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, butView Image of Page 50 nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St. Peter's life. When he accepted almost the first position offered him, in order to marry at once, and came to take the chair of European history at Hamilton, he was thrown upon his wife for mental companionship. Most of his colleagues were much older than he, but they were not his equals either in scholarship or in experience of the world. The only other man in the faculty who was carrying on important research work was Doctor Crane, the professor of physics. St. Peter saw a good deal of him, though outside his specialty he was uninteresting—a narrow-minded man, and painfully unattractive. Years ago Crane had begun to suffer from a malady which in time proved incurable, and which now sent him up for an operation periodically. St. Peter had had no friend in Hamilton of whom Lillian could possibly be jealous until Tom Outland came along, so well fitted by nature and early environment to help him with his work on the Spanish Adventurers.

When he had almost reached his old house and his study, the Professor remembered that he really must have an understanding with his landlord, or the place would be rented over his head. He turned and went down into another part of the city, by the car shops, where only workmen lived, and found his landlord's View Image of Page 51 little toy house, set on a hill-side, over a basement faced up with red brick and covered with hop vines. Old Appelhoff was sitting on a bench before his door, making a broom. Raising broom corn was one of his economies. Beside him was his dachshund bitch, Minna.

St. Peter explained that he wanted to stay on in the empty house, and would pay the full rent each month. So irregular a project annoyed Appelhoff. "I like fine to oblige you, Professor, but dey is several parties looking at de house already, an' I don't like to lose a year's rent for maybe a few months."

"Oh, that's all right, Fred. I'll take it for the year, to simplify matters. I want to finish my new book before I move.

Fred still looked uneasy. "I better see de insurance man, ch? It says for purposes of domestic dwelling."

"He won't object. Let's have a look at your garden. What a fine crop of apples and sickle pears you have!"

"I don't like dem trees what don't bear noting," said the old man with sly humour, remembering the Professor's glistening, barren shrubs and the good ground wasted behind his stucco wall.

"How about your linden-trees?"

"Oh, dem Rowers is awful good for de headache!"

"You don't look as if you were subject to it, Fred."

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"Not me, but my woman always had."

"Pretty lonesome without her, Appelhoff?"

"I miss her, Professor, but I ain't just lonesome." The old man rubbed his bristly chin. "My Minna here is most like a person, and den I got so many t'ings to t'ink about."

"Have you? Pleasant things, I hope?"

"Well, all kinds. When I was young, in de old coun- try, I had it hard to git my wife at all, an' I never had time to 'ink. When I come to dis country I had to work so turrible hard on dat farm to make crops an' pay debts, dat I was like a horse. Now I have it easy, an' I take time to 'ink about all dem t'ings."

St. Peter laughed. "We all come to it, Appelhoff. That's one thing I'm renting your house for, to have room to think. Good morning."

Crossing the public park, on his way back to the old house, he espied his professional rival and enemy, Professor Horace Langtry, taking a Sunday morning stroll—very well got up in English clothes he had brought back from his customary summer in London, with a bowler hat of unusual block and a horn-handled walking-stick. In twenty years the two men had scarcely had speech with each other beyond a stiff "good morning." When Langtry first came to the university heView Image of Page 53 looked hardly more than a boy, with curly brown hair and such a fresh complexion that the students called him Lily Langtry. His round pink cheeks and round eyes and round chin made him look rather like a baby grown big. All these years had made little difference, except that his curls were now quite grey, his rosy cheeks even rosier, and his mouth dropped a little at the corners, so that he looked like a baby suddenly grown old and rather cross about it.

Seeing St. Peter, the younger man turned abruptly into a side alley, but the Professor overtook him. "Good morning, Langtry. These elms are becoming real trees at last. They've changed a good deal since we first came here."

Doctor Langtry moved his rosy chin sidewise over his high double collar. "Good morning, Doctor St. Peter. I really don't remember much about the trees. They seem to be doing well now."

St. Peter stepped abreast of him. "There have been many changes, Langtry, and not all of them are good. Don't you notice a great difference in the student body as a whole, in the new crop that comes along every year now—how different they are from the ones of our early years here?

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The smooth chin turned again, and the other professor of European history blinked. "In just what respect?" "Oh, in the all-embracing respect of quality! We have hosts of students, but they're a common sort."

"Perhaps. I can't say I've noticed it." The air between the two colleagues was not thawing out any. A church-bell rang. Langtry started hopefully. "You must excuse me, Doctor St. Peter, I am on my way to service."

The Professor gave it up with a shrug. "All right, all right, Langtry, as you will. Quelle folie!

Langtry half turned back, hesitated on the ball of his suddenly speeding foot, and said with faultless politeness: "I beg your pardon?"

St. Peter waved his hand with a gesture of negation, and detained the church-goer no longer. He sauntered along slackly through the hot September sunshine, wondering why Langtry didn't see the absurdity of their long grudge. They had always been directly opposed in matters of university policy, until it had almost become a part of their professional duties to outwit and cramp each other.

When young Langtry first came there, his specialty was supposed to be American history. His uncle was president of the board of regents, and very influential in State politics; the institution had to look to him, indeed, View Image of Page 55 to get its financial appropriations passed by the Legislature. Langtry was a Tory in his point of view, and was considered very English in his tone and manner. His lectures were dull, and the students didn't like him. Every inducement was offered to make his courses popular. Liberal credits were given for collateral reading. A student could read almost anything that had ever been written in the United States and get credit for it in American history. He could charge up the time spent in perusing "The Scarlet Letter" to Colonial history, and "Tom Sawyer" to the Missouri Compromise, it was said. St. Peter openly criticized these lax methods, both to the faculty and to the regents. Naturally, "Madame Langtry" paid him out. During the Professor's second Sabbatical year in Spain, Horace and his uncle together very nearly got his department away from him. They worked so quietly that it was only at the eleventh hour that St. Peter's old students throughout the State got wind of what was going on, dropped their various businesses and professions for a few days, and came up to the capital in dozens and saved his place for him. The opposition had been so formidable that when it came time for his third year away, the Professor had not dared ask for it, but had taken an extension of his summer vacation instead. The fact that he was carrying on anView Image of Page 56other line of work than his lectures, and was publishing books that weren't strictly text-books, had been used against him by Langtry' uncle.

As Langtry felt that the unpopularity of his course was due to his subject, a new chair was created for him. There couldn't be two heads in European history, so the board of regents made for him a chair of Renaissance history, or, as St. Peter said, a Renaissance chair of history. Of late years, for reasons that had not much to do with his lectures, Langtry had prospered better. To the new generations of country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in manners,—what is called an "influence." To the football-playing farmer boy who had a good allowance but didn't know how to dress or what to say, Langtry looked like a short cut. He had several times taken parties of undergraduates to London for the summer, and they had come back wonderfully brushed up. He introduced a very popular fraternity into the university, and its members looked after his interests, as did its affiliated sorority. His standing on the faculty was now quite as good as St. Peter's own, and the Professor wondered what Langtry still had to be sore about.

What was the use of keeping up the feud? They hadView Image of Page 57 both come there young men, fighting for their places and their lives; now they were not very young any more; they would neither of them, probably, ever hold a better position. Couldn't Langtry see it was a draw, that they had both been beaten?

On Monday afternoon St. Peter mounted to his study and lay down on the box-couch, tired out with his day at the university. The first few weeks of the year were very fatiguing for him; there were so many exhausting things besides his lectures and all the new students; long faculty meetings in which almost no one was ever frank, and always the old fight to keep up the standard of scholarship, to prevent the younger professors, who had a sharp eye to their own interests, from farming the whole institution out to athletics, and to the agricultural and commercial schools favoured and fostered by the State Legislature.

The September heat, too, was hard on him. He wanted to be out at the lake every day—it was never so fine as in late September. He was lying with closed eyes, resting his mind on the picture of intense autumn-blue water, when he heard a tap at the door and his daughter Rosamond entered, very handsome in a silk suit of a View Image of Page 58 vivid shade of lilac, admirably suited to her complexion and showing that in the colour of her cheeks there was actually a tone of warm lavender. In that low room she seemed very tall indeed, a little out of drawing, as, to her father's eye, she so often did. Usually, however, peo- ple were aware only of her rich complexion, her curving, unresisting mouth and mysterious eyes. Tom Out- land had seen nothing else, and he was a young man who saw a great deal.

"Am I interrupting something important, Papa?"

"No, not at all, my dear. Sit down."

On his writing-table she caught a glimpse of pages in a handwriting not his—a script she knew very well.

"Not much choice of chairs, is there?" she smiled. "Papa, I don't like to have you working in a place like this. It's not fitting.

"Much easier than to break in a new room, Rosie. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one."

"That's really what I came to see you about." Rosamond traced the edge of a hole in the matting with the tip of her lilac sunshade. "Won't you let me build you a little study in the back yard of the new house? I have such good ideas for it, and you would have no bother about it at all."

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"Oh, thank you, Rosamond. It's most awfully nice of you to think of it. But keep it just an idea—it's better so. Lots of things are. For the present I'll plod on here. It's absurd, but it suits me. Habit is such a big part of work."

"With Augusta's old things lying about, and those dusty old forms? Why didn't she at least get those out of your way?"

"Oh, they have a right here, by long tenure. It's their room, too. I don't want to come upon them lying in some dump-heap on the road to the lake. They remind me of the times when you were little girls, and your first party frocks used to hang on them at night, when worked."

Rosamond smiled, unconvinced. "Papa, don't joke with me. I've come to talk about something serious, and it's very difficult. You know I'm a little afraid of you." She dropped her shadowy, bewitching eyes.

"Afraid of me? Never!"

"Oh, yes, I am when you're sarcastic. You mustn't be today, please. Louie and I have often talked this over. We feel strongly about it. He's often been on the point of blurting out with it, but I've curbed him. You don't always approve of Louie and me. Of course it was only Louie's energy and technical knowledge that ever made Tom's discovery succeed commercially, but we don't View Image of Page 60 feel that we ought to have all the returns from it. We think you ought to let us settle an income on you, so that you could give up your university work and devote all your time to writing and research. That is what Tom would have wanted."

St. Peter rose quickly, with the light, supple spring he had when he was very nervous, crossed to the window, wide on its hook, and half closed it. "My dear daughter," he said decisively, when he had turned round to her, "I couldn't possibly take any of Outland's money."

"But why not? You were the best friend he had in the world, he owed more to you than to anyone else, and he hated having you hampered by teaching. He admired your mind, and nothing would have pleased him more than helping you to do the work you do better than anyone else. If he were alive, that would be one of the first things he would use this money for."

"But he is not alive, and there was no word about me in his will, and so there is nothing to build your pretty theory upon. It's wonderfully nice of you and Louie, and I'm very pleased, you know."

"But Tom was so impractical, Father. He never thought it would mean more than a liberal dress allowance for me, if he thought at all. I don't know—he never spoke to me about it."

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St. Peter smiled quizzically. "I'm not so sure about his impracticalness. When he was working on that gas, he once remarked to me that there might be a fortune in it. To be sure, he didn't wait to find out whether there was a fortune, but that had to do with quite another side of him. Yes. I think he knew his idea would make money and he wanted you to have it, with him or without him.

The young woman's face grew troubled. "Even if I married?"

"He wanted you to have whatever would make you happy."

She sighed luxuriously. "Louie has done that. The only thing that troubles me is, I feel you ought to have some of this money, that he would wish it. He was so full of gratitude, felt that he owed you so much."

Her father again rose, with that guarded, nervous movement. "Once and for all. Rosamond, understand that he owed me no more than I owed him. Nothing hurts me so much as to have any member of my family talk as if we had done something fine for that young man, brought him out, produced him. In a lifetime of teaching, I've encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that, I'd consider my good years largely wasted. And there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can't explain just how I feel about it,View Image of Page 62 but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I'm purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue."

His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.

"Sometimes," she murmured, "I think you feel I oughtn't to have taken it, either."

"You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn't, and there was no material clause in it. He empowered you to carry out all his wishes, and I realize that you have responsibilities—but none toward me. There is Rodney Blake, of course, if he should ever turn up. You keep up some search for him?"

"Louie attends to it. He has investigated and rejected several impostors.

"Then, of course, there are other friends of Tom's. The Cranes, for instance?"

Rosamond' face grew hard. "I won't bother you about the Cranes, Papa. We will attend to them. Mrs. Crane is a common creature, and she is advised by that dreadful shyster brother of hers, Homer Bright. You know what he is."

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"Oh, yes! He was about the greatest bluffer I ever had in my classes."

Rosamond had risen to go. "I want you to be awfully happy, daughter," St. Peter went on, and Tom did. It's only young people like you and Louie who can get any fun out of money. And there is enough to cover the fine, the almost imaginary obligations. You won't be sorry if you are generous with people like the Cranes."

"Thank you, Papa. I shan't forget." Rosamond went down the narrow stairway, leaving behind her a faint, fresh odour of lavender and orris-root, and her father lay down again on the box-couch. "A hint about the Cranes will be enough," he was thinking.

He didn't in the least understand his older daughter. Not that he pretended to understand Kathleen, either; but he usually knew how she would feel about things, and she had always seemed to need his protection more than Rosamond. When she was a student at the university, he used sometimes to see her crossing the campus alone, her head and shoulders lowered against the wind, her muff beside her face, her narrow skirt clinging close. There was something too plucky, too "I can-go-it-alone," about her quick step and jaunty little head; he didn't like it, it gave him a sudden pang. He would always call to her and catch up with her, and make her take his arm and be docile.

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She had been much quicker at her lessons than Rosie, and very clever at water-colour portrait sketches. She had done several really good likenesses of her father- one, at least, was the man himself. With her mother she had no luck. She tried again and again, but the face was always hard, the upper lip longer than it seemed in life, the nose long and severe, and she made something cold and plaster-like of Lillian's beautiful complexion. "No, I don't see Mamma like that," she used to say, throwing out her chin. "Of course I don't! It just comes like that. She had done many heads of her sister, all very sentimental and curiously false, though Louie Marsellus protested to like them. Her drawing-teacher at the university had urged Kathleen to go to Chicago and study in the life classes at the Art Institute, but she said resolutely: "No, I can't really do anybody but Papa, and I can't make a living painting him."

"The only unusual thing about Kitty," her father used to tell his friends, "is that she doesn't think herself a bit unusual. Nowdays the girls in my classes who have a spark of aptitude for anything seem to think themselves remarkable."

Though wilfulness was implied in the line of her figure, in the way she sometimes threw out her chin, Kathleen had never been deaf to reasoning, deaf to herView Image of Page 65 father, but once; and that was when, shortly after Rosamond's engagement to Tom, she announced that she was going to marry Scott McGregor. Scott was young, was just getting a start as a journalist, and his salary was not large enough for two people to live upon. That fact, the St. Peters thought, would act as a brake upon the impetuous young couple. But soon after they were engaged Scott began to do his daily prose poem for a newspaper syndicate. It was a success from the start, and increased his earnings enough to enable him to marry. The Professor had expected a better match for Kitty. He was no snob, and he liked Scott and trusted him; but he knew that Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father thought a more interesting man would make her happier. There was no holding her back, however, and the curious part of it was that, after the very first, her mother supported her. St. Peter had a vague suspicion that this was somehow on Rosamond's account more than on Kathleen's; Lillian always worked things out for Rosamond. Yet at the time he couldn't see how Kathleen's marriage would benefit Rosie. "Rosie is like your second self," he once declared to his wife, "but you never pampered yourself at her age as you do her".

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It was an intense September noon—warm, windy, golden, with the smell of ripe grapes and drying vines in the air, and the lake rolling blue on the horizon. Scott McGregor, going into the west corner of the university campus, caught sight of Mrs. St. Peter, just ahead of him, walking in the same direction. He ran and caught up with her.

"Hello, Lillian! Going in to see the Professor? So am I. I want him to go swimming with me—I'm cutting work. Shall we drop in and hear the end of his lecture, or sit down here on a bench in the sun?"

"We can go quietly to the door and listen. If it's not interesting, we can come back and sit down for a chat." "Good! I came early to overhear a bit. This is the hour he's with his seniors, isn't it?"

They entered and went along the hall until they came to number 17; the door was ajar, and at the moment one of the students was speaking. When he finished, they heard the Professor reply to him.

"No, Miller, I don't myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems areView Image of Page 67 insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn't given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You'll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by making their conduct of no importance—you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with asView Image of Page 68 much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

"Moses learned the importance of that in the Egyptian court, and when he wanted to make a population of slaves into an independent people in the shortest possible time, he invented elaborate ceremonials to give them a feeling of dignity and purpose. Every act had some imaginative end. The cutting of the finger nails was a religious observance. The Christian theologians went over the books of the Law, like great artists, getting splendid effects by excision. They reset the stage with more space and mystery, throwing all the light upon a few sins of great dramatic value—only seven, you remember, and of those only three that are perpetually enthralling. With the theologians came the cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glassworkers and painters. They might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said,Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven. How can it be done anywhere else as it is in heaven? But I think the hour is up. You might tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable."

As the young men filed out of the room, Mrs. St. Peter and McGregor went in.

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"I came over to get you to go to the electrician's with me, Godfrey, but I won't make you. Scott wants you to run out to the lake, and it's such a fine day, you really should go."

"Car's outside. We'll just drop Lillian at the house, Doctor, and you can pick up your bathing-suit. We heard part of your lecture, by the way. How you get by the Methodists is still a mystery to me."

"I wish he would get into trouble, Scott," said Lillian as they left the building. "I wish he wouldn't talk to those fat-faced boys as if they were intelligent beings. You cheapen yourself, Godfrey. It makes me a little ashamed."

"I was rather rambling on to-day. I'm sorry you happened along. There's a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn't slow, and he excites me to controversy. "All the same." murmured his wife, "it's hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It's in rather bad taste,"

"Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won't do it again. It took Scott only twenty minutes to get out to the lake. He drew up at the bit of beach St. Peter had bought for himself years before; a little triangle of sand running out into the water, with a bath-house and seven shaggy pine-trees on it. Scott had to fuss with the car,View Image of Page 70 and the Professor was undressed and in the water before him.

When McGregor was ready to go in, his father-in-law was some distance out, swimming with an over-arm stroke, his head and shoulders well out of the water. He wore on his head a rubber visor of a kind he always brought home from France in great numbers. This one was vermilion, and was like a continuation of his flesh—his arms and back were burned a deep terra-cotta from a summer in the lake. His head and powerful reaching arms made a strong red pattern against the purple blue of the water. The visor was picturesque—his head looked sheathed and small and intensely alive, like the heads of the warriors on the Parthenon frieze in their tight, archaic helmets.

By five o'clock St. Peter and McGregor were dressed and lying on the sand, their overcoats wrapped about them, smoking. Suddenly Scott began to chuckle.

"Oh, Professor, you know your English friend, Sir Edgar Spilling? The day after I met him at your house, he came up to my office at the Herald to get some facts you'd been too modest to give him. When he was leaving he stood and looked at one of these motto cards I have over my desk, DON'T KNOCK, and said: 'May I ask why you don't have that notice on the outside of View Image of Page 71 your door? I didn't observe any other way of getting in.' They never get wise, do they? He really went out to see Marsellus' place—seemed interested. Doctor, are you going to let them call that place after Tom?"

"My dear boy, how can I prevent it?"

"Well, you surely don't like the idea, do you?"

The Professor lit another cigarette and was a long while about it. When he had got it going, he turned on his elbow and looked at McGregor. "Scott, you must see that I can't make suggestions to Louie. He's perfectly consistent. He's a great deal more generous and public-spirited than I am, and my preferences would be enigmatical to him. I can't, either, very gracefully express myself to you about his affairs."

"I get you. Sorry he riles me so. I always say it shan't occur the next time, but it does." Scott took out his pipe and lay silent for a time, looking at the gold glow burning on the water and on the wings of the gulls as they flew by. His expression was wistful, rather mournful. He was a good-looking fellow, with sunburned blond hair, splendid teeth, attractive eyes that usually frowned a little unless he was laughing outright, a small, prettily cut mouth, restless at the corners. There was something moody and discontented about his face. The Professor had a great deal of sympathy for him; Scott was tooView Image of Page 72 good for his work. He had been delighted when his daily poem and his "uplift editorials first proved successful, because that enabled him to marry. Now he could sell as many good-cheer articles as he had time to write, on any subject, and he loathed doing them. Scott had early picked himself out to do something very fine, and he felt that he was wasting his life and his talents. The new group of poets made him angry. When a new novel was discussed seriously by his friends, he was perfectly miserable. St. Peter knew that the poor boy had seasons of desperate unhappiness. His disappointed vanity ate away at his vitals like the Spartan boy's wolf, and only the deep lines in his young forehead and the twitching at the corners of his mouth showed that he suffered.

Not long ago, when the students were giving an historical pageant to commemorate the deeds of an early French explorer among the Great Lakes, they asked St. Peter to do a picture for them, and he had arranged one which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the subject. He posed his two sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before the walls of Jerusalem. Marsellus, in a green dressing-gown and turban, was seated at a table with a chart, his hands extended inView Image of Page 73 reasonable, patient argument. The Plantagenet was standing, his plumed helmet in his hand, his square yellow head haughtily erect, his unthoughtful brows fiercely frowning, his lips curled and his fresh face full of arrogance. The tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter had said dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But the Professor liked his picture, and he thought it quite fair to both the young men.

The Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers, dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by View Image of Page 74 being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed—it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.

In a corner, beside the steaming brass tea-kettle, sat Lillian and Louie, a little lacquer table between them, bending, it seemed, over a casket of jewels. Lillian held up lovingly in her fingers a green-gold necklace, evidently an old one, without stones. "Of course emeralds would be beautiful, Louie, but they seem a little out of scale—to belong to a different scheme of life than any you and Rosamond can live here. You aren't, after all, outrageously rich. When would she wear them?"

"At home, Dearest, with me, at our own dinner-table at Outland! I like the idea of their being out of scale. I've never given her any jewels. I've waited all this time to give her these. To me, her name spells emeralds."

Mrs. St. Peter smiled, easily persuaded. "You'll never be able to keep them. You'll show them to her."

"Oh, no, I won't! They are to stay at the jeweller's, in Chicago, until we all go down for the birthday party. That's another secret we have to keep. We have such lots of them!" He bent over her hand and kissed it with warmth.

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St. Peter swung in over the window rail. "That is always the cue for the husband to enter, isn't it? What's this about Chicago, Louie?"

He sat down, and Marsellus brought him some tea, lingering beside his chair. "It must be a secret from Rosie, but you see it happens that the date of your lecture engagement at the University of Chicago is coincident with her birthday, so I have planned that we shall all go down together. And among other diversions, we shall attend your lectures."

The Professor's eyebrows rose. "Busman's holiday for the ladies, I should say."

"But not for me. Remember, I wasn't in your classes, like Scott and Outland. Id give a good deal if I'd had the chance!" Louie said somewhat plaintively. "So you must make it up to me."

"Come if you wish. Lectures seem to me a rather grim treat, Louie.

"Not to me. With a wink of encouragement I'll go on to Boston with you next winter, when you give the Lowell lectures."

"Would you, really? Next year's a long way off. Now I must get clean. I've been working in my other-house garden, and I'm scarcely fit to have tea with a beautiful lady and a smartly dressed gentleman. What am I to doView Image of Page 76 about that garden in the end, Lillian? Destroy it? Or leave it to the mercy of the next tenants?"

As he went upstairs he turned at the bend of the staircase and looked back at them, again bending over their little box. Mrs. St. Peter was wearing the white silk crèpe that had been the most successful of her summer dresses, and an orchid velvet ribbon about her shining hair. She wouldn't have made herself look quite so well if Louie hadn't been coming, he reflected. Or was it that he wouldn't have noticed it if Louie hadn't been there? A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

Lillian's coquetry with her sons-in-law amused him. He hadn't foreseen it, and he found it rather the most piquant and interesting thing about having married daughters. It had begun with Scott—the younger sister was married before the elder. St. Peter had thought that Scott McGregor was the sort of fellow Lillian always found tiresome. But no; within a few weeks after Kathleen's marriage, arch and confidential relations began to be evident between them. Even now, when Louie was so much in the foreground, and Scott was touchy and jealous, Lillian was very tactful and patient with him.

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With Louie, Lillian seemed to be launching into a new career, and Godfrey began to think that he understood his own wife very little. He would have said that she would feel about Louie just as he did; would have cultivated him as a stranger in the town, because he was so unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign into the family circle. She had always been fastidious to an unreasonable degree about small niceties of deportment. She could never forgive poor Tom Outland for the angle at which he sometimes held a cigar in his mouth, or for the fact that he never learned to eat salad with ease. At the dinnertable, if Tom, forgetting himself in talk, sometimes dropped back into railroad lunch-counter ways and pushed his plate away from him when he had finished a course, Lillian's face would become positively cruel in its contempt. Irregularities of that sort put her all on edge. But Louie could hurry audibly through his soup, or kiss her resoundingly on the cheek at a faculty reception, and she seemed to like it.

Yes, with her sons-in-law she had begun the game of being a woman all over again. She dressed for them, planned for them, schemed in their interests. She had begun to entertain more than for years past— the new View Image of Page 78 house made a plausible pretext—and to use her influence and charm in the little anxious social world of Hamilton. She was intensely interested in the success and happiness of these two young men, lived in their careers as she had once done in his. It was splendid, St. Peter told himself. She wasn't going to have to face a stretch of boredom between being a young woman and being a young grandmother. She was less intelligent and more sensible than he had thought her.

When Godfrey came downstairs ready for dinner, Louie was gone. He walked up to the chair where his wife was reading, and took her hand.

"My dear," he said quite delicately, "I wish you could keep Louie from letting his name go up for the Arts and Letters. It's not safe yet. He's not been here long enough. They're a fussy little bunch, and he ought to wait until they know him better."

"You mean someone will blackball him? Do you really think so? But the Country Club——"

"Yes, Lillian; the Country Club is a big affair, and needs money. The Arts and Letters is a little group of fellows, and, as I said, fussy."

"Scott belongs," said Mrs. St. Peter rebelliously. "Did he tell you?"

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"No, he didn't, and I shall not tell you who did. But if you're tactful, you can save Louie's feelings."

Mrs. St. Peter closed her book without glancing down at it. A new interest shone in her eves and made them look quite through and beyond her husband. "I must see what I can do with Scott," she murmured. St. Peter turned away to hide a smile. An old student of his, a friend who belonged to "the Outland period," had told him laughingly that he was sure Scott would blackball Marsellus if his name ever came to the vote. "You know Scott is a kid in some things," the friend had said. "He's a little sore at Marsellus, and says a secret ballot is the only way he can ever get him where it wouldn't hurt Mrs. St. Peter."

While the Professor was eating his soup, he studied his wife's face in the candlelight. It had changed so much since he found her laughing with Louie, and especially since he had dropped the hint about the Arts and Letters. It had become, he thought, too hard for the orchid velvet in her hair. Her upper lip had grown longer, and stiffened as it always did when she encountered opposition.

"Well," he reflected, "it will be interesting to see what she can do with Scott. That will make rather a test case."

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Early in November there was a picturesque snowstorm, and that day Kathleen telephoned her father at the university, asking him to stop on his way home in the afternoon and help her to decide upon some new furs. As he approached McGregor's spick- and-span bungalow at four o'clock, he saw Louie's Pierce-Arrow standing in front, with Ned, the chauffeur and gardener, in the driver's seat. Just then Rosamond came out of the bungalow alone, and down the path to the sidewalk, without seeing her father. He noticed a singularly haughty expression on her face; her brows drawn together over her nose. The curl of her lips was handsome, but terrifying. He observed also something he had not seen before—a coat of soft, purple-grey fur, that quite disguised the wide, slightly stooping shoulders he regretted in his truly beautiful daughter. He called to her, very much interested. "Wait a minute, Rosie. I've not seen that before. It's extraordinarily becoming." He stroked his daughter's sleeve with evident pleasure. "You know, these things with a kind of lurking purple and lavender in them are splendid for you. They make your colour prettier than ever. It's only lately you've begun to wear them. Louie's taste, I suppose?"

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"Of course. He selects all my things for me," said Rosamond proudly.

"Well, he does a good job. He knows what's right for you." St. Peter continued to look her up and down with satisfaction. "And Kathleen is getting new furs. You were advising her?"

"She didn't mention it to me," Rosamond replied in a guarded voice.

"No? And what do you call this, what beast?" he asked ingenuously, again stroking the fur with his bare hand.

"It's taupe."

"Oh, moleskin!" He drew back a little. "Couldn't be better for your complexion. And is it warm?"

"Very warm—and so light."

"I see, I see!" He took Rosamond's arm and escorted her to her car. "Give Louie my compliments on his choice." The motor glided away—he wished he could escape as quickly and noiselessly, for he was a coward But he had a feeling that Kathleen was watching him from behind the sash curtains. He went up to the door and made a long and thorough use of the foot-scraper before he tapped on the glass. Kathleen let him in. She was very pale; even her lips, which were always pink, like the inside of a white shell, were without colour Neither of them mentioned the just-departed guest.

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"Have you been out in the park, Kitty? This is a pretty little storm. Perhaps you'll walk over to the old house with me presently." He talked soothingly while he took off his coat and rubbers. "And now for the furs!

Kathleen went slowly into her bedroom. She was gone a great while—perhaps ten actual minutes. When she came back, the rims of her eyes were red. She carried four large pasteboard boxes, tied together with twine. St. Peter sprang up, took the parcel, and began untying the string. He opened the first and pulled out a brown stole. "What is it, mink?"

"No, it's Hudson Bay sable."

"Very pretty." He put the collar round her neck and drew back to look at it. But after a sharp struggle Kathleen broke down. She threw off the fur and buried her face in a fresh handkerchief.

"I'm so sorry, Daddy, but it's no use today. I don't want any furs, really. She spoils everything for me. "Oh, my dear, my dear, you hurt me terribly!" St. Peter put his hands tenderly on her soft hazel-coloured hair. "Face it squarely, Kitty, you must not, you cannot, be envious. It's self-destruction.

"I can't help it, Father. I am envious. I don't think I would be if she let me alone, but she comes here with View Image of Page 83 her magnificence and takes the life out of all our poor little things. Everybody knows she's rich, why does she have to keep rubbing it in?"

"But, Kitty dear, you wouldn't have her go home and change her coat before coming to see you?"

"Oh, it's not that, Father, it's everything! You know we were never jealous of each other at home. I was always proud of her good looks and good taste. It's not her clothes, it's a feeling she has inside her. When she comes toward me, I feel hate coming toward me, like a snake's hate!"

St. Peter wiped his moist forehead. He was suffering with her, as if she had been in physical anguish. "We can't, dear, we can't, in this world, let ourselves think of things—of comparisons—like that. We are all too susceptible to ugly suggestions. If Rosamond has a grievance, it's because you've been untactful about Louie."

"Even if I have, why should she be so revengeful? Does she think nobody else calls him a Jew? Does she think it's a secret? I don't mind being called a Gentile."

"It's all in the way it's done, you know, Kitty. And you've shown that you were a little bored with all their new things, now haven't you?"

"I've shown that I don't like the way she overdresses, I suppose. I would never have believed that Rosie couldView Image of Page 84 do anything in such bad taste. While she is here among her old friends, she ought to dress like the rest of us."

"But doesn't she? It seems to me her things look about like yours."

"Oh, Father, you're so simple! And Mother is very careful not to enlighten you. We go to the Guild to sew for the Mission fund, and Rosie comes in in a handmade French frock that cost more than all our dresses put together."

"But if hers are no prettier, what does it matter how much they cost?" He was watching Kathleen fearfully. Her pale skin had taken on a greenish tinge—there was no doubt about it. He had never happened to see that change occur in a face before, and he had never realized to what an ugly, painful transformation the common phrase "green with envy" referred.

"Oh, foolish, they are prettier, though you may not see it. It's not just the clothes"—she looked at him intently, and her eyes, in their reddened rims, expanded and cleared. "It's everything. When we were at home, Rosamond was a kind of ideal to me. What she thought about anything, decided it for me. But she's entirely changed. She's become Louie. Indeed, she's worse than Louie. He and all this money have ruined her. Oh, Daddy, why didn't you and Professor Crane get to work View Image of Page 85 and stop all this before it began? You were to blame. You knew that Tom had left something that was worth a lot, both of you. Why didn't you do something? You let it lie there in Crane's laboratory for this—this Marsellus to come along and exploit, until he almost thinks it's his own idea."

"Things might have turned out the same, anyway, her father protested. "Whatever the process earned was Rosamond's. I wasn't in the mood to struggle with manufacturers, I know nothing of such things. And Crane needs every ounce of his strength for his own experiments. He doesn't care about anything but the extent of space.

"He'd better have taken a few days off and saved his friend's reputation. Tom trusted him with everything. It's too foolish; that poor man being cut to pieces by surgeons all the time, and picking up the little that's left of himself and bothering about the limitations of space—much good they'll do him!"

St. Peter rose, took both of his daughter's hands, and stood laughing at her. "Come now! You have more brains than that, Kitty. It happens you do understand that whatever poor Crane can find out about space is more good to him than all the money the Marselluses will ever have. But are you implying that if Crane and IView Image of Page 86 had developed Tom's discovery, we might have kept Rosie and her money in the family, for ourselves?"

Kathleen threw up her head. "Oh, I don't want her money!"

"Exactly; nor do I. And we mustn't behave as if we did want it. If you permit yourself to be envious of Rosie, you'll be very foolish, and very unhappy."

The Professor walked away across the snowy park with a tired step. He was heavy-hearted. For Kathleen he had a special kind of affection. Perhaps it was because he had had to take care of her for one whole summer when she was little. Just as Mrs. St. Peter was ready to start for Colorado with the children, the younger one developed whooping-cough and had to be left at home with her father. He had opportunity to observe all her ways. She was only six, but he found her a square-dealing, dependable little creature. They worked out a satisfactory plan of life together. She was to play in the garden all morning, and was not on any account to disturb him in his study. After lunch he would take her to the lake or the woods, or he would read to her at home. She took pride in keeping her part of the contract. One day when he came out of his study at noon, he found her sitting on the third floor stairs, just outside his door, with the arnica bottle in one hand and the View Image of Page 87 fingers of the other puffed up like wee pink sausages. A bee had stung her in the garden, and she had waited half the morning for sympathy. She was very independent, and would tug at her leggings or overshoes a great while before she asked for help.

When they were little girls, Kathleen adored her older sister and liked to wait on her, was always more excited about Rosie's new dresses and winter coat than about her own. This attachment had lasted even after they were grown. St. Peter had never seen any change in it until Rosamond announced her engagement to Louie Marsellus. Then, all at once, Kathleen seemed to be done with her sister. Her father believed she couldn't forgive Rosie's forgetting Tom so quickly.

It was dark when the Professor got back to the old house and sat down at his writing-table. He would have an hour on his notes, he told himself, in spite of families and fortunes. And he had it. But when he looked up from his writing as the Angelus was ringing, two faces at once rose in the shadows outside the yellow circle of his lamp: the handsome face of his older daughter, surrounded by violet-dappled fur, with a cruel upper lip and scornful half-closed eyes, as she had approached her car that afternoon before she saw him; and Kathleen, her square little chin set so fiercely, her whiteView Image of Page 89 cheeks actually becoming green under her swollen eyes. He couldn't believe it. He rose quickly and went to his one window, opened it wider, and stood looking at the dark clump of pine-trees that told where the Physics building stood. A sharp pain clutched his heart. Was it for this the light in Outland' laboratory used to burn so far into the night!

The following week St. Peter went to Chicago to give his lectures. He had engaged rooms for himself and Lillian at a quiet hotel near the university. The Marselluses went down by the same train, and they all alighted at the station together, in a raging snow-storm. The St. Peters were to have tea with Louie at the Blackstone, before going to their own quarters.

Tea was served in Louie's suite on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The Professor was in a genial mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious hotel, and especially pleased to be able to sit in comfort and watch the storm over the water.

"How snug you are here, Louie! This is really very nice," he said, turning back from the window when Rosamond called him.

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Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter's shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: "And do you like these rooms, sir? Well, I'm glad, for they're yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It's all arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won't have our great scholar staying off in some grimy place on the South side. We want him where we can keep an eye on him."

Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. "And our luggage?" "It's on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too much. You dine early; you have an engagement for to night. You and Dearest are going to the opera——Oh, not with us! We have other fish to fry. You are going off alone."

"Very well, Louie! And what are they giving tonight?"

"Mignon. It will remind you of your student days in Paris."

"It will. I always had abonnemnet at the Opéra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It's one of my favourites."

"I thought so!" Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten hisView Image of Page 90 scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife, while he unpacked his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and Rosamond. "Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn't it?"

At eight o'clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium. The overture brought a smile to his lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth, —that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses—the delicacy, too—belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned to-ward him and whispered: "Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Gocthe in his youth."

"So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn't know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too.

She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile besideView Image of Page 91 the courtly Wilbelm. When she began her immortal song, one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. Connais-tu - le pays—it stirred one like the odours of early spring, recalled the time of sweet, impersonal emotions."

When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. "A fine cast, don't you think? And the harps are very good. Except for the wood-winds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the Comique."

"How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things!" his wife murmured. It had been long since he had seen her face so relaxed and reflective and undetermined.

Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften a face. More than once he saw a starry moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was when she wasn't doing her duty!

"My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely ship. wrecked together when we were young.

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"How often I've thought that!" she replied with a faint, melancholy smile.

"You? But you're so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily," he murmured in astonishment.

"One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn't the children who came between us." There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.

"You, you too?" he breathed in amazement. He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through his fingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own. Presently the melting music of the tenor's last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.

That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep heView Image of Page 93 found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.

Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor's colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted—when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.

"That," her husband replied, "is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up View Image of Page 94 in the worst possible light. I'm not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn't afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow."

They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.

"Godfrey," said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, "surely you're not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There's no way of heating your study except by that miserable little stove."

"There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.

"It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn't safe when you keep the window open. A gust of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you'd never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You'll get a fine headache one of these days."

"I've got headaches that way before, and survived them." he said stubbornly.

"How can you be so perverse? You know things areView Image of Page 95 different now, and you ought to take more care of your health."

"Why so? It's not worth half so much as it was then."

His wife disregarded this. "And don't you think it's a foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?"

The Professor's dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows ascended toward his black hair. "It's almost my only extravagance," he muttered fiercely.

"How irritable and unreasonable he is becoming!" his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his over-shoes in the hall.

9

For Christmas day the weather turned mild again, There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some sandwiches, so that he needn't come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn't foresight —Prohibition was then unthinkable—but a View Image of Page 97 lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.

As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass.

"Are you still going to the old house, Professor?" she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur collar and her stiff black hat.

"Oh, yes, Augusta, but it's not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won't you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them looking smart.

Augusta laughed. "You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your classes, I'd be scandalized. But I always tell people you don't mean half you say."

"And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?"

"Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church," she said gravely.

"But, really, Augusta, I don't think I ever do."

"Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as You, and you ought to be careful."

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"It doesn't matter. What they think to-day, they'll forget to-morrow." He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. "That reminds me: I've been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory—is that the Magnificat?"

Augusta stopped and looked at him. "Why, Professor! Did you receive no religious instruction at all?"

"How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas, and I guess my father forgot his religion."

"That happens, in mixed marriages." Augusta spoke meaningly.

"Ah, yes, I suppose so. But tell me, what is the Magnificat, then?"

"The Magnificat begins, My soul doth magnify the Lord; you must know that."

"But I thought the Magnificat was about the Virgin?"

"Oh, no, Professor! The Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat."

St. Peter became intensely interested. "Oh, she did?"

Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to rebuke his ignorance too sharply. "Why, yes, just as soon as the angel had announced toView Image of Page 98 her that she would be the mother of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat. I always think of you as knowing everything, Doctor St. Peter!"

"And you're always finding out how little I know. Well, you don't give me away. You are very discreet."

Their ways parted, and both went on more cheerful than when they met. The Professor climbed to his study feeling quite as though Augusta had been there and brightened it up for him. (Surely she had said that the Blessed Virgin sat down and composed the Magnificat!) Augusta had been with them often in the holiday season, back in the years when holidays were holidays indeed. He had grown to like the reminders of herself that she left in his work-room—especially the toilettes upon the figures. Sometimes she made those terrible women entirely plausible!

In the early years, no matter how hard he was working, he had always felt the sense of holiday, of a special warmth and fragrance in the air, steal up to his study from the house below. When he was writing his best, he was conscious of pretty little girls in fresh dresses— of flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby sitting-room—of his wife's good looks and good taste—even of a better dinner than usual under preparation down-stairs. All the while he had been working so fiercelyView Image of Page 99 at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux—working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes, —alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories.

On this Christmas morning, with that sense of the past in his mind, the Professor went mechanically to work, and the morning disappeared. Before he knew it was passing, the bells from Augusta's church across the park rang out and told him it was gone. He pushed back his papers and arranged his writing-table for lunch.

He had been working hard, he judged, because he was so hungry. He peered with interest into the basket his wife had given him—a wicker bag, it was, really, that he had once bought full of strawberries at Gibraltar. Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California grapes, and two shapely, long-necked russet pears. That would do very well; and Lillian had thoughtfully put in one of her best dinner napkins, knowing he hated ugly linen. From the chest he took out a round cheese, and a bottle of his wine, and began to polish a sherry glass.

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While he was enjoying his lunch, he was thinking of certain holidays he had spent alone in Paris, when he was living at Versailles, with the Thieraults, as tutor to their boys. There was one All Souls' day when he had gone into Paris by an early train and had a magnificent breakfast on the Rue de Vaugirard —not at Foyot's, he hadn't money enough in those days to put his nose inside the place. After breakfast he went out to walk in the soft rainfall. The sky was of such an intense silvery grey that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue Soufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The shop windows were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weather- worn bosses white as wood-ash. All at once, from somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and woman, pushing a hand-cart, came into the empty street. The cart was full of pink dahlias, all exactly the same colour. The young man was fair and slight, with a pale face; the woman carried a baby. Both they and the wheels of their barrow were splashed with mud. They must have come from a good way in the country, and were a weary, anxious-looking pair. They stopped at a corner before the Pantheon and fearfully scanned the bleak, silvery,View Image of Page 101 deserted streets. The man went into a bakery, and his wife began to spread out the flowers, which were done up in large bouquets with fresh green chestnut-leaves. Young St. Peter approached and asked the price.

"Deur francs cinquante, Monsieur," she said with a kind of desperate courage.

He took a bunch and handed her a five-franc note. She had no change. Her husband, watching from the bakery, came running across with a loaf of bread under his arm.

"Deux franes cinquante," she called to him as he came up. He put his hand into his pocket and fumbled.

"Deux francs cinquante," she repeated with painful tension. The price agreed upon had probably been a franc or a franc fifty. The man counted out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration. St. Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn't occurred to him to get more; but all his life he had regretted that he didn't buy two bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again found dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with bright chestnut-leaves.

A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he could give his bouquet, when a pathetic procession filed past him through the rain. The View Image of Page 102 girls of a charity school came walking two and two, in hideous dark uniforms and round felt hats without ribbon or bow, marshalled by four black-bonneted nuns. They were all looking down, all but one—the pretty one, naturally—and she was looking sidewise, directly at the student and his flowers. Their eyes met, she smiled, and just as he put out his hand with the bouquet, one of the sisters flapped up like a black crow and shut the girl's pretty face from him. She would have to pay for that smile, he was afraid. Godfrey spent his day in the Luxembourg Gardens and walked back to the Gare St. Lazare at evening with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket, very glad to get home to Versailles in time for the family dinner.

When he first went to live with the Thieraults, he had found Madame Thierault severe and exacting, stingy about his laundry and grudging about the cheese and fruit he ate for dinner. But in the end she was very kind to him; she never pampered him, but he could depend upon her. Her three sons had always been his dearest friends. Gaston, the one he loved best, was dead—killed in the Boxer uprising in China. But Pierre still lived at Versailles, and Charles had a business in Marseilles. When he was in France their homes were his. They were much closer to him than his own View Image of Page 103 brothers. It was one summer when he was in France, with Lillian and the two little girls, that the idea of writing a work upon the early Spanish explorers first occurred to him, and he had turned at once to the Thieraults. After giving his wife enough money to finish the summer and get home, he took the little that was left and went down to Marseilles to talk over his project with Charles Thierault fils, whose mercantile house did a business with Spain in cork. Clearly St. Peter would have to be in Spain as much as possible for the next few years, and he would have to live there very cheaply. The Thieraults were always glad of a chance to help him. Not with money,—they were too French and too logical for that. But they would go to any amount of trouble and no inconsiderable expense to save him a few thousand francs.

That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried house in the Prado, until his little brig, L'Espoir, sailed out of the new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lions. On the voyage everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St. Peter's mind; the skipper, the old Catalan second mate, the sea itself. One day stood out above the View Image of Page 104 others. All day long they were skirting the south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered on their right, snow peak after snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and topaz. St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in the purple water, and the design of his book unfolded in the air above him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through.

It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the new house, but he was in such a happy frame of mind that he feared nothing, not even a family dinner. He quite looked forward to it, on the contrary. His wife heard him humming his favorite air from Matrimonio Segreto while he was dressing.

That evening the two daughters of the house arrived almost at the same moment. When Rosamond threw off her cloak in the hall, her father noticed that she was wearing her new necklace. Kathleen stood looking at it, and was evidently trying to find courage to say something about it, when Louie helped her by breaking in.

"And, Kitty, you haven't seen our jewels! What do you think? Just look at it."

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"I was looking. It's too lovely!"

"It's very old, you see, the gold. What a work I had finding it! She doesn't like anything showy, you know, and she doesn't care about intrinsic values. It must be beautiful, first of all."

"Well, it is that, surely."

Louie walked up and down, admiring his wife. "She carries off things like that, doesn't she? And yet, you know, I like her in simple things, too." He dropped into reflection, just as if he were alone and talking to himself. "I always remember a little bracelet she wore the night I first met her. A turquoise set in silver, wasn't it? Yes, a turquoise set in dull silver. Have you it yet, Rosie?"

"I think so." There was a shade of displeasure in Rosamond's voice, and she turned back into the hall to look for something. "Where are the violets you brought for Mamma?"

Mrs. St. Peter came in, followed by the maid and the cocktails. Scott began the usual Prohibition lament. "Why don't you journalists tell the truth about it in print?" Louie asked him. "It's a case where you could do something."

"And lose my job? Not much! This country's split in two, socially, and I don't know if it's ever coming together. It's not so hard on me, I can drink hard liquor. But you and the Professor like wine and fancy stuff."

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"Oh, it's nothing to us! We're going to France for the summer," Louie put his arm round his wife and rubbed his cheek against hers, saying caressingly, "and drink Burgundy, Burgundy, Burgundy!"

"Please take me with you, Louie," Mrs. St. Peter pleaded, to distract him from his wife. Nothing made the McGregors so uncomfortable and so wrathful as the tender moments which sometimes overtook the Marselluses in public.

"We are going to take you, and Papa too. That's our plan. I take him for safety. If I travelled on the Continent alone with two such handsome women, it wouldn't be tolerated. There would be a trumped-up quarrel, and a stiletto, and then somebody would be a widow; turning again to his wife.

"Come here, Louie." Mrs. St. Peter beckoned him. "I have a confession to make. I'm afraid there's no dinner for you tonight."

"No dinner for me?"

"No. There's nothing either you or Godfrey will like. It's Scott's dinner tonight. Your tastes are so different, I can't compromise. And this is his, from the cream soup to the frozen pudding."

"But who said I didn't like cream soup and frozen pudding?" Louie held out his hands to show their guiltView Image of Page 107lessness. "And are there baricots verts in cream sauce? I thought so! And I like those, too. The truth is, Dearest," he stood before her and tapped her chin with his finger, "the truth is that I like all Scott's dinners, it's he who doesn't like mine! He's the intolerant one."

"True for you, Louie," laughed the Professor.

"And it's that way about lots of things," said Louie a little plaintively.

"Kitty," said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in the driver's seat beside him, "that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was one of Tom's trinkets, wasn't it? Do you suppose she has some feeling for him still, under all this pomposity?"

"I don't know, and I don't care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very much!" she cried vehemently.

He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand over hers, inside her muff. "Sure?" he muttered.

"Yes, I do! she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with all her might.

"Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty. Most girls wouldn't have thought it necessary. I'm the only one who knows, ain't I?"

"The only one who ever has known.

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"And I'm just the one another girl wouldn't have told. Why did you, Kit?"

"I don't know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you were the real one." Her head dropped on his shoulder. "You know you are the real one, don't you?"

"I guess!"

10

That winter there was a meting of an Association of Electrical Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up his father-in-law.

"I'll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of Louie's party?"

"I had classes."

"It was some lunch! Louie's a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty of them," Scott tapped his breast pocket. "We had poor Tom served up again. It was all right, of course—the scientific men were interested, didn't know much about him. Louie called on me forView Image of Page 109 personal recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn't express myself very well. I'm not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be talking uphill. You know, Tom isn't very real to me any more. Sometimes I think he was just a—a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor."

Scott's remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house. With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.

He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope , came in at the green door that led from the street.

"Are you Professor St. Peter?" he inquired.

Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was his manly, mature voice—low, calm, experienced, very different from the thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The next thing he observed View Image of Page 110 was the strong line of contrast below the young man's sandy hair—the very fair forehead which had been protected by his hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was fine-looking, he saw—tall and presumably well built, though the shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.

"I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I've come to ask your advice. I don't know anybody in me town."

"You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you from?"

"I've never been to high school, sir. That's the trouble.

"Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you from?"

"New Mexico. I haven't been to school, but I've studied. I read Latin with a priest down there."

St. Peter smiled incredulously. "How much Latin?" "I read Cæsar and Virgil, the Æneid."

"How many books?"

"We went right through." He met the Professor's questions squarely, his eyes were resolute, like his voice.

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"Oh, you did." St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. "Can you repeat any of it?"

The boy began: "Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," and steadily continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking hand.

"Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a Frenchman?"

"Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium."

"Did you learn any French from him?"

"No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish."

"You speak Spanish?"

"Not very well, Mexican Spanish."

The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew enough to get credit for a modern language. "And what are your deficiencies?"

"I've never had any mathematics or science, and I write a very bad hand."

That's not unusual." St. Peter told him. "But, by the way, how did you happen to come to me instead of to the registrar?"

"I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew. I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father Duchëne said it View Image of Page 112 was the only thing with any truth in it he'd read about our country down there."

The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular periodicals it got him into trouble. "Well, what are your plans, young man? And, by the way, what is your name?"

"Tom Outland."

The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.

"How old are you?"

"I'm twenty." He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn't know exactly how old he was. "I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics this summer."

"Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?"

Outland's face grew grave. "I'm rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you'd find I have money in the bank there, and you'd think I had been deceiving you. But it's money I can't touch while I'm able-bodied. It's in trust for someone else. But I've got three hundred dollars without any string on it, and I'm hoping to get work here. I've been bossing a section gang all winter, and View Image of Page 113 I'm in good condition. I'll do anything but wait table. I won't do that." On this point he seemed to feel strongly.

The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he said, were "mover people," and both died when they were crossing southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He was a baby and had been informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in her last hours, —a locomotive engineer named O'Brien, and his wife. This engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.

"What's a call boy, a messenger boy?"

"No, sir. It's a more responsible position. Our town was an important freight division on the Santa Fé, and a lot of train men live there. The freight schedule is always changing, because it's a single track road and the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can. Suppose you're a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A.M.; well, like as not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning. You go to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on your mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour before your train goes out, he comes and View Image of Page 114 taps on your window and gets you up in time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the town. He must know when there's a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. You can't tell when there's a spotter about, and if a man's reported for gambling, he's fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when he isn't where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at home for that." The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon irregular behaviour.

Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband if he wouldn't bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the Professor wouldn't hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St. Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he didn't want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a giggle, and her View Image of Page 115 elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter apologized for the stairs.

"I'm not much used to stairs, living mostly in 'dobe houses," Tom explained, as he picked himself up.

At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his face with it, became a rag. "I didn't know it would be so warm up here, or I'd have picked a lighter suit," he said, embarrassed by the activity of his skin. "We would like to hear more about your life in the South-west." said his host. "How long were you a call boy?"

"Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm."

Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able to conceal their astonishment.View Image of Page 116 Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.

"I think the very best is the old, —the cliff-dweller pottery," he said. "Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma'am? Maybe you'd like to see some I have brought along." As they rose from the table he went to his telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.

"That's one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I don't know just how old, but there's piñon trees three hundred years old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the ruins where I got it."

"Stone trail...piñons?" she asked.

"Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet coming and going for generations. And these old piñon trees have come up in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about how long ago it was by them." He showed her a coating of black on the under side of the jar.

"That's not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off.View Image of Page 117 It's soot, from when it was on the cook-fire last—and that was before Columbus landed, I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old pots, with the fire-black on them." As she gave it back to him, he shook his head. "That one's for you, Ma'am, if you like it."

"Oh, I couldn't think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for yourself, or put it in a museum." But that seemed to touch a sore spot.

"Museums," he said bitterly, "they don't care about our things. They want something that came from Crete or Egypt. I'd break my jars sooner than they should get them. But I'd like this one to have a good home, among your nice things"—he looked about appreciatively. "I've no place to keep them. They're in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don't get them out whole like that very often."

"But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it."

"Maybe some day, Ma'am, I can tell you," he said, wiping his sooty fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled. Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat View Image of Page 118 where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: "These I would like to give to the little girls." In his palm lay two lumps of soft blue stone, the colour of robins' eggs, or of the sea on halcyon days of summer.

The children marvelled. "Oh, what are they?"

"Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians like them this way."

Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she couldn't let him give his stones to the children. "They are worth a lot of money."

"Id never sell them. They were given to me by friend. I have a lot, and they're no use to me, but they'll make pretty playthings for little girls." His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to do.

"Hold them still a moment," said the Professor, looking down, not at the turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.

In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that occasion.

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"Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs leaving princely gifts.

Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still true. Fellows like Outland don't carry much luggage, yet one of the things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity—and when they are gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely gifts.

With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three years' mathematics in four months, Latin, he owned, had been hard for him. But in mathematics, he didn't have to work, he had merely to give his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter held the boy at arm's length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes commonplace by a natural law.

In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as "Ma'am." He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little girls. He would spend hours withView Image of Page 120 them in the garden, making Hopi villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend Roddy.

"Mother," Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, "what do you think! Tom hasn't any birthday."

"How is that?"

"When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot to tell the O'Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he was so big, but Mrs. O'Brien always said he didn't have enough teeth for that."

St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon.

"Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom's father went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom's mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her into the O'Briens' yard, because that was nearestView Image of Page 121 the doctor's and Mrs. O'Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours."

"Does Tom know anything about his father?"

"Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother told the O'Briens that much. But the O'Briens were just lovely to him."

St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and Indians. "And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa Fé, and went off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with Tom and take care of him after he'd had pneumonia," Kathleen told them.

"That wasn't the only reason," Rosamond added dreamily. "Roddy was proud. He didn't like taking orders and living on pay cheques. He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night. You know Tom said that, Kitty!"

"Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!" Kathleen finished it off.

After the first day, when he had walked into the garView Image of Page 122 den and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do so. He would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about Father Duchëne, the missionary priest who had been his teacher, about the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely and confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy could afford to spend so much time with the children. All through that summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the garden. In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play Five Hundred or to take a dancing-lesson.

There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived a rough life. He enjoyed the prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were flowers Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom's face—so much fairer now than when he first arrived in Hamilton—if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to squeeze it hard enough to hurt, crying: "Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and then afterward tell us about when the rattlesnake bitView Image of Page 123 Henry!" He would whisper: "Pretty soon," and after a while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and exclamations of the little girls, and that singularly individual voice of Tom's— mature, confident, seldom varying in pitch, but full of slight, very moving modulations.

He couldn't have wished for a better companion for his daughters, and they were teaching Tom things that he needed more than mathematics.

Sitting thus in his study, long afterward, St. Peter reflected that those first years, before Outland had done anything remarkable, were really the best of all. He liked to remember the charming groups of three he was always coming upon,—in the hammock swung between the linden-trees, in the window-seat, or before the dining-room fire. Oh, there had been fine times in this old house then: family festivals and hospitalities, little girls dancing in and out, Augusta coming and going, gay dresses hanging in his study at night, Christ- mas shopping and secrets and smothered laughter on the stairs. When a man had lovely children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and generous impulses, why couldn't he keep them? Was there no way but Medea's, he wondered?

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11

St. Peter had come in late from an afternoon lecture, and had just lighted his kerosene lamp to go to work, when he heard a light foot ascending the stairs. In a moment Kathleen's voice called: "May I interrupt for a moment, Papa?"

He opened the door and drew her in.

"Kitty, do you remember the time you sat out there with your bee-sting and your bottle? Nobody ever showed me more consideration than that, not even your mother."

Kathleen threw her hat and jacket into the sewing- chair and walked about, touching things to see how dusty they were. "I've been wondering if you didn't need me to come in and clean house for you, but it's not so bad as they report it. This is the first time I've called on you since you've been here alone. I've turned in from the walk more than once, but I've always run away again." She paused to warm her hands at the little stove. "I'm silly, you know; such queer things make me blue. And you still have Augusta's old forms. I don't think anything ever happened to her that amused her so much. And now, you know, she's quite sentimental about their being here. It's about Augusta that I came,View Image of Page 125 Papa. Did you know that she had lost some of her savings in the Kinkoo Copper Company?"

"Augusta? Are you sure? What a shame!"

"Yes. She was sewing for me last week. I noticed that she seemed depressed and hadn't much appetite for lunch — which, you know, is unusual for Augusta. She was ashamed to tell any of us about it, because it seems she'd asked Louie's advice, and he told her not to invest in that company. But a lot of the people in her church were putting money into it, and of course that made it seem all right to her. She lost five hundred dollars, a fortune for her, and Scott says she'll never get a cent of it back."

"Five hundred dollars," murmured St. Peter. "Let me see, at three dollars a day that means one hundred and sixty-six days. Now what can we do about it?"

"Of course we must do something. I knew you'd feel that way, Father."

"Certainly. Among us, we must cover it. I'll speak to Rosamond tonight."

"You needn't, dear." Kathleen tossed her head. "I have been to her. She refuses."

"Refuses? She can't refuse, my dear. I'll have a word to say." The firmness of his tone, and the quick rush of claret colour under his skin, were a gratification to his daughter.

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"She says that Louie took the trouble to speak to his banker and to several copper men before he advised Augusta; and that if she doesn't learn her lesson this time, she will do the same thing over again. Rosamond said they would do something for Augusta later, but she didn't say what."

"Leave Rosamond to me. I'll convince her."

"Even if you can do anything with her, she's determined to make Augusta admit her folly, and it can't be done that way. Augusta is terribly proud. When I told her her customers ought to make it up to her, she was very haughty and said she wasn't that kind of a sewing- woman; that she gave her ladies good measure for their money. Scott thought we could buy stock in some good company and tell her we had used our influence and got an exchange, but that she must keep quiet about it. We could manage some such little fib, she knows so little about business. I know I can get the Dudleys and the Browns to help. We needn't go to the Marselluses."

"Wait a few days. It's a disgrace to us as a family not to make it up ourselves. On her own account, we oughtn't to let Rosamond out. She's altogether too blind to responsibilities of that kind. In a world full of blunderers, why should Augusta have to pay scrupulously for her mistakes? It's very petty of Rosie, really!"

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Kathleen started to speak, stopped and turned away. "Scott will give a hundred dollars," she said a moment later.

"That's very generous of him. I'll give another, and Rosie shall make up the rest. If she doesn't, I'll speak to Louie. He's an absolutely generous chap. I've never known him to refuse to give either time or money."

Kathleen's eyes suddenly brightened. "Why, Daddy, you have Tom's Mexican blanket! I never knew he gave it to you. I've often wondered what became of it." She picked up from the foot of the box-couch a purple blanket, faded in streaks to amethyst, with a pale yellow stripe at either end.

"Oh, yes, I often get chilly when I lie down, especially if I turn the stove out, which your mother says I ought always to do. Nothing could part me from that blanket."

"He wouldn't have given it to anybody but you. It was like his skin. Do you remember how horsey it smelled when he first brought it over and showed it to us?"

"Just like a livery stable! It had been strapped behind the saddle on so many sweating cow-ponies. In damp weather that smell is still perceptible."

Kathleen stroked it thoughtfully. "Roddy brought it up from Old Mexico, you know. He gave it to Tom that View Image of Page 128 winter he had pneumonia. Tom ought to have taken it to France with him. He used to say that Rodney Blake might turn up in the Foreign Legion. If he had taken this, it might have been like the wooden cups that were always revealing Amis and Amile to each other."

St. Peter smiled and patted her hand on the blanket. "Do you know, Kitty, I sometimes think I ought to go out and look for Blake myself. He's on my conscience. If that country down there weren't so everlastingly big——"

"Oh, Father! That was my romantic dream when I was little, finding Roddy! I used to think about it for hours when I was supposed to be taking my nap. I used to swim rivers and climb mountains and wander about with Navajos, and rescue Roddy at the most critical moments, when he was being stabbed in the back, or drugged in a gambling-house, and bring him back to Tom. You know Tom told us about him long before he ever told you."

"You children used to live in his stories. You cared more about them than about all your adventure books." "I still do." said Kathleen, rising. "Now that Rosamond has Outland, I consider Tom's mesa entirely my own."

St. Peter put down the cigarette he had just lighted View Image of Page 129 with anticipation. "Can't you stay awhile, Kitty? I almost never see anyone who remembers that side of Tom. It was nice, all those years when he was in and out of the house like an older brother. Always very different from the other college boys, wasn't he? Always had something in his voice, in his eyes… One seemed to catch glimpses of an unusual background behind his shoulders when he came into the room."

Kathleen smiled wanly. "Yes, and now he's all turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn't he? But not for you and me! Our Tom is much nicer than theirs. She put on her jacket and went out of the study and quickly down the stairs. Her father, on the landing, looked after her until she disappeared. When she was gone he still stood there, motionless, as if he were listening intently, or trying to fasten upon some fugitive idea.

12

St. Peter was breakfasting at six-thirty, alone, reading last night's letter while he waited for the coffee to percolate. It had been long since he had had an eight o'clock class, but this year the schedule committee had slyly put him down for one. "He can afford to take a taxi over now." the Dean remarked.

After breakfast he went upstairs and into his wife'sView Image of Page 130 room. "I have a rendezvous with a lady," he said, tossing an envelope upon her counterpane. She read a note from Mrs. Crane, the least attractive of the faculty ladies, requesting an interview with the Professor at his earliest convenience: as she wished to see him quite alone, might she come to his study in the old house, where she understood he still worked?

"Poor Godfrey!" murmured his wife.

"One ought not to joke about it——" St. Peter went into his own room to get a handkerchief and came back, taking up his suspended sentence. "I'm afraid it means poor Crane is coming up for another operation. Or, worse still, that the surgeons tell her another would be useless. It's like The Pit and the Pendulum. I feel as if the poor fellow were strapped down on a revolving disk that comes around under the knife just so often."

Mrs. St. Peter looked judicially at the letter, then at her husband's back. She didn't believe that surgery would be the subject of discussion when they met. Mrs. Crane had been behaving very strangely of late.

Doctor Crane had married a girl whom no other man ever thought of courting, a girl of whom people always said: "Oh, she's so good!" chiefly because she was so homely. They had three very plain daughters, and only Crane's salary to live upon. Doctors and surgeons kept them poor enough.

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St. Peter kissed his wife and went forth quite unconscious of what was going on in her mind. During the morning he telephoned Mrs. Crane, and arranged a meeting with her at five o'clock. As the bell in the old house didn't work now, he waited downstairs on the front porch, to receive his visitor and conduct her up to his study. It was raining drearily, and Mrs. Crane arrived in a rubber coat, and a knitted sport hat belonging to one of her daughters. St. Peter took her wet umbrella and led her up the two flights of stairs.

"I'm not very well appointed to receive ladies, Mrs. Crane. This was the sewing-room, you know. There's Augusta's chair, which she insisted was comfortable. "Thank you." Mrs. Crane sat down, took off her gloves, and tucked wisps of damp hair up under her crocheted hat. Her bleak, plain face wore an expression of grievance.

"I've come without my husband's knowledge, Doctor St. Peter, to ask you what you think can be done about our rights in the Outland patent. You know how my husband's health has crippled us financially, and we never know when his trouble may come on worse again. Myself, I've never doubted that you would see it is only right to share with us."

St. Peter looked at her in amazement. "But, my dearView Image of Page 132 Mrs. Crane, how can I share with you what I haven't got? Tom willed his estate and royalties in a perfectly regular way. The fact that he named my daughter as his sole beneficiary doesn't affect me, any more than if he had named some relative of his own. I tell you frankly, I have never received one dollar from the Outland patent.

"It's all the same if it goes to your family, Doctor St. Peter. My husband must be considered in this matter. He spent days and nights working with Outland. Tom never could have worked his theory out without Robert's help. He said so, more than once, in my presence and in the presence of others."

"Oh, I believe that, Mrs. Crane. But the difficulty is that Tom didn't make any recognition of that assistance in his will."

Mrs. Crane had set her head and advanced her long chin with meek determination. "Well, this is how it was, Professor. Mr. Marsellus came here a stranger, to put in the Edison power plant, just at the time the city was stirred up about Outland's being killed at the front. Everybody was wanting to do something in recognition of the young man. You brought Mr. Marsellus to our house and introduced him. After that he came alone, again and again, and he got round my husband. Robert View Image of Page 133 thought he was disinterested, and was only taking a scientific interest, and he told him a great deal about what he and Outland had been working on. Then Rosamond's lawyers came for the papers. Tom Outland had no laboratory of his own. He was allowed the use of a room in the physics building, at my husband's request. He wanted to be there, because he constantly needed Robert's help. The first thing we knew, your daughter's engagement to Marsellus was announced, and then we heard that all Outland's papers had been given over to him."

Here St. Peter anticipated her. "But, Mrs. Crane, your husband couldn't, and wouldn't, have kept Tom's papers. They had to be given over to his executor, who was my daughter's attorney."

"Well, I could have kept them, if he couldn't!"—Mrs. Crane threw up her head as if to show that the worm had turned at last—"kept them until justice was done us, and some recognition had been made of my husband's part in all that research work. If he had taken the papers to court then, with all the evidence we have, we could easily have got an equity. But Mr. Marsellus is very smooth. He flattered Robert and got everything there was.

"But he didn't get anything from your husband. OutView Image of Page 134 land's papers and apparatus were delivered to his executor, as was inevitable."

"That was a poor subterfuge," said Mrs. Crane, with deep meaning. "You know how unworldly Robert is, and as an old friend you might have warned us.

"Of what, Mrs. Crane?"

"Why, that Marsellus saw there was a fortune in the gas my husband and his pupil had made, and we could have asked for our equity before we gave your son-in-law a free hand with everything."

St. Peter felt very unhappy. He began walking up and down the little room. "Heaven knows I'd like to see Crane get something out of it, but how? How? I've thought a great deal about this matter, and I've blamed Tom for making that kind of will. I don't think it occurred to the boy that the will would ever be probated. He expected to come back from the war and develop the thing himself. I doubt whether Robert, with all his superior knowledge, would have known the twists and turns by which the patent could be commercialized. It took a great deal of work and a special kind of ability to do that."

"A salesman's ability!" Mrs. Crane was becoming nasty.

"If you like; but certainly Robert would have been noView Image of Page 135 man to convince manufacturers and machinists, any more than I would. A great deal of money was put into it, too, before any came back; every cent Marsellus had, and all he could borrow. He took heavy chances. Crane and I together could never have raised a hundredth part of the capital that was necessary to get the thing started. Without capital to make it go, Tom's idea was merely a formula written out on paper. It had lain for two years in your husband's laboratory, and would have lain there for years more before he or I would have done anything about it."

Mrs. Crane's dreary face took on more animation than he had supposed it capable of. "It had lain there because it belonged there, and was made there! My husband was done out of it by an adventurer, and his friendship for you tied his hands. I must say you've shown very little consideration for him. You might have warned us never to let those papers go. You see Robert getting weaker all the time and having those terrible operations, and our girls going shabby and teaching in the ward schools, and Rosamond riding about in a limousine and building country houses,—and you do nothing about it. You take your honours—you've deserved them, we never forget that—and move into your new house, and you don't remember what it is to be in straitened circumstances."

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St. Peter drew his chair nearer to Mrs. Crane, and addressed her patiently. "Mrs. Crane, if you had any legal rights in the patent, I'd defend them against Rosamond as soon as against anyone else. I think she ought to recognize Dr. Crane's long friendship and helpfulness to Tom in some way. I don't see just how it can be done, but I feel it should be. And if you wish, I'll tell Rosamond how I feel. Why don't you put this matter before her?"

"I don't care to ask anything of Mrs. Marsellus. I wrote her some time ago, and she replied to me through her lawyer, saying that all claims against the Outland patent would be considered in due order. It's not worthy of a man in Robert's position to accept hush money from the Marselluses. We want justice, and my brother is confident the court will give it to us."

"Well, I suppose Bright knows more about what the courts will do than I. But if you've decided to go to law about it, why did you come to me?"

"There are some things the law don't cover," said Mrs. Crane mysteriously, as she rose and put on her gloves. "I wanted you to know how we feel about it."

St. Peter followed her downstairs and put up her umbrella for her, and then went back to his study to think it over. His friendship with Crane had been a View Image of Page 137 strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to "show results" that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing " to give the taxpayers what they wanted."

The struggle to preserve the dignity of the university,View Image of Page 138 and their own, had brought St. Peter and Dr. Crane much together. They were, moreover, the only two men on the faculty who were doing research work of an uncommercial nature, and they occasionally dropped in on one another to exchange ideas. But that was as far as it went. St. Peter couldn't ask Crane to dinner; the presence of a bottle of claret on the table would have made him uncomfortable. Dr. Crane had all the prejudices of the Baptist community in which he grew up. He carried them with him when he went to study at a German university, and brought them back. But Crane knew that none of his colleagues followed his work so closely, and rejoiced at his little triumphs so heartily, as St. Peter.

St. Peter couldn't help admiring the man's courage; poor, ill, overworked, held by his conscience to a generous discharge of his duties as a teacher, he was all the while carrying on these tedious and delicate experiments that had to do with determining the extent of space. Fortunately, Crane seemed to have no social needs or impulses. He never went anywhere, except, once or twice a year, to a dinner at the President's house. Music disturbed him too much, dancing shocked him—he couldn't see why it was permitted among the stu- dents. Once, after Mrs. St. Peter had sat next him at the President's dinner-table, she said to her husband: "The View Image of Page 139 man is too dreary! All evening his heavy underwear kept coming down below his cuffs, and he kept poking it back with his forefinger. I believe he thinks it's wicked to live with even so plain a woman as Mrs. Crane."

After Tom Outland graduated from the university, he and Dr. Crane worked side by side in the Physics building for several years. The older man had been of great assistance to the younger, without doubt. Though that kind of help, the result of criticism and suggestion, is not easily reckoned in percentages, still St. Peter thought Crane ought to get something out of the patent. He resolved to see Louie about it. But first he had better talk with Crane himself, and try to dissuade him from going to law. His brother-in-law, Homer Bright, would be tempted by the publicity which an action involving the Outland patent would certainly bring him. But he would lose the case, and Crane would get nothing. Whereas Louie, if he were properly approached, would be generous.

St. Peter looked at his watch. He would go home now, and after dinner he would walk over to the Physics building, where his colleague worked every night. He never went to see Crane at his house if he could help it. He lived in the most depressing and unnecessary ugliness.

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13

At dinner Lillian asked him no questions about his interview with Mrs. Crane, and he volunteered no information. She was not surprised, however, when he said he would not stop for a cigar, as he was going over to the Physics laboratory.

He walked through the park, past the old house and across the north end of the campus, to a building that stood off by itself in a grove of pine-trees. It was constructed of red brick, after an English model. The architect had had a good idea, and he very nearly succeeded in making a good thing, something like the old Smithsonian building in Washington. But after it was begun, the State Legislature had defeated him by grinding down the contractor to cheap execution, and had spoiled everything, outside and in. Ever since it was finished, plumbers and masons and carpenters had been kept busy patching and repairing it. Crane and St. Peter, both young men then, had wasted weeks of time with the contractors, and had finally gone before the Legislative committee in person to plead for the integrity of that building. But nothing came of all their pains. It was one of many lost causes.

St. Peter entered the building and went upstairs to a View Image of Page 141 small room at the end of a chain of laboratories. After knocking, he heard the familiar shuffle of Crane's carpet slippers, and the door opened.

Crane was wearing a grey cotton coat, shrunk to a rag by washing, though he wasn't working with fluids or batteries to-night, but at a roll-top desk littered with papers. The room was like any study behind a lecture room; dusty books, dusty files, but no apparatus —except a spirit-lamp and a little saucepan in which the physicist heated water for his cocoa at regular intervals. He was working by the glare of an unshaded electric bulb of high power—the man seemed to have no feeling for comfort of any kind. He asked his visitor to sit down, and to excuse him for a moment while he copied some entries into a note-book.

St. Peter watched him scribbling with his fountain pen. The hands that were so deft in delicate manipulations were white and soft-looking; the fingers long and loosely hung, stained with chemicals, and blunted at the tips like a violinist's. His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted beard. His pale eyes and fawn-coloured eyebrows were out- balanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard. The lipsView Image of Page 142 had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them rather than with them. He seemed painfully conscious of them.

St. Peter saw no use in beating about the bush. As soon as Crane put down his pen, he remarked that Mrs. Crane had been to see him that afternoon. His colleague flushed, took up a large celluloid paper-knife, and began shutting and unshutting his hands about the blade.

"I want to know exactly how you feel about this, and what the facts are," St. Peter began. "We've never discussed it before, and there may be things I know nothing about. Did Tom ever say that he meant you to have a share in his profits, if there were any?"

"No, not exactly. Not exactly that." Dr. Crane moved his shoulders about in his tight coat and looked embarrassed and unhappy. "More than once he said, in a general way, that he hoped it would go, on my account as well as on his own, and that we would use the income for further experiments."

"Did he talk much about the possible commercial value of the gas while he was trying to make it?"

"Not much. No, very seldom. Perhaps not more than half a dozen times in the three years he was working in my laboratory. But whenever he did, he spoke as if there View Image of Page 143 would be something in it for both of us if our gas became remunerative."

"Just how much was it 'our gas,' Crane?"

"Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn't. The idea was Outland'. He benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him with his experiments. He never acquired a nice laboratory technic. He would fail repeatedly in some perfectly sound experiment because of careless procedure."

"Do you think he would have arrived at his results without your help?"

Dr. Crane was clenching the paper-knife with both hands. "That I cannot say. He was impatient. He might have got discouraged and turned to something else. He would have been much slower in getting his results at any rate. His conception was right, but very delicate manipulation was necessary, and he was a careless experimentor."

St. Peter felt that this was becoming nothing less than cross-examination. He tried to change the tone of it.

"I want to see you get recognition and compensation for whatever part you had in his experiments, if there's any way to get it. But you've been neglectful, Crane. You haven't taken the proper steps. Why in the world View Image of Page 144 didn't you have some understanding with Tom when he was getting his patent? You knew all about it."

"It didn't occur to me then. We'd finished the experiments, and I put them out of my mind. I was trying to concentrate on my own work. His results weren't as interesting scientifically as I'd expected them to be."

"While his manuscripts and formula were lying here those two years, did you ever make the gas, or give any study to its behaviour?"

"No, of course not. It's off my own line, and didn't interest me."

"Then it's only since this patent has begun to make money that it does interest you?"

Dr. Crane twisted his shoulders. "Yes. It's the money."

"Heaven knows I'd like to see you get some of it. But why did you put it off so long? Why didn't you make some claim when you delivered the papers to his executor, since you hadn't done so before? Why didn't you bring the matter up to me then, and let me make a claim against the estate for you?"

Dr. Crane could endure his chair no longer. He began to walk softly about in his slippers, looking at nothing, but, as he talked, picking up objects here and there,—drawing-tools, his cocoa-cup, a china cream-pitcher, turning them round and carefully putting them View Image of Page 145 down again, just as he often absently handled pieces of apparatus when he was lecturing.

"I know," he said, "appearances are against me. But you must understand my negligence. You know how little opportunity a man has to carry on his own line of investigation here. You know how much time I give to any of my students who are doing honest work. Outland was, of course, the most brilliant pupil I ever had, and I gave him time and thought without stint. Gladly, of course. If he were reaping the rewards of his discovery himself, I'd have nothing to say—though I've not the least doubt he would compensate me liberally. But it does not seem right that a stranger should profit, and not those who helped him. You, of course, do profit—indirectly, if not directly. You cannot shut your eyes to the fact that this money, coming into your family, has strengthened your credit and your general security, That's as it should be. But your claim was less definite than mine. I spent time and strength I could ill afford to spare on the very series of experiments that led to this result. Marsellus gets the benefit of my work as well as of Outland's. I have certainly been ill-used—and, as you say, it's difficult to get recompense when I ask for it so late. It's not to my discredit, certainly, that I didn't take measures to protect my interests. I never thought View Image of Page 146 of my student's work in terms of money. There were others who did, and I was not considered." he conclued bitterly.

"Why don't you put in a claim to Marsellus, for your time and expert advice? I think he'd honour it. He is going to live here. He probably doesn't wish to be more unpopular than a suddenly prosperous man is bound to be, and you have many friends. I believe I can convince him that it would be poor policy to disregard any reasonable demand."

"I had thought of that. But my wife's brother advises a different course."

"Ah, yes. Mrs. Crane said something of that sort. Well, Crane, if you're going to law about it, I hope you'll consult a sound lawyer, and you know as well as I that Homer Bright is not one."

Dr. Crane coloured and bridled. "I'm sure you are disinterested, St. Peter, but, frankly, I think your judgment has been warped by events. You don't realize how clear the matter is to unprejudiced minds. Though I'm such an unpractical man, I have evidence to rest my claims upon."

"The more the better, if you are going to depend on such a windbag as Bright. If you go to law, I'd like to see you win your case."

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St. Peter said good-night, went down the stairs, and out through the dark pine-trees. Evidence, Crane said; probably letters Tom had written him during the winter he was working at Johns Hopkins. Well, there was nothing to be done, unless he could get old Dr. Hutchins to persuade Crane to employ an intelligent lawyer. Homer Bright's rhetoric might influence a jury in a rape or bigamy case, but it would antagonize a judge in an equity court.

The Professor took a turn in the park before going home. The interview had depressed him, and he was afraid he might be wakeful. He had never seen his colleague in such an unbecoming light before. Crane was narrow, but he was straight; a man you could count on in the shifty game of college politics. He had never been out to get anything for himself. St. Peter would have said that nothing about the vulgar success of Outland's idea could possibly matter to Crane, beyond gratifying his pride as a teacher and friend.

The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars. The world was sad to St. Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small and tight and airless. The university, his new house, his old house, everything around View Image of Page 148 him, seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a sea-sick man. Yes, it was possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that: a boat on which one could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings of revolution. He brought himself back with a jerk. Ah, yes, Crane; that was the trouble. If Outland were here to-night, he might say with Mark Antony, My fortunes have corrupted honest men.

2

At the end of the semester, St. Peter went to Chicago with Rosamond to help her buy things for her country house. He had very much wanted to stay at home and rest—the university work seemed to take it out of him that winter more than ever before: but Rosamond had set her mind on his going, and Mrs. St. Peter told him he couldn't refuse. A Chicago merchant had brought over a lot of old Spanish furniture, and on this nobody's judgment would be better than St. Peter's. He was supposed to know a good deal about rugs, too. When his wife said a thing must be done, the Professor usually did it, from long-established habit. Her instincts about what one owed to other people were better than his.

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Louie accompanied them to Chicago, where he was to join his brother, the one who was in the silk trade in China, and go on to New York with him for a family reunion. St. Peter was amused, and pleased, see to that Louie sincerely hated to leave them—with very little encouragement he would have sent his brother on alone and remained in Chicago with his wife and father-in-law. They all lunched together, after which the Professor and Rosamond took the Marsellus brothers to the LaSalle Street station. When Louie had again and again kissed his hand to them from the rear platform of the Twentieth Century observation car, and was rolled away in the very act of shouting something to his wife, St. Peter, who had so often complained that there was too much Louie in his life, now felt a sudden drop, a distinct sense of loss.

He took Rosamond's arm, and they turned away from the shining rails. "We must be diligent, Rosie. He expects wonders of us."

Scott McGregor got on the Blue Bird Express one afternoon, returning from a business trip for his paper. On entering the smoking-car, he came upon his father-in-law lying back in a leather chair, his clothes covered with dust, his eyes closed, a dead cigar hanging between View Image of Page 150 the relaxed fingers of his dark, muscular hand. It gave Scott a start; he thought the Professor didn't look well.

"Hello, Doctor! What are you doing here? Oh, yes! the shopping expedition. Where's Rosamond?"

"In Chicago. At the Blackstone."

"Outlasted you, did she?"

"That's it." The Professor smiled apologetically, as if he were ashamed to admit it.

Scott sat down beside him and tried to interest him in one subject after another, without success. It occurred to him that he had never before seen the Professor when he seemed absolutely flattened out and listless. That was a bad sign; he was glad they were only half an hour from Hamilton. "The old chap needs rest," he reflected. "Rosamond's run him to death in Chicago. He oughtn't to be used as a courier, anyhow! I'm going to tell Kitty that we must look out for her father a little. The Marselluses have no mercy, and Lillian has always taken it for granted that he was as strong as three men.

That evening Mrs. St. Peter was standing by the French windows in the drawing-room, watching some. what anxiously for her husband. The Chicago train was usually punctual, and surely he would have taken a cab from the station, for it was a raw February night with a View Image of Page 151 freezing wind blowing off the lake. St. Peter arrived on foot, however. As he came through the gate, she could see by his walk and the set of his shoulders that he was very tired. She hurried to open the front door, and asked him why he hadn't come up in a taxi.

"Didn't think of it, really. I'm a creature of habit, and that's one of the things I never used to do."

"And in your lightest overcoat! I thought you only wore this one because you were going to buy a new fur coat in Chicago."

Well, I didn't." he said rather shortly. "Let's omit the verb 'to buy' in all forms for a time. Keep dinner back a little, will you, Lillian? I want to take a warm bath and dress. I did get rather chilled coming up."

Mrs. St. Peter went to the kitchen, and, after a discreet interval, followed her husband upstairs and into his room.

"I know you're tired, but tell me one thing: did you find the painted Spanish bedroom set?"

"Oh, dear, yes! Several of them."

"And were they pretty?"

"Very. At least, I think I'd have found them so if I'd come upon them without so many other things. Too much is certainly worse than too little—of anything. It turned out to be rather an orgy of acquisition."

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"Rosamond lost her head?"

"Oh, no! Perfectly cool. I should say she had a faultless purchasing manner. Wonder where a girl who grew up in that old house of ours ever got it. She was like Napoleon looting the Italian palaces."

"Don't be harsh. You had a nice little vacation, at any rate"

"A very expensive one, for a poor professor. And not much rest."

A look of sharp anxiety came into Mrs. St. Peter's face. "You mean," she breathed in a hushed voice, "that she let you——"

He cut in sharply. "I mean that I paid my way, as I hope always to be able to do. Any suggestion to the contrary might have been very graceful, but it would have been rejected. I am quite ready to permit myself a little extravagance to be of service to the women of my family. Any other arrangement is humiliating."

"Then that was why you didn't get your fur coat!"

"That may have been one reason. I was not much in the humour for it."

Mrs. St. Peter went swiftly downstairs to make him a cocktail. She sensed unusual weariness in him. and felt, as it were, the bitter taste on his tongue. A man, she knew, could get from his daughter a peculiar kind ofView Image of Page 153 hurt—one of the cruellest that flesh is heir to. Her heart ached for Godfrey.

When the Professor had been warmed and comforted by a good dinner, he lit a cigar and sat down before the hearth to read. After a while his wife saw that the book had slid to his knee, and he was looking into the fire. Studying his dark profile, she noticed that the corners of his funny eyebrows rose, as if he were amused by something.

"What are you thinking about, Godfrey?" she said presently. "Just then you were smiling—quite agreeably!"

"I was thinking." he answered absently; "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life."

15

THE month of March was the dreariest and bleakest of the year in Hamilton, and Louie strove to brighten it by opening a discussion of plans for the summer. He had been hinting for some time that he had a very attractive project up his sleeve, and though he View Image of Page 154 had not succeeded in keeping it from Mrs. St. Peter, he said nothing to the Professor until one night when they were dining at the Marselluses'. All through dinner Louie kept reminding them of the specialties of this and that Paris restaurant, so that St. Peter was not altogether unprepared.

As they left the dining-room, Louie burst out with it. He and Rosamond were to take Doctor and Mrs. St. Peter to France for the summer. Louie had decided upon the dates, the boat, the itinerary; he was intoxicated with the pleasure of planning.

"Understand," he said, "it is to be our excursion, from Hamilton back to Hamilton. We'll travel in the most ample comfort, but not in magnificence. We'll go down to Biarritz for a little fashionable life, and stop at Marseilles to see your foster-brother, Charles Thierault. The rest of the summer we'll lead a scholarly life in Paris. I have my own reasons for wishing you to go along, Professor. The pleasure of your company would be quite enough, but I have also other reasons. I want to see the intellectual side of Paris, and to meet some of the savants and men of letters whom you know. What a shame Gaston Paris is not living! We could very nicely make up a little party at Lapérouse for him. But there are others."

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Mrs. St. Peter developed the argument. "Yes, Louie, you and Godfrey can lunch with the scholars while Rosamond and I are shopping.

Marsellus looked alarmed. "Not at all, Dearest! It's to be understood that I always shop with you. I adore the shops in Paris. Besides, we shall want you with us when we lunch with celebrities. When was a savant, and a Frenchman, not eager for the company of two charming ladies at déjeuner? And you may have too much of the society of your sposi; very nice for you to have variety. You must keep a little engagement book: Lundi, déjeuner, M. Emile Faguet. Mercredi, diner, M. Anatole France; and so on."

St. Peter chuckled. "I'm afraid you exaggerate the circumference of my social circle, Louie. I haven't the pleasure of knowing Anatole France."

"No matter, we can have M. Paul Bourget for Wednesday.

"You can help us, too, about finding things for the house, Papa, said Rosamond. "We expect to pick up a good many things. The Thieraults ought to know good shops down in the South, where prices have not gone up."

"I'm afraid the antiquaries are centralized in Paris. I never saw anything very interesting in Lyons or the Midi. However, they may exist.

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"Charles Thierault is still interested in a shipping. line that runs to the City of Mexico, isn't he? He could perfectly well send our purchases from Marseilles to the City of Mexico for us. They would go in without duty, and Louie thinks he can get them across the border as household goods."

"That sounds practicable, Rosie. It might be managed."

Marsellus laughed and patted his wife's hand. "Oh-ho, cher Papa, you haven't begun to find how practical we can be!"

"Well, Louie, it's a tempting idea, and I'll think it over. I'll see whether I can arrange my work." St. Peter knew at that moment that he would never be one of this light-hearted expedition, and he hated himself for the ungracious drawing-back that he felt in the region of his diaphragm.

The family discussed their summer plans all evening. Louie wanted to write at once for rooms at the Meurice, but Mrs. St. Peter ruled it out as too expensive. That night, after he was in bed, St. Peter tried in vain to justify himself in his inevitable refusal. He liked Paris, and he liked Louie. But one couldn't do one's own things in another person's way; selfish or not, that was the truth. Besides, he would not be needed. He could View Image of Page 157 trust Louie to take every care of Lillian, and nobody could please her more than her son-in-law. Beaux-fils, apparently, were meant by Providence to take the husband's place when husbands had ceased to be lovers. Marsellus never forgot one of the hundred foolish little attentions that Lillian loved. Best of all, he admired her extravagantly, her distinction was priceless to him. Many people admired her, but Louie more than most. That worldliness, that willingness to get the most out of occasions and people, which had developed so strongly in Lillian in the last few years, seemed to Louie as natural and proper as it seemed unnatural to Godfrey. It was an element that had always been in Lillian, and as long as it resulted in mere fastidiousness, was not a means to an end, St. Peter had liked it, too. He knew it was due to this worldliness, even more than to the fact that his wife had a little money of her own, that she and his daughters had never been drab and a little pathetic, like some of the faculty women. They hadn't much, but they were never absurd. They never made shabby compromises. If they couldn't get the right thing, they went without. Usually they had the right thing, and it got paid for, somehow. He couldn't say they were extravagant; the old house had been funny and bare enough, but there were no ugly things in it.

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Since Rosamond's marriage to Marsellus, both she and her mother had changed bewilderingly in some respects—changed and hardened. But Louie, who had done the damage, had not damaged himself. It was to him that one appealed, —for Augusta, for Professor Crane, for the bruised feelings of people less fortunate. It was less because of Louie than for any other reason that he would refuse this princely invitation.

He could get out of it without hurting anybody—though he knew Louie would be sorry. He could simply insist that he must work, and that he couldn't work away from his old study. There were some advantages about being a writer of histories. The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep into.

When St. Peter told his family of his decision, Louie was disappointed; but he was respectful, and readily conceded that the Professor's first duty was to his work. Rosamond was incredulous and piqued; she didn't see how he could be so ungenerous as to spoil an arrangement which would give pleasure to everyone concerned. His wife looked at him with thoughtful disbelief.

When they were alone together, she approached the matter more directly than was her wont nowadays.

"Godfrey," she said slowly and sadly, "I wonder what View Image of Page 159 it is that makes you draw away from your family. Or who it is."

"My dear, are you going to be jealous?"

"I wish I were going to be. I'd much rather see you foolish about some woman than becoming lonely and inhuman."

"Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one, I suppose, just as inevitably as the more cheerful habit of living with various ladies. There's something to be said for both."

"I think your ideas were best when you were your most human self."

St. Peter sighed. "I can't contradict you there. But I must go on as I can. It is not always May."

"You are not old enough for the pose you take. That's what puzzles me. For so many years you never seemed to grow at all older, though I did. Two years ago you were an impetuous young man. Now you save yourself in everything. You're naturally warm and affectionate: all at once you begin shutting yourself away from everybody. I don't think you'll be happier for it." Up to this point she had been lecturing him. Now she suddenly crossed the room and sat down on the arm of his chair, looking into his face and twisting up the ends of his military eyebrows with her thumb and middle finger. View Image of Page 160 "Why is it, Godfrey? I can't see any change in your face, though I watch you so closely. It's in your mind, in your mood. Something has come over you. Is it merely that you know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy? You were always the wisest person in the world. What is it, can't you tell me?"

"I can't altogether tell myself, Lillian. It's not wholly a matter of the calendar. It's the feeling that I've put a great deal behind me, where I can't go back to it again—and I don't really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a home-staying man, I've lived pretty hard. I wasn't willing to slight anything—you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired. One pays, coming or going. A man has got only just so much in him; when it's gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did." They both laughed. That was an old joke— the Professor's darkest secret. At the font he had been christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in the family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Armée. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn't know what it had been originally.

"I think, you know," he told his wife as he rose to go to bed, "that I'll get my second wind. But for the presView Image of Page 161ent I don't want anything very stimulating. Paris is too beautiful, and too full of memories."

16

One Saturday morning in the spring, when the Professor was at work in the old house, he heard energetic footsteps running up the uncarpeted stairway. Louie's voice called:

"Cher Papa, shall I disturb you too much?"

St. Peter rose and opened to him. Louie was wearing his golf stockings, and a purple jacket with a fur collar.

"No, I'm not going golfing. I changed my mind, but didn't have time to change my clothes. I want you to take a run out along the lake-shore with us. Rosie is going to lunch with some friends at the Country Club. Well have a drive with her, and then drop her there. It's a glorious day." Louie's keen, interested eye ran about the shabby little room. He chuckled. "The old bear, he just likes his old den, doesn't he? I can readily understand. Your children were born here. Not your daughters—your sons, your splendid Spanish-adventurer sons! I'm proud to be related to them, even by marriage. And your blanket, surely that's a Spanish touch!" Louie pounced upon the purple blanket, threw it across his chest, and, moving aside the wire lady, studied him View Image of Page 162 self in Augusta's glass. "And a very proper dressing-gown it would make for Louie, wouldn't it?"

"It was Outland's—a precious possession. His lost chum brought it up from Mexico."

"Was it Outland's, indeed?" Louie stroked it and regarded it in the glass with increased admiration. "I can never forgive destiny that I hadn't the chance to know that splendid fellow."

The Professor's eyebrows rose in puzzled interrogation. "It might have been awkward—about Rosie, you know."

"I never think of him as a rival," said Louie, throwing back the blanket with a wide gesture. "I think of him as a brother, an adored and gifted brother."

Half an hour later they were spinning along through the country, just coming green, Rosamond and her father on the back seat, Louie facing them. It struck the Professor that Louie had something on his mind; his restless bright eyes watched his wife narrowly, as if to seize an opportune moment.

"You know, Doctor," he said presently, "we've decided to give up our house before we go abroad, and cut off the rent. We'll move the books and pictures up to Outland (and our wedding presents, of course), and the silver we'll put in the bank. There won't be much of our View Image of Page 163 present furniture that we'll need. I wonder if you could use any of it? And it has just occurred to me, Rosie,' here he leaned forward and tapped her knee, "that we might ask Scott and Kathleen to come round and select anything they like. No use bothering to sell it, we'd get so little."

Rosamond looked at him in astonishment. It was very evident they had not discussed anything of this sort before. "Don't be foolish, Louie," she said quietly. "They wouldn't want your things."

"But why not?" he persisted playfully. "They are very nice things. Not right for Outland, but perfectly right for a little house. We chose them with care, and we don't want them going into some dirty second-hand shop."

"They won't have to. We can store them in the attic at Outland, Heaven knows it's big enough! You don't have to do anything with them just now."

"It seems a pity, when somebody might be getting the good of them. I know Scott could do very well with that chiffonier of mine. He admired it greatly, I remember, and said he'd never had one with proper drawers for his shirts."

Rosamond's lip curled.

"Don't look like that, Rosie! It's naughty. Stop it!" View Image of Page 164 Louie reached forward and shook her gently by the elbows. "And how can you be sure the McGregors wouldn't like our things, when you've never asked them? What positive ideas she does get into her head!"

"They wouldn't want them because they are ours, yours and mine, if you will have it," she said coldly, drawing away from him.

Louie sank back into his seat and gave it up. "Why do you think such naughty things? I don't believe it, you know! You are so touchy. Scott and Kitty may be a little stand-offish, but it might very possibly make them feel better if you went at them nicely about this." He rallied and began to coax again. "She's got it into her head that the McGregors have a grudge, Doctor. There's nothing to it."

Rosamond had grown quite pale. Her upper lip, that was so like her mother's when she was affable, so much harder when she was not, came down like a steel curtain. "I happen to know, Louie, that Scott blackballed you for the Arts and Letters. You can call that a grudge or not, as you please."

Marsellus was visibly shaken. He looked sad. "Well, if he did, it wasn't very nice of him, certainly. But are you sure, Rosie? Rumours do go about, and people like to stir up family differences."

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"It isn't people, and it's not rumour. I know it positively. Kathleen's best friend told me." Louie lay back and shook with laughter. "Oh, the ladies, the ladies! What they do to each other, Professor!"

St. Peter was very uncomfortable. "I don't think I'd accept such evidence, Rosamond. I don't believe it of Scott, and I think Louie has the right idea. People are like children, and Scott's poor and proud. I think Louie's chiffonier would go to his heart, if Louie offered it to him. I'm afraid you wouldn't do it very graciously. "Professor, I'll go to McGregor's office and put it up to him. If he scorns it, so much the worse for him. He'll lose a very handy piece of furniture."

Rosamond's paleness changed to red. Fortunately they were spinning over the gravel loops that led through shaven turf to the Country Club. "You can do as you like with your own things, Louie. But I don't want any of mine in the McGregors' bungalow. I know Scott's brand of humour too well, and the kind of jokes that would be made about them."

The car stopped. Louie sprang out and gave his arm to his wife. He walked up the steps to the door with her, and his back expressed such patient, protecting kindness that the Professor bit his lower lip with indignaView Image of Page 166tion. Louie came back looking quite grey and tired, and sank into the seat beside the Professor with a sadder-and-wiser smile.

"Louie," St. Peter spoke with deep feeling, "do you happen to have read a novel of Henry James, The American? There's a rather nice scene in it, in which a young Frenchman, hurt in a duel, apologizes for the behaviour of his family. I'd like to do something of the sort. I apologize to you for Rosamond, and for Scott, if he has done such a mean thing."

Louie's downcast face brightened at once. He squeezed the Professor's arm warmly. "Oh, that's all right, sir! As for Scott, I can understand. He was the first son of the family, and he was the whole thing. Then I came along, a stranger, and carried off Rosie, and this patent began to pay so well—it's enough to make any man jealous, and he a Scotchman! But I think Scott will come around in the end; people usually do, if you treat them well, and I mean to. I like the fellow. As for Rosamond, you mustn't give that a thought. I love her when she's naughty. She's a bit unreasonable sometimes, but I'm always hoping for a period of utter, of fantastic unreasonableness, which will be the beginning of a great happiness for us all."

"Louie, you are magnanimous and magnificent!" murmured his vanquished father-in-law.

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17

Lillian and the Marselluses sailed for France 1 early in May. The Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to spray his rose-vines, and his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his university duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to the old house and settled down to a leisurely bachelor life. He realized that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all day, was no longer valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was a little thing, but one of those little things at which the hand becomes self-conscious, feels itself stiff and clumsy.

It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland's diary —to edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy's life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and straightforward personality.

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Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether straightforward; but that was merely because he was not altogether consistent. As an investigator he was clear-sighted and hard-headed; but in personal relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too exalted for the circumstances—"chivalry of the cinema," Lillian used to say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the logical result of Tom's strange bringing-up and his early associations. There is, he knew, this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love down among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Tom had brought it along to the university, where advancement through personal influence was considered honourable.

It was not until Outland was a senior that Lillian began to be jealous of him. He had been almost a member of the family for two years, and she had never found View Image of Page 169 fault with the boy. But after the Professor began to take Tom up to the study and talk over his work with him, began to make a companion of him, then Mrs. St. Peter withdrew her favour. She could change like that; friendship was not a matter of habit with her. And when she was through with anyone, she of course found reasons for her fickleness. Tom, she reminded her husband, was far from frank, though he had such an open manner. He had been consistently reserved about his own affairs, and she could not believe the facts he withheld were altogether creditable. They had always known he had a secret, something to do with the mysterious Rodney Blake and the bank account in New Mexico upon which he was not at liberty to draw. The young man must have felt the change in her, for he began that winter to make his work a pretext for coming to the house less often. He and St. Peter now met in the alcove behind the Professor's lecture room at the university.

One Sunday, shortly before Tom's Commencement, he came to the house to ask Rosamond to go to the senior dance with him. The family were having tea in the garden; a few days of intensely warm weather had come on and hurried the roses into bloom. Rosamond happened to ask Tom, who sat in his white fannels, View Image of Page 170 fanning himself with his straw hat, if spring in the South-west was as warm as this.

"Oh, no," he replied. "May is usually chilly down there—bright sun, but a kind of edge in the wind, and cool nights. Last night reminded me of smothery May nights in Washington.

Mrs. St. Peter glanced up. "You mean Washington City? I didn't know you had ever been so far east."

There was no denying that the young man looked uncomfortable. He frowned and said in a low voice: "Yes, I've been there. I suppose I don't speak of it because I haven't very pleasant recollections of it.' "How long were you there?" his hostess asked. "A winter and spring, more than six months. Long enough to get very home-sick." He went away almost at once, as if he were afraid of being questioned further. The subject came up again a few weeks later, however. After Tom's graduation, two courses were open to him. He was offered an instructorship, with a small salary, in the Physics department under Dr. Crane, and a graduate scholarship at John Hopkins University. St. Peter strongly urged him to accept the latter. One evening when the family were discussing Tom's prospects, the Professor summed up all the reasons why he ought to go to Baltimore and work in the laboratory made View Image of Page 171 famous by Dr. Rowland. He assured him, moreover, that he would find the atmosphere of an old Southern city delightful.

"Yes, I know something about the atmosphere," Tom broke out at last. "It is delightful, but it's all wrong for me. It discourages me dreadfully. I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me blue. I don't believe I could ever work there."

"But can you trust a child's impressions to guide you now, in such an important decision?" asked Mrs. St. Peter gravely.

"I wasn't a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am now—older, in some ways. It was only about a year before I came here."

"But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all up?" Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed the knuckles together, as she did when she wanted to punish him.

"Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn't matter. It was long enough to count for two ordinary years," he muttered abstractedly.

Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had definitely accepted the instructorship under Crane, and would stay on In Hamilton.

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During that summer after Outland' graduation, St. Peter got to know all there was behind his reserve. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of his own, over in the Physics laboratory. He and St. Peter were often together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming. Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the cleaning-woman, and he and Tom went to the lake and spent the day in his sail-boat.

It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. He dined at eight o'clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius.

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It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the dining-room, that Tom at last told the story he had always kept back. It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about —until he grows older.

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2

Book Two

Tom Outland's Story

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1

The "The thing that side-tracked me and made me so late coming to college was a somewhat unusual accident, or string of accidents. It began with a poker game, when I was a call boy in Pardee, New Mexico. One cold, clear night in the fall I started out to hunt up a freight crew that was to go out soon after midnight. It was just after pay day, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that there would be a poker game going on in the card-room behind the Ruby Light saloon. I knew most of my crew would be there, except Conductor Willis, who had a sick baby at home. The front windows were dark, of course. I went up the back alley, through a tumble-down ice house and a court, into a "dobe room that didn't open into the saloon proper at all. It was crowded, and hot and stuffy enough. There were six or seven in the game, and a crowd of fellows were standing about the walls, rubbing the whitewash View Image of Page 177 off on to their coat shoulders. There was a bird-cage hanging in one window, covered with an old flannel shirt, but the canary had wakened up and was singing away for dear life. He was a beautiful singer—an old Mexican had trained him—and he was one or the attractions of the place.

I happened along when a jack-pot was running. Two of the fellows I'd come for were in it, and they naturally wanted to finish the hand. I stood by the door with my watch, keeping time for them. Among the players I saw two sheep men who always liked a lively game, and one of the bystanders told me you had to buy a hundred dollars' worth of chips to get in that night. The crowd was fussing about one fellow, Rodney Blake, who had come in from his engine without cleaning up. That wasn't customary; the minute a man got in from his run, he took a bath, put on citizen's clothes, and went to a barber. This Blake was a new fireman on our division. He'd come up town in his greasy overalls and sweaty blue shirt, with his face streaked up with smoke. He'd been drinking; he smelled of it, and his eyes were out of focus. All the other men were clean and freshly shaved, and they were sore at Blake—said his hands were so greasy they marked the cards. Some of them wanted to put him out of the game, but he was a big,View Image of Page 178 heavy-built fellow, and nobody wanted to be the man to do it. It didn't please them any better when he took the jack-pot.

I got my two men and hurried them out, and two others from the row along the wall took their places. One of the chaps who left with me asked me to go up to his house and get his grip with his work clothes. He'd lost every cent of his pay cheque and didn't want to face his wife. I asked him who was winning.

"Blake. The dirty boomer's been taking everything. But the fellows will clean him out before morning."

About two o'clock, when my work for that night was over and I was going home to sleep, I just dropped in at the card-room to see how things had come out. The game was breaking up. Since I left them at midnight, they had changed to stud poker, and Blake, the fireman, had cleaned everybody out. He was cashing in his chips when I came in. The bank was a little short, but Blake made no fuss about it. He had something over sixteen hundred dollars lying on the table before him in bank- notes and gold. Some of the crowd were insulting him, trying to get him into a fight and loot him. He paid no attention and began to put the money away, not looking at anybody. The bills he folded and put inside the bandView Image of Page 179 of his hat. He filled his overalls pockets with the gold, and swept the rest of it into his big red neckerchief.

I'd been interested in this fellow ever since he came on our division; he was close-mouthed and unfriendly. He was one of those fellows with a settled, mature body and a young face, such as you often see among working-men. There was something calm, and sarcastic, and mocking about his expression—that, too, you often see among working-men. When he had put all his money away, he got up and walked toward the door without a word, without saying good-night to anybody.

"Manners of a hog, and a dirty hog!" little Barney Shea yelled after him. Blake's back was just in the door-way; he hitched up one shoulder, but didn't turn or make a sound.

I slipped out after him and followed him down the street. His walk was unsteady, and the gold in his baggy overalls pockets clinked with every step he took. I ran a little way and caught up with him. "What are you going to do with all that money, Blake?" I asked him.

"Lose it, to-morrow night. I'm no hog for money. Damned barber-pole dudes!"

I thought I'd better follow him home. I knew he lodged with an old Mexican woman, in the yellow quarter, behind the round-house. His room opened on to View Image of Page 180 the street, by a sky-blue door. He went in, didn't strike a light or make a stab at undressing, but threw himself just as he was on the bed and went to sleep. His hat stuck between the iron rods of the bed-head, the gold ran out of his pockets and rolled over the bare floor in the dark.

I struck a match and lit a candle. The bed took up half the room; on the dresser was a grip with his clean clothes in it, just as he'd brought it in from his run. I took out the clothes and began picking up the money; got the bills out of his hat, emptied his pockets, and collected the coins that lay in the hollow of the bed about his hips, and put it all into the grip. Then I blew out the light and sat down to listen. I trusted all the boys who were at the Ruby Light that night, except Barney Shea. He might try to pull something off on a stranger, down in Mexican town. We had a quiet night, however, and a cold one. I found Blake's winter overcoat hanging on the wall and wrapped up in it. I wasn't a bit sorry when the roosters began to crow and the dogs began barking all over Mexican town. At last the sun came up and turned the desert and the 'dobe town red in a minute. I began to shake the man on the bed. Waking men who didn't want to get up was part of my job, and I didn't let up on him until I had him on his feet.

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"Hello, kid, come to call me?"

I told him I'd come to call him to a Harvey House breakfast. "You owe me a good one. I brought you home last night."

"Sure, I'm glad to have company. Wait till I wash up a bit." He took his soap and towel and comb and went out into the patio, a neat little sanded square with flowers and vines all around, and washed at the trough under the pump. Then he called me to come and pump water on his head. After he'd stood the gush of cold water for a few seconds, he straightened up with his teeth chattering.

"That ought to get the whisky out of a fellow's head, oughtn't it? Felt good, Tom." Presently he began feeling his side pockets. "Was I dreaming something, or did I take a string of jack-pots last night?"

"The money's in your grip," I told him. "You don't deserve it, for you were too drunk to take care of it. had to come after you and pick it up out of the mud."

"All right. I'll go halvers. Easy come, easy go." I told him I didn't want anything off him but breakfast, and I wanted that pretty soon.

"Go easy, son. I've got to change my shirt. This one's wet."

"It's worse than wet. You oughtn't to go up town View Image of Page 182 without changing. You're a stranger here, and it makes a bad impression."

He shrugged his shoulders and looked superior. He had a square-built, honest face and steady eyes that didn't carry a cynical expression very well. I knew he was a decent chap, though he'd been drinking and acting ugly ever since he'd been on our division.

After breakfast we went out and sat in the sun at a place where the wooden sidewalk ran over a sand gully and made a sort of bridge. I had a long talk with him. I was carrying the grip with his winnings in it, and I finally persuaded him to go with me to the bank. We put every cent of it into a savings account that he couldn't touch tor a year.

From that night Blake and I were fast friends. He was the sort of fellow who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There are lots like that among working-men. They aren't trained by success to a sort of systematic selfishness. Rodney had been unlucky in personal relations. He'd run away from home when he was a kid because his mother married again—a man who had been paying attention to her while his father was still alive. He got engaged to a girl down on the Southern Pacific, and she double-crossed him, as he said. He went to Old Mexico and let his friends put all View Image of Page 183 his savings into an oil well, and they skinned him. What he needed was a pal, a straight fellow to give an account to. I was ten years younger, and that was an advantage. He liked to be an older brother. I suppose the fact that I was a kind of stray and had no family, made it easier for him to unbend to me. He surely got to think a lot of me, and I did of him. It was that winter I had pneumonia. Mrs. O'Brien couldn't do much for me; she was overworked, poor woman, with a houseful of children. Blake took me down to his room, and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to have had boys of his own to look after. Nature's full of such substitutions, but they always seem to me sad, even in botany.

I wasn't able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father Duchène said I must give up night work and live in the open all summer. Before I knew anything about it, Blake had thrown up his job on the Santa Fé, and got a berth for him and me with the Sitwell Cattle Company. Jonas Sitwell was one of the biggest cattle men in our part of New Mexico. Roddy and I were to ride the range with a bunch of grass cattle all summer, then take them down to a winter camp on the Cruzados river and keep them on pasture until spring.

We went out about the first of May, and joined our cattle twenty miles south of Tarpin, down toward the View Image of Page 184 Blue Mesa. The Blue Mesa was one of the landmarks we always saw from Tarpin— landmarks mean so much in a flat country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes, three sharp blue peaks that always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People said the rock itself had a deep purplish cast. It looked, from our town, like a naked blue rock set down alone in the plain, almost square, except that the top was higher at one end. The old settlers said nobody had ever climbed it, because the sides were so steep and the Cruzados river wound round it at one end and under-cut it.

Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual work wouldn't have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to their hands. John Rapp, the foreman, came along once a month in his spring-wagon, to see how the cattle were doing and to bring us supplies and bundles of old newspapers.

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Blake was a conscientious reader of newspapers. He always wanted to know what was going on in the world, though most of it displeased him. He brooded on the great injustices of his time; the hanging of the Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember, and the Dreyfus case. We had long arguments about what we read in the papers, but we never quarrelled. The only trouble I had with Blake was in getting to do my share of the work. He made my health a pretext for taking all the heavy chores, long after I was as well as he was. I'd brought my Casar along, and had promised Father Duchène to read a hundred lines a day. Blake saw that I did it— made me translate the dull stuff aloud to him. He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn't have to work with my back all my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he believed it was some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live without work. We had Robinson Cruse with us, and Roddy's favourite book, Gulliver's Travels, which he never tired of.

Late in October, Rapp, the foreman, came along to accompany us down to the winter camp. Blake stayed with the cattle about fifteen miles to the east, where the grass was still good, and Rapp and I went down to air out the cabin and stow away our winter supplies. View Image of Page 186

2

The cabin stood in a little grove of piñons, about thirty yards back from the Cruzados river, facing south and sheltered on the north by a low hill. The grama grass grew right up to the door-step, and the rabbits were running about and the grasshoppers hitting the door when we pulled up and looked at the place. There was no litter around, it was as clean as a prairie-dog's house. No outbuildings, except a shed for our horses. The hill-side behind was sandy and covered with tall clumps of deer-horn cactus, but there was nothing but grass to the south, with streaks of bright yellow rabbit-brush. Along the river the cottonwoods and quaking asps had already turned gold. Just across from us, overhanging us, indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs. From the cabin, night and day, you could hear the river, where it made a bend round the foot of the mesa and churned over the rocks. It was the sort of place a man would like to stay in forever.

I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned stuff on the View Image of Page 187 shelves behind the cook-stove. I confess I looked forward to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that Blake and I wouldn't be able to enjoy all this luxury together for a time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.

"There's not pasture enough down here to take them through a long winter," he said, "and it's safest to keep them grazing up north while you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather's so warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. They swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that's the last you ever see of them. We've lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been populated by runaways from our herd, till now there's a fine bunch of wild cattle up there. When the wind's right, our cows over here get the scent of them and make a break for the river. You'll have to watch 'em close when you bring 'em down."

I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle out.

Rapp glared at me. "Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet. The cliffs are like the base of a View Image of Page 188 monument, all the way round. The only way into it is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just where the river makes the bend. You can't get in by that, because the river's too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a horse could swim it, if cattle can, but I don't want to be the man to try."

I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to climb it.

"Not while you're working for the Sitwell Company, you don't! If you boys try any nonsense of that sort, I'll fire you quick. You'd break your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn't for that mesa, this would be the best winter range in all New Mexico."

After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine weather; blue and gold days, and clear, frosty nights. We kept the cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of them. One man was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only neighbour, and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance. Its sky-line was like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the north, higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The View Image of Page 189 north end we could easily believe impassable— sheer cliffs that fell from the summit to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon that split the bulk in two, from the top rim to the river, then wound back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a mouse track winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn't break the solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to see that it was there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about three miles long from north to south, but east and west it measured nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we couldn't see—it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river side were fringed with beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and piñons and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the hanging gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing so far up on the rocks, took on the bluish tint of the cliffs themselves.

It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars along the rocks would be gold—metallic, like tarnished gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the View Image of Page 190 dark river like a blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.

No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning would play round it and jab into it so that we were always expecting it would fire the brush. I've never heard thunder so loud as it was there. The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though it seemed so solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account for the prolonged growl and rumble that followed every crash of thunder. After the burst in the sky was over, the mesa went on sounding like a drum, and seemed itself to be muttering and making noises.

One afternoon I was out hunting turkeys. Just as the sun was getting low, I came through a sea of rabbit-brush, still yellow, and the horizontal rays of light, playing into it, brought out the contour of the ground with great distinctness. I noticed a number of straight View Image of Page 191 mounds, like plough furrows, running from the river inland. It was too late to examine them. I cut a scrub willow and stuck a stake into one of the ridges, to mark it. The next day I took a spade down to the plantation of rabbit-brush and dug around in the sandy soil. I came upon an old irrigation main, unmistakable, lined with hard smooth cobbles and 'dobe cement, with sluices where the water had been let out into trenches. Along these ditches I turned up some pieces of pottery, all of it broken, and arrow-heads, and a very neat, well-finished stone pick-ax.

That night I didn't go back to the cabin, but took my specimens out to Blake, who was still north with the cattle. Of course, we both knew there had been Indians all over this country, but we felt sure that Indians hadn't used stone tools for a long while back. There must have been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient times: fixed residents, like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter range better than any place I'd ever been in. I never came out View Image of Page 192 of the cabin door in the morning to go after water that I didn't feel fresh delight in our snug quarters and the river and the old mesa up there, with its top burning like a bonfire. I wanted to see what it was like on the other side, and very soon I took a day off and forded the river where it was wide and shallow, north of our camp. I rode clear around the mesa, until I met the river again where it flowed under the south flank.

On that ride I got a better idea of its actual structure. All the way round were the same precipitous cliffs of hard blue rock, but in places it was mixed with a much softer stone. In these soft streaks there were deep dry watercourses which could certainly be climbed as far as they went, but nowhere did they reach to the top of the mesa. The top seemed to be one great slab of very hard rock, lying on the mixed mass of the base like the top of an old-fashioned marble table. The channels worn out by water ran for hundreds of feet up the cliffs, but always stopped under this great rim rock, which projected out over the erosions like a granite shelf. Evidently, it was because of this unbroken top layer that the butte was inaccessible. I rode back to camp that night, convinced that if we ever climbed it, we must take the route the cattle took, through the river and up the one canyon that broke down to water-level. View Image of Page 193

3

We brought the bunch of cattle down to the winter range in the latter part of November. Early in December the foreman came along with generous provisions for Christmas. This time he brought with him a super-cargo, a pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up at Tarpin, the railroad town thirty miles north-east of us, where the Sitwells bought their supplies. This old man was a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name. He had been a valet, and a hospital orderly, and a cook, and for many years was a table steward on the Anchor Line. Lately he had been cooking for a sheep outfit that were grazing in the cattle country, where they weren't wanted. They had done something shady and had to get out in a hurry. They dropped old Henry at Tarpin, where he soon drank up all his wages. When Rapp picked him up there, he was living on hand-outs.

"I've told him we can't pay him anything," Rapp explained. "But if he wants to stay here and cook for you boys till I make my next trip, he'll have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery stable in Tarpin. He says he's a good cook, and I thought he might liven things up for you at Christmas time. He View Image of Page 194 won't bother you, he's not got any of the mean ways of a bum—I know a bum when I see one. Next time I come down I'll bring him some old clothes from the ranch, and you can fire him if you want to. All his baggage is that newspaper bundle, and there's nothing in it but shoes—a pair of patent leathers and a pair of sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off skylarking, you two, and leave him with the cattle. Not for an hour, mind you. He ain't strong enough, and he's got no head."

Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a wonderful cook and a good house- keeper. He kept that cabin shining like a playhouse; used to dress it all out with piñon boughs, and trimmed the kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy pat- terns. He had learned to make up cots when he was a hospital orderly, and he made our bunks feel like a Harvey House bed. To this day that's the best I can say for any bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him. He loved to tell about the celebrated View Image of Page 195 people he'd been steward to, and the liberal tips they had given him. There with us, where he couldn't get at whisky, he was a model of good behaviour. "Drink is me weakness, you might say." he occasionally remarked apologetically. He shaved every morning and was as clean as a pin. We got to be downright fond of him, and the three of us made a happy family.

Ever since we'd brought our herd down to the winter camp, the wild cattle on the mesa were more in evidence. They came down to the river to drink oftener, and loitered about, grazing in that low canyon so much that we began to call it Cow Canyon. They were fine- looking beasts, too. One could see they had good pasture up there. Henry had a theory that we ought to be able to entice them over to our side with salt. He wanted to kill one for beefsteaks. Soon after he joined us we lost two cows. Without warning they bolted into the mesa, as the foreman had said. After that we watched the herd closer; but a few days before Christmas, when Blake was off hunting and I was on duty, four fine young steers sneaked down to the water's edge through the brush, and before I knew it they were swimming the river—seemed to do it with no trouble at all. They frisked out on the other side, ambled up the canyon, and disappeared. I was furious to have them steal a march on View Image of Page 196 me, and I swore to myself I'd follow them over and drive them back.

The next morning we took the herd a few miles cast, to keep them out of mischief. I made some excuse to Blake, cut back to the cabin, and asked Henry to put me up a lunch. I told him my plan, but warned him not to bear tales. If I wasn't home when Blake came in at night, then he could tell him where I'd gone.

Henry went down to the river with me to watch me across. It had grown colder since morning, and looked like snow. The old man was afraid of a storm; said I might get snowed in. But I'd got my nerve up, and I didn't want to put off making a try at it. I strapped my blanket and my lunch on my shoulders, hung my boots around my neck to keep them dry, stuffed my socks inside my hat, and we waded in. My horse took the water without any fuss, though he shivered a good deal. He stepped out very carefully, and when it got too deep for him, he swam without panic. We were carried down-stream a little by the current, but I didn't have to slide off his back. He found bottom after a while, and we easily made a landing. I waved good-bye to Henry on the other side and started up the canyon, running beside my horse to get warm.

The canyon was wide at the water's edge, and though View Image of Page 197 it corkscrewed back into the mesa by abrupt turns, it preserved this open, roomy character. It was, indeed, a very deep valley with gently sloping sides, rugged and rocky, but well grassed. There was a clear trail. Horses have no sense about making a trail, but you can trust cattle to find the easiest possible path and to take the lowest grades. The bluish rock and the sun-tanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning. It may have been the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley. It made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation. I kept telling myself that it was very different from the air on the other side of the river, though that was pure and uncontaminated enough.

When I had gone up this canyon for a mile or so, I came upon another, opening out to the north—a box canyon, very different in character. No gentle slope there. The walls were perpendicular, where they weren't actually overhanging, and they were anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand feet high, as we afterward View Image of Page 198 found by measurement. The floor of it was a mass of huge boulders, great pieces of rock that had fallen from above ages back, and had been worn round and smooth as pebbles by the long action of water. Many of them were as big as haystacks, yet they lay piled on one another like a load of gravel. There was no footing for my horse among those smooth stones, so I hobbled him and went on alone a little way, just to see what it was like. My eyes were steadily on the ground—a slip of the foot there might cripple one.

It was such rough scrambling that I was soon in a warm sweat under my damp clothes. In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff. I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with fat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.

It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing View Image of Page 199 slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in colour, even on that grey day. In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak-leaves. A fringe of cedars grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and repose—immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity. The falling snow-flakes, sprinkling the piñons, gave it a special kind of solemnity. I can't describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.

As I stood looking up at it, I wondered whether I ought to tell even Blake about it; whether I ought not to go back across the river and keep that secret as the mesa had kept it. When I at last turned away, I saw still another canyon branching out of this one, and in its wall still another arch, with another group of buildings. The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once View Image of Page 200 been like a bee-hive; it was full of little cliff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe, a particular civilization.

That night when I got home Blake was on the river-bank waiting for me. I told him I'd rather not talk about my trip until after supper, —that I was beat out. I think he'd meant to upbraid me for sneaking off, but he didn't. He seemed to realize from the first that this was a serious matter to me, and he accepted it in that way. After supper, when we had lit our pipes, I told Blake and Henry as clearly as I could what it was like over there, and we talked it over. The town in the cliffs explained the irrigation ditches. Like all pueblo Indians, these people had had their farms away from their dwellings. For a stronghold they needed rock, and for farming, soft earth and a water main.

"And this proves," said Roddy, "that there must have been a trail into the mesa at the north end, and that they carried their harvest over by the ford. If this Cow Canyon was the only entrance, they could never have farmed down here." We agreed that he should go over on the first warm day, and try to find a trail up to the Cliff City, as we already called it. We talked and speculated until after midnight. It was Christmas eve, and Henry said it was but right we View Image of Page 201 should do something out of the ordinary. But after we went to bed, tired as I was, I was unable to sleep. I got up and dressed and put on my overcoat and slipped outside to get sight of the mesa. The wind had come up and was blowing the squall clouds across the sky. The moon was almost full, hanging directly over the mesa, which had never looked so solemn and silent to me before. I wondered how many Christmases had come and gone since that round tower was built. I had been to Acoma and the Hopi villages, but I'd never seen a tower like that one. It seemed to me to mark a difference. I felt that only a strong and aspiring people would have built it, and a people with a feeling for design. That cluster of buildings, in its arch, with the dizzy drop into empty air from its doorways and the wall of cliff above, was as clear in my mind as a picture. By closing my eyes I could see it against the dark, like a magic-lantern slide.

Blake got over the river before New Year's day, but he didn't find any way of getting from the bottom of the box canyon up into the Cliff City. He felt sure that the inhabitants of that sky village had reached it by a trail from the top of the mesa down, not from the bottom of the canyon up. He explored the branch canyons a little, and found four other villages, smaller than the first, placed in similar arches.

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These arches we had often seen in other canyons. You can find them in the Grand Canyon, and all along the Rio Grande. Whenever the surface rock is much harder than the rock beneath it, the softer stone begins to crack and crumble with weather just at the line where it meets the hard rim rock. It goes on crumbling and falling away, and in time this wash-out grows to be a spacious cavern. The Cliff City sat in an unusually large cavern. We afterward found that it was three hundred and sixty feet long, and seventy feet high in the centre. The red tower was fifty feet in height.

Blake and I began to make plans. Our engagement with the Sitwell Company terminated in May. When we turned our cattle over to the foreman, we would go into the mesa with what food and tools we could carry, and try to find a trail down the north end, where we were sure there must once have been one. If we could find an easier way to get in and out of the mesa, we would devote the summer, and our winter's wages, to exploring it. From Tarpin, the nearest railroad, we could get supplies and tools, and help if we needed it. We thought we could manage to do the work ourselves if old Henry would stay with us. We didn't want to make our discovery any more public than necessary. We were reluctant to expose those silent and beautiful View Image of Page 203 places to vulgar curiosity. Finally we outlined our plan to Henry, telling him we couldn't promise him regular wages.

"We won't mention it," he said, waving his hand. "Id ask nothing better than to share your fortunes. In me youth it was me ambition to go to Egypt and see the tombs of the Pharaohs."

"You may get a bad cold going over the river, Henry," Blake warned him. "It's bad crossing—makes you dizzy when you take to swimming. You have to keep your head."

"I was never seasick in me life," he declared, "and at that, I've helped in the cook's galley on the Anchor Line when she was fair standing on her head. You'll find me strong and active when I'm once broke into the work. I come of an enduring family, though, to be sure, I've abused me constitution somewhat."

Henry liked to talk about his family, and the work they'd done, and the great age to which they lived, and the brandy puddings his mother made. "Eighteen we was in all, when we sat down at table," he would often say with his thin, apologetic smile. "Mother and father, and ten living, and four dead, and two still-born." Roddy and I used to strain our imagination trying to visualize such a family dinner party.

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Everything worked out well for us. The foreman showed so much interest in our plans that we told him everything. He insisted that we should stay on at the winter camp as long as we needed a home base, and use up whatever supplies were left. When he paid us off, he sold us our two horses at a very reasonable figure.

4

Blake and I got over to the mesa together for the first time early in May. We carried with us all the food we could, and an ex and spade. It took us several days to find a trail leading from the bottom of the box canyon up to the Cliff City. There were gaps in it; it was broken by ledges too steep for a man to climb. Lying beside one of these, we found an old dried cedar trunk, with toe-notches cut in it. That was a plain suggestion. We felled some trees and threw them up over the gaps in the path. Toward the end of the week, when our provisions were getting low, we made the last lap in our climb, and stepped upon the ledge that was the floor of the Cliff City.

In front of the cluster of buildings, there was an open space, like a court-yard. Along the outer edge of this yard ran a low stone wall. In some places the wall had fallen away from the weather, but the buildings themView Image of Page 205selves sat so far back under the rim rock that the rain had never beat on them. In thunder-storms I've seen the water come down in sheets over the face of that cavern without a drop touching the village.

The court-yard was not choked by vegetation, for there was no soil. It was bare rock, with a few old, flat-topped cedars growing out of the cracks, and a little pale grass. But everything seemed open and clean, and the stones. I remember. were warm to the touch. smooth and pleasant to feel.

The outer walls of the houses were intact, except where sometimes an outjutting corner had crumbled. They were made of dressed stones, plastered inside and out with 'dobe, and were tinted in light colours, pink and pale yellow and tan. Here and there a cedar log in the ceiling had given way and let the second-story chamber down into the first; except for that, there was little rubbish or disorder. As Blake remarked, wind and sun are good housekeepers.

This village had never been sacked by an enemy, certainly. Inside the little rooms water jars and bowls stood about unbroken, and yucca-fibre mats were on the floors.

We could give only a hurried look over the place, as our food was exhausted, and we had to get back over the View Image of Page 206 river before dark. We went about softly, tried not to disturb anything— even the silence. Besides the tower, there seemed to be about thirty little separate dwellings. Behind the cluster of houses was a kind of back court-yard, running from end to end of the cavern; a long, low, twilit space that got gradually lower toward the back until the rim rock met the floor of the cavern, exactly like the sloping roof of an attic. There was perpetual twilight back there, cool, shadowy, very grateful after the blazing sun in the front court-yard. When we entered it we heard a soft trickling sound, and we came upon a spring that welled out of the rock into a stone basin and then ran off through a cobble-lined gutter and dripped down the cliffs. I've never anywhere tasted water like it; as cold as ice, and so pure. Long afterward Father Duchène came out to spend a week with us on the mesa; he always carried a small drinking-glass with him, and he used to fill it at the spring and take it out into the sunlight. The water looked like liquid crystal, absolutely colourless, without the slight brownish or greenish tint that water nearly always has. It threw off the sunlight like a diamond.

Beside this spring stood some of the most beautifully shaped water jars we ever found—I gave Mrs. St. Peter one of them—standing there just as if they'd been left View Image of Page 207 yesterday. In the back court we found a great many things besides jars and bowls: a row of grinding-stones, and several clay ovens, very much like those the Mexicans use today. There were charred bones and charcoal, and the roof was thick with soot all the way along. It was evidently a kind of common kitchen, where they roasted and baked and probably gossiped. There were corncobs everywhere, and ears of corn with the kernels still on them—little, like popcorn. We found dried beans, too, and strings of pumpkin seeds, and plum seeds, and a cupboard full of little implements made of turkey bones.

Late that afternoon Roddy and I crossed the river and got back to our cabin to rest for a few days.

The second time we went over, we found a long winding trail leading from the Cliff City up to the top of the mesa—a narrow path worn deep into the stone ledges that overhung the village, then running back into the wood of stunted piñons on the summit. Following this to the north end of the mesa, we found what was left of an old road down to the plain. But making this road passable was a matter of weeks, and we had to get workmen and tools from Tarpin. It was a narrow foot-path, barely wide enough for a sure-footed mule, and it wound down through Black Canyon, dropping in View Image of Page 208 loops along the face of terrifying cliffs. About a hundred feet above the river, it ended—broke right off into the air. A wall of rock had fallen away there, probably from a landslide. That last piece of road cost us three weeks' hard work, and most of our winter's wages. We kept the workmen on long enough to build us a tight log cabin on the mesa top, a little way back from the ledge that hung over the Cliff City.

While we were engaged in road-building, we made a short cut from our cabin down to the Cliff City and Cow Canyon. Just over the Cliff City, there was a crack in the ledge, a sort of manhole, and in this we hung a ladder of pine-trunks spliced together with light chains, leaving the branch forks for footholds. By climbing down this ladder we saved about two miles of winding trail, and dropped almost directly into Cow Canyon, where we meant always to leave one of the horses grazing. Taking this route, we could at any time make a quick exit from the mesa—we were used to swimming the river now, and in summer our wet clothes dried very quickly.

Bill Hook, the liveryman at Tarpin, who'd sheltered old Henry when he was down and out, proved a good friend to us. He got our workmen back and forth for us, brought our supplies up on to the mesa on his pack- View Image of Page 209 mules, and when one of us had to stay in town overnight he let us sleep in his hay barn to save a hotel bill. He knew our expenses were heavy, and did everything for us at a bottom price.

By the first of July our money was nearly gone, but we had our road made, and our cabin built on top of the mesa. We brought old Henry up by the new horse-trail and began housekeeping. We were now ready for what we called excavating. We built wide shelves all around our sleeping-room, and there we put the smaller artides we found in the Cliff City. We numbered each specimen, and in my day-book I wrote down just where and in what condition we had found it, and what we thought it had been used for. I'd got a merchant's ledger in Tarpin, and every night after supper, while Roddy read the newspapers, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote up an account of the day's work.

Henry, besides doing the housekeeping, was very eager to help us in the "rewins," as he called them. He was more patient than we, and would dig with his fingers half a day to get a pot out of a rubbish pile without breaking it. After all, the old man had a wider knowledge of the world than either of us, and it often came in handy. When we were working in a pale pink house, with two stories, and a sort of balcony before the upperView Image of Page 210 windows, we came on a closet in the wall of the upstairs room; in this were a number of curious things, among them a deerskin bag full of little tools. Henry said at once they were surgical instruments; a stone lancet, a bunch of fine bone needles, wooden forceps, and a catheter.

One thing we knew about these people; they hadn't built their town in a hurry. Everything proved their patience and deliberation. The cedar joists had been felled with stone axes and rubbed smooth with sand. The little poles that lay across them and held up the clay floor of the chamber above, were smoothly polished. The door lintels were carefully fitted (the doors were stone slabs held in place by wooden bars fitted into hasps). The clay dressing that covered the stone walls was tinted, and some of the chambers were frescoed in geometrical patterns, one colour laid on another. In one room was a painted border, little tents, like Indian tepees, in brilliant red.

But the really splendid thing about our city, the thing that made it delightful to work there, and must have made it delightful to live there, was the setting. The town hung like a bird's nest in the cliff, looking off into the box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley we called Cow Canyon, facing an ocean of clear air. A View Image of Page 211 people who had the hardihood to build there, and who lived day after day looking down upon such grandeur, who came and went by those hazardous trails, must have been, as we often told each other, a fine people. But what had become of them? What catastrophe had overwhelmed them?

They hadn't moved away, for they had taken none of their belongings, not even their clothes. Oh, yes, we found clothes; yucca moccasins, and what seemed like cotton cloth, woven in black and white. Never any wool, but sheepskins tanned with the fleece on them. They may have been mountain sheep; the mesa was full of them. We talked of shooting one for meat, but we never did. When a mountain sheep comes out on a ledge hundreds of feet above you, with his trumpet horns, there's something noble about him—he looks like a priest. We didn't want to shoot at them and make them shy. We liked to see them. We shot a wild cow when we wanted fresh meat.

At last we came upon one of the original inhabitants—not a skeleton, but a dried human body, a woman. She was not in the Cliff City, we found her in a little group of houses stuck up in a high arch we called the Eagle's Nest. She was lying on a yucca mat, partly covered with rags, and she had dried into a mummy in View Image of Page 212 that water-drinking air. We thought she had been murdered; there was a great wound in her side, the ribs stuck out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony. Part of the nose was gone, but she had plenty of teeth, not one missing, and a great deal of coarse black hair. Her teeth were even and white, and so little worn that we thought she must have been a young woman. Henry named her Mother Eve, and we called her that. We put her in a blanket and let her down with great care, and kept her in a chamber in the Cliff City.

Yes, we found three other bodies, but afterward. One day, working in the Cliff City, we came upon a stone slab at one end of the cavern, that seemed to lead straight into the rock. It was set in cement, and when we loosened it we found it opened into a small, dark chamber. In this there had been a platform, of fine cedar poles laid side by side, but it had crumbled. In the wreckage were three bodies, one man and two women, wrapped in yucca-fibre, all in the same posture and apparently prepared for burial. They were the bodies of old people. We believed they were among the aged who were left behind when the tribe went down to live on their farms in the summer season; that they had died in View Image of Page 213 the absence of the villagers, and were put into this mortuary chamber to await the return of the tribe, when they would have their funeral rites. Probably these people burned their dead. Of course an archologist could have told a great deal about that civilization from those bodies. But they never got to an archæologist—at least, not on this side of the world.

5

The first of August came, and everything was going well with us. We hadn't met with any bad luck, and though we had very little money left, there was Blake's untouched savings account in the bank at Pardee, and we had plenty of credit in Tarpin. The merchants there took an interest and were friendly. But the little new moon, that looked so innocent, brought us trouble. We lost old Henry, and in a terrible way. From the first we'd been a little bothered by rattlesnakes —you generally find them about old stone quarries and old masonry. We had got them pretty well cleared out of the Cliff City, hadn't seen one there for weeks. But one Sunday we took Henry and went on an exploring expedition at the north end of the mesa, along Black Canyon. We caught sight of a little bunch of ruins we'd never noticed before, and made a fool- View Image of Page 214hardy scramble to get up to them. We almost made it, and then there was a stretch of rock wall so smooth we couldn't climb it without a ladder. I was the tallest of the three, and Henry was the lightest; he thought he could get up there if he stood on my shoulders. He was standing on my back, his head just above the floor of the cavern, groping for something to hoist himself by, when a snake struck him from the ledge—struck him square in the forehead. It happened in a flash. He came down and brought the snake with him. By the time we picked him up and turned him over, his face had begun to swell. In ten minutes it was purple, and he was so crazy it took the two of us to hold him and keep him from jumping down the chasm. He was struck so near the brain that there was nothing to do. It lasted nearly two hours. Then we carried him home. Roddy dropped down the ladder into Cow Canyon, caught his horse, and rode into Tarpin for the coroner. Father Duchène was preaching there at the mission church that Sunday, and came back with him.

We buried Henry on the mesa. Father Duchène stayed on with us a week to keep us company. We were so cut up that we were almost ready to quit. But he had been planning to come out to see our find for a long while, and he got our minds off our trouble. He worked View Image of Page 215 hard every day. He went over everything we'd done, and examined everything minutely: the pottery, cloth, stone implements, and the remains of food. He measured the heads of the mummies and declared they had good skulls. He cut down one of the old cedars that grew exactly in the middle of the deep trail worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope. You couldn't count them with the unassisted eve, for growing out of a tiny crevice in the rock as that tree did, the increase of each year was so scant that the rings were invisible except with a glass. The tree he cut down registered three hundred and thirty-six years' growth, and it could have begun to grow in that well-worn path only after human feet had ceased to come and go there.

Why had they ceased? That question puzzled him, too. Smallpox, any epidemic, would have left unburied bodies. Father Duchène suggested what Dr. Ripley, in Washington, afterward surmised: that the tribe had been exterminated, not here in their stronghold, but in their summer camp, down among the farms across the river. Father Duchène had been among the Indians nearly twenty years then, he had seventeen Indian pueblos in his parish, and he spoke several Indian dialects. He was able to explain the use of many of the implements we found, especially those used in religious View Image of Page 216 ceremonies. The night before he left us, he summed up the results of his week's study, something like this:

"The two square towers on the mesa top, to which you have given little attention, were unquestionably granaries. Under the stones and earth fallen from the walls, there is a quantity of dried corn on the car. Not a great harvest, for life must have come to an end here in the summer, when the new crop was not yet garnered and the last year's grain was getting low. The semicircular ridge on the mesa top, which you can see distinctly among the piñons when the sun is low and brings it into high relief, is the buried wall of an amphitheatre, where probably religious exercises and games took place. I advise you not to dig into it. It is probably the most important thing here, and should be left for scholars to excavate.

"The tower you so much admire in the cliff village may have been a watch tower, as you think, but from the curious placing of those narrow slits, like windows, I believe it was used for astronomical observations. I am inclined to think that your tribe were a superior people Perhaps they were not so when they first came upon this mesa, but in an orderly and secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace. There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than View Image of Page 217 food and shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been quite complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are not grouped like that by pure accident, though convenience probably had much to do with it. Convenience often dictates very sound design.

"The workmanship on both the wood and stone of the dwellings is good. The shapes and decoration of the water jars and food bowls is better than in any of the existing pueblos I know, better even than the pottery made at coma. I have seen a collection of early pottery from the island of Crete. Many of the geometrical decorations on these jars are not only similar, but, if my memory is trustworthy, identical.

"I see your tribe as a provident, rather thoughtful people, who made their livelihood secure by raising crops and fowl—the great number of turkey bones and feathers are evidence that they had domesticated the wild turkey. With grain in their store-rooms, and mountain sheep and deer for their quarry, they rose gradually from the condition of savagery. With the proper variation of meat and vegetable diet, they developed physically and improved in the primitive arts. They had View Image of Page 218 looms and mills, and experimented with dyes. At the same time, they possibly declined in the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.

"I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable, where they had practically overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their time and environment.

"They were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues, some horde that fell upon them in their summer camp and destroyed them for their hides and clothing and weapons, or from mere love of slaughter. I feel sure that these brutal invaders never even learned of the existence of this mesa, honeycombed with habitations. If they had come here, they would have destroyed. They killed and went their way.

"What I cannot understand is why you have not found more human remains. The three bodies you View Image of Page 219 found in the mortuary chamber were prepared for burial by the old people who were left behind. But what of the last survivors? It is possible that when autumn wore on, and no one returned from the farms, the aged banded together, went in search of their people, and perished in the plain.

"Like you, I feel a reverence for this place. Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot. Your people were cut off here without the influence of example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized it.

Father Duchène warmly agreed with Blake that I ought to go to Washington and make some report to the Government, so that the proper specialists would be sent out to study the remains we had found.

"You must go to the Director of the Smithsonian Institution," he said. "He will send us an archælogist who will interpret all that is obscure to us. He will revive this civilization in a scholarly work. It may be that you will have thrown light on some important points in the history of your country."

After he left us, Blake and I began to make definite plans for my trip to Washington. Blake was to work on View Image of Page 220 the railroad that winter and save as much money as possible. The expense of my journey would be paid out of what we called the jack-pot account, in the bank at Pardee. All our further expenses on the mesa would be paid by the Government. Roddy often hinted that we would get a substantial reward of some kind. When we broke or lost anything at our work, he used to smile and say: "Never mind. I guess our Uncle Sam will make that good to us."

We had a beautiful autumn that year, soft, sunny, like a dream. Even up there in the air we had so little wind that the gold hung on the poplars and quaking aspens late in November. We stayed out on the mesa until after Christmas. We wanted our archæologist, when he came, to find everything in good order. We cleared up any litter we'd made in digging things out, stored all the specimens, even the mummies, in our cabin, and padlocked the doors and windows before we left it. I had written up my day-book carefully to the very end, had even written out some of Father Duchëne's deductions. This book I left in concealment on the mesa. I climbed up to the Eagle's Nest in which we had found the mummy of the murdered woman we called Mother Eve, where I had noticed a particularly neat little cupboard in the wall. I put my book in this niche and sealed View Image of Page 221 it up with cement. Mother Eve had greatly interested Father Duchëne, by the way. He laughed and said she was well named. He didn't believe her death could throw any light on the destruction of her people. "I seem to smell," he said slyly, "a personal tragedy. Perhaps when the tribe went down to the summer camp, our lady was sick and would not go. Perhaps her husband thought it worth while to return unannounced from the farms some night, and found her in improper company. The young man may have escaped. In primitive society the husband is allowed to punish an unfaithful wife with death."

When the first snow began to fly, we said good-bye to our mesa and rode into Tarpin. It took several days to outfit me for my journey to Washington. We bought a trunk (I'd never owned one in my life), and a supply of white shirts, an overcoat that was as heavy as lead and just about as cold, and two suits of clothes. That conscienceless trader worked off on me a clawhammer coat he must have had in stock for twenty years. He easily persuaded Roddy that it was the proper thing for dress occasions. I think Roddy expected that I would be received by ambassadors—perhaps I did.

Roddy drew six hundred dollars out of the bank to stake me, and bought my ticket and Pullman through to View Image of Page 222 Washington. He went to the station with me the morning I left, and a hard handshake was good-bye. For a long while after my train pulled out, I could see our mesa bulking up blue on the sky-line. I hated to leave it, but I reflected that it had taken care of itself without me for a good many hundred years. When I saw it again, I told myself, I would have done my duty by it; I would bring back with me men who would understand it, who would appreciate it and dig out all its secrets.

6

Got off the train, just behind the Capitol building, one cold bright January morning. I stood for a long while watching the white dome against a flashing blue sky, with a very religious feeling. After I had walked about a little and seen the parks, so green though it was winter, and the Treasury building, and the War and Navy, I decided to put off my business for a little and give myself a week to enjoy the city. That was the most sensible thing I did while I was there. For that week I was wonderfully happy.

My sightseeing over, I got to work. First I went to see the Representative from our district, to ask for letters of introduction. He was cordial enough, but he gave me View Image of Page 223 bad advice. He was very positive that I ought to report to the Indian Commission, and gave me a letter to the Commissioner. The Commissioner was out of town, and I wasted three days waiting about his office, being questioned by clerks and secretaries. They were not very busy, and seemed to find me entertaining. I thought they were interested in my mission, and interest was what I wanted to arouse I didn't know how influential these people might be—they talked as if they had great authority. I had brought along in my telescope bag some good pieces of pottery—not the best, I was afraid of accident, but some that were representative—and all the photographs Blake and I had taken. We had only a small kodak, and these pictures didn't make much show,—looked, indeed, like grubby little "dobe ruins such as one can find almost anywhere. They gave no idea of the beauty and vastness of the setting. The clerks at the Indian Commission seemed very curious about everything and made me talk a lot. I was green and didn't know any better. But when one of the fellows there tried to get me to give him my best bowl for his cigarette ashes, I began to suspect the nature of their interest

At last the Commissioner returned, but he had pressing engagements, and I hung around several days more View Image of Page 224 before he would see me. After questioning me for about half an hour, he told me that his business was with living Indians, not dead ones, and that his office should have informed me of that in the beginning. He advised me to go back to our Congressman and get a letter to the Smithsonian Institution. I packed up my pottery and got out of the place, feeling pretty sore. The head clerk followed me down the corridor and asked me what I'd take for that little bowl he'd taken a fancy to. He said it had no market value, I'd find Washington full of such things; there were cases of them in the cellar at the Smithsonian that they'd never taken the trouble to unpack, hadn't any place to put them.

I went back to my Congressman. This time he wasn't so friendly as before, but he gave me a letter to the Smithsonian. There I went through the same experience. The Director couldn't be seen except by appointment, and his secretary had to be convinced that your business was important before he would give you an appointment with his chief. After the first morning I found it difficult to see even the secretary. He was always engaged. I was told to take a seat and wait, but when he was disengaged he was hurrying off to luncheon. I would sit there all morning with a group of unfortunate people: girls who wanted to get typewritView Image of Page 225ing to do, nice polite old men who wanted to be taken out on surveys and expeditions next summer. The secretary would at last come out with his overcoat on, and would hurry through the waiting-room reading a letter or a report, without looking up.

The office assistants cheered me along, and I kept this up for some days, sitting all morning in that room, studying the patterns of the rugs, and the shoes of the patient waiters who came as regularly as I. One day after the secretary had gone out, his stenographer, nice little Virginia girl, came and sat down in an empty chair next to mine and began talking to me. She wasn't pretty, but her kind eyes and soft Southern voice took hold of me at once. She wanted to know what I had in my telescope, and why I was there, and where I came from, and all about it. Nearly everyone else had gone out to lunch— that seemed to be the one thing they did regularly in Washington— and we had the waiting. room to ourselves. I talked to her a good deal. Her name was Virginia Ward. She was a tiny little thing, but she had lovely eyes and such gentle ways. She seemed indignant that I had been put off so long after having come so far.

"Now you just let me fix it up for you," she said at last. "Mr. Wagner is bothered by a great many foolish View Image of Page 226 people who waste his time, and he is suspicious. The best way will be for you to invite him to lunch with you. I'll arrange it. I keep a list of his appointments, and I know he is not engaged for luncheon tomorrow. I'll tell him that he is to lunch with a nice boy who has come all the way from New Mexico to inform the Department about an important discovery. I'll tell him to meet you at the Shoreham, at one. That's expensive, but it would do no good to invite him to a cheap place. And, remember, you must ask him to order the luncheon. It will maybe cost you ten dollars, but it will get you somewhere."

I felt grateful to the nice little thing,—she wasn't older than I. I begged her wouldn't she please come to lunch with me herself to-day, and talk to me. "Oh, no!" she said, blushing red as a poppy. "Why, I'm afraid you think——"

I told her I didn't think anything but how nice she was to me, and how lonesome I was. She went with me, but she wouldn't go to any swell place. She told me a great many useful things.

"If you want to get attention from anybody in Washington," she said, "ask them to lunch. People here will do almost anything for a good lunch."

"But the Director of the Smithsonian, for instance," View Image of Page 227I said, "surely you don't mean that the high-up ones like that——? Why would he want to bother with a cow-puncher from New Mexico, when he can lunch with scientists and ambassadors?"

She had a pretty little fluttery Southern laugh. "You just name a hotel like the Shoreham to the Director, and try it! There has to be somebody to pay for a lunch, and the scientists and ambassadors don't do that when they can avoid it. He'd accept your invitation, and the next time he went to dine with the Secretary of State he'd make a nice little story of it, and paint you up so pretty you'd hardly know yourself."

When I asked her whether I'd better take my pottery—it was there under the table between us—to the Shoreham to show Mr. Wagner, she tittered again. wouldn't bother. If you show him enough of the Shoreham pottery, that will be more effective."

The next morning, when the secretary arrived at his office, he stopped by my chair and said he understood he had an engagement with me for one o'clock. That was a good idea, he added: his mind was freer when he was away from office routine.

I had been in Washington twenty-two days when I took the secretary out to lunch. It was an excellent lunch. We had a bottle of Château d'Yquem. I'd never View Image of Page 228 heard of such a wine before, but I remember it because it cost five dollars. I drank only one glass, and that pleased him too, for he drank the rest. Though he was friendly and talked a great deal, my heart sank lower, for he wouldn't let me explain my mission to him at all. He kept telling me that he knew all about the South-west. He had been sent by the Smithsonian to conduct parties of European archæologists through all the show places, Frijoles and Canyon de Chelly, and Taos and the Hopi pueblos. When some Austrian Archduke had gone to hunt in the Pecos range, he had been sent by his chief and the German ambassador to manage the tour, and he had done it with such success that both he and the Director were given decorations from the Austrian Crown, in recognition of his services. Then I had to listen to a long story about how well he was treated by the Archduke when he went to Vienna with his chief the following summer. I had to hear about balls and receptions, and the names and titles of all the people he had met at the Duke's country estate. I was amazed and ashamed that a man of fifty, a man of the world, a scholar with ever so many degrees, should find it worth his while to show off before a boy, and a boy of such humble pretensions, who didn't know how to eat the hors d'euvres any more than if an assortment of cocoanuts had been set before him with no hammer.

View Image of Page 229

Imagine my astonishment when, as he was drinking his liqueur, he said carelessly: "By the way, I was successful in arranging an interview with the Director for you. He will see you at four o'clock on Monday.

That was Thursday. I spent the time between then and Monday trying to find out something more about the kind of people I had come among, I persuaded Virginia Ward to go to the theatre with me, and she told me that it always took a long while to get anything through with the Director, that I mustn't lose heart, and she would always be glad to cheer me up. She lived with her mother, a widow lady, and they had me come to dinner and were very nice to me.

All this time I was living with a young married couple who interested me very much, for they were unlike any people I had ever known. The husband was "in office, as they say there, he had some position in the War Department. How it did use to depress me to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building at sunset! Their lives seemed to me so petty, so slavish. The couple I lived with gave me a prejudice against that kind of life. I couldn't help knowing a good deal about their affairs. They had only a small flat, and rented me one room of it, so I was very much in their confidence and couldn't help overhearing. They askedView Image of Page 230 me not to mention the fact that I paid rent, as they had told their friends I was making them a visit. It was like that in everything; they spent their lives trying to keep up appearances, and to make his salary do more than it could. When they weren't discussing where she should go in the summer, they talked about the promotions in his department; how much the other clerks got and how they spent it, how many new dresses their wives had. And there was always a struggle going on for an invitation to a dinner or a reception, or even a tea- party. When once they got the invitation they had been scheming for, then came the terrible question of what Mrs. Bixby should wear.

The Secretary of War gave a reception; there was to be dancing and a great showing of foreign uniforms. The Bixbys were in painful suspense until they got a card. Then for a week they talked about nothing but what Mrs. Bixby was going to wear. They decided that for such an occasion she must have a new dress. Bixby borrowed twenty-five dollars from me, and took his lunch hour to go shopping with his wife and choose the satin. That seemed to me very strange. In New Mexico the Indian boys sometimes went to a trader's with their wives and bought shawls or calico, and we thought it rather contemptible. On the night of the reception the View Image of Page 231 Bixbys set off gaily in a cab; the dress they considered a great success. But they had bad luck. Somebody spilt claret-cup on Mrs. Bixby's skirt before the evening was half over, and when they got home that night I heard her weeping and reproaching him for having been so upset about it, and looking at nothing but her ruined dress all evening. She said he cried out when it happened. I don't doubt it.

Every cab, every party, was more than they could afford. If he lost an umbrella, it was a real misfortune. He wasn't lazy, he wasn't a fool, and he meant to be honest; but he was intimidated by that miserable sort of departmental life. He didn't know anything else. He thought working in a store or a bank not respectable. Living with the Bixbys gave me a kind of low—spiritedness I had never known before. During my days of waiting for appointments, I used to walk for hours around the fence that shuts in the White House grounds, and watch the Washington monument colour with those beautiful sunsets, until the time when all the clerks streamed out of the Treasury building and the War and Navy. Thousands of them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me like people in slavery, who ought to be free. I remember the city chiefly by those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white colView Image of Page 232umns and green shrubbery, and the monument shaft still pink while the stars were coming out.

I got my interview with the Director of the Smithsonian at last. He gave me his attention, he was interested. He told me to come again in three days and meet Dr. Ripley, who was the authority on prehistoric Indian remains and had excavated a lot of them. Then came an exciting and rather encouraging time for me. Dr. Ripley asked the right sort of questions, and evidently knew his business. He said he'd like to take the first train down to my mesa. But it required money to excavate, and he had none. There was a bill up before Congress for an appropriation. We'd have to wait. I must use my influence with my Representative. He took my pottery to study it. (I never got it back, by the way.) There was a Dr. Fox. connected with the Smithsonian, who was also interested. They told me a good many things I wanted to know, and kept me dangling about the office. Of course they were very kind to take so much trouble with a green boy. But I soon found that the Director and all his staff had one interest which dwarfed every other. There was to be an International Exposition of some sort in Europe the following summer, and they were all pulling strings to get appointed on juries or sent to international congresses—appointments that would View Image of Page 233 pay their expenses abroad, and give them a salary in addition. There was, indeed, a bill before Congress for appropriations for the Smithsonian; but there was also a bill for Exposition appropriations, and that was the one they were really pushing. They kept me hanging on through March and April, but in the end it came to nothing. Dr. Ripley told me he was sorry, but the sum Congress had allowed the Smithsonian wouldn't cover an expedition to the South-west.

Virginia Ward, who had been so kind to me, went out to lunch with me that day, and admitted I had been let down. She was almost as much disappointed as I. She said the only thing Dr. Ripley really cared about was getting a free trip to Europe and acting on a jury, and maybe getting a decoration. "And that's what the Director wants, too," she said. "They don't care much about dead and gone Indians. What they do care about is going to Paris, and getting another ribbon on their coats."

The only other person besides Virginia who was genuinely concerned about my affair was a young Frenchman, a lieutenant attached to the French Embassy, who came to the Smithsonian often on business connected with this same International Exposition. He was nice and polite to Virginia, and she introduced him View Image of Page 234 to me. We used to walk down along the Potomac together. He studied my photographs and asked me such intelligent questions about everything that it was a pleasure to talk to him. He had a fine attitude about it all; he was thoughtful, critical, and respectful. I feel sure he'd have gone back to New Mexico with me if he'd had the money. He was even poorer than I.

I was utterly ashamed to go home to Roddy, dead broke after all the money I'd spent, and without a thing to show for it. I hung on in Washington through May, trying to get a job of some sort, to at least earn my fare home. My letters to Blake had been pretty blue for some time back. If I'd been sensible, I'd have kept my troubles to myself. He was easily discouraged, and I knew that. At last I had to write him for money to go home. It was slow in coming, and I began to telegraph. I left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more depressing they are than workmen coming out of a factory.

I was terribly disappointed when I got off the train at Tarpin and Roddy wasn't at the station to meet me. View Image of Page 235 It was late in the afternoon, almost dark, and I went straight to the livery stable to ask Bill Hook for news of Blake. Hook, you remember, had done all our hauling for us, and had been a good friend. He gave me a glad hand and said Blake was out on the mesa.

"I expect maybe he's had his feelings hurt here. He's been shy of this town lately. You see, Tom, folks weren't bothered none about that mesa so long as you fellows were playing Robinson Cruse out there, digging up curios. But when it leaked out that Blake had got a lot of money for your stuff, then they begun to feel jealous—said them ruins didn't belong to Blake any more than to anybody else. It'll blow over in time; people are always like that when money changes hands. But right now there's a good deal of bad feeling."

I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. "You mean you ain't heard about the German, Fechtig? Well, Rodney's got some surprise waiting for you! Why, he's had the damnedest luck! He's cleaned up a neat little pile on your stuff."

I begged him to tell me what stuff he meant "Why, your curios. This German, Fechtig, come along; he'd been buying up a lot of Indian things out here, and he bought your whole outfit and paid four thousand dollars down for it. The transaction made View Image of Page 236 quite a stir here in Tarpin. I'm not kicking. I made a good thing out of it. My mules were busy three weeks packing the stuff out of there on their backs, and I held the Dutchman up for a fancy price. He had packing cases made at the wagon shop and took 'em up to the mesa full of straw and sawdust, and packed the curios out there. I lost one of my mules, too. You remember Jenny? Well, they were leading her down with a big box on her, and right there where the trail runs so narrow around a bump in the cliff above Black Canyon, she lost her balance and fell clean to the bottom, her load on her. Pretty near a thousand feet, I guess. We never went down to hold a post-mortem, but Fechtig paid for her like a gentleman."

I remember I sat down on the sofa in Hooks office because I couldn't stand up any longer, and the smell of the horse blankets began to make me deathly sick. In a minute I went over, like a girl in a novel. Hook pulled me out on the sidewalk and gave me some whisky out of his pocket flask.

When I felt better I asked him how long this German had been gone, and what he had done with the things.

"Oh, he cleared out three weeks ago. He didn't waste no time. He treated everybody well, though; nobody's sore at him. It's your partner they're turned against.View Image of Page 238 Fechtig took the stuff right along with him, chartered a freight car, and travelled in the car with it. I reckon it's on the water by now. He took it straight through into Old Mexico, and was to load it on a French boat. Seems he was afraid of having trouble getting curiosities out of the United States ports. You know you can take any. thing out of the City of Mexico."

I had heard all I wanted to hear. I went to the hotel, got a room, and lay down without undressing to wait for daylight. Hook was to drive me and my trunk out to the mesa early the next morning. All I'd been through in Washington was nothing to what I went through that night. I thought Blake must have lost his mind. I didn't for a minute believe he'd meant to sell me out, but I cursed his stupidity and presumption. I had never told him just how I felt about those things we'd dug out together, it was the kind of thing one doesn't talk about directly. But he must have known; he couldn't have lived with me all summer and fall without knowing. And yet, until that night, I had never known myself that I cared more about them than about anything else in the world.

At the first blink of daylight I jumped up from my damnable bed and went round to the stable to rout Hook out of his bunk. We had breakfast and got out of View Image of Page 238 town with his best team. On the way to the mesa we had a break-down, one of the old dry wheels smashed to splinters. Hook had to unhitch and ride back to Tarpin and get another. Everything took an unreasonably long time, and the afternoon was half gone when he put me and my trunk down at the foot of the Black Canyon trail. Every inch of that trail was dear to me, every delicate curve about the old piñon roots, every chancy track along the face of the cliffs, and the deep windings back into shrubbery and safety. The wild-currant bushes were in bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a narrow ravine, the scent of them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to lie down and sleep. I wanted to see and touch everything, like home sick children when they come home.

When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted piñons,—the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that glorious feeling that I've never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what air!—Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of piñons—it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky. Down there behind me was the plain, already streaked View Image of Page 239 with shadow, violet and purple and burnt orange until it met the horizon. Before me was the flat mesa top, thinly sprinkled with old cedars that were not much taller than I, though their twisted trunks were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black shadow going ahead.

I made straight for the cabin, it was about three miles from the spot where the trail emerged at the top. I saw smoke rising before I could see the hut itself. Blake was in the doorway when I got there. I didn't look at his face, but I could feel that he looked at mine.

"Don't say anything, Tom. Don't rip me up until you hear all about it," he said as I came toward him.

"I've heard enough to about do for me," I blurted out. "What made you do it, Blake? What made you do it?"

"It was a chance in a million, boy. There wasn't any time to consult you. There's only one man in thousands that wants to buy relics and pay real money for them. I could see how your Washington campaign was coming out. I know you'd thought about big figures, so had I. But that was all a pipe dream. Four thousand's not so bad, you don't pick it up every day. And he bore all the expenses. Why, it was a terrible expensive job, getting all that frail stuff out of here. Who else would have View Image of Page 240 bought it, I want to know? We'd have had to pack it around at Harvey Houses, selling it at a dollar a bowl, like the poor Indians do. I took the best chance going, for both of us, Tom."

I didn't say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn't go into the bunk-room, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me as you hear people talking when you are asleep.

"Who else would have bought them?" he kept saying. "Folks make a lot of fuss over such things, but they don't want to pay good money for them."

When I at last told him that such a thing as selling them had never entered my head, I'm sure he thought I was lying. He reminded me about how we used to talk of getting big money from the Government.

I admitted I'd hoped we'd be paid for our work, and View Image of Page 241 maybe get a bonus of some kind, for our discovery. "But I never thought of selling them, because they weren't mine to sell—nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. You've gone and sold them to a country that's got plenty of relics of its own. You've gone and sold your country's secrets, like Dreyfus."

"That man was innocent. It was a frame-up," Blake murmured. It was a point he would never pass up.

"Whether he's guilty or not, you are! If there was only anybody in Washington I could telegraph to, and have that German held up at the port!"

"That's just it. If there was anybody in Washington that cared a damn, I wouldn't have sold 'em. But you pretty well found out there ain't."

"We could have kept them, then," I told him. "I've got a strong back. I'm not so poor that I have to sell the pots and pans that belonged to my poor grandmothers a thousand years ago. I made all my plans on the train, coming back." (It was a lie, I hadn't.) "I meant to get a job on the railroad and keep our find right here, and come back to it when I had a lay-off. I think a lot more of it now than before I went to Washington. And after a while, when that Exposition is over and the SmithsoView Image of Page 242nian people get home, they would come out here all right. I've learned enough from them so that I could go on with it myself."

Blake reminded me that I had my way to make in the world, and that I wanted to go to school. "That money's in the bank this minute, in your name, and you're going to college on it. You're not going to be a day-labourer like me. After you've got your sheepskin, then you can divide with me."

"You think I'd touch that money?" I looked squarely at him for the first time. "No more than if you'd stolen it. You made the sale. Get what you can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?"

Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he'd always supposed I meant to "realize" on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. "Everything does," he added.

"If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of four thousand, I'd have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and View Image of Page 243 handed on to you and me, two poor cow-punchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to keep a trust. I'd as soon have sold my own grand. mother as Mother Eve—I'd have sold any living woman first.

"Save your tears," said Roddy grimly. "She refused to leave us. She went to the bottom of Black Canyon and carried Hook's best mule along with her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded Jenny out an inch or so too far from the canyon wall."

This painful interview went on for hours. I walked up and down the kitchen trying to make Blake understand the kind of value those objects had had for me. Unfortunately, I succeeded. He sat slumping on the bench, his elbows on the table, shading his eyes from the lantern with his hands.

"There's no need to keep this up," he said at last. "You're away out of my depth, but I think I get you. You might have given me some of this Fourth of July talk a little earlier in the game. I didn't know you valued that stuff any different than anything else a fellow might run on to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise."

"I suppose you gave him my diary along with the rest?"

"No," said Blake, his voice growing gloomier and View Image of Page 244 darker, "that's in the Eagle's Nest, where you hid it. That's your private property. I supposed I had some share in the relics we dug up—you always spoke of it that way. But I see now I was working for you like a hired man, and while you were away I sold your property."

I said again it wasn't mine or his. He took something out of the pocket of his flannel shirt and laid it on the table. I saw it was a bank passbook, with my name on the yellow cover.

"You may as well keep it," I said. "I'll never touch it. You had no right to deposit it in my name. The townspeople are sore about the money, and they'll hold it against me."

"No they won't. Can't you trust me to fix that?"

"I don't know what I can trust you with, Blake. I don't know where I'm at with you," I said.

He got up and began putting on his coat. "Motives don't count, eh?" he said, his face turned away, as he put his arm into the sleeve.

"They would in anything of our own, between you and me," I told him. "If it was my money you'd lost gambling, or my girl you'd made free with, we could fight it out, and maybe be friends again. But this is different."

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"I see. You make it clear." He was quietly stirring around as he spoke. He got his old knapsack off its nail on the wall, opened his trunk and took out some underwear and socks and a couple of shirts. After he had put these into the bag, he slung it over one shoulder, and his canvas water-bag over the other. I let these preparations go on without a word. He went to the cupboard over the stove and put some sticks of chocolate into his pocket, then his pipe and a bag of tobacco. Presently I said he'd break his neck if he tried riding down the trail in the dark.

"Tm not riding the trail," he replied curtly. "I'm going down the quick way. My horse is grazing in Cow Canyon."

"I noticed the river's high. It's dangerous crossing," I remarked.

"I got over that way a few days ago. I'm surprised at you, using such common expressions!" he said sarcastically. "Dangerous crossing; it's painted on signboards all over the world!" He walked out of the cabin without looking back. I followed him to the V-shaped break in the rim rock, hardly larger than a man's body, where the spliced tree-trunks made a swinging ladder down the face of the cliff. I wanted to protest, but only succeeded in finding fault.

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"You'll catch your knapsack on those forks and come to grief."

"That's my look-out."

By this time my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and I could see Blake quite clearly—the stubborn, crouching set of his shoulders that I used to notice when he first came to Pardee and was drinking all the time. There was an ache in my arms to reach out and detain him, but there was something else that made me absolutely powerless to do so. He stepped down and settled his foot into the first fork. Then he stopped a moment and straightened his pack, buttoned his coat up to the chin, and pulled his hat on tighter. There was always a night draught in the canyon. He gripped the trunk with his hands. "Well," he said with grim cheerfulness, "here's luck! And I'm glad it's you that's doing this to me, Tom; not me that's doing it to you."

His head disappeared below the rim. I could hear the trees creak under his heavy body, and the chains rattle a little at the splicings. I lay down on the ledge and listened. I could hear him for a long way down, and the sounds were comforting to me, though I didn't realize it. Then the silence closed in. I went to sleep that night hoping I would never waken.

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7

The next morning the whinnying of my saddle-horse in the shed roused me. I took him down to the foot of the trail where I'd left my trunk, and packed my things up to the cabin on his back. I sat up late that night, waiting for Blake, though I knew he wouldn't come. A few days later I rode into Tarpin for news of him. Bill Hook showed me Roddy's horse. He had sold him to the barn for sixty dollars. The station-master told me Blake had bought a ticket to Winslow, Arizona. I wired the station-master and the dispatcher at Winslow, but they could give me no information. Father Duchène came along, on his rounds, and I told him the whole story.

He thought Blake would come back sometime, that I'd only miss him if I went out to look for him. He advised me to stay on the mesa that summer and get ahead with my studies, work up my Spanish grammar and my Latin. He had friends all along the Santa Fé, and he was sure we could catch Blake by advertising in the local papers along the road; Albuquerque, Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams, Los Angeles. After a few days with him, I went back to the mesa to wait.

I'll never forget the night I got back. I crossed theView Image of Page 248 river an hour before sunset and hobbled my horse in the wide bottom of Cow Canyon. The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the piñons along the edge of the top ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water.

I remember these things, because, in a sense, that was the first night I was ever really on the mesa at all—the first night that all of me was there. This was the first rime I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had View Image of Page 249 happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify, and that process, going on in my mind, brought with it great happiness. It was possession. The excitement of my first discovery was a very pale feeling compared to this one. For me the mesa was no longer an adventure, but a religious emotion. I had read of filial piety in the Latin poets, and I knew that was what I felt for this place. It had formerly been mixed up with other motives; but now that they were gone, I had my happiness unalloyed.

What that night began lasted all summer. I stayed on the mesa until November. It was the first time I'd ever studied methodically, or intelligently. I got the better of the Spanish grammar and read the twelve books of the æneid. I studied in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked at clearing away the mess the German had made in packing—tidying up the ruins to wait another hundred years, maybe, for the right explorer. I can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide. Every morning, when the sun's rays first hit the mesa top, while the rest of the world was in shadow, I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything. Nothing tired me. Up there alone, a close neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct View Image of Page 250 way. And at night, when I watched it drop down behind the edge of the plain below me, I used to feel that I couldn't have borne another hour of that consuming light, that I was full to the brim, and needed dark and sleep.

All that summer, I never went up to the Eagle's Nest to get my diary —indeed, it's probably there yet. I didn't feel the need of that record. It would have been going backward. I didn't want to go back and unravel things step by step. Perhaps I was afraid that I would lose the whole in the parts. At any rate, I didn't go for my record.

During those months I didn't worry much about poor Roddy. I told myself the advertisements would surely get him—I knew his habit of reading newspapers. There are times when one's vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down. Hurrying from my cabin in the morning to the spot in the Cliff City where I studied under a cedar, I used to be frightened at my own heartlessness. But the feel of the narrow moccasin-worn trail in the flat rock made my feet glad, like a good taste in the mouth, and I'd forget all about Blake without knowing it. I found I was reading too fast; so I began to commit long passages of Vergil to memory—if it hadn't been for that, I might have forgotten View Image of Page 251 how to use my voice, or gone to talking to myself. When I look into the ænid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green pitons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage—behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.

Happiness is something one can't explain. You must take my word for it. Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.

Next winter I went back to Pardee and stayed with the O'Briens again, working on the section and studying with Father Duchëne and trying to get some word of Blake. Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I couldn't fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible way, had all the Santa Fé operatives and the police and the Catholic missionaries on the watch for him, offered a thousand dollars reward for whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchëne and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I'm not View Image of Page 252 very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I'll be called to account when I least expect it.

In the spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here and walked into your garden, and the rest you know.

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3

Book Three

The Professor

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2

All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance. His education in France had been an accident. His married life had been happy largely through a circumstance with which neither he nor his wife had anything to do. They had been young people with good qualities, and very much in love, but they could not have been happy if Lillian had not inherited a small income from her father—only about sixteen hundred a year, but it had made all the difference in the world. A few memorable interregnums between servants had let him know that Lillian couldn't pinch and be shabby and do housework, as the wives of some of his colleagues did. Under such conditions she became another person, and a bitter one. Tom Outland had been a stroke of chance he couldn't possibly have imagined; his strange coming, his strange View Image of Page 257 story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame—it was all fantastic. Fantastic, too, that this tramp boy should amass a fortune for someone whose name he had never heard, for "an extravagant and wheeling stranger." The Professor often thought of that curiously bitter burst from the barytone in Brahms' Requiem, attending the words, "He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall scatter them!" The vehemence of this passage had seemed to him uncalled for until he read it by the light of the history of his own family.

St. Peter thought he had fared well with fate. He wouldn't choose to live his life over—he might not have such good luck again. He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mind—of the imagination. Just when the morning brightness of the world was wearing off for him, along came Outland and brought him a kind of second youth.

Through Outland's studies, long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy's mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.

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If the last four volumes of "The Spanish Adventurers" were more simple and inevitable than those that went before, it was largely because of Outland. When St. Peter first began his work, he realized that his great drawback was the lack of early association, the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers' adventures. By the time he had got as far as the third volume, into his house walked a boy who had grown up there, a boy with imagination, with the training and insight resulting from a very curious experience; who had in his pocket the secrets which old trails and stones and watercourses tell only to adolescence.

Two years after Tom's graduation they took the copy of Fray Garcés' manuscript that the Professor had made from the original in Spain, and went down into the South-west together. By autumn they had been over every mile of his trail on horseback. Tom could take a sentence from Garcés' diary and find the exact spot at which the missionary crossed the Rio Colorado on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could always find the route by which the priest had reached the next.

It was on that trip that they went to Tom's Blue Mesa, climbed the ladder of spliced pine-trees to the View Image of Page 259 Cliff City, and up to the Eagle's Nest. There they took Tom's diary from the stone cupboard where he had sealed it up years ago, before he set out for Washington on his fruitless errand.

The next summer Tom went with the Professor to Old Mexico. They had planned a third summer together, in Paris, but it never came off. Outland was delayed by the formalities of securing his patent, and then came August, 1914. Father Duchêne, the missionary priest who had been Tom's teacher, stopped in Hamilton on his way back to Belgium, hurrying home to serve in any capacity he might. The rugged old man stayed in Hamilton only four days, but in that time Outland made up his mind, had a will drawn, packed, and said good-bye. He sailed with Father Duchène on the Rochambeau.

To this day St. Peter regretted that he had never got that vacation in Paris with Tom Outland. He had wanted to revisit certain spots with him: to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after rain; to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figures—Time, bearing away the youth who was strugView Image of Page 260gling to snatch his palm—or was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might have mattered to Tom, had not chance, In one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself.

And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him. He couldn't see Tom building "Outland," or becoming a public-spirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas? A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses. His fellow scientists, his wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to "manage" a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. He had escaped all that. He had made something new in the world—and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others.

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2

All those summer days, while the Professor was sending cheerful accounts of his activities to his family in France, he was really doing very little. He had begun, in a desultory way, to annotate the diary that Tom had kept on the mesa, in which he had noted down the details of each day's work among the ruins, along with the weather and anything unusual in the routine of their life. There was a minute description of each tool they found, of every piece of cloth and pottery, frequently accompanied by a very suggestive pencil sketch of the object and a surmise as to its use and the kind of life in which it had played a part. To St. Peter this plain account was almost beautiful, because of the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say. If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only conventional phrases.

When the first of August came round, the Professor View Image of Page 262 realized that he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week. But he had been doing a good deal besides—something he had never before been able to do.

St. Peter had always laughed at people who talked about "day-dreams," just as he laughed at people who naively confessed that they had "an imagination." All his life his mind had behaved in a positive fashion. When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth. He found he could lie on his sand-spit by the lake for hours and watch the seven motionless pines drink up the sun. In the evening, after dinner, he could sit idle and watch the stars, with the same immobility. He was cultivating a novel mental dissipation—and enjoying a new friendship. Tom Outland had not come back again through the garden door (as he had so often done in dreams!), but another boy had: the boy the Professor had long ago left behind him in Kansas, in the Solomon Valley—the original, unmodified Godfrey St. Peter.

This boy and he had meant, back in those far-away days, to live some sort of life together and to share good and bad fortune. They had not shared together, for the View Image of Page 263 reason that they were unevenly matched. The young St. Peter who went to France to try his luck, had a more active mind than the twin he left behind in the Solomon Valley. After his adoption into the Thierault household, he remembered that other boy very rarely, in moments of home-sickness. After he met Lillian Ornsley; St. Peter forgot that boy had ever lived.

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.

The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. When he met Lillian, it reached its maturity. From that time to this, existence had been a catching at handholds. One thing led to another and one develop-View Image of Page 264 ment brought on another, and the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover. It had been shaped by all the penalties and responsibilities of being and having been a lover. Because there was Lillian, there must be marriage and a salary. Because there was marriage, there were children. Because there were children, and fervour in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters. His histories, he was convinced, had no more to do with his original ego than his daughters had; they were a result of the high pressure of young manhood.

The Kansas boy who had come back to St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever sun sunned and main mined and snow snowed wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so cultivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have been—and yet he was terribly wise. He seemed to be at the root of the matter; Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths. He seemed to know, among other things, that he was solitary and must always be so; he had never married, never been a father. He was earth, and would return to earth. When white clouds blew over the lake like bellying sails, when the seven pine-trees turned red in the declining sun, he felt View Image of Page 265 satisfaction and said to himself merely: "That is right:' Coming upon a curly root that thrust itself across his path, he said: "That is it." When the maple-leaves along the street began to turn yellow and waxy, and were soft to the touch,—like the skin on old faces,—he said: "That is true; it is time." All these recognitions gave him a kind of sad pleasure.

When he was not dumbly, deeply recognizing, he was bringing up out of himself long-forgotten, unimportant memories of his early childhood, of his mother, his father, his grandfather. His grandfather, old Napoleon Godfrey, used to go about lost in profound, continuous meditation, sometimes chuckling to himself. Occasionally, at the family dinner-table, the old man would try to rouse himself, from motives of politeness, and would ask some kindly question—nearly always absurd and often the same one he had asked yesterday. The boys used to shout with laughter and wonder what profound matters could require such deep meditation, and make a man speak so foolishly about what was going on under his very eyes. St. Peter thought he was beginning to understand what the old man had been thinking about, though he himself was but fifty-two, and Napolcon had been well on in his eighties. There are only a few years, at the last, in which man can conView Image of Page 266 sider his estate, and he thought he might be quite as near the end of his road as his grandfather had been in those days.

The Professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man's life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together.

What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him, and he suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the life of another person.

Along with other states of mind which attended his realization of the boy Godfrey, came a conviction (he did not see it coming, it was there before he was aware of its approach) that he was nearing the end of his life. This conviction took its place so quietly, seemed so matter-of-fact, that he gave it little thought. But one View Image of Page 267 day, when he realized that all the while he was preparing for the fall term he didn't in the least believe he would be alive during the fall term, he thought he might better see a doctor.

3

The family doctor knew all about St. Peter. It was summer, moreover, and he had plenty of time. He devoted several mornings to the Professor and made tests of the most searching kind. In the end he of course told St. Peter there was nothing the matter with him.

"What made you come to me, any discomfort or pain?"

"None. I simply feel tired all the time."

Dr. Dudley shrugged. "So do I! Sleep well?"

"Almost too much."

"Eat well?"

"In every sense of the word, well. I am my own chef." "Always a gourmet, and never anything wrong with your digestive tract! I wish you'd ask me to dine with you some night. Any of that sherry left?"

"A little. I use it plentifully."

"I'll bet you do! But why did you think there was something wrong with you? Low in your mind?"

"No, merely low in energy. Enjoy doing nothing. I came to you from a sense of duty."

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"How about travel?"

"I shrink from the thought of it. As I tell you, I enjoy doing nothing."

"Then do it! There's nothing the matter with you. Follow your inclination."

St. Peter went home well satisfied. He did not mention to Dr. Dudley the real reason for his asking for a medical examination. One doesn't mention such things. The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea.

Letters came every week from France. Lillian and Louie alternated, so that one or the other got off a letter to him on every fast boat. Louie told him that wherever they went, when they had an especially delightful day, they bought him a present. At Trouville, for instance, they had laid in dozens of the brilliant rubber casquettes he liked to wear when he went swimming. At Aix-les-Bains they found a gorgeous dressing- gown for him in a Chinese shop. St. Peter was happy in his mind about them all. He was glad they were there, and that he was here. Their generous letters, written when there were so many pleasant things to do, cerView Image of Page 269tainly deserved more than one reading. He used to carry them out to the lake to read them over again. After coming out of the water he would lie on the sand, holding them in his hand, but somehow never taking his eyes off the pine-trees, appliquéd against the blue water, and their ripe yellow cones, dripping with gum and clustering on the pointed tips like a mass of golden bees in swarming-time. Usually he carried his letters home unread.

His family wrote constantly about their plans for next summer, when they were going to take him over with them. Next summer? The Professor wondered…Sometimes he thought he would like to drive up in front of Notre Dame, in Paris, again, and see it standing there like the Rock of Ages, with the frail generations breaking about its base. He hadn't seen it since the war.

But if he went anywhere next summer, he thought it would be down into Outland' country, to watch the sunrise break on sculptured peaks and impassable mountain passes—to look off at those long, rugged, untamed vistas dear to the American heart. Dear to all hearts, probably—at least, calling to all. Else why had his grandfather's grandfather, who had tramped so many miles across Europe into Russia with the Grande Armée, come out to the Canadian wilderness to forget the chagrin of his Emperor's defeat?

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4

The fall term of the university opened, and now the Professor went to his lectures instead of to the lake. He supposed he did his work; he heard no complaints from his assistants, and the students seemed interested. He found, however, that he wasn't willing to take the trouble to learn the names of several hundred new students. It wasn't worth while. He felt that his relations with them would be of short duration.

The McGregors got home from their vacation in Oregon, and Scott was much amused to find the Professor so doggedly anchored in the old house.

It never struck me, Doctor, that you were a man who would be keeping up two establishments. They'll be coming home pretty soon, and then you'll have to decide where you are going to live."

"I can't leave my study, Scott. That's flat."

"Don't, then! Darn it, you've a right to two houses if you want 'em."

This encounter took place on the street in front of the house. The Professor went wearily upstairs and lay down on the couch, his refuge from this ever-increasing fatigue. He really didn't see what he was going to do about the matter of domicile. He couldn't make himself View Image of Page 271 believe that he was ever going to live in the new house again. He didn't belong there. He remembered some lines of a translation from the Norse he used to read long ago in one of his mother's few books, a little two-volume Ticknor and Fields edition of Longfellow, in blue and gold, that used to lie on the parlour table: For thee a house was built Ere thou wast born; For thee a mould was made Ere thou of woman camest.

Lying on his old couch, he could almost believe himself in that house already. The sagging springs were like the sham upholstery that is put in coffins. Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts, he reflected. Why pretend that it is possible to soften that last hard bed?

He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth.

One morning, just as St. Peter was leaving the house View Image of Page 272 to go to his class-room, the postman handed him two letters, one addressed in Lillian's hand and one in Louie's. He put them into his pocket. The feel of them disturbed him. They were of a suspicious thinness—as if they didn't contain amusing gossip, but announced sudden decisions. He set off down the street, sniffing the lake-cooled morning air and trying to overcome a feeling of nervous dread.

All the morning those two letters lay in his breast pocket. Though they were so light, their effect was to make him drop his shoulders and look woefully tired. The weather, too, had changed, come on suddenly hot and sultry at noon, as if getting ready for a storm. When his classes were over and he was back in his study again, St. Peter felt no interest in lunch. He took out the two letters and ripped them open with his forefinger to have it over. Yes, all plans were changed, and by the happiest of expectations. The family were hurrying home to prepare for the advent of a young Marsellus. They would sail on the sixteenth, on the Berengaria.

Lillian added a postscript to the effect that by this same mail she was getting off a letter to Augusta, who would come to him for the keys of the new house. She would be the best person to open the house and arrange to have the cleaning done. She would take it entirely off View Image of Page 273 his shoulders and see that everything was properly put in order.

They were sailing on the sixteenth, and this was the seventeenth; they were already on the water. The Berengaria was a five-day boat. St. Peter caught up his hat and light overcoat and started down the stairs. Half-way down, he stopped short, went back to his study, and softly shut the door behind him. He sat down, forgetting to take off his overcoat, though the afternoon was so hot and his face was damp with perspiration. He sat motionless, breathing unevenly, one dark hand lying clenched on his writing-table. There must, he was repeating to himself, there must be some way in which a man who had always tried to live up to his responsibilities could, when the hour of desperation came, avoid meeting his own family.

He loved his family, he would make any sacrifice for them, but just now he couldn't live with them. He must be alone. That was more necessary to him than anything had ever been, more necessary, even, than his marriage had been in his vehement youth. He could not live with his family again—not even with Lillian. Especially not with Lillian! Her nature was intense and positive; it was like a chiselled surface, a die, a stamp upon which he could not be beaten out any longer. If her View Image of Page 274 character were reduced to an heraldic device, it would be a hand (a beautiful hand) holding flaming arrows—the shafts of her violent loves and hates, her clear-cut ambitions.

"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love—if once one has ever fallen in.

Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.

St. Peter did not go out of the house that afternoon. He did not leave his study. He sat at his desk with bent head, reviewing his life, trying to see where he had made his mistake, to account for the fact that he now wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.

Late in the afternoon the heaviness of the air in the room drove him to the window. He saw that a storm was coming on. Great orange and purple clouds were blowing up from the lake, and the pine-trees over about the Physics laboratory were blacker than cypresses and looked contracted, as if they were awaiting something. The rain broke, and it turned cold.

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The rain-storm was over in half an hour, but a heavy blow had set in for the night. The wind would be a protection, he thought. Even Augusta would hardly come plodding up the stairs to-night. It seemed strange to be dreading Augusta, but just now he did dread her. He believed he was safe, for to-night. Though it was only five o'clock, the sky was black, and the room was dusky and chilly. He lit the stove and lay down on the couch. The fire made a flickering pattern of light on the wall. He lay watching it, vacantly; without meaning to, he fell asleep. For a long while he slept deeply and peacefully. Then the wind, increasing in violence, disturbed him. He began to be aware of noises—things banging and slamming about. He turned over on his back and slept deeper still.

When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitch- black and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and rather dazed. The long-anticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up——? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? How would such a case be decided under English law? He hadn't lifted his hand against himself—was he required to lift it for himself?

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5

At midnight St. Peter was lying in his study, on his box-couch, covered up with blankets, a hot water bottle at his feet; he knew it was midnight, for the clock of Augusta's church across the park was ringing the hour. Augusta herself was there in the room, sitting in her old sewing-chair by the kerosene lamp, wrapped up in a shawl. She was reading a little much-worn religious book that she always carried in her handbag. Presently he spoke to her.

"Just when did you come in, Augusta?"

She got up and came over to him.

"Are you feeling comfortable, Doctor St. Peter?"

"Oh, very, thank you. When did you happen in?"

"Not any too soon, sir," she said gravely, with a touch of reproof. "You never would take my cautions about that old stove, and it very nearly asphyxiated you. I was barely in time to pull you out."

"You pulled me out, literally? Where to?"

"Into the hall. I came over in the storm to ask you for the keys of the new house—I didn't get Mrs. St. Peter's letter until I got home from work this evening, and I came right over. When I opened the front door I smelled gas, and I knew that stove had been up to its old View Image of Page 277 tricks. I supposed you'd gone out and forgot to turn it off. When I got to the second floor I heard a fall over- head, and it flashed across me that you were up here and had been overcome. I ran up and opened the two windows at the head of the stairs and dragged you out into the wind. You were lying on the floor." She lowered her voice. "It was perfectly frightful in here."

"I seem to remember Dudley's being here."

"Yes, after I'd turned off the stove and opened everything up, I went next door and telephoned for Doctor Dudley. I thought I'd better not say what the trouble was, but I asked him to come at once, as you'd been taken ill. You soon came round, but you were flighty." Augusta hurried over her recital. She was evidently embarrassed by the behaviour of the stove and the condition in which she had found him. It was an ugly accident, and she didn't want the neighbours to know of it.

"You must have great presence of mind, Augusta, and a strong arm as well. You say you found me on the floor? I thought I was lying here on the couch. I remember waking up and smelling gas."

You were stupefied, but you must have got up and tried to get to the door before you were overcome. I was on the second floor when I heard you fall. I'd never heard anyone fall before, that I can remember, but I seemed to know just what it was."

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"I'm sorry to have given you a fright. I hope the gas hasn't made your head ache."

"Alls well that ends well, as they say. But I doubt if you ought to be talking, sir. Could you go to sleep again? I can stay till morning, if you prefer."

"Id be greatly obliged if you would stay the night with me, Augusta. It would be a comfort. I seem to feel rather lonely—for the first time in months."

"That's because your family are coming home. Very well, sir."

"You do a good deal of this sort of thing—watching and sitting up with people, don't you?"

"Well, when I happen to be sewing in a house where there's sickness, I am sometimes called upon."

Augusta sat down by the table and again took up her little religious book. St. Peter, with half-closed eyes, lay watching her—regarding in her humankind, as if after a definite absence from the world of men and women. If he had thought of Augusta sooner, he would have got up from the couch sooner. Her image would have at once suggested the proper action.

Augusta, he reflected, had always been a corrective, a remedial influence. When she sewed for them, she breakfasted at the house— that was part of the arrangement. She came early, often directly from church, and View Image of Page 279 had her breakfast with the Professor, before the rest of the family were up. Very often she gave him some wise observation or discreet comment to begin the day with. She wasn't at all afraid to say things that were heavily, drearily true, and though he used to wince under them, he hurried off with the feeling that they were good for him, that he didn't have to hear such sayings half often enough. Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from,—yet when he had to face it, he found that it wasn't altogether repugnant. Sometimes she used to telephone Mrs. St. Peter that she would be a day late, because there had been a death in the family where she was sewing just then, and she was "needed." When she met him at the table the next morning, she would look just a little more grave than usual. While she ate a generous breakfast, she would reply to his polite questions about the illness or funeral with befitting solemnity, and then go readily to another topic, not holding the dolorous note. He used to say that he didn't mind hearing Augusta announce these deaths which seemed to happen so frequently along her way, because her manner of speaking about it made death seem less uncomfortable. She hadn't any of the sentimentality that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke of aView Image of Page 280 hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature.

It occurred to St. Peter, as he lay warm and relaxed but undesirous of sleep, that he would rather have Augusta with him just now than anyone he could think of. Seasoned and sound and on the solid earth she surely was, and, for all her matter-of-factness and hard-handedness, kind and loyal. He even felt a sense of obligation toward her, instinctive, escaping definition, but real. And when you admitted that a thing was real, that was enough—now.

He didn't, on being quite honest with himself, feel any obligations toward his family. Lillian had had the best years of his life, nearly thirty, and joyful years they had been, nothing could ever change that. But they were gone. His daughters had outgrown any great need of him. In certain wayward moods Kitty would always come to him. But Rosamond, on that shopping expedition in Chicago, had shown him how painful the paternal relation could be. There was still Augusta, however; a world full of Augustas, with whom one was outward bound.

All the afternoon he had sat there at the table where now Augusta was reading, thinking over his life, trying to see where he had made his mistake. Perhaps the misView Image of Page 281take was merely in an attitude of mind. He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.

Though he had been low-spirited all summer, he told the truth when he told Dr. Dudley that he had not been melancholy. He had no more thought of suicide than he had thought of embezzling. He had always regarded it as a grave social misdemeanour—except when it occurred in very evil times, as a form of protest. Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often. He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember a crisis, a moment of acute, agonized strangulation.

His temporary release from consciousness seemed to have been beneficial. He had let something go —and it was gone: something very precious, that he could not consciously have relinquished, probably. He doubted whether his family would ever realize that he was not the same man they had said good-bye to; they would be too happily preoccupied with their own affairs. If his View Image of Page 282 apathy hurt them, they could not possibly be so much hurt as he had been already. At least, he felt the ground under his feet. He thought he knew where he was, and that he could face with fortitude theBerengaria and the future.

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Acknowledgments

The textual editing of The Professor's House is the result of contributions from many members of the Cather Edition staff, among whom we wish to acknowledge especially Kathleen Danker and Erin Marcus. The graduate students who contributed to the textual work were Kathryn A. Bellman, Paul McCallum, Susan Moss, Stephanie Tritle, and Kelly Utley-Wouthtiwongprecha.

Consultations with several people were especially helpful in the early stages of the preparation of the Cather Edition. In Willa Cather: A Bibliograpby (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983), Joan Crane provided an authoritative starting place for our identification and assembly of basic materials, then in correspondence was unfailingly generous with her expertise. The late Fredson Bowers (University of Virginia) advised us about the steps necessary to organize the project. David J. Nordioh (Indiana University) provided advice as we established policies and procedures and wrote our editorial manual. As editor of the Lewis and Clark journals, Gary Moulton (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) generously provided exView Image of Page 285pertise and encouragement. Conversations with Richard Rust (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) were helpful in refining procedures concerning variants.

We are grateful to Herbert H. Johnson (Rochester Institute of Technology) for material assistance in the interpretation of printing-house practices in the period. Robert E. Knoll (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) shared his knowledge of the personalities and politics of the University of Nebraska in Cather's day. Brad Potter (University of Nebraska- Lincoln) aided us in understanding the Aeneid. Don L. Cook (Indiana University) brought his expertise and keen eye to his inspection of our materials on behalf of the Committee on Scholarly Editions.

We appreciate the assistance of Michelle Fagan and Lynn R. Beideck-Porn, Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Patricia Phillips and Steven P. Ryan, S.J., directors of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, Red Cloud; Ann Billesbach, first at the Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud, and later at the Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; and Beverly Cooper, of Hastings, Nebraska, who generously made mate rials from her personal collection available to the project. We also wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to the late Mildred R. Bennett, whose work as founder and president of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation ensured that Cather-related materials in Webster County would be preserved and whose knowledge guided us through those materials.

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We are particularly grateful to the staffs of Love Library, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, particularly those at Interlibrary Loan, who located many printings for us; the Heritage Room, Bennett Martin Public Library (Lincoln NE), particularly Laura Lacy and Vicki Clarke; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino CA); the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Library, Yale University; the Butler Library, Columbia University, Special Collections, the Gelman Library, George Washington University, the Nebraska State Historical Society: the Willa Cather Pincer Memorial and Educational Foundation; and the New Mexico State Records Center. The libraries of the Beatrice Public Library, the Bishop Clarkson School of Nursing (Omaha NE), Duke University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Tulane University, and the University of New Mexico all loaned copies of volumes in their holdings. We especially thank Pat Riles Bart (Dept. of English, University of Virginia-Charlottes- ville) for valuable information about copies of The Professor's House held by the University of Virginia libraries.

The College English Association graciously gave us permission to reprint Cather's letter on The Professor's House from their Newsletter. Christopher Sten (George Washington University) kindly loaned us prints from his collection. We wish to express our special gratitude to Helen Cather Southwick for her assistance and encouragement throughoul this project.

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For their administrative support at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln we thank Gerry Meisels, John G. Peters, and Brian L. Foster, former deans of the College of Arts and Sciences; John Yost, former vice chancellor for research; and John R. Wunder, former director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. We are especially grateful to Stephen Hilliard and Linda Ray Pratt, who as chairs of the Department of English provided both departmental support and personal encouragement for the Cather Edition.

For funding during the initial year of the project we are grateful to the Woods Charitable Fund. For research grants during subsequent years we thank the Nebraska Council for the Humanities; and the Research Council, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Department of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The preparation of this volume was made possible in part by a gift from Mr. and Mrs. William H. Campbell and in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

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Historical Apparatus

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Historical Essay

The Profesor's House was Willa Cather's seventh novel, published in 1935 when she was fifty-two.' By this time she was an author with a worldwide reputation. She had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her fifth novel, One of Ours, and her sixth novel, A Last Lady, had been a great critical success. By 195 the income from her writing had made her relatively affluent. Her long struggle for success, which had begun with sixteen years of journalism after graduating from college in 1895, was well behind her. One might have expected a writer with such a history to feel happy and fulfilled at this point in her career.

The early 1920s, however, were for Cather a period of stress and turmoil, a period of midlife crisis that lasted for several years. She always had believed that the end was nothing, that the road was all, and reaching the top of her profession had produced a letdown. About the same time that she had won the Pulitzer Prize, as she later wrote, she had felt that for her the world had broken in two. The story of Godfrey St. Peter, Cather's professor in this novel, reflects this View Image of Page 291 troubled time in its author's life. When her old friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher joked that she had written a middle. aged novel, she readily admitted it. Doesn't everyone have a middle-aged mood sometimes? she replied. And she went on to call her novel a nasty, grim little tale and wondered why it seemed to be selling better than any of her books so far (wc to DCI, 12 October 1935). Nevertheless, it is a profound, disturbing novel, and three-quarters of a century after its publication, it has taken its place as one of Cather's most important works.

Writing the Note

Cather left for France at the end of April 1923 to visit her friend Isabelle McClung Hamburg and Isabelle's violin ist husband, Jan Hambourg, to whom The Professor's House would be dedicated. The Hamburgs had prepared a study for her at their home in Ville d'Avray outside Paris, and she was expecting to stay a year (Bohlke 58). Although her friend and companion Edith Lewis later remembered that Cather did no writing there, returning to New York with only the idea for The Professor's House in mind (133), some of Cather's visitors reported that she was at work on a novel;² Blanche Knopf, her publisher, shipped a typewriter to France at Cather's request (BK to WC, 28 May 1923).

Progress was apparently slow. Leaving Ville d'Avray, where she "was so busy drinking in the beauty of the place" that she "could not work," Cather moved to Paris, "hoping to achieve a working state of mind, but again it proved imView Image of Page 292 possible" (Bohlke 85). The ever-changing skies reflected on the water of the Seine absorbed her thoughts, and the colorful life surging around her was utterly distracting. She was also troubled by an attack of neuritis in her right arm and shoulder, which sent her south to Aix-les-Bains, a fashionable spa that became the setting of one of her last stories, "The Old Beauty." In the fall she returned to Paris and finished the sittings for a portrait by Léon Bakst, which had been commissioned by a women's group in Omaha. Cather left France in November, sailing on the Berengaria, the ship that would carry the Professor's family at the end of the novel.

Back in New York, while the reviews of A Lost Lady (published 14 September 1923) were still appearing, Cather plunged into the writing of The Professor's House at her Greenwich Village apartment on Bank Street; she worked on it off and on during the ensuing winter and spring. She already had written "The Blue Mesa," a tale of the Southwest that probably became "Tom Outland's Story," the long center section of the novel. Cather had begun it about a year after her 1915 visit to Mesa Verde National Park; she spent the fall of 1916 working on it, but she apparently found the material too fresh to use. Her method of artistic creation required the experience to mature, what Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility" and she put this work-in-progress aside while she wrote My Antonia.

Thus when she had the idea of creating Godfrey St. Peter, View Image of Page 193 her professor of history whose great work would be an account of the Spaniards in the Southwest, she found a way to combine his story with the tale of Tom Outland, her fictional discoverer of the ancient cliff dwellings. The creative process for this novel was similar to the inspiration she had had in 1912, when she discovered that her two stories, "Alexandra' and "The White Mulberry Tree," could be joined together to create O Pioneers!, her first important novel.

The writing of The Professor's House went so well during the winter and spring of 1923-24 that Cather was able to take time off to begin work on an edition of the best stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, a project she had promised to do for her former publisher, Houghton Miffin (WC to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 19 March 1924). Jewett had been Cather's friend and mentor, the one who had encouraged her to find her "own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world" (SOJ to WC, 13 December 1908). Cather also found time to write another story, "Uncle Valentine," which the Knopfs sold to the Woman's Home Companion for publication in 1925, and she accepted an invitation to speak to a gathering of English teachers at Columbia University, one of whom was Herbert Bates, her teacher at the University of Nebraska who had been the prototype for Gaston Cleric in My Antonia (Herbert Bates to WC, 19 March 1924).

Cather's increasing fame, however, had made it ever more difficult to preserve her privacy and workang time. She was being driven to distraction by invitations to speak to schools and colleges. To solve this problem, she hired Sarah Bloom View Image of Page 294 to be her secretary, handle her correspondence, turn down unwanted engagements, and head off people who wanted to see her. But she did not mind being interrupted when Frieda and D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett arrived in New York in March, en route to Mabel Dodge Luhan's ranch in New Mexico. She spent a week entertaining them, then had to go to a resort in the Pocono Mountains to rest up after they left, but she was back in New York in time to attend Robert Frost's fiftieth birthday dinner.

In the early summer of 1024 Cather went back to Nebraska to visit her parents, stopping off in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to receive her second honorary degree. Then she went to Grand Manan Island off the coast of New Brunswick carrying her manuscript with her to work on in the cottage she rented at Whale Cove. After two weeks at Grand Manan she was nearly half finished with the first draft of her novel. She was in high spirits, surrounded by wild woods and wild weather, and after her three-hour stint of work each morning she walked along the cliffs overlooking the sea, regardless of the weather (WC to Zoë Akins, 2, 7 September 1924). When the autumn fogs began to roll in, however, it was time to leave the island, and she went south to Boston and then to Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where she often spent time in the fall. By the middle of October she was back in her New York apartment working on The Professor's House. In December the novel was far enough along that an interviewer reported the book would appear the following autumn (Bohlke 72). Cather took part of the manuscript with her when she went View Image of Page 295 back to Nebraska to spend Christmas, leaving a copy with her old friend in Chicago, Irene Miner Weisz. After she returned to New York in January, Cather finished the novel.

The revision process probably began immediately: Blanche Knopf asked for the first twenty pages for the printers to begin work on, and for the first five or six chapters to show to magazines (BK to WC, 27 February 1925). At about the same time Cather sent a copy of the first two parts of the story to her agent, Paul Reynolds (MEMO PR, 6 March 1925), and it was Reynolds who sold the story to Collier's for S10,000 (Woodress 363).

In 1940 Cather published a letter she had written to Pat Knopf, the son of her publisher Alfred Knopf, in answer to a question about the writing of The Professor's House ("On The Professor's House"; see pp. 335-36). She said she had wanted to try two "experiments in form." the first "the device often used by the early French and Spanish novelists…of inserting theNoutelle into the Roman"; thus "Tom Outlands Story" was placed in the middle of the novel. The second experiment was something rather vague, she added, but she compared it to the sonata form in music. By this she mesn! that the center section would be in significant contrast to the other two parts of the novel. When she was finishing the novel, she told her friend Elizabeth Sergeant that the new book was to have a musical form—the sonata—each part with its musical term. The first part was to be molto moderato; Sergeant's impression was that the second part was to be molto appassionata (203-4). Cather added in her letter to View Image of Page 296 Knopf that she had recently seen in Paris an exhibit of Dutch genre paintings in which one could see through a window "the masts of ships or a stretch of grey sea" (see p. 336).³ In the novel she thed to make the Professor's house "overcrowded and stuffy with things." Then through that window she "let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom Outland's face and in his behaviour."

Sources of the Novel: Book I ("The Family") and III ("The Professor")

Cather's literary method is neatly summed up in a quotation from Sarah Orne Jewett, which she included in her preface to the edition of Jewett's stories written at the time she was working on The Professor's House: "The thing that teases the mind ou er and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to literature" (Willa Cather on Writing [hereafter referred to as WCOW] 47). The materials that went into The Professor's House had indeed teased Cather's mind for many years. The stories of both Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland have a long foreground in Cather's experiences and memory. As Cather also writes in her essay "Miss Jewett," "A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his talent" (WCOW 54).

The earliest clue to the origin of the Professor's story appears in 1902 when Cather published a story, "The Profes-View Image of Page 298 sor's Commencement." She was then a high-school teacher of English in Pittsburgh and undergoing her apprenticeship as a writer of fiction. The story concerns Professor Emerson Graves, who prepares for his final commencement, after which he will retire. He suggests an early version of Professor St. Peter, with his exquisite taste in art and literature and his considerable superiority to his colleagues. Despite his superior talents, Graves has clected to remain a high school teacher of English in an urban high school in order to "secure for youth the rights of youth; the right to be gen crous, to dream, to enjoy" (Collected Sort Fiction (hereafter referred to as sr] :89). His students all are boys and girls from the factories and offices of the great and grimy industrial city. St. Peter's fight against efforts to turn his university into a trade school is not unlike Professor Graves's struggle to raise the cultural level of his pupils.

But the most significant foreshadowing of The Professor's House comes in Graves's memory of "his one and only genius: his restless, incorrigible pupil ... at once timid and utterly reckless, who had seen even as Graves saw: who had suffered a little, sung a little, struck the true lyric note, and died wretchedly at three-and-twenty in his master's arms, the victim of a tragedy as old as the world" (csf 290). Here is the germ of St. Peter's relationship with Tom Outland: "In : lifetime of teaching," St. Peter tells his daughter Rosamond, "I've encountered just one remarkable mind; but for that I'd consider my good years largely wasted" (PH 62). Tom Out- land, of course, did not die in St. Peter's arms but was killed in World War I when he was barely thirty.

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There is more to the relationship, however, between Tom and the Professor than the fact he had been the Professor's one brilliant student. As Bernice Slote observed, Cather used in this novel "a situation which by its recurrence takes on a kind of archetypal significance in her imaginative world" (Slote siv). It is the situation of an older man, estranged from a wife he loves but is not comfortable with, who turns for emotional harmony "to a youthful figure- himself in memory or another who represents to him youth or creative force" (Slote tv). This situation is the core of Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge. It reappears in My Antonia in Jim Burden's recapturing his youth in his relationship with Antonia, and for a third time in a story; "Her Boss" (1919), in which a businessman of sixty, terminally ill, turns to a young secretary to whom he dictates his memoirs while his unconcerned family is scattered tor the summer. This motif appears for the fourth time in The Professor's House.

Because Cather put great emphasis on a writer's use of memory and experience, it is not surprising to find in her work many autobiographical details. Like the young Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark and Jim Burden in My Antonia, Professor St. Peter's life in many ways parallels his author's. Almost the same age as Cather, the Professor was born on a farm on the shores of Lake Michigan, which has for him the same emotional pull that the mountains of the Shenandoah Valley had for Cather. He had a strong-willed Protestant mother, a gentle father, and a patriarchal grandfather, all of which Cather had. When he was eight, his parents dragged View Image of Page 300 him out to the wheatlands of Kansas, and St. Peter "nearly died of it" (PH 32). Cather was nine when her parents moved from Virginia to Nebraska. As an adult St. Peter went back to the region of his childhood for his professional career, just as Cather did. After he had been teaching a number of years, he conceived of the plan for a great historical work and then devoted fifteen years of his life to writing it.

The first three volumes of his history made no stir at all, just as Cather's first three books, April Twilights, The Troll Garden, and Alerander's Bridge, brought her little acclaim. With the Professor's fourth volume (for Cather it was O Pioneers!) he began to attract attention; with the fifth and sixth (for Cather, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia) he began to be well known; and with the last two volumes (for Cather, One of Ours and A Lost Lady) he achieved an internatonal reputation. The Professor won the Oxford Prize for history, which brought him five thousand pounds. Cather's Pulitzer Prize was a modest sum, but her royalties from Knopf the year before writing The Professor's House were close to the equivalent of five thousand pounds.*

The autobiographical similarities go much deeper than these rather obvious correspondences. The large preoccupation with houses in the novel has a considerable relevance to one aspect of Cather' life. Leaving a place where she had lived and put down roots was for her a painful experience freely acknowledged in her letters and interviews. The removal from her spacious and comfortable childhood home in Virginia had been a wrenching blow. Her departure for col- View Image of Page 301 lege from the cramped little house in Red Cloud was perhaps less traumatic, but she returned to it often in her affections and in her fiction. The loss of the McClung house where she lived in Pittsburgh during her high-school teaching years was the most shattering experience of all. It was there that she had worked in a sewing room/study at the top of the house, as the Professor does in her novel. The house not only had been her home, but it also had been her refuge even after moving to New York in 1906. After Judge McClung died in i915 and his daughter, Isabelle McClung, subsequently married, the house was sold. When the Professor refuses to leave the old house, one can believe that Cather was giving her Professor an option she had not had. Later, in 1027, when she would have to move out of her Greenwich Village apartment when the Eighth Avenue subway was being built, she felt lost, and camped out at the Grosvenor Hotel forty years before finally finding a Park Avenue apartment to house her for the rest of her life.

We have already noted the recurrent pattern in Cather's fiction of the alienated spouse turning to a sympathetic other; but this is not the only pattern to be found. In The Professor's House Cather vigorously castigates the love of material possessions and money. As early as "The Professor's Commencement" Cather was deploring the commercialism of Pittsburgh, and in O Pioneers! Alexandra's brothers are mean. spirited materialists. In One of Ours Claude Wheeler's father and brothers are objects of Cather's scorn, and one of Cath- er's most repulsive characters, Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady, is View Image of Page 302 mercilessly satirized for his materialistic pursuits. This the matic thread, which is deeply woven into Cather's own character, appears in the fabric of her fiction over and over. The national worship of Mammon, which culminated in the roaring Twenties, may well have been a significant reason for the alienation Cather felt in that era and made her feel that the world had broken in two.

Cather was an avid reader from her childhood forward and an indefatigable book reviewer in her apprentice years. Because she had a very retentive memory, the hundreds of books she read lay in the deep well of her unconscious, to use William James's phrase, as a literary resource to be drawn upon. She never consciously imitated a literary source, but there are countless echoes of her reading in her work. Many times the links to her reading are buried in allusions, but not always, and in the case of The Professor's House Cather has planted a clue to a source in her reference to Augusta's dress forms that occupy the Professor's attic study along with his desk and papers. When Augusta wants to move the forms to the new house, the Professor flatly refuses to let them go. "If they were good enough for Monsieur Bergeret, they are certainly good enough for me" (p 20). The reference here is to a novel by Anatole France, Le Mannequin d'osier (1897), in which the protagonist, M. Bergeret, is, like St. Peter, a professor who has a cluttered study that he occupies with wicker-work dress form.

The similarities between The Professor's House and Le Mannequin d'osier ,however, do not go very far. Yet when View Image of Page 303 Cather was reminded of the dress form and M. Bergeret (who is Anatole France's alter ego and appears in several novels and newspaper columns besides Le Mannequin d'osier), she may well have had the idea of a way to combine "Tom Outland's Story," already written, with the Professor's story. Both noses have a favorite student who comes between husband and wife, but the two novels and the characters of the professors are very different. In the French novel M. Bergeret married without love because friends urged him to, and early in the novel he comes upon his prize student and his wife making love, not for the first time, on a couch in the salon. In a symbolic act of rage he smashes the wicker-work dress form, which appears to him as his wife "odious and grotesque" (303).

Some scholars have argued that Louie Marsellus was suggested by Isabelle McClung's Jewish husband, Jan Hambourg, the Jan to whom the book was dedicated, and represents a subtle bit of anti-Semitism. Contemporary readers, however, saw nothing objectionable in the characterization of Louie Marsellus. The Professor on the whole likes him, and when Scott McGregor, his other son-in-law, blackballs Louie for membership in an exclusive club, St. Peter is over. whelmed by Louie's magnanimous reaction to his brother- in-law's mean-spirited act. It remained for critics of a later generation to suggest that Cather created Louie as a satiric portrait of Jan Hambourg, and then to conceal her deed dedicated the novel to him: "For Jan, because he likes narrative."View Image of Page 204

Sources of be Notel: Book II ("Tom Outland's Story")

The midsection of The Professor's House is devoted to "Tom Outland's Story." the romantic tale of the discovery of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and its aftermath. While the Outland tale is a story that can stand alone (and has been reprinted separatcly), the character of Tom (dead five years before the novel opens) actually permeates the entire work. David Harrell, in From Mesa Verde to The Professor's House, the definitive study of this novel, argues convincingly that "'Tom Outland's Story' is the key to the novel" (6). He notes that in Book I, before Tom's story is ever told, Tom is mentioned by name 120 times, and if all the nouns and pronouns that refer to him were counted, the references would more than double. And in Book III Tom is mentioned by name twenty-two times.

The background of this part of the story goes much farther back than Cather's trip to Mesa Verde in 1915. Next to her abiding love of Nebraska, to which she returned time after time, Cather developed a passion for the American Southwest. Her interest in that area began probably soon after her family moved to Nebraska in 1883. She said in an interview in 1925, the year The Professor's House was published, that "when I was a little girl nothing in the world gave me such a moment as the idea of the cliff dwellers, of whole civilizations before ours linking me to the soil." Accounts of the Southwest no doubt came from travelers who passed through or were residents of Red Cloud when Cather was growing up. By 1883 railroads crossed the plains to the West Coast, making travel easy to New Mexico and Arizona.

View Image of Page 305

Cather's first literary use of the Southwest appears in a story, "The Enchanted Bluff," published in 1909, three years before she managed to visit that area. In this tale boys from Sandtown (based on Red Cloud) are talking on an island in the Republican River after cooking their dinner. They dis. cuss the Aztecs of Mexico, the mound-builders of the Mid- west, and Coronado' search for the seven mythical cities of Cibola. Then one of the boys describes a story heard from his uncle of "a big red rock" somewhere in New Mexico that "goes right up out of the sand for about nine hundred feet.... They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there because no white man has ever been on top of it" (sF 74). Once there had been an Indian village on the top, but a storm had destroyed the stairway to the summit and marauding Indians had wiped out the braves trapped on the plain below. The story excites the boys, all of whom someday want to find and climb the Enchanted Bluff. Although there is a high mesa on the road from Laguna to Acoma known as Mesa Encantada (Enchanted Bluff), Cather's enchanted bluff is mythic. Her story of 1gog contains the germ of her later treatment, also largely mythic, of Tom Outland's discovery of the ancient civilization of the Anasazi people at Mesa Verde.

With her great interest in cliff dwellers and the Southwest, it is not surprising that Cather wanted to see the country for herself. The chance to go west came at the end of 1911 when Cather took six months' leave from her job as managing editor of McClure's Magazine. In April 1912, Cather traveled west to visit her brother Douglass, who worked for the Santa View Image of Page 306 Fe Railroad and was based in Winslow, Arizona. She spent two months in Arizona and New Mexico, visited the Painted Desert, various lesser canyons, the Grand Canyon, and, most important of all, Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff, Arizona, where she saw her first cliff dwellings. Cather was captivated by the Southwest, the most beautiful country she had seen anywhere (we to Elizabeth Sergeant, 20 April 1912), and charmed by the Indians and Mexicans she met. She had left New York a jaded journalist, but she returned refreshed and invigorated and ready to become the major novelist we know. She also had resigned from McClure's by the time she came back to New York.

The excursion to Walnut Canyon with her brother created an indelible impression on her, so powerful that it appeared nearly three years later in Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), as Panther Canyon in Book IV ("The Ancient People"). "I always wanted to go down there, " Thea Kronborg says when she is offered a vacation in Arizona by her friend Fred Ottenburg after she has grown stale in her musical studies in Chicago (:89). Fred had asked her if cliff dwelers still interested her. as he remembered her asking about them. "Of course, they do," she replies, and Fred ex- plains that his father owns a ranch with a canyon full of them. It is there in Panther Canyon that Thea's symbolic rebirth as an artist occurs.

Walnut Canyon increased Cather's appetite for more cliff dwellines, and it was no doubt further whetted by a visit she made with Elizabeth Sergeant in 1914 to an exhibit of cliff.View Image of Page 307 dweller artifacts at the New York Museum of Natural History (Sergeant 122-23). Accordingly, she and Edith Lewis went to Colorado together in 1915 to visit Mesa Verde National Park, the most important and extensive archacological site in all of the Southwest. They left New York in early August 1915, heading for Denver. Interviews in Denver newspapers say that Cather was already planning to write a novel about the cliff dwellers, presumably the one she would call "The Blue Mesa." From there they boarded the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad for the balance of the trip to Man- cos, Colorado, the town closest to the park. After a few days in Mancos, a town Cather found very attractive, they hired transportation to take them into the park. Lewis remembers that they hired a wagon and driver (Lewis 94), although they could have gone by car, as an auto road had been opened inta the park the year before they arrived. They spent a week exploring the cliff dwellings, and then returned to Mancos for another day or two.

Shortly before Cather and Lewis were to leave Mesa Verde, they had an adventure that even made the New York Times under the headline "Lost in Colorado Canyon" (26 Au- gust 1915). They had planned to visit an unexcavated cliff dwelling called the Tower House, but they were sent off with an inexperienced guide. He managed to get them to Tower House, but they had to descend to the bottom of Soda Can- yon by a trail so steep they could not have returned without ropes. The guide said he would take them back by another route, but by evening, after they had walked miles, the guide View Image of Page 308 had to admit he was lost. They had come to the junction of Soda Canyon and Cliff Canyon, and the guide thought there was an archaeologist's camp about four miles up Cliff Can- yon. Cather said she and Lewis would stay where they were while the guide went for help.

Lewis reports the scene vividly: "The four or five hours spent waiting there were, I think, for Willa Cather the most rewarding of our whole trip to Mesa Verde. There was a large flat rock at the mouth of Cliff Canyon, and we settled ourselves comfortably on this rock. . . . We were tired and rather thirsty, but not worried, for we knew we should eventually be found. We did not talk, but watched the long summer twilight come on, and the full moon rise up over the rim of the canyon. The place was very beautiful" (97). They were subsequently rescued by two men from the camp of Jesse Walter Fewkes, a Smithsonian archacologist, and got back to their tent cabin on the mesa in the early hours of the morning. When Cather wrote Elizabeth Sergeant about the adventure, she aid she was bruised and sore but happy and ready to go back. She never had learned so much as in the twenty-four hours of that experience. That country, she said, drives one crazy with delight (wC to Es, 21 September 1915).

After they returned to Mancos, Cather had a talk with Clayton Wetherill, brother of Richard Wetherill and brother- in-law of Charles Mason, who are generally given credit for discovering Cliff Palace (Tom's Cliff City) '° In her letter to Pat Knopf in 1938, Cather wrote: "I myself had the good for- tune to hear the story of it from a very old man [actually only View Image of Page 309 forty-seven], brother to Dick Wetherell [sic]. Dick Wetherell as a young boy (actually age thirty] forded Mancos River and rode into the Mesa after lost cattle. I followed the real story very closely in Tom Outland's narrative" (see p. 336). Perhaps in 1938 Cather did think she had told the story as she had heard it in 1915, but as David Harrell's research shows, she was more interested in myth than history. "Cather departed from it [Richard Wetherill's story] in a number of significant ways to produce a story almost completely her own" (97). How Cather took the germ of the Wetherill story and turned it into memorable fiction provides a fasanating glimpse into the worangs of a first-rate creative imagination.

While Cather's Blue Mesa is a more remote, inaccessible, and idyllic place than Mesa Verde, its emotional impact on Tom is like that of the actual cliff dwellings on Cather. How- ever, the imaginative experience had to be backed up by re- search about this ancient civilization. One source Cather used was Gustaf Nordenskiöld's The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (1893), which she cites in the article she wrote for the Denter Times (31 January 1916) soon after her visit to Mesa Verde (sc pp. 327-34). Nordensköld had been to Mesa Verde in 181 and had written an account of the ruins. He also had hired the Wetherills to help him excavate a num- ber of the ruins and pack up a collection of artifacts to take back to Sweden. The character of Fechtig, the German who bought artifacts from Roddy Blake, perhaps came from the account of Nordenskiöld taking his collection back to Eu-View Image of Page 310 rope. Harrell has noted many parallels to descriptive details of Nordenskiöld's findings in Cather's account of the discov. eries of Tom and his pal Roddy.

Susan Rosowski and Bernice Slote, who found the 1916 Mesa Verde essay, also saw evidence of Cather's use of Nordenskiöld's book:

The volume would have been well suited to ideas Cather associated with the Mesa Verde. By combining scientific objectivity with personal recollection, Nordenskiöld provided a transition between an ancient and a modern world... With the precise observation of a scientist, he presented detailed descriptions of the chief geographical features of the Mesa Verde region... and of artifacts found in the ruins; he illustrated his written account with maps, tables, diagrams, and drawings. Information he included - descriptions of turkey bones, mummies, clay pots, tools, yucca-fiber mats and ears of corn - provides an excellent background for Cather's descriptions in her essay and, later, in "Tom Outland' Story (Rosowski and Slote 87)

Nordenskiöld's account of the ruins also had an emotional impact in tune with Cather' reaction to her experiences. Here is the Swedish scientist's description of the ruins of Spring House:

On following the edge of Wetherill's mesa from Step House a few hundred paces to the south or south-east we descry in the opposite wall of the cañon an extensive cliff-dwelling. Spring House. . . . What a striking view these ruins present at a distance! The explorer pictures to himself a whole town inView Image of Page 311 miniature under the lofty vault of rock in the cliff before him. But the rown is a deserted one: not a sound breaks the clencs and not a movement meets the eve, among those sloot. half-ruined walls whose contours stand off sharply from the darkness of this inner cave. (43)

Nordenskiöld's initial view of Cliff Palace made an impression similar to that of Cliff City on Tom:

In a long…. wild and gloomy gorge named Cliff Canvon, lies the largest of the ruins on the Mesa Verde, the Cliff Pal- ace. Strange and indescribable is the impression on the traveller, when, after a long and tiring ride through the bound. less, monotonous oinon forest, he suddenly halts on the brink of the precipice, and in the opposite cliff beholds the ruins of the chance rimed in the mature saut of rode abase and in a bed of sunlit cedar and piñon trees below. . .. This nun well deserves its name for with its rohnd towers an high walls rising out of the heaps of stones deep in the muste. nous twilight of the cavern, and defying in their sheltered site the ravages of ume, it resembles an enchanted castle. (69)

These are good visual images written by an able scientist, but Cather, as a consummate artist. adds drama to Tom's first glimpse of Cliff City by having him see it from below, not from above, as Richard Wetherill, Charles Mason, and Nordenskiold saw it:

In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling View Image of Page 312 snow. For up above me, a thousand tect or so, set in a great chefce of the chill sw a little at o! stone, asleep It was as still as sculpture - and something like that. It al hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower. (PH 199)

Whatever else Cather read in her research is problematical, but the park library by 1915 contained more than forty titles, many written by Fewkes, the archaeologist Cather and Lewis met. One item that Cather no doubt saw (Harrell also finds echoes of it in the story) was the park brochure, The Prebistoric Cliff Derellings/Mesa Verde National Park. In addition to her reading, Cather surely talked about the ruins with Fewkes and listened to the dramatic campfire talks that he gave in the evenings when there were visitors present. Cather may also have seen the account of the discovery by Charles Mason, written in 1914 and published in the Denver Post in 1917. This report contains an account of finding a mummified woman, which the Wetherills named "She" (Harrell 50-51), but which Cather improved on by re-christening her "Mother Eve."

Much of this research was probably accomplished by the end of 1916, for the Mesa Verde article contains much of the information, and even some of the same wordings, found in "Tom Outland's Story." The "veil of lightly falling snow" through which Tom sees Cliff City is already in Cather's account of Wetherill's discovery (199), as is the preservation View Image of Page 313 of the artifacts in the dry sunlight "like a fly in amber" (200). Both accounts assert that the cliff dwellers burned their dead and used the round tower tor astronomical observatons, and both mention the mummies. Father Duchène's discussion of the character and fate of the cliff dwellers is very similar Cather's account, especially in the emphasis on the ritualistic quality of their lives, the uncivilized nature of their enemies and exterminators, and in the emphasis on the way in which the cliff dwellers "humanized" the landscape."

Throughout her career Cather used people she had known as models for characters in her fiction. She always maintained they were composites, and this is no doube true, but there are enough similarities to pin actual names of real people to a good many of her fictional creations. The Professor's House is no exception. We have seen that the Protessor bears many resemblances to Cather herself, and it is likely that some of the other faculty members at Hamilton University were based on those Cather had known as a student at the University of Nebraska. In "Tom Outland's Story" a number of characters seem to have prototypes. A clearly identifiable person who plays a bit part in the narrative is C. B. Kelly, the Mancos liveryman who took Cather and Lewis into the Park (Harrell 41). He appears as Bill Hook, who was hired by the German Fechtig to pack out artifacts from the Blue Mesa, role Kelly had played for Nordenskiöld. More problematic is the character of Henry Atkins, who resembles the English cook, Henry, who kept house for Douglass Cather and his View Image of Page 314 roommate Tooker, both cooks have a drinking problem and wide experience of the world (Woodress 5). Another is Father Duchène, who may have been modeled on a Father Connolly, a friend of Cather's brother Douglass, whom she met in Arizona in 1912 and who took her to visit some of the missions. They talked about the country and the people, and he filled her full of Spanish and Indian legends (we to Elizabeth Sergeant, 12 May 1912; wE to "Dear Sister," a3 No- ember 1940). But he was only the first of many Catholic missionary priests she came to know in the Southwest, whose lives and works would later help characterize the priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).13

The most important character to have a real-life counter. part, however, is Roddy Blake, Tom's partner, who shares his discoveries and leaves after selling the artifacts. He resembles Douglass Cather's roommate Tooker, a brakeman on the Santa Fe. As Cather reported from Winslow when she visited her brother in 1912, Tooker was addicted to reading magazines (with Roddy it is newspapers) and was a great bore in town, but when they explored canyons together, he was a splendid companion on the trail, strong, active, resourceful. He had worked on ranches and in the mines and was full of interesting stories. He appears first in Cather's fiction as Ray Kennedy, the conductor, in The Song of the Lark before having another avatar as Roddy Blake (Woodress 8).

Although in some ways Tom Outland seems an idealized younger Willa Cather, Harrell notes that the character bears striking resemblances to the Wetherills in his reverence forView Image of Page 315 the ruins and their anilaces. 'The father of the Wetherill brothers wrote in his autobiography that "it was so much like treading "holy ground' to go into those peaceful-looking homes of a vanished people" (Harrell q6). The rest of the family shared this feeling and regarded themselves somewhat as custodians of the ancient ruins. In addition, the Wetherills kept records of their findings as they dug them out of the accumulated debris of the centuries, just as Tom Outland records in his journal each recovered artifact: "I wrote down just where and in what condition we had found it, and what we thought it had been used for" (PH 210).

Tom's trip to Washington to inform the Smithsonian In- stitution of his discovery also probably was suggested by the Wetherills' experience with the Smithsonian. They con tacted the Smithsonian, urging them to begin excavation Mesa Verde, but they got no action. Whereas the Wetherills only wrote to the Smithsonian, Cather heightened the drama by sending Tom to Washington. The Smithsonian, however, was more interested in the discovery than the indifference Tom Outland encounters suggests, but it was some years before they got around to acting (Harrell 45).

The exchange of letters between the Wetherills and the Smithsonian, which Cather must have heard about from Clayton Wetherill, gave her a chance to contrast the stultifying ham-handedness of the Washington bureaucracy with the starry-eyed idealism of Tom Outland. Here again is the theme of East versus West, a familiar note in Cather's writing. Cather was probably also remembering Washington View Image of Page 316 from the six months she spent there in 1900-1901, a time when she worked briefly in a government office as a translator. "How it did use to depress me," says Tom, "to see all the hundreds of clerks come pouring out of that big building (the war department] at sunset. Their lives seemed so petty, so slavish" (PH 230).

Publication

After finishing the novel in January 1925 and having delivered copies of her typescript to her publisher and her agent, Cather had the me in the next seven months betore publication for other literary chores. She finished the edition of Jewett's stories for Houghton Miffin and then wrote three introductions for Alfred Knopf and an essay for his in-house annual, The Borzoi. Her prefaces introduce editions of De. foe's The Fortunate Mistres, Gertrude Hall's The Wagnerian Romances, and Wounds in the Rain, one of the volumes in Knopf's edition of Stephen Crane's collected works. The es- say for The Borzoi was a piece on Katherine Mansfield.

In mid-June Cather and Lewis left New York for the Grand Canyon, and by the end of the month they were set- ted at the San Gabriel Ranch near Española, New Mexico. Then on June 23 Collier's began a nine-part weekly serialization of the novel, during which time Cather read proof for book publication of the novel. On September 4 Knopf published The Professor's House in a trade edition of twenty thou- sand copies at S:.00 per copy. Knopf announced that the first printing had been sold out three weeks before the publica-View Image of Page 317 ton date, and an ad in Publishers' Weekly reported on October 31 that the book was already in its fifty-fifth thousand, and more copies had been sold than in any similar period (ten weeks) of any book by Cather (Crane 114).

Reception

Enthusiastic comments about the novel began arriving even before book publication. The earliest reaction came from Irene Weis, who had read part of the book in manuscript Cather was pleased that Irene saw in the novel the really fierce feeling that lay behind the rather dry and impersonal manner of the telling (we to IMW, 17 February 1925). When Cather and Lewis went to Santa Fe after their stay at the San Gabriel Ranch and a visit to Mabel Dodge Luhan's at Taos, they put up at the La Fonda Hotel and found there a large accumulation of mail forwarded from New York. There war an astonishing number of letters from solemn professors and hard-boiled publishers telling her that "Tom Outland's Story" in Collier's had, as Cather put it, given them a pulse. She answered one fan letter praising the story by saying that neither years nor miles could lessen the pull or the excitement this country had for her (Woodress 376).

Reviews of the novel began appearing as soon as the book was officially published, but they were a motley collection, ranging from cestatic praise to complete rejection. The favorable ones far outnumber the unfavorable, but neither those who liked the novel nor those who disliked it could agree on their reasons. James Ford in the Literary Digest View Image of Page 318 (November 1935, p. 775) hailed the book as the best Cather had yet written. He found the Professor a great characterization and "Tom Outland' Story" the most thrilling account he ever had read of an extinct civilization. On the other hand the New York Times reviewer called the book a catastrophe. The first book of the novel was "ingeniously invented and admirably carried along as far as it goes. It stops in mid- channel. Book the second is a flat and amateurish essay in archaeological adventure. It is flat, stale, and unprofitable. Book the third finds Miss Cather far beyond her philosophical depth" (6 September 1935. p. 8). Henry S. Canby, who was to become one of Cather's friends, reviewed the novel for the newly founded Saturday Review of Literature. He was one of the few reviewers who saw beneath the surface the real story of the "slow discovery by Professor St. Peter - of him- self." He was more interested in this novel than Cather others because "the soul, after all, is the greatest subject for art" (:6 September 1925, p. 151). The experimental structure bothered many critics even when they thought the performance on the whole superior. The most perceptive critics, however, would have agreed with R. C. Kennedy in the New Statesman: "There is no formal shape to the whole; and yet it has the very accent of truth. It would be difficult to convey, without seeming to exaggerate, the case and precision with which fine inexplicable shades of mood and emotion are rendered" (19 December 1935, p. 306).

For Schuyler Ashley in the Kansas City Star, the Professor was "indubitably the most valuable attainment of Willa View Image of Page 319 Cather's new novel. To create such a man, talented, whimsical with out eccentricities, and innately attractive, to make him credible and complete is a substantial accomplishment" ( October 1925). This reviewer, however, thought Cather was very hard on her own sex, surrounding the Professor as she did with a worldly wife, a greedy elder daughter, and 7 jealous younger one. He quoted St. Peter's comment about Euripides, who "went and lived in a cave by the sea" in his old age: "It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life" (PH 154).

For many reviewers and readers the novel was a surprise, for it deserts the Western pioneering settings of the novels that had made her reputation - O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, My Antonia, A Last Lady, and the contemporary West of One of Ours. Cather herself was surprised at how good the reviews were. The Professor's House, she wrote Fisher, was certainly not her favorite among her books (27 February 1925). She also thought she had gotten Knopf into some- thing of a bind by switching from her Western subjects. She was like an old wild turkey who forsakes the feeding ground as soon as there are signs of people, which in her case meant readers and book buyers. Nevertheless, the novel was one she felt compelled to write. The issues with which it is engaged - loss and change, the death of romantic idealism, materialism, the roles of art and religion in modern life-are those which everyone must face.View Image of Page 320

Notes

1. Biographical information not documented comes from James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life.

2. A reporter from the New York Times (a1 May 1923) said, "She has just started another novel" (Bohlke 58); her old friend Will Owen Jones, editor of the Nebraska State Journal, visited her at Ville d'Avray and reported her working on a novel (Webster County Argus, 13 September 1923), an indirect account of a letter from Cather to her parents, reported in the Omaha World-Herald (13 October 1923), noted that neuritis had interfered with her work.

3. In forty years of visiting picture galleries in Europe, especially in Paris and Amsterdam, I have looked in vain for a Dutch genre painting in which one could see the masts of ships or a stretch of sea through a window. There is sometimes an open window, however, and Cather may have been remembering something she thought she had seen but actually had not. She often remembered things the way she would have liked them to be, as was the case with her memory of the Wetherills and the discovery of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings (see p. 309).

4. Patricia Lee Yongue suggests Adolph Bandelier as a model for St. Peter as a historian. Bandelier's history of the Spanish conquistadores, like the Professors, used manuscript sources and travel in the Southwest to supplement conventional sources.

5. Cather has changed the situation, however, for M. Bergeret has only one dress form in his study, and it's his wife who drapes her dresses on it. not a swine woman like Augusta. Furthermore, M. Bergeret doesn't like the dress form and has to move it every time he gets a book from his bookcase. After smashing the form, M. Berecret proceeds, after a good many digressions of View Image of Page 321 all sorts, to get rid of his wife by hiring a servant so ugly and sonorious that Madame Bergeret moves out. For her part, Madame Bergeret did not love her husband and, in fact, de. spised him because he was so easy to fool, as she had done twice before with other men. Her only regret was that she had been stupid enough to get caught.

Nevertheless, Cather certainly had Anatole Frances novel in mind when she wrote The Professors's House. She may well have renewed her acquaintance with Frances novels during her stay in France, In her journalistic days she had highly recommendco to her readers Frances The Crime of Sylveter Bonnard and lauded his election to the French Academy. She also had praised his novel Thais, and her Pittsburgh friend George Seibel (197) remembered that they had read together France's Le Lys rouge (The Red Lib). That Cather had Anatole France on her mind is further made clear by the reference to him when Louis Mar sellus is planning his hypothetical lunchcons (p. 186). In addition, Anatole France had been closely associated with the Dreyfus case as one of the staunchest defenders of Dreyfus. Cather certainly would have remembered this, and it no doubt is reflected in two references to Dreyfus (pp. 186 and 243). Finally, the idea of making her protagonist a professor perhaps came from Artole France.

6. An example of this interpretation may be found in Leon Edels Literary Biograpby (Garden City Ny: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1959), 91-12a; revised in Stuff of Dreams: Experiments in Liter- dry Pychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), =16-40; reprinted in John J. Murphy, ed., Critical Essays en Willa Catber (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), pp. 200-217.

7. Quoted by Harrell (p. 8). The quotation comes from an inter- View Image of Page 322 view with Cather published in the Cbica go Daily Tribune, 1: Sepember 1935.9.... 8. See the Denver Times, 10 August 1915, 12:2; another article from an unidentified Denver paper was reprinted in the Nebraska State Journal, 4 October 1915.

9. Cather's published account of her trip to Mesa Verde is in the Denver Times of 31 January 1916 and a shorter version in Book News Monthly 34 (January 1916): 214. The longer account says, "I expected to find Mancos a railway station and had planned to stay one night there. I staved in all six days. The town lies at the foot of the la Plata (Silver) mountains, in a richly-irrigated taller. I he tans ver. c aras diss and with bars and water willows, runs thru the middle of the town. The streets are lined with trees, the yards are a not of giant syc and Indian paintbrush, shaded with cedars; the wheat fields are veritable cloth of gold and the whole town is buried in sweet clover." Cather also shared ber delight in the Mesa Verde coun try by giving a public ulk in Red Cloud (Webster County Argus, 24 August 1916).

10. Alchough Richard Wetherill and Charles Mason are generally aven credit for discosenng the Clift Palace, there has been controversy on this point. Al Wethenll has also been credited with the discovery (sc Harrell, DD. 02-04), Harrell's research concludes by a process of climination that the brother Cather faked to must have bcen Clayton.

11. Here are some of the historical or geographical facts Cather chose to change or modify: Cather's Blue Mesa is in New Mex- ico, while Mesa Verde is in Colorado. While Tom Outland is the first to discover the cliff dwellings of the Blue Mesa, Richard Mahenll was nos the fire white man to discover ruins in the View Image of Page 323 Mesa Verde; some of the outlying sites in the area had been explored carlier. Cather' Cruzados River is a deep, swift stream, but the Mancos River is relatively shallow: even in winter with rains swelling its volume a horseman could ford it and not have to swim. The Blue Mesa has sides "like the base of a monument. all the way around" capped by "chis great rim rock, which projected out over the erosions like a granite shelf" (189, 193) although Mesa Verde's sides are steep, it was still possible for early-twentieth-century technology to build an automobile road into what is now the national park. Richard Wetherill had been accompanied by Charles Mason when he first found Cliff Palace from the top of the mesa, but Tom is alone when he first sees his Cliff City from below. (However, Richard's brother Al had first seen it from below one winter day, as Tom does.) The ruins of the Blue Mesa are clean and bare, nearly intact, and there is a spring of pure water at Cliff City, early photo- graphs of Mesa Verde show the ruins choked with debris, and although there was a spring of good water near Spruce Tree House, the water at Chiff Palace was so alkaline as to be virtually undrinkable.

12. See Rosowski and Slote. 8t-or. fora fuller discussion.

13. After the publication of Death Comes for the Archishop, Cather wrote a letter to Commonzeal (7, 27 November 1927) saying that she remembered meeting a Belgian priest, Father Haltermann, "who lived with his sister in the parsonage behind the beautiful old church at Santa Cruz, New Mexico... He was a florid, full-bearded farmer priest, who drove about his eighteen missions with a spring wagon and a pair of mules. He knew a great deal about the country and the Indians and their traditions." This priest, Cather reported, went back to Europe afterView Image of Page 324 World War I began and served as a chaplain in the French army, Cher aid she me Father Haltermann on her visit to the Southerce in tons. but there is no reterence to any priest except Father Connolly in her 1012 letters. But it seems likely that Father Haltermann also may have helped shape the character of Father Duchène.

Works Cited

Bates, Herbert. Letter to Willa Cather, 2y February 1925.

Bohlike, Brent. Wills Caber in Person. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.1986

Cather, Willa. The Enchanted Bluff" and "The Professor's Commencement." In Collected Sort Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,1965-69-77.383-91.

Letters to Zoe Akans. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Letters to Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher Collection. Bailey Howe Library; University of Vermont, Burlington.

Letters to Birabeth Sheplev Sergeant. 20 Apni 1912. Pic/* pont Morgan Library, New York.

"On The Professor's House." News Letter of the College English Association, October 1940; reprinted in Willa Cater on Writing.

Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. New York: Knopf, 1962.

Crane, Joan. Willa Cather: A Bibliography. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 1982.

France, Anatole. Le Mannequin d'osier, Vol. 11 of Oeuvres completes de Anatole France. Paris Calmann-lew. 1927.225-453.

Harrell, David. From Mess Verde to The Professor's House. Albu querque: U of New Mexico P, 1992.

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Jewett, Sarah Orne. Letters of Sarah Ore freett. Ed. Annie Fields. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. 249-50.

Knopf, Blanche. Letter to Willa Cather. ay February 1935. Knopf Collection. Harry Rancom Bumanities Resource @enter. Uni versity of Teras at Austin.

Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Knopf, 1953.

Nordenskiöld, Gustaf. The Cliff Decilers of be Mesa Verde: Soutb- west Colorado, Their Pottery and Implements. Trans. Lloyd Mor- gan with new intro, by Watson Smith. New Yore aus Preo for Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard Univ, Cambridge, Mass, 1973; first published, Stockholm: Royal Printing Office, 1893; reprint, Glorieta, N.M: Rio Grande Press, 1979.

Reynolds, Paul R. Memo. Reynolds Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University

Rosowski, Susan, and Bernice Slote. "Willa Cathers 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor's House." Prairie Schooner 52 (winter 1984): 81-92.

Seibel, George. "Miss Willa Cather from Nebraska." New Colophon 2, part 7 (1949): 195-208.

Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, Willa Cather: A Memoir. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953.

Slote, Bernice, ed. Uncle Valentine and Otber Stories: Willa Cather's Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1939. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.1973

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Ne- braska P, 1987.

Wordsworth. William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed. 1800.

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Mesa Verde

Cather's article appeared in the Dercer Times, 31 January 1916; a shortened version, beginning at paragraph six (*Any approach to the Mesa Verde is impressive ), appeared in the Book Are Monthly 34 (January 1916): 214

Mess Verde Wonderland Is Easy to Reach Colorado Show Place as Authoress Sees It

ADVENTUROUS YOUNG SWEDE, WHO NADE TRIP LONG AGO, WROTE BOOK TO DESCRIBE IT

JOURNEY NOW EASY AND SPELL CAST BY REMAINS OF FORGOTTEN RACE IS POTENT

WILLA SIBERT CATHER

TWENTY-Five years ago an adventurous young Swede, the Baron Nordenskjöld, started on a trip around the world, sailing westward. When he got to Denver he heard rumors about certain cliff dweller remains that had been found in the extreme southwest corner of Colorado. He went down to the Mesa Verde and got no farther on his trip around the View Image of Page 328 world. He stayed on the mesa for some months and then went back to Stockholm and wrote and published the book which first made the Mesa Verde known to the world. Later the book was translated but the English edition also was published in Stockholm. There is no American edition.

The journey to the Mesa Verde, which was a hard one in Nordenskjöld's time, is now a very easy one, and the railway runs within thirty miles of the mesa. You leave Denver in the evening, over the Denver & Rio Grande. From the time when your train crawls out of La Veta pass at about 4 in the morning, until you reach Durango at nightfall, there is not a dull moment. All day you are among high mountains, swinging back and forth between Colorado and New Mexico, with the Sangre de Cristo and the Culebra ranges always in sight until you cross the continental divide at Cumbres and begin the wild scurry down the westward slope.

That particular branch of the Denver & Rio Grande is called the Whiplash, and most of the way you can signal to the engineer from the rear car. You stay all night at Durango. In the morning you take another train for Mancos; a friendly train with invariably friendly passengers and a conductor who has been on that run for fourteen years and who can give you all sorts of helpful information. When you reach Mancos you find the station agent, the hotel people and the camp outfitters quite as cordial as the train crew. Your business transactions become of minor importance, and before you know It you are staying on in Mancos because you like the people.

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I expected to find Mancos a railway station and had planned to stay one night there. I stayed in all six days. The town lies at the toot of the La Plata (Silver) mountains, in a richly-irrigated valley. The Mancos river, clear as glass and bordered with poplars and water willows, runs thru the middle of the town. The streets are lined with trees, the yards are a riot of giant sage and Indian paintbrush, shaded with cedars; the wheat fields are veritable cloth of gold and the whole town is buried in sweet clover. It grows in tall hedges along the water ditches and in the low ground along the river. Not once while was in Mancos, indoors or out. was there a moment when I could not smell the sweet clover.

From the streets of Mancos and from the hills about it one can a wars see the green mesa - not green at that distance but a darkish purple, a rather grim mass bulking up in the West. It sits like a cheese box in the plain, the deep cañons with which it is slashed imperceptible from far away. The mesa is forty-five miles long and twenty-five wide, and its sides are so steep that it is accessible from only one point. The government wagon road is recent. Until within a few years there was only a difficult horse trail. Charles Kelly, who now takes travelers out to the mesa by wagon or motor, is the same guide who formerly provided mounts and provisions and pack horses for people who came to see the ruins on the mesa. There is now a very comfortable tent camp on the mesa, just above the fine springs at Spruce Tree house, and the wife of the forest ranger provides excellent food. Anyone can be very comfortable there for several weeks.

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Any approach to the Mesa Verde is impressive, but one must always think with envy of the entrada of Richard Wethen. the frt white man who discovered the ruins in its cañon forty-odd years ago. Until that time the mesa was entirelv unexplored, and was known only as a troublesome place into which cattle wandered off, and from which they never came back. All the country about it was open range. The Wetherills had a ranch west of Mancos. One December day a boy brought word to the ranch house that a bunch of cattle had got away and gone up into the mesa. The same thing had happened before, and young Richard Wetherill said that this time he was going after his beasts. He rode off with one of his cow men and they entered the mesa by a deep cañon from the Mancos river, which Rows at its base. They followed the cañon toward the heart of the mesa until they could go no farther with horses. They tied their mounts and went on foot up a side cañon, now called Cliff cañon. After a long stretch of hard climbing young Wetherill happened to glance up at the great cliffs above him, and there, thru a veil of lightly falling snow, he saw practically as it stands today and as it had stood for 800 years before, the cliff palace - not a cliff dwelling, but a cliff village; houses, courts, terraces and towers, a place large enough to house 300 people, lying in a natural archway let back into the cliff. It stood as if it had been deserted yesterday; undisturbed and undesecrated, preserved by the dry atmosphere and by its great inaccessibility.

That is what Mesa Verde means; its ruins are the highest achievement of stone-age man -preserved in bright, dry View Image of Page 331 sunshine, like a fly in amber - sheltered by great cañon walls and hidden away in a difficult mesa into which no one had ever found a trail. When Wetherill rode in after his cattle no later civilization blurred the outlines there. Life had been extinct upon the mesa since the days of the Cliff Dwellers. Not only their buildings, but their pottery, linen cloth, feather cloth, sandals, stone and bone tools, dried pumpkins, corn and onions, remained as they had been left. There were even a few well-preserved mummies - not many, for the clift dwellers cremated their dead.

Altho only three groups of buildings have been excavated and made easily accessible to travelers, there are ruins ever. where - perched about like swallows' nests. The whole mesa, indeed, is one vast ruin. Eight hundred years ago the mesa was hung with villages, as the hills above Amalfi are today. There must have been about 10,000 people living there. The villages were all built back in these gracious natural arches in the cliffs; with such an outlook, such a setting as men have never found for their dwellings anywhere else in the world. 'The architecture is like that of most southern countries-of Palestine, northern Africa, southern Spain - absolutely harmonious with its site and setting. On the way from New York to the Montezuma valley one goes thru hundreds of ugly little American towns, but when you once reach the mesa, all that is behind you. The stone villages in the cliff arches are a successful evasion of ugliness - perhaps an indolent evasion. Color, simplicity, space, an absence of clutter, the houses of the Pueblo Indians today and of their ancestors on the Mesa Verde are a reproach to the messiness in which we live.

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Everything in the cliff dweller villages points to a tempered, settled, ritualistic life, where generations went on gravely and reverently repeating the past, rather than battling for anything new. Their lives were so full of ritual and symobolism that all their common actions were ceremonial-- planting and harvesting, hunting, feasting, tasting. The great drama of the weather and the seasons occupied their minds a good deal, and they seem to have ordered their behavior according to the moon and sun and stars. The windows in the towers were arranged with regard for astronomical observations. Their strong habitations, their settled mode of living, their satisfying ritual, seem to have made this people conservative and aristocratic. The most plausible theory as to their exunchon is that the dwellers on the Mesa Verde were routed and driven out by their vulgar, pushing neighbors of the plains, who were less comfortable, less satisfied, and con sequently more energetic.

The mesa people may have been somewhat enslaved by their strongholds, and their temper may have been softened by their comparative comfort and their attention to order and detail. They worked out a mode of life that satisfied them, and they were absolutely unenterprising in the modern American sense. Their architecture and their religion were their national purpose. Their religion was largely a personal recognition and interpretation of nature. They seem not to have struggled to overcome their environment. They accommodated themselves to it, interpreted it and made it personal; lived in a dignited relation with it. In more senses View Image of Page 333 than one they built themselves into it. They lived by hurrying and concentrating natural conditions and processes just a little. They supplemented the rainfall by building reservoirs and irrigating. House building, in those great natural arches of stone. was but carrying out a suggestion that stared them in the face; often they used a great rock that had fallen down into the archway as a cornerstone and anchor for their own lighter masonry. When they felled cedars with stone axes they were but accelerating a natural process; the ends of their roof rafters looked as if they had been gnawed thru by a beaver.

Dr. Johnson declared that man is an historical animal. Certainly it is the human record, however slight, that stirs us most deeply, and a country without such a record is dumb, no matter how beautiful. The Mesa Verde is not, as many people think, an inconveniently situated museum. It is the story of an early race, of the social and religious life of a people indigenous to that soil and to its rocky splendors. It is the human expression of that land of sharp contours, brutal contrasts, glorious color and blinding light. The human consciousness, as we know it today, dwelt there, and a feeling for beauty and order was certainly not absent. 'There are in those stone villages no suggestions revolting to our sensabilities No sinister ideas lurk in the sun-drenched ruins hung among the crags. One has only to go down into Hopiland to find the same life going on today on other mesa tops; houses like these, kivas like these, ceremonial and religious implements like these -every detail preserved with the utmost fidelity. View Image of Page 334 When you see those ancient, pyramidal pueblos once more brought nearer by the sunset light that beats on them like gold-beaters' hammers, when the aromatic piñon smoke be- gins to curl up in the still air and the boys bring in the cattle and the old Indians come out in their white burnouses and take their accustomed grave positions upon the housetops you begin to feel that custom, ritual, integrity of tradition have a reality that goes deeper that the bustling business of the world.

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OnThe Professor's House

Let me try to answer your question. When wrote The Professor's House, I wished to try two experiments in form. The first is the device often used by the early French and Spanish novelists; that of inserting the Nouvelle into the Roman. "Tom Outiand's Story" has been published in French and Polish and Dutch, as a short narrative for school children studying English.

But the experiment which interested me was something a little more vague, and was very much akin to the arrangement tollowed in sonars in which the academic sonar torm was handled somewhat freely. Just before I began the book I had seen, in Paris, an exhibition of old and modern Dutch paintings. In many of them, the scene presented was a living room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors, whether drawing-room orView Image of Page 336 kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships or a stretch of gray sea. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply quietly on all the waters of the globe- to Java, etc. In my book I tried to make Professor St. Peter's house rather overcrowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes, furs, petty ambitions, quivering jeal- :- until one got rather sutled. Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa, and the fine disregard of trivialities which was in Tom ands and in his behaviour.

The above concerned me as a writer only, but the blue Mesa (the Mesa Verde) actually was discovered by a young cowpuncher in just this way. The great explorer Norden skiöld wrote a scientific book about this discovery, and I my. self had the good fortune to hear the story of it from a very old man, brother to Dick Wetherell. Dick Wetherell as a young boy forded Mancos River and rode into the Mesa after lost cattle. I followed the real story very closely in Tom Out land's narrative.

Willa Cather

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Explanatory Notes

As two spent swimmers, that do cling together and choke their art.

Malcolm has asked the sergeant how the recent battle went; the sergeant replies that the outcome was for a time doubtful, like two spent swimmers clinging to each other and preventing each other from being able to swim

Textual Essay

This sixth volume of the Cather Edition provides a critical text of Willa Cather’s seventh novel, The Professor’s House, a three-part story in which Tom Outland’s account of his discovery of Anasazi dwellings at Cliff City is set between third-person narratives focusing on Godfrey St. Peter, a middle-aged professor whose best student Tom Outland becomes. The novel first appeared in installments in Collier’s magazine in the summer of 1925; the first edition in book form was published by Alfred A. Knopf early that fall. A substantial typescript comprising 204 pages of heavily revised text was recently discovered among Cather papers in the possession of Helen Cather Southwick. The manuscript is now part of the Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection housed in the Archives and Special Collections of Love Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It has been used with permission in the preparation of this volume. No manuscripts, proofs, or other materials antedating or contemporary with these versions of the work have been found. William Heinemann published the first edition in England in November 1925; Tauchnitz produced an edition in English in 1926, no. 4716 in its Collection of British and American Authors. The Autograph Edition text of the novel constitutes volume 8 of that edition, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1938. No other edition in English was published during Cather’s lifetime, although translations appeared as early as 1927.

The editorial procedure of the Cather Addition is guided by the protocols of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions. We begin with a bibliographical survey of the history of the text, sorting out any problems it may present. Making a calendar of extant texts, we collect and examine examples of all known texts produced during Cather’s lifetime, identifying those forms that may be authorial (i.e., that involved or may have involved Cather’s participation or intervention). These forms are then collated against a standard of collation. The collations provide lists of substantive and accidental variations among these forms.’ A conflation, constructed from the collations, then produces a list of all substantive pre- or post-copy-text changes in all relevant (authorial) editions. After an analysis of this conflation, we choose a copy-text and prepare a critical text (an emended copy-text). The collations and conflation also provide the materials for an emendations list, which identifies changes the editors have made in the copy-text, and a list of rejected substantives that contributes to a history of the text in its various authorial forms. In a separate procedure, we make a list of end-hyphenated compounds with their proper resolution.

This essay includes a discussion of the production and history of the text of The Professor’s House during Cather’s lifetime, an analysis of the changes made in the text during this period, a rationale for the choice of copy-text for this edition, and a statement of the policy under which emendations have been introduced into the copy-text. The reader should note that all page and line references are to the text of the present edition, unless otherwise specified.

Stages of Cather’s composition of The Professor’s House are exceptionally distinct. Their ten-year history is documented by a news article, by the most complete typescript of any of Cather’s novels yet discovered, and finally by the magazine version and the first book edition. These stages began with Cather’s visit to Mesa Verde in rg15, “the real genesis” of The Professor’s House, according to Lewis (99). Shortly thereafter Cather wrote an article about Mesa Verde, which was published in the Denver Times under the byline Willa Sibert Cather on 31 January 1916 (reprinted in the appendix to the Historical Essay). Though it did not become part of the actual text of The Professor’s House, this article prefigured “Tom Outland’s Story” in content and mood. In 1916 Cather wrote most of the novel’s middle section, then titled “The Blue Mesa” and later “Tom Outland’s Story,” in which she shifted from describing Mesa Verde and its discovery by Richard Wetherill to recreating Wetherill’s experience in fictional form.

Edith Lewis reports that Cather returned from a long visit to France at the end of October 1923 with the idea for a novel incorporating the story (Lewis 133), but she may have begun the book some months earlier, while in France. Paul Reynolds, her agent, notes in a memo dated 27 March 1923 that something that started out as short stories was developing into a long story of probably six parts. Blanche Knopf shipped a typewriter to Cather in France (BK to WC, 28 May 1923), and W. O. Jones, who visited her there, reported that she was working on a new book (Webster County Argus, 13 September 1923). A memo dated 15 May 1924 and initialed by Paul Reynolds, after noting that Cather had finished a story (“Uncle Valentine”) and in a couple of weeks would go “out West” for two months and then to Grand Manan, New Brunswick, continues: “She will send me when she gets it done twenty five pages or so of the third story, which will, she thinks, be enough to show something of its character so that I can perhaps make a contract for this third story. She does not now know its length, but as she thinks of it, she thinks it may be a long and a very distinguished story of three or four parts.” Cather worked on the novel during the summer of 1924 at Grand Manan and in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, that fall, and finished it in New York in January 1925 (wc to Zoé Akins, 7 September [1924]; Lewis 133, 137; Woodress 355).

The Columbia University library owns a two-page summary by Reynolds, dated 6 March 1925, of “the 183 pages that I have” of the novel. In this version, Reynolds noted, Tom Outland’s narrative began on p. 127; in the first edition it begins on p. 179. The memo concludes, “There is about thirty pages to come, which I suppose will join up the two parts,” and the third section of the printed book indeed comes to some twenty-seven pages. Thus, assuming a normal relationship between typescript and printed copy, Cather considerably extended the first two sections of the novel, and wrote the third, between the time Reynolds received his version and the date on which setting-copy was sent to Collier's.

Cather’s usual practice was to write her novels in longhand, then prepare or have prepared one or more typescripts, with carbons, always revising in the process. Final typescripts were prepared by a professional typist.’ Recent discoveries have confirmed that Cather retained a number of draft typescripts, although she requested that the original typescripts of her books be returned to her after production and wrote that they had been destroyed (wc to Pat Knopf, 19 January 1936); Alfred Knopf, interviewed in 1983 by Susan Rosowski, mentioned Cather’s instructions that manuscripts and typescripts be returned to her so that she might destroy them. In the case of The Professor’s House and other novels that appeared in the magazines, one typescript would have been used for the magazine version and another, revised, for the Knopf edition in book form. The Southwick typescript was not setting-copy for either the magazine version of the novel or the first book edition: the many false starts, typeovers, cancellations, and paste-ups are those of an author rather than of a professional typist; no printer’s or copy editor’s marks appear on it; and the extensive revisions would require that a retyped version be made for the printer.

The printing history of The Professor’s House begins with Collier’s. A memo from one H. O. (Harold Ober) to Miss Magee (both Reynolds employees), dated 11 March 1925, notes that “Collier will pay $10,000 for this in weekly installments of $1000, beginning with the week of May 18th.” The first installment of the book actually appeared in the June 6 issue, followed by a new one each week through 1 August. The magazine installments were illustrated by Frank Smith, who provided the cover and three additional illustrations for the initial number, then two more (one large and one smaller) for each of the remaining eight. ‘The table below indicates the relation between these installments and the book, chapter, and inclusive page numbers of the first book edition:

• Collier’s Knopf 1925
• I 6 June L1-2, pp. 11-45
• 2 13 June 1.3-6, pp. 46-81
• 3 20 June 1.7-9, pp. 82-110
• 4 27 June I.10-12, pp. r11-42
• 5 4 July 113-16, pp. 143-70
• 6 11 July L.17-II.3, pp. 171-202.9
• 7 18 July II.3—6, pp. 202.10-234.9
• 8 25 July TL.6-IIL2, pp. 234.10-267
• 9 1 August IL.3-5, pp. 268-83

Knopf published the first book edition on 4 September 1925. There were four issues of the first printing: two limited issues, one of 4o copies on Japan vellum and one of 185 copies on Borzoi rag paper; a trade issue comprising 20,000 copies; and a Canadian issue using sheets of the trade issue, published by Macmillan (Toronto) with its own imprint and other changes to the binding and front matter. The two limited issues were signed and numbered, with special bindings and board boxes; a single numbering sequence was used for both issues. The very large first trade printing reflected Knopf’s confidence in his author and her work; the firm began shipping copies on 7 August (Publishers’ Weekly, 18 July 1925, p. 152) and was soon able to announce that the first printing had been sold out three weeks before the official publication date (pw, 29 August 1925, p. 1669).

In her discussion of the order of first-printing issues of Shadows on the Rock, Joan Crane notes that “it is reasonably certain that a large part of the first printing of the trade issue had already come off the presses when the numbers of the limited issue were determined and put in work, especially as Knopf announced that 47,290 trade copies had been shipped before publication” (160-61), and goes on to say, citing Sydney Jacobs of Knopf’s production department, that since both issues “were printed from the same setting of plates and frequently simultaneously, it is splitting hairs to make too fine a point of priority” (161). For that novel, Crane lists the limited issues after the trade; in the case of The Professor’s House she lists them first, although the same argument could apply. The publisher’s records indicate that all three issues were ordered on 8 July, but the invoice for the presswork for the trade issue was posted to the Knopf cost sheets on 5 August and those for the two limited issues on 11 September, some five weeks later. However, such data do not in themselves determine the relative dates of production.

The novel sold very well at first: Crane quotes Knopf’s advertisement in Publishers’ Weekly, 31 October 1925, p. 1516, which noted that “the book was already in its 55th thousand and more copies have been sold than have ever been sold in a similar period —ten weeks— of any book by Willa Cather” (114). Demand continued heavy through the year but not thereafter, as the following list of printings during Cather’s lifetime shows:

• 2nd printing August 1925 10,000 copies
• 3rd printing September 1925 5,000 copies
• 4th printing September 1925 5,000 copies
• 5th printing October 1925 10,000 copies
• 6th printing October 1925 5,000 copies
• 7th printing November 1925—5,000 copies
• 8th printing December 1925 5,000 copies, some with special binding.
• 9th printing October 1942 785 copies

Knopf allowed Grosset and Dunlap to issue a cheap “edition” in September 1927; as Crane notes (p. 115), the copyright notice is that of the Knopf 8th printing, so it is technically a separate issue of that printing. The production record for the 9th printing (October 1942) lists corrections, posted to the record in 1946, to pp. 40, 41, 115, 135, and 147; these required resetting pp. 40-41, and introduced six new readings. The changes were not made in the copies of K9, as Cranestates (pp. 115-16), but first appear in K 10, issued in January 1949, the printing that deletes the dedication to Jan Hambourg, also mandated in a note on the production record for k9. Although Crane does not mention additional states, five corrections in the plates were earlier made for the eighth printing, in December 1925.

There are thus three states of the x text: State a, K1-7 and the limited and Macmillan (Canada) issues State b, K8—9:

• Agusta > Augusta (125.23)
• Strickly > Strictly (144.4)
• Anthony > Antony (149.8)
• Wesnesday > Wednesday (156.18)
• come > came (171.17)

State c, K10 (includes changes made in state b):

deletes dedication

• bulkheaded vacuum > Outland engine (42.6)
• vacuum > engine (42.15)
• vacuum > engine (43.6)
• moved > mover (114.4)
• vacuum > patent (133.7)
• vacuum > patent (145.12)

Several mistakes in k1 were never corrected during the life of the edition: “mantles” at 11.13, “pompuosity” at 108.13, and “oevres” at 229.25. The Autograph Edition (1938) does not make the changes from “vacuum” to “engine” or “patent” later introduced into K10, but corrects the three typos just mentioned as well as those corrected in K8 and later in K10. The eighteenth and last U.S. printing of the first edition was made for the Random House Vintage paperback “edition” (v-913, May 1973). This printing was produced by photo offset from an image of plates of a printing after k9 and is thus a separate issue (or sub-edition, depending on the terminology one uses) of K rather than a new edition. It also exhibits state c of the text.

William Heinemann, Ltd., published the first British edition of The Professor’s House in November 1925. The variants from K1 consist largely of changes in accidentals: punctuation, word division, spelling, and capitalization. The epigraph and dedication are omitted. The few substantive changes are either unnecessary or introduce errors, as the list below suggests (K1 reading first):

• 87.19 all morning all the morning
• 114.20 you're a brakeman you're brakeman
• 140.7 building buildings
• 141.21 pains plans
• 143.8 his the
• 173.23 watched night fall watched nightfall
• 263.13 sand-spit sand-pit
• 282.5 may be even may even be

Because there is no external or internal evidence that Cather had any hand in the variant readings of this text, we do not consider it authorial, and its readings are not included in the list of rejected substantives.

The text of the Tauchnitz edition of 1926 follows K1’s punctuation with extraordinary fidelity, but makes a number of changes in word division and capitalization: “bathroom” and “homesick” are set as single words; “sea-sick” and “rim rock” are hyphenated; “Dachshund” is capitalized. Most of the accidental variants involve spelling: Tauchnitz follows British usage even more thoroughly than Knopf, setting numerous words like “civilisation,” “realise,” and “sympathise” with an s instead of Knopf’s z. “Ax” is set as “axe,” “story” as “storey,” “wagon” as “waggon,” “enquire” always as “inquire.” Five of the nine typographical errors in K1 are corrected. A few errors are introduced: “mother Eve” for “Mother Eve” at 213.10, “I” for “It” at 222.14. The only substantive variant seems to have been the result of an error by the Tauchnitz compositor, who substitutes “A mis and A mile” for K1’s “Amis and Amile” (129.5).

Again, there is no external or internal evidence that Cather had any hand in the variant readings of this text. Therefore, we do not consider it authorial and have not included its readings in the list of rejected substantives.

The 204-page Southwick typescript represents a stage of composition that succeeded the lost or destroyed holograph version(s) and preceded the setting-copy prepared by a professional typist. Most of the typescript’s pages are standard size (8% X 11 inches); the text usually fills the page, but some pages, especially interpolated ones, contain as little as a single paragraph. The typescript also includes several long pages (about fourteen inches each) made up of two or more pieces of paper pasted together or separate pieces pasted or pinned to blank sheets—another indication that this type script was not a final draft (pages 62, 98 and 99, 114, 116, 149, 1§4, 158, 214, 221, 222). The first twenty-two pages are missing, as are pages 207, 208, 213, 215-220, 227, 228, and 230. The extant pages are erratically numbered 23-229, with some repeated numbers, some missing numbers where the text is continuous, and many interpolated sheets (864, for example). The numbers §3, 60, 62, 69, 71, 72, 78, 110, 121, and 133 are penciled in at the left margins of pages numbered 55, 64, 66, 73, 76, 77, 83, 19, 131, and 145, respectively. One at first suspects that these penciled-in numbers might be galley numbers, but in the few cases where the indicator marks appear within a line of the typescript, the divisions do not correspond to line beginnings in either K1 or Collier's.

The original version of the typescript (UTS) was heavily revised throughout; we refer to the revised text as RTs. The revisions correct many typographical errors and change hundreds of accidentals. In addition, hundreds of substantive changes are made, many involving no more than a word or phrase, but many others that are much more extensive. Holograph revisions appear in two hands: Cather’s (an open and somewhat heavy script) and that of her companion, Edith Lewis (a neater and tighter script). Cather and Lewis are known to have corrected proofs together, and the presence of Lewis’s hand on this and other typescripts shows that she was involved at earlier stages of production as well. We accept revisions in Lewis’s hand as having Cather’s approval, Lewis would not have made significant changes on her own, and Cather would in any case have reviewed the proposed changes as she prepared the next draft. The typescript of “Two Friends,” in fact, shows a few revisions in Lewis’s hand that were struck out and replaced by other readings in Cather’s hand.

We record more than eighteen hundred substantive variants between the text of k1 and those of the original and revised texts of the Southwick typescript and the text of the serial version in Collier’. More than fifteen hundred of these variants occur in the unrevised version of the typescript (UTS); the revised version (RTS) changes over eight hundred of these to the K1 reading. It is obvious that the uncorrected typescript was revised in the direction of the K1 text. The remaining seven hundred variants between RTS and K1 indicate that the Southwick typescript was an intermediate version rather than a final draft of the text: Cather customarily revised her texts at the galley and sometimes even at the page proof stages of production, but this large number of variants and the lack of evidence in the typescript of the hand of a copy-editor suggest that RTS was not setting-copy for K1. We conclude, therefore, that at least one other typescript was prepared after RTS. One copy of that later typescript, with revisions, went to Collier’s; another copy, with additional changes, went to Knopf. RTS is slightly closer to the Collier's text (c) than to K1, but that difference suggests only that changes were made by Knopf, and by Cather in proofs, on the setting-copy of the retyped version of RTS that was sent to Knopf and published as K1.

The Southwick typescript is especially interesting because in its unrevised form it is one of the earliest substantially complete texts of any Cather novel. Many pages show only slight revisions (28, 30, 32, 64, 81, 130), and as collations with K1 demonstrate, these pages contain near-finished passages. Other pages are heavily inked (33, 34, 115, 204, 229) or have entire passages canceled (86, 93, 119, 134, 136, 142, 152, 223, 229). The revisions follow familiar patterns. As she customarily did, Cather focused on clarifying and improving diction and syntax at the sentence level and on eliminating ambiguity of reference, wordiness, and irrelevant detail — not on reconceptualizing character or motive or on recasting scene or dialogue. The overwhelming majority of variants involve one, two, or three words. For example, “very nicely” becomes “nicely,” and “a luncheon engagement” becomes simply “luncheon” (225.23-24). Unnecessary details are dropped: the UTS sentence “The old man looked like a red Indian, Scott observed to himself as he plunged in after him” is omitted in k1 (71.15). Awkward syntax is revised when the UTS reading “subject, it was his way of saying it, his optimistic squint the public liked —and he loathed doing it” is changed to “subject, and he loathed doing them” (73.5). In the Southwick typescript a more specific or precise word is often substituted for a general one: “hobbled my horse” for UTS’s “turned my horse loose” (299.1), “sage-brush” for “vegetation” (299.9-I10), or “Gare St. Lazare” for “the station” (103.11-12).

In a great many instances k1 abbreviates or drops passages found in the typescript that “overfurnish” the text. For example, “this was the best possible day to go see Appelhoff, because he lived down by the car shops, and the noise there was too deafening on week days” (UTS 34.14—-16) is entirely dropped in K1 (51.23), as is the subsequent description of Appelhoff’s dog, “Minna, whose dugs dragged the dust” (UTS 34.22, CE 52.5). Details about St. Peter’s life with the Thieraults (urs 77.20—-23) are omitted in Kr (103.14), as is Tom Outland’s comment, “somebody’d sneaked in chips he hadn’t bought” (UTS 140.5, cE 179.18). Cather’s difficulty in deciding whether Outland’s invention was a vacuum or a gas is reflected in the canceled version of K1 42.6—7: “a vacuum protected by a gas that does not fill it” (UTS 26.4—-5). Scott McGregor’s intrusion on the narrator’s prerogative (UTS 27.17-20) also is canceled (43.24), as is the reference to St. Peter’s having received an Oxford prize (UTS 39.21-22, CE 57.24). Three sentences of St. Peter’s lecture are dropped (464.19-21, CE 69.16). At UTS 145.4-7 Tom’s narrator-like generalization about landmarks is dropped (185.3).

Perhaps the most interesting of these changes come late in the typescript. The accounts of Tom’s death and St. Peter's thoughts about what Tom’s life might have been like had he survived the war are heavily revised (UTS 205.1-19 and 206a.1-21, CE 261.5—-23). And several of St. Peter’s reflections about his own life and about death are cut: “There had been a time when he believed in the survival of personality, but now he understood that illusion” (UTS 221.9-11, after CE 272.16-17); “What was a man to do when he had lost the incentives that made him get up in the morning and lie down at night” (UTS 223.17—19, after CE 281.25); “All this summer he had felt a conviction that somebody was going to die. Somebody was; the old Godfrey St. Peter, the man Lillian married, was dead” (UTS 229.19—21, after CE 282.7).

Hundreds of accidental variants exist between the texts of UTS and RTS and that of K1, more than half of which involve punctuation. UTs ordinarily uses a comma plus dash where KI uses a dash only. UTS lacks many of the commas, as well as the apostrophe in dialectal forms like “t'ink,” that are present in K1. Spelling and accent variants are less commonly found: UTS often omits the accent supplied in K1 in words like “Santa Fe,” and uses the U.S. spelling of words like “color” instead of the British spelling “colour” used in k1. Some idiosyncratic spellings, probably left over from the holograph versions of the texts, survive in uts: “barytone,” “puebloes,” “lavendar,” and “storeys,” for example. UTS does not capitalize words like “day” or “street” after a specific day or street name, but routinely capitalizes “University”; k1 does the reverse. UTS usually presents compound nouns as two words; K1 is much more apt to hyphenate compounds like “box-couch” or “pine-trees.” The words “tonight” and “goodbye” in UTS are hyphenated in k1. A number of changes appear in paragraphing and font; RTS changes nearly a third of such variants to readings that appear in K1. There are comparatively few cases in which RTS introduces an accidental variant, and even fewer in which K1, UTS, and RTS all differ.

Like the Woman’s Home Companion text of “Old Mrs, Harris,” the Collier's text (c) of The Professor’s House lacks a number of passages present in the Knopf first-edition text (K1), some dating back to the Southwick typescript. Although many of these passages are relatively short, several run from half a page to three pages. Like other magazine versions of Cather’s novels, this one is best regarded as a late draft rather than a finished one: there are more than thirteen hundred variants in accidentals and some five hundred in substantives between the magazine text and that of the first printing of the Knopf first edition (K1).

The accidental variants between c and K1 are typical of those Cather made in the process of revising late drafts. Changes in punctuation account for more than half the total; of these, well over half involve the addition of a comma in Kt. Studies of Cather’s revisions made for other volumes in this edition document her fondness for commas, perhaps as a means of suggesting visually the prose rhythms of the text; we believe that many of the commas added in x1 are authorial. It is likely that Collier’s deleted some of the punctuation present in its setting-copy, following its house style, and that Cather and Knopf restored it in the course of preparing the first book edition.

Changes in word division, spelling or accent, and capitalization each account for about an eighth of the accidental variants between c and K1. Of those involving word division, some go percent hyphenate expressions that in c are either one or two words more commonly, two words. More than a third of the spelling variants replace the o of the magazine text with ou in words such as “ardor” and “color”; the change from “canion(s)” to K1’s “canyon(s)” accounts for almost another fifth of these changes. Some three-quarters of the changes in capitalization raise lowercase in c to uppercase in K1; more than 40 percent of these change a form of “professor” to a form of “Professor.” Again, many of these changes are probably due to the differences between the house style of the magazine and that of Knopf; the variants involving hyphenation and spelling, perhaps even the changes in case, show the relatively close connection between RTs and c. Cather’s attention to such accidentals in preparing the book versions of her novels is well documented; in the case of The Professor’s House she certainly read proofs for k1, but it is unlikely that she saw proofs of the serial text.

Some three-quarters of the substantive variants between the magazine text and K1 involve no more than a word or two (K1 reading first): “spreading” for “single” at 15.10, “tip” for “end” at 59.22, “When” for “After” at 130.14, “put me” for “put” at 197.5, “give” for “to give” at 223.18. Changes involving three to five words include “black eyebrows” instead of c’s “black-and-gray eyebrows” (13.15), “price” instead of c’s “price of the flowers” (102.4), “her father noticed” instead of c’s “he saw” (105.20), and “red-fruited thorn-trees” instead of c’s “spotted laurel” (112.2—3).

The smallcaps readings are often more economical: “Air Service” for c’s “air branch of the service” (43.3-4), “difficult” for c’s “a difficult one” (168.10), “falling snow-flakes” for c’s “veil of lightly falling snow” (200.10-11). A particularly good example of this sort of change comes at the beginning of the book, when k1 replaces c’s “None the less, he quite agreed with his wife when she said” with “However, as his wife said” (12.17). Often the K1 readings are more specific than those of c: “glints” instead of “lights” (38.22), “that gas” for “his discovery” (62.2), “Pierce-Arrow” for “luxurious car” (81.7). Such changes as “Tom” for “he” (61.22) and “The Magnificat” for “it” (98.17) clarify pronoun reference. Sometimes, however, the variants are more difficult to characterize: “that in a flash” “would for c’s “that” (13.19), “sometimes stretched” for stretch” (15.2), “she at least” for “she” (60.6), “jewels” for “new necklace” (105.24), “sketch” for “portrait” (168.19), and “went to dine” for “dined” (228.10).

Approximately an eighth of the substantive variants, but a much larger fraction by word count, involve more extensive changes. At 15.13, for example, c’s “In the corners were masses of green-brier” is altered in k1 to “Masses of greenbrier grew in the corners,” making the verb more active. In some cases, a Clause or sentence in c is deleted in K1. After “extravagance” at 96.10, c reads “I’m going to have some of that money for my own self”; following “mathematics” at 124.9, it reads “After lingering near them he would go back to his work with a safe, happy feeling about them all. Tom was a valuable addition to his family circle.” The x deletions remove a dissonance in c’s presentation of St. Peter.

Over half of the longer variants consist of passages added in K1 to the c text; most of these are present in the Southwick typescript as well. After “table” (28.18) K1 adds “It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn’t dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.” This and other examples develop the character of St. Peter. The passage about the functions of ceremony (69.4—21) does not appear in c, nor does a significant interaction between St. Peter and his wife (153.22-154.18). Another long addition in K (158.2-25) tells the reader a great deal about St. Peter, but also something about Louis Marsellus’s treatment of Lillian and the disturbing parallels St. Peter sees between his wife and his daughter Rosamond’s husband. The last two and a half pages of chapter 15 of the first section, which discuss St. Peter’s decision not to go to Paris with his wife and the Marselluses, represent a significant addition in the K1 text, illuminating St. Peter’s character, his motives, and his relationship with his wife.

c also cuts material in the second book. The description of the saloon Tom visits (177.9-178.6) is not in c. Much of Rodney Blake’s history is omitted in c: 183.19-184.13, 186.1—19. At 187.7—-20, K1’s description of the cabin on the Cruzados River is cut, as is the account of Henry Atkins at 195.19-196.3. C drops Tom Outland’s account of Father Duchéne’s interest in “Mother Eve,” the subsequent paragraph describing Outland’s preparation for his Washington trip (221.1-23), and also the passage describing his reading of the Aeneid (251.20-252.8). The longest cut comes at the beginning of the seventh chapter of Book II (“Tom Outland’s Story”); c drops three pages describing Tom’s reaction to Blake’s departure and his feeling of having “found everything” on the mesa even after the loss of the artifacts. Book III in the c text shows no substantial cuts of this kind; it remains much shorter than the other two.

The unique c variants can be divided into several groups. In addition to its longer cuts, c often omits words and phrases present in K1, especially qualifiers and intensifiers like “so” and “very” (205.6, 273.10). occasionally bowdlerizes K1: Minna is a “dachshund,” not a “dachshund bitch” (52.5), and there is no free advertising: “Ford” is “little car” and “Pierce-Arrow” appears as “luxurious car” (46.15, 81.7). c also is fussier about grammar: at 49.24, “keep” reads “keeps,” and at 194.13, “they weren’t” reads “it wasn’t.” In general, however, except for the passages of K1 (and the typescript) that c omits, c either agrees with K1, UTS, or RTS, or its reading combines elements of the typescript reading with the reading of K1. Many of c’s readings may well have been introduced by the magazine editor, following Collier’s policy and styling practices.

Scribner’s had wished to publish a subscription edition of Cather’s fiction as early as 1932, but Houghton Mifflin would not release the rights to the four early novels it had published (Lewis 180; Ferris Greenslet to wc, 1 July 1933; Knopf memoirs). When Houghton Mifflin itself took up the idea, Cather worked with Ferris Greenslet, who had been her editor there; after much negotiation, she agreed to the edition. She wanted W. A. Dwiggins, who had designed some of her Knopf books, as the designer, and she wanted the same font used in the Thistle edition of Robert Louis Stevenson (wc to FG, 18 December 1936). Greenslet did not agree (21 December 1936), and Bruce Rogers was engaged to design the new edition. During 1936 Cather looked over the titles to be included and made changes, the degree of change varying with the particular title; Greenslet received the revisions for The Professor’s House on 15 September (Fe to we, 15 September 1936).

There are some four hundred accidental variants between the k1 text of The Professor’s House and that of the Autograph Edition, volume 8. Of these, about a third involve differences in word division, and more than a quarter entail differences in spelling or accent. Another quarter of the variants involve changes in punctuation; almost two-thirds of these either add or delete a comma. Case changes account for less than an eighth of the differences. Analysis of these accidental variants suggests that at least some of them are the result either of Houghton Mifflin’s house style or of Bruce Rogers's design for the edition. For example, the Autograph Edition text (a) regularly changes “whisky” to “whiskey,” not only in The Professor's House but also in other novels in the edition, and it invariably changes K1’s “canyon(s)” to the Spanish form “canion(s).” Abbreviations like “Dr.” and “St.” (although not “St. Peter”) are spelled out. These changes contribute to a more formal tone in the Autograph Edition text. x1, like the texts of other Cather novels of this period, ordinarily uses lowercase for words like "river,” “street,” or “mountain” when a specific name is added; in a, such nouns are invariably capitalized, as is “Day” after “Christmas” or “Ember.” Occasionally, the evident interest in more formal or “correct” usage leads to the reverse sort of change: following French practice, “rue” is set in lowercase when the name of a specific street follows.

House or edition styling may also explain many variants in punctuation and word division. The A text usually omits the comma before a dash, a standard feature of the texts of Cather’s novels as published by Knopf. Hyphenated compounds in KI are set as one word in a more than fifty times and as two words some thirty times; conversely, some forty two-word compounds in k1 are hyphenated or set as one word in a. Some evidence for house style as a source of accidental variants can also be seen in spelling changes, when later forms” “coconuts” replace earlier ones: “briar” for K1’s “brier, for “cocoanuts,” “baritone” for “barytone.” Given Cather’s known interest in both kinds of variants and her stature as an author in 1937-38, it is possible that she was consulted about the various features of the design, including the proposed treatment of certain classes of accidentals, and that she approved some blanket changes. However, it is unlikely that she would specify many or most of the hundreds of accidental changes in the Autograph Edition text but make so few substantive revisions, all but a handful minor.

The substantive variants in the Autograph Edition fall into several categories:

• (a)Expressions are made more formal or more correct: eighteen contractions are expanded, “though” is expanded to “although” twice, “round” becomes “around,” and “Nowdays” becomes “Nowadays.” “Louie” is changed to “Louis” at one point. A “lacquer table” becomes a “lacquered” one, “different than” twice becomes “different from,” “Yes” is changed to “Yes, sir,” and “remarked” is changed to the more contextually appropriate “had remarked.” The most complicated change in this category clarifies and simplifies k1’s reading “Because there were children, and fervour in the blood and brain, books were born as well as daughters” to “Because there was fervour in the blood and brain... daughters” (265.6-8).
• (b) Adjectives are omitted before some nouns: “much washing” becomes “washing,” “such gentle” becomes “gentle,” “big building” becomes “building,” “delicate curve” becomes “curve,” and “long passages” becomes “passages.”
• (c) Slight stylistic changes are made that do not much alter meaning: “two last” to “last two,” “dancing” to “and dancing,” “All” to “All that,” “Next” to “The next,” “alike” to “All alike.”
• (d) Errors are introduced: “young” for K1’s “younger” at 54.10 and “as Mrs.” for K1’s “and Mrs.” at 74.6.
• (e) More up-to-date words are substituted for those that might have been unclear to some readers in 1938: “sickle pear” becomes “russet pear” (52.18) and “telescope” is clarified as “telescope travelling-bag” (115.15).
• (f) Changes are made that substantially alter meaning without correcting or introducing errors: Page/Line KI A 180.8 often sometimes 183.15 fast friends friends 183.22 attention attentions 252.6 rude round 260.17~261.14 {{ present} {] omitted} Although there is no external evidence that Cather was responsible for any of these changes, we believe that all the changes in categories (b), (e), and (f), and several in (a) and (c), are authorial. They are typical of the changes Cather is known to have made in other of her novels, and they are not the sort of changes a copyeditor would make, especially the copyeditor for a text Cather is known to have had a hand in.

The copy-text for this edition is a copy of the first trade printing of the first U.S. edition of the novel in book form, published on 4 September 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf (k1). Collation of copies of all potentially relevant texts demonstrates that only five show evidence of Cather’s hand and are therefore authorial: the unrevised and revised versions of the Southwick typescript, the Collier’s magazine text, and the texts of k1 and of the Autograph Edition. All other texts that appeared during Cather’s lifetime were either separate issues, reprints, or texts that derive from K without evidence of authorial intervention. The unrevised version of the South wick typescript is clearly an intermediate draft of the novel; its readings differ in hundreds of cases involving both substantives and accidentals, not only from those of the Collier’s text but also from those of k1. The revisions shown in the revised form of the typescript obviously move the text closer to that of k1, but hundreds of variants remain, far more than can be accounted for by changes at the galley and page proof stages of production. Given the number and character of the variants, it is improbable that rts served as copy for either the Collier’s text or that of k1. We therefore reject both versions of the Southwick typescript as copy-text on the basis of the internal evidence presented above: far too many variants exist to suggest that RTs was setting-copy for either the magazine text or for k1, and the patterns of revision clearly reflect a movement from uTs to RTs toward K1. Moreover, there are no copy-editing marks present in the Southwick typescript. We conclude that at least one subsequent draft of the text was prepared, copies of which served as the basis for both the magazine text and that of k1. As with many other Cather novels, few changes were made to the text once the first edition in book form was published.

It is difficult to establish the relationship between the Southwick typescript and the typescript Paul Reynolds refers to in his memo of 6 March 1925. “The Family” runs from p. [1] through p. 138 of the Southwick typescript, but pp. 1126 in the one Reynolds had. “Tom Outland’s Story” runs from p. 139 through p. 199 in the Southwick typescript, but pp. 127-183 in the Reynolds one. These differences could easily be accounted for by the shorter length of a cleaned-up and retyped version of the Southwick text. Moreover, Reynolds had sold the novel to Collier’s by 11 March, and the first installment of the magazine text appeared fewer than three months later. To consider the Reynolds typescript as earlier (and presumably rougher) than the Southwick one, we would have to assume that Cather made at least two additional drafts between March and perhaps mid-May —that is, the Southwick one and a retyped version of RTs which she then sent to Collier’. If, however, the Reynolds typescript was produced later than the Southwick one, then most of the changes between rTs and c would be accounted for by the kind of lighter revision Cather usually made to a relatively clean typescript (one copy of which would be sent on to the magazine and the other retained for some additional revision prior to book publication). The latter alternative seems the more likely case, and one that reinforces our conclusion that RTs would have been a poor choice for copy-text.

The Collier's text, also authoritative, contains variants consistent with Cather’s usual practice of having a typist prepare a clean copy plus carbon, then sending one for magazine publication while she revised the other for book publication. Both substantive and accidental changes between c and K1 reflect late-stage refinements that, in our judgment, argue for K1 as best representing Cather’s intention at the time of her most intense engagement with the work. The magazine text does not in our judgment represent the intention of the author at the time of her most intense engagement with the work nearly so well, either in substantives or in accidentals, as does K1. The Autograph Edition text comes some thirteen years later and represents a later intention for the book, in this case one not significantly different substantively, except in its somewhat more formal style, from that realized in kr. The choice of copy-text in this instance depends on a combination of internal and external evidence, all of which points to KI,

External evidence suggests that Cather was interested in the magazine versions of her work only as they provided income; she told Knopf on one occasion that she reacted negatively to the very idea of such publication but recognized its income potential and publicity value (wc to ak, 22 November 1922). There is little indication that she took pains with any of the magazine texts of her fiction except for the Forum text of Death Comes for the Archbishop, of which corrected proof sheets exist for some chapters of Book I. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that she took great pains with the book versions. Edith Lewis, for example, notes that Cather “did not much like serial publication” (180) but insisted on seeing foundry proofs of her novels and asked Lewis herself to look at those proofs for Shadows on the Rock in her absence (161). We have many indications from other works, as well as the testimony of existing typescripts and of Alfred Knopf himself (in his memoirs), that Cather paid close attention to accidentals as well as to substantives in the Knopf first printings of her novels, and that long before 1925 she was using English spelling of such words as “colour” and “neighbour”—words that are routinely given U.S. spellings in the Collier’s text. She is also much more likely to hyphenate a compound than to present it as two words, as the Collier’s text tends to do.

Cather’s known interest in such matters as typography, page format, and illustration also suggests the primacy of the K1 text. She would not have liked the uninspired typography or the three- or four-column format used by Collier’s, and she would have objected to the arbitrary division of her work merely to ensure visually manageable units; the blank spaces between paragraphs in the magazine text often bear no relation to the text divisions Cather used in k1. There are so many of these units that, especially in conjunction with the positioning of the illustrations, they constitute what is in effect a different reading field, imposing another and foreign intention on the work.

For example, the breaks in c correspond to chapter divisions or white space in K less than 30 percent of the time. Many of the breaks come where there is a lapse of time or a change of scene in x, but by no means all: on three occasions, c breaks in the middle of a K paragraph, and several breaks come either in the middle of a scene in K or even in the middle of a conversation. The multicolumn magazine format requires many more breaks than the book and chapter divisions in K, and sometimes these breaks come almost immediately before or after the k divisions, thus seeming to defy the narrative’s structure. Because the breaks in c are by no means of equal length, several come in the course of two or three pages in K, chopping up the text into disconcertingly short sections.

The passages in KI not present in c also suggest K1 as copy-text, and were presumably cut by the magazine editor to save space. They significantly enhance the story, and they appear in all printings subsequent to K1 and were retained in the Autograph Edition text, a version known to have had Cather’s attention.

It is clear from the many and substantial differences between c and k1 that in the few weeks that elapsed before K1 was published, Cather made extensive revisions to her copy of the typescript she had sent to Collier's. That is, we conclude that the Collier’s text was based on one copy of a typescript and K1 on a later, revised copy. Cather probably made numerous changes on the Knopf galleys, but the differences between c and k1 seem too substantial and numerous to have resulted from changes in galley proof alone.”

In sum: (1) K1 is closest to Cather’s practice in its treatment of accidentals.’ (2) Cather is known to have taken great pains with the book versions of her works, but to have shown little or no interest in the magazine versions of most of them; nonlinguistic features of the latter, particularly their division into relatively short blocks of type, reflect intentions contrary to those realized in k1. (3) Had Cather regarded the magazine version of the novel as realizing her contemporary intention for the work, she would have sent to Knopf for use as setting-copy for the book a copy or duplicate of the typescript used by Collier’s, She did not do so, but sent a later, much revised one. (4) The substantive differences between the two published texts are broadly consistent with the difference between a late draft and a more finished work, especially the deletion in the magazine text of passages present in K1 and retained in all subsequent texts. (5) The many changes between the Collier’s text and that of K1 confirm Cather’s strong interest in revising her work up until its first publication in book form. Later printings introduce only a few changes in wording having to do with Tom Outland’s invention and correct some of K1’s typographical errors.

Not until 1938, when the Autograph Edition was published, is there evidence of the sort of revision that preceded K1. Many of the differences in accidentals between K1 and A, we have argued above, may be the result of house styling or edition design; the changes made are consistent with those made in other volumes of the edition. Moreover, there is no external evidence concerning the specific interventions Cather made. For these reasons, we follow Greg in adopting the accidentals of k1. The Autograph was a marketing venture designed to confirm Cather’s status as a novelist by presenting a “new” collected edition of her works. The new look is established by changes in typography and design and by a treatment of accidentals that helps ensure uniformity among the volumes in the edition. The edition, taken as a whole, realizes a different intention for the works included.

This new intention can be seen in many of the substantive changes as well. The Autograph text adopts in many instances the somewhat more formal or “correct” language and sparer style of Cather’s last years as a writer. The expansion of contractions and the change of “than” to “from” after “different” and from “though” to “although” exemplify this tendency; these changes were also made in other volumes of the edition. The variants specific to The Professor’s House show a similar pattern: unnecessary adjectives are pruned, generalizations are restricted, syntax smoothed out.

For all these reasons, we use a copy of the first printing of KI as copy-text and emend only to correct specified errors or inconsistencies.

The Cather Edition emends copy-text under the following circumstances: (1) to correct a typographical error; (2) to change an accidental when it is clear from many other examples that a particular reading is anomalous —a slip or a rare exception; (3) rarely, to resolve inconsistencies in accidentals occurring in such close proximity as to distract a reader; (4) to correct a misspelling, or supply the proper accent on a word in a foreign language; (5) to correct a substantive error or make a substantive change that Cather herself asked to have corrected or can be reasonably inferred to be a change she requested; (6) to correct a substantive error when it is clear from many other examples that a particular reading is a slip or a rare exception. We do not emend to “improve” Cather’s wording or grammar, to modernize her diction or usage or use of accidentals, to impose consistency where there is no evidence that consistency was desired, to incorporate authorial revisions that do not belong to the period of Cather’s fullest imaginative engagement with the work, or to correct errors Cather herself did not address (except when a simple factual error can be corrected without further revising the text).

The forty-one emendations accepted into the copy-text by the present editors include the correction of eleven typographical errors, two changes normalizing the inconsistent spelling of a character’s name, one correction of the spelling of a Paris street name, eighteen corrections involving accent marks, two place-name corrections, and two changes in the spelling of French place names. The number of emendations reflects the relative carelessness of typesetting in the first book edition; the work is not up to Knopf’s usual standard for Cather’s novels.

We also admit five substantive changes referring to Tom Outland’s invention; these do not appear in print until k10 (1949) but are indicated on the publisher’s records as early as 1942. We believe them authorial, and we admit them because they attempt to correct k1 rather than merely “improve” it. Outland could not have invented a “vacuum” or a “bulkheaded vacuum,” but he could have invented an “engine” or secured a “patent.”

We do not admit the variant substantive readings of the Autograph Edition. We know that Cather did an unspecified amount of work on the text of the novel for the edition, and she may well have indicated specific changes she wanted or have agreed with Houghton Mifflin on blanket procedures for some accidentals and even some substantives (for example, the change from “though” to “although”). In a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson dated 23 October 1937, for example, Cather notes that she made changes involving wording and punctuation even in the case of Death Comes for the Archbishop, where the changes were not extensive, but that she read proof and revised proof of the Autograph text only when there were extensive changes. We are as certain as we can being the absence of external evidence that some of the substantive changes here are authorial; no editor would have omitted a paragraph of Cather’s text, changed “rude” to “round,” or “often” to “sometimes”—at least not without her approval.

However, although the Autograph Edition text comes only thirteen years after k1, and the substantive differences between the two are not as obvious as in the case of O Pioneers!, we believe that the differences nevertheless reflect a different intention for the collected-edition text: they produce a somewhat more formal style, they occasionally modernize and smooth out the language, and they seem to us to present a reconception of a particular passage or phrase. For example, the expression of working men is certainly better described as calm, sarcastic, and mocking “sometimes” rather than “often,” as K1 has it, and a prehistoric tower is better described as “round” than “rude.” But we are committed to providing readers with the most fully realized text belonging to the period of Cather’s most complete imaginative engagement with her work, not with what might be in our opinion the “best” text of that work. When Cather made the revisions for the Autograph Edition, she and her publisher wanted a new and collected edition that would confirm her status as a major author, and Cather presumably made changes with that new intention in mind. We have no external evidence of the precise changes she made, but we do not believe those changes, even in the case of those substantives that we believe to be authorial, should take precedence over the readings of the first book edition. Had Cather felt strongly about the changes she made for the Autograph Edition, she would probably have tried to incorporate at least some of them into the subsequent printings of K, despite the expense involved.

Some readers may not be comfortable with this approach; they will see those relatively few substantive changes that are clearly authorial as perfecting the intention realized in K1 rather than contributing to what we have considered a new intention in A. Such readers may prefer the readings of the Autograph Edition found in the Rejected Substantives, which lists all substantive variants—other than those accepted as emendations—between the copy-text, the Southwick typescript, the Collier’s magazine text, and the text of the Autograph Edition. Variants from the Cassell and Tauchnitz editions are not included because we do not consider the variants of these editions authorial. The Rejected Substantives also includes a small number of accidental variants that affect meaning, such as the change from a period to an exclamation point, and a record of the differences in paragraphing among the several authoritative texts.

Records of Cather’s direct involvement in the design and production of her works have led us to take special care in the presentation of them. We are particularly concerned with compositor error. By agreement with the University of Nebraska Press, we undertake proofreading in stages to meet the CSE guidelines, which call for at least four readings. Insofar as is feasible within the series format of a scholarly edition, the editors have cooperated with the designer to create a volume that reflects Cather’s known wishes for the presentation of her works.

• 1. It is possible that a holograph or typescript text of The Professor's House exists in a private collection. To date, the editors have been unable to confirm its existence.
• 2. We follow the usual distinction: substantive variants are changes in wording (including morphemic variations); accidental variants include changes in spelling, case, punctuation, and word division. Typographical changes (in paragraphing, font, spacing, etc.) are neither substantive nor accidental, although they may be discussed; they represent part of what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographical” as opposed to “linguistic” codes. The basis of the distinctions here is the extent to which a class of differences affects the meaning of the text: typography and accidentals often do not, substantives usually do. However, we also recognize a class of quasi-substantives, which includes typographical or accidental variants which in a particular case seem clearly to affect meaning. There is a clear distinction in meaning, for example, between “she wanted to be there” and “she wanted to be there” or between “You're hungry.” and “You’re hungry?” See Bowers; Greg; McGann; and Tanselle. Richard Rust’s use of inflection as a basis for distinguishing accidentals that affect meaning has also been of assistance.

• 3. For this volume we conducted or supervised two solo hand collations and one independent team collation of a copy of the Southwick typescript against a copy of the Knopf first book edition; three independent solo hand collations and two independent team hand collations of a copy of the Collier’s text against a copy of k1; and two independent solo hand collations and one independent team hand collation of a copy of the Autograph Edition text against a copy of k1. The K1 standard of collation was machine collated or spot-checked against copies of several other printings, including k2—-10 and the Vintage paperback edition of May 1973. Copies of the Heinemann and Tauchnitz editions were also collated against the standard of collation. The collations were checked twice, and then against each other; the conflation was checked three times. The full record of the collations and conflations is on file and available in the Editorial Resources Center of the Department of English, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

  The following copies were used in the preparation of this edition (UNL=Love Library, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; HLCL=Heritage Room collections, Bennett Martin Public Library, Lincoln Ne):

  • Typescript: Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives and Special Collections, UNL.
  • KI, trade issue: uNL Spec. Slote ps3505 487P7 1925; UNL Spec PS3505 A87P7 1925; HLCL 3 3045 00782 8904; HLCL 3 3045 00782 8912.
  • K1, limited issue: HLCL 3 3045 00953 0458 (#74); UNL Spec. Slote ps 3505 487P7 1925bx (#103); UNL Spec. Sullivan ps 3505 A87P7 1925 (#157).
  • K1, Macmillan issue: HLCL 3 3045 00782 8854.
  • K2: UNL Spec. Faulkner ps 3505 a87P7 1925, C.2; HLCL 3 3045 00782 8896; Union College Library, Lincoln NE 813.c28p; copies owned by Susan J. Rosowski; a copy owned by Frederick M. Link.
  • K3: UNL Spec. Slote ps3505 a87P7 1925cx; UNL Spec. PS3505 A87P7 1925, C.2; HLCL 3 3045 00782 8888.
  • K4: A copy owned by Susan J. Rosowski.
  • K5: Clarkson Memorial Hospital School of Nursing, Omaha NE Ps3505 A87P7 1925; a copy owned by Kari A. Ronning.
  • K6: Duke University Library 813.5 c363Q, C.2, #329492.
  • K7: Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University 818 c63p, #ROIOI4 05482.
  • K8: Beatrice Public Library #29139, Beatrice NE.
  • K8, G and D issue: HLCL 3 3045 00782 8862; a copy owned by Kari A. Ronning.
  • K9: HLCL 3 3045 00721 3180; University of New Mexico PS3505 A87P7, C.2.
  • KIO: UNL Spec. Faulkner ps 3505 A877 1925.
  • K11: HLCL 3 3045 00844 0329.
  • K15: HLCL 3 3045 00783 0876.
  • K17: HLCL 3 3045 00783 0868.
  • K18 (Vintage v-913): uNL Spec. Faulkner ps3505 a87P7 1973} HLCL 3 3045 00782 8839.
  • Heinemann: University of Missouri-Columbia ps3505 A87P7 19254 1336085.
  • Hamish Hamilton (reprint of k1, 1961): UNL Spec. Slote PS3505 A87P7 196Ix.
  • Tauchnitz: unl Spec.ps3505 a87P7 1926; HLCL 3 3045 00955 9713.
  • Autograph: uNL Spec. Ps3505 A87A15 1937x, v.8; UNLSpec. Slote ps3505 a87A15, 1937x, v8; HLCL 3 3045 00782 8870; Rinsen reprint, Tokyo 1973: uNL Spec. Slote ps3505 A87AI5 1973x, v.8.
• 4. We have resolved end-line hyphenation in the copy-text to establish the form of the word or compound to be used in quotations from this edition. The following criteria are applied in descending order: (1) majority rule, if one or more instances of the word or compound appear elsewhere in the copy-text; (2) analogy, if one or more examples of similar words or compounds appear elsewhere in the copy-text; (3) by example or analogy, if one or more examples of the word or compound, or of similar words or compounds, appear in first editions of Cather’s works chronologically close to The Professor’s House; (4) in the absence of the above criteria, commonsense combinations of the following: (a) possible or likely morphemic forms; (b) examples of the word or compound, or of similar words or compounds, in the Autograph Edition text; (c) the form given in Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1926); (d) the Style Manual of the Department of State (1937); (e) hyphenation of two-word compounds when used as adjectives.
• 5. Several descriptions of Cather’s process of composition exist. See Bohlke, 41 (Nebraska State Journal 2/11/1921), 76 (New York World 4/19/1925), 125 (Good Housekeeping 9/1931); Lewis, 127. The most telling reference to her habit of making extensive changes in her drafts is in Lewis, p. 106.
• 6. The fee was substantial; the magazine rights to A Lost Lady, admittedly a shorter book, had brought only $2000. By this time Cather was reading proof for the Knopf first edition (ak to wc, 23 May 1925).
• 7. The information in this section is based largely on Joan Crane’s discussion in Willa Cather: A Bibliography, checked against copies of the Knopf printings and issues, the Publishers’ Weekly advertisements, and the Knopf production records.
• 8. Professor Herbert Johnson, Rochester Institute of Technology, was of material assistance in the interpretation of Knopf production records. In a private communication (January 1997), he warns against assuming that posting dates necessarily correlate closely with production dates: “The vendor’s invoice normally follows completion of the work by at least a week or more”; “Knopf’s production department might hold an invoice for up to thirty days or longer by questioning the accuracy of m, the charges”; “most publishing companies control cash flow by delaying (or, on rare occasions, advancing) payment.”
• 9. The standard changes for the 9th printing (ad card, title, copy right, and colophon pages) were posted to the production record on 23 October 1942. The list of corrections that follows was not posted until 8 April 1946. Professor Johnson notes that the charges for them are not included in the total for the 9th printing, which means that they were corrections for an anticipated roth printing. The small number of copies of the 9th printing, Professor Johnson notes, was probably the result of wartime paper restrictions.
• The “edition” published in England by Hamish Hamilton in 1961 also falls into this category; Crane notes (p. 118) that it was produced by photo-offset “from the first American edition (1925) plates.”
• 11. For a full discussion of the notion of reading fields, see McGann, especially chapter 5.
• See the textual introductions to Obscure Destinies and My Mortal Enemy (forthcoming) for analysis of two cases involving substantial evidence based on typescripts. Forthcoming editions of Lucy Gayheart, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Shadows on the Rock also make use of one or more typescripts.
• 13. See Greg.
• 14. We are aware of, but do not agree with, the arguments against the possibility of establishing a single satisfactory text. T. H. Howard-Hiill has put the matter succinctly: the “insistence that a scholarly editor is not a ‘rescuer and restorer’ of texts and that editors ‘have been caught out trying to promote the purity of texts’ leaves the matter of emendation in doubt. . . . If merely accidental collocations of words will satisfy the needs of literary critics, then editing is essentially unnecessary. Literary theories that emphasize the ambiguity, multivalency, and plurisignification of textual utterances recommend a form of edition in which these textual properties are appropriately acknowledged. Nevertheless, it seems that it would be important for critics who value these textual properties to know the source and (probably) the authority of the specific utterances on which critical attention is to be focused. Only the kind of textual criticism that results in the ‘establishment’ of a text can furnish this information. It may be polemically advantageous for advocates of new forms of editing to denigrate and dismiss the fundamental functions of textual criticism, but ultimately it is irrational” (52).
• 15. See Cather’s letter to Ferris Greenslet about foreign-language text and accents in The Song of the Lark, 12 May [1915].
• 16. We have not emended “leaped” (12.20) to “leaned,” for example, not only because it appears in all texts but also because it is feasible in context. The rationale for emending factual errors not noticed by the author is stated by G. Thomas Tanselle in “External Fact as an Editorial Problem,” especially pp. 42-46.
• 17. Cather incorporated some, but not all, Autograph Edition substantive readings into late printings of K in the cases of Death Comes for the Archbishop and One of Ours.
• 18. The University of Nebraska Press sets the novel’s text directly into page proof, running three sets. Two sets come to the Cather Edition editors, who read the clear text against the emended copy-text and the apparatus against the typescript setting-copy, first as a team and then as individuals. At this stage, the editors add page and line numbers to the materials comprising the apparatus, keying all references to the Cather Edition text. They also check end-line hyphenation to ensure accurate resolutions and to gather material for the word-division list B. Also at this stage, unP proofs the text of the new edition against the copytext and the text of the apparatus against the typescript setting copy. The editors collate their two sets of corrected proof and the Press collates all three sets, sending the final corrected proof to the compositor for correction, When the corrected proofs return from the Press, the editors again make a team collation of the material, correcting any errors in page and line numbers, checking to see that indicated corrections have been made. The Press, meanwhile, compares pages to corrected proof to ensure that no text has been dropped and reads the lines that have been corrected. When the Press sends xeroxes of reproduction paper (equivalent to “blues”) to the editors, they make a machine collation of these “repros” against the last set of proofread page proofs.

• Bohlke, L. Brent, ed. Wille Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Emendations

The following list records all substantive and accidental changes introduced into the copy-text, the first printing of the first edition, published by Alfred A. Knopf on 4 September 1925. The reading of the present edition appears to the left of the bracket; to the right are recorded the source(s) of that reading and, if different, the copy-text reading (k1), the readings of the unrevised and revised versions of the Southwick typescript (uts and rts), the reading of the magazine version (c), and the reading of the Autograph Edition (4). Different readings are separated by semicolons. The abbreviation ce indicates emendations made on the authority of the present editors. An asterisk following a line number indicates that there is a note on this emendation. Lineation refers to text lines only. The following texts are referred to:

• K1...10 The specific printings of the first book edition, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925–1949. A plus sign following indicates that the correction is made in subsequent printings. A “K" without a number following refers to all printings of the edition.
• UTS:The unrevised version of the Southwick typescript, University of Nebraska, Love Library, Archives and Special Collections.
• RTS:The revised version of the Southwick typescript, University of Nebraska, Love Library, Archives and Special Collections.
• C:The Collier’s magazine text of the novel, 6 June–1 August 1925.
• A The Autograph Edition text of the novel, vol. 8, Houghton Mifflin, 1938.
• CE The text of the present edition.
• 11.13* mantels] C, A; mantles k
• 39.3* Sudan] C; Soudan UTS, RTS, K, A
• 42.6* Outland engine] K10+; bulkheaded vacuum UTS, RTS,C,K1-9, A
• 42.15,43.6 engine] K10+; vacuum UTS, RTS, C, K1-9, A
• 53.2* Appelhoff]UTS, RTS, A;ApplehoffC, K
• 53.14 Appelhoff]UTS, RTS, C, A;ApplehoffK
• 101.4 day] Day K, C, A
• 101.11* Soufflot] CE; omittedC; Sufflot UTS, RTS, K, A
• 104.22* Lions] CE; Lyons CE; Lyons C K A
• 108.13 pompostiy] C, A; pompousuosity UTS, RTS; pompuosity K
• 112.25* Duchene] CE; Deschene UTS, RTS; Duchene C,K,A
• 114.4* mover] UTS, RTS, K8+, C, A; moved KI-9
• 125.23 Augusta] UTS, RTS, K8+, C, A; Agusta KI-7
• 133.7 patent] K10+; gas UTS, RTS, C, K1-9, A
• 144.4 Strictly] UTS, RTS, K8+, C, A; Strickly K1-7
• 145.12 patent] K10+; vacuum C, K1-9, A
• 149.9 Anotony] UTS, TRS, K8+, C, A; Anthony K1-7
• 156.18 Wednesday] UTS, RTS, K8+, C, A; Wednesday K1-7
• 171.17 came] UTS, RTS, K8+, C, A;come K1-7
• 184.25,185.2* Tarpin] CE; Pardee UTS, RTS, C, K, A
• 202.10* Acoma] UTS, RTS, C, K, A
• 218.13 Acoma] CE; Acoma UTS, RTS, C, K, A
• 229.25 oeuvres]C, A; oevreRTS; Oevres K
• 248.head VII]C, A; VI K; VUTS,RTS; {not in C}
• 259.15, 19* Garces] CE; Garces UTS, RTS, C, K, A

Rejected Substantives

This list records all substantive and quasi-substantive variants between the copy-text and the texts of the unrevised and revised versions of the Southwick typescript, of the Collier’s magazine version, and of the Autograph Edition that have not been adopted in the text of the present edition. The reading of the Cather Edition text appears to the left of the bracket; to the right appear the variant reading(s) and their source(s); variants are separated by semicolons. If a text is not cited, it agrees with x1. Ellipsis dots indicate an omission made for the sake of brevity; they are not part of the text of this edition. Page and line numbers refer to the text of this edition. Braces {} enclose editorial interpolations. A change from the earliest form of the unrevised text of the Southwick typescript to the later form, or from the earlier form of the revised text to the final form, is indicated by a pointed bracket ()). When the change results in the K1 reading, that is indicated by the symbol ) K1 rather than by including the k1 reading.

The Southwick typescript includes two versions of a number of passages, one version canceled and replaced with the other, both versions usually showing changes to the text. In this list we first locate such a passage in relation to the text of k1. We then present the canceled text in both its unrevised and revised forms, after which we list the variants between K1, the unrevised and revised versions of the replacement text, c, and a.

The following texts are referred to:

• UTS The unrevised version of the Southwick typescript.
• RTS The revised version of the Southwick typescript.
• CThe text published in Collier’s weekly magazine, 6 June through 1 August 1925.
• K1The text published by Alfred Knopf in September 1925.
• AThe text of the Autograph Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1938, vol. 8.
• 12.17: However...said] None the less, he quite agreed with his wife when she said c
• 13.15: curly, black] curly, black-and-gray c
• 13.17: his wicked-looking] These very striking c
• 13.19: that in a flash] that c
• 13.20: from] at once in c
• 13.25: had once] (in his dinner clothes, with a Spanish order in his coat, the professor was a very paintable person), once c
• 13.25: said:—“The] said of him, “The C
• 14.6: ridge] bridge c
• 14.11: out] down C
• 14.13: from] into it from C
• 14.19: this undertaking] this C
• 14.24: any] an C
• 15.2: sometimes stretched] would stretch C
• 15.10: spreading] single c
• 15.13: Masses . . . corners] In the corners were masses of green-brier c
• 15.15: bushes] bushes. Of his red-fruited thorn trees St. Peter was very proud c
• 15.20: had got] had c
• 15.24: sending] and sent c
• 16.4: deck] desk c
• 16.8-9: knew that] knew c
• 19.3: knew that] knew c
• 19.16: took on] had c
• 20.22: confidential.] confidential! c
• 21.9: I never] I’ve never c
• 21.14: I'm not] I am not A
• 22.8: here] here now C
• 22.16: so] so now C
• 23.6: first] the first C
• 23.16: with] up with C
• 24.3: mustn't] must not A
• 24.17: Augusta!] Augusta. C
• 25.8: the room] a room C
• 25.21: Ember day] or the Ember days C
• 26.7: thing!] thing, C
• 27.14-15: By that. . . work by] {not in C}
• 28.6: surely] invariably C
• 28.18-22: It was. . . the day] {not in C}
• 28.23: someone in] one of C
• 28.24: of the] in the C
• 29.24: But] But at least C
• 30.5: subtle] so subtle C
• 30.17: window] window, open on the hook, C
• 30.23: with his] with a C
• 30.24-25: into. . . again] back into his boat C
• 33.17: Nobody] None C
• 34.10-11: two last] last two A
• 34.23: have got] have had C
• 35.20: repulsive?] repulsive. C
• 36.24: coat? And] coat? It pleases the girls. And C
• 37.2: Louie] Louis C
• 37.3: so] so very C
• 37.18: restlessly. . . down] about C
• 38.5: rich] a rich C
• 38.17-18: Kathleen, the . . . she was— had] Kathleen, the St. Peters’ friends considered much less pretty, than her sister,-though she had uts; Kathleen, the younger sister) daughter looked even younger than she was-- had rts
• 38.22: glints] lights UTS, RTS, C
• 38.22: it. To] it, soft, curly, not abundant. To UTS, RTS, C
• 38.23: in the] about the UTS, RTS
• 38.24: cast] threw, cast UTS
• 38.24: in the] and the UTS, TRS, C
• 38.26: point.] pint, because of the tense way she threw her shoulders foward. UTS, RTS
• 39.1-8: Mrs. St. Peter . . . but quiet.] Seated between her daughters Mrs. St. Peter listened intently to the conversation between Sir Edgar and Marsellus. Scott, she saw, was going to be sulky because the talk was about things outside ) beyond his little circle of interests. She made no effort to draw him into the conversation, but let him prow] like a restless leopard among the books. The Professor was amiable, but quiet. Mrs. St. Peter frankly liked having a sonin-law who could tot up acquaintance with Sir Edgar from the Soudan to Alaska, and she was pleased with the turn the talk had taken. uts; {RTs =K1 except “Scott, she” ) “Mrs. St. Peter” ) K1}
• 39.10: Mrs. St. Peter] she uts
• 39.11: seat] place) seat UTS
• 39.12: found] took UTS
• 39.12: After] When UTS, RTS
• 39.17: not] not yet UTS
• 39.18: Then] If UTS
• 39.18: a fortnight ago] last week) K1 UTS
• 39.19: it must be] you must find it UTS
• 39.20: house] place place UTS, RTS, C
• 40.4: in half] in less than half UTS, RTS, C
• 40.5: can] can have C
• 40.5: We] Taken) We UTS
• 40.14: Edgar] Egbert UTS, RTS
• 40.15: and allowed] allowed uts
• 40.16: whose look at] who signalled to uts
• 40.16-17: implied that] that uTs
• 40.17-18: baronet . . . moustaches] gentleman with walrus mustaches uTs; baronet c
• 40.18: amounted to much after] were a baronet at uTs
• 40.19: Louie] Louis c
• 40.23: Edgar] Egbert uts
• 40.24: copied] made ) copied uTs
• 41.3: didn’t mean] didn’t uts
• 41.4: often say] say c
• 41.7: Louie] Louis a
• 41.19: understand] rise uTs
• 41.20: Louie] Louis c
• 41.21: hearts] heart uts
• 41.23: heavy] grizzled uts, RTS, c
• 41.23: eyebrows] eyebrows and squinting uTs
• 42.2: fighting with] in uTs
• 42.5: of the] of a uTs
• 42.6-7: vacuum that is] vacuum,-tahat [sic] is, a vacuum protected by a gas that does not fill it, the thing that is UTS
• 42.8-9: had taken pains to protect] he had protected it, taken out a patent uTs
• 42.9: He] But he uts, rts, c
• 42.14-15: you are... engine] it is the inventor of the Outland vacuum you are talking about uts; it is the inventor of the Outland vacuum you are referring to RTS, C
• 43.3-4: Air Service] air branch of the service uTS, RTS, C
• 43.9: got nothing out] got nothing out ) never got anything out {canceled} = K1 uTs
• 43.15-16: with. We have . . . pictures] with, and we have a room for all his personal effects, his library and pictures UTS
• 43.18: his] all his uts
• 43.21: his cool] his salad ) K1 uts
• 43.21: struggling with] mastering uts
• 43.22: had never] never uTs
• 43.23: seen] saw UTS
• 43.23: while] and that uts
• 43.24: friend.] friend, while Doctor St. Peter had been Outland’s discoverer, his closest friend, his whole personal life, indeed, except a complementary sentiment which went to the older daughter of the house. UTS
• 44.1: come here] come uTS
• 44.1: manuscripts] the manuscripts uTs
• 44.3: them] this uts
• 44.3: conversation] talk) k1 uts
• 44.16: we] Sir Edgar and I uts, rts, c
• 44.20: gazing] looking uTs
• 45.6: Louie] him uts
• 45.8-9: This . . . together.) That revived him, he took her arm and they went upstairs together. uts; {not in c}
• 45.11: outlandish!] outlandish, uTs, RTs, c
• 45.12: hear him] hear c
• 45.15: we] that we uTs
• 46.5: cigar-end] cigar uts
• 46.7: fastidious] exclusive uts
• 46.7: taste] tastes UTS
• 46.8: had half] half uts
• 46.12: After the] The uts
• 46.12: were] were quickly uts
• 46.12: they] the moment they uTs
• 46.15: Ford] little car c
• 46.16: Now what the] Now what in uts; What in c
• 46.20: Sunday] Sunday morning uTs
• 47.6: be] be so) k1 RTS
• 47.18: a] an UTS
• 47.20-21: begun to talk about] started the conversation on UTS
• 48.2: are annoyed] are peeved uTs; are plainly annoyed c
• 48.4: admit] own uTs
• 48.10: wouldn’t] would not a
• 48.21: it] the cup uTs
• 48.22: is] was UTS
• 49.8-9: thoughtfully, . . . before.] slowly, thoughtfully. uts
• 49.11-12: Whoever it was] Whoever uTs
• 49.14: sing] should sing uTs
• 49.15: as a] as UTS
• 49.15: or a] or UTS
• 49.24: keep] keeps c
• 50.9: or the] the uts
• 50.12: Outland] Outland, who had made) K1 uts
• 50.13: his wife] Lillian uts
• 50.14: and studying] studying uTs
• 50.16: complexion.] complexion, also because she was reserved and imperious in manner. With her reserved and almost forbidding beauty uTs
• 50.17: With her really radiant charm, she] she uTs
• 50.18: mind] a mind uts
• 50.19: What she had was] What She) k1 rts
• 50.21: vehement] strong uTS
• 50.23: his] their uTs
• 50.24: Lillian’s] her uts; his wife’s) k1 RTS
• 51.2: St. Peter’s] Godfrey's uts
• 51.2: accepted] took uts
• 51.3: offered him] that came to hand uts
• 51.5: Most] Though most uts
• 51.6: but they] they uts
• 51.8: man in] man on UTS, RTS, C
• 51.9-10: carrying on . . . Doctor Crane, the professor] developing his powers and constantly carrying on important research work was Professor Crane, Professor UTS; carrying on important research work was Crane, the professor c
• 51.10: St. Peter] St. Peter deeply respected him, and uTs
• 51.11-12: uninteresting —a narrow-minded man] the most } uninteresting, narrow minded uts
• 51.13: Years ago Crane] While they were still both of them young men, and friends in so far as University matters went, Crane uTS
• 51.14: which in] which had in uts
• 51.15: an operation periodically] operations every few years. Whatever strength and time he had left over from his lectures he needed for his research work UTS
• 51.19: Adventurers] Adventurers that Lillian had submitted, but she had never forgiven uTs
• 51.20: When he] St. Peter uts; The) K1 rts
• 51.21: the Professor] when he uts
• 51.22: the place] it uTs
• 51.23: head. He] head, and that this was the best possible day to go to see Appelhoff, because he lived down by the car shops and the noise was too deafening on week days. He uts; head. This was the best possible day to go to see Appelhoff, because he lived down by the car shops, and the noise there was too deafening on week days. He) k1 RTS
• 51.24: another part... car shops] the part of the town ) city uts; beyond another part of the city, by the car shops ) K1 RTS
• 51.25: workmen] workingmen ) K1 RTS
• 52.1: over] on UTS
• 52.5: was his dachshund bitch] sat his dachshund bitch, Minna, whose dugs dragged the dust uts; dachshund, Minna c
• 52.6-7: on in the empty house] on uts
• 52.7: rent] rent on the empty house uts
• 52.8: So irregular a] Such an irregular uts, RTs, c
• 52.8: Appelhoff] old Appelhoff uts
• 52.12: Fred] Fritz) k1 uTS
• 52.17: have] take uts
• 52.18: sickle] Seckel c; russet a
• 53.17: Crossing] On his way back to the old house, he crossed uTs
• 53.18: he] and uts
• 53.19: Langtry] Lilly) K1 uts
• 53.20: English clothes] one of the suits uts
• 53.21: customary] usual uts, RTs
• 53.23: In twenty years the two men] Lilly was younger than St. Peter, but they had both come to the University young men, and in twenty years they uts
• 53.25: Langtry] he uTs
• 54.1: hardly] scarcely uts, RTS
• 54.7: dropped] drooped uts, rts
• 54.10: younger] young a
• 54.15: Doctor] Dr. uts, RTS, C
• 54.16: Doctor] Dr. uts, RTs, c
• 54.22: along] in uTs
• 54.22-23: year now] year c
• 55.1: smooth] round uts
• 55.3: quality! We] quality. There is no such thing as quality anymore. We uTS
• 55.5: I've] I have A
• 55.8: Doctor] Dr. uTs, RTS, c
• 55.11: hesitated] hesitating uTs, RTS, C
• 55.13: pardon?] pardon. c
• 55.20: a part] a part) one of {canceled} uts
• 55.22-23: When young Langtry . . . supposed to be] Five years after St. Peter came to the University as head of the Department of European History, young Langtry was put in as full professor, his specialty being uts
• 56.2: Langtry] Young Langtry uts
• 56.5-6: popular . . . given for] popular, especially liberal credits for uTs
• 56.8: it in] it uTs
• 56.9: charge up] charge uts
• 56.13: to the regents] and the board of regents uts, RTS, C
• 56.17: worked] had worked uts
• 56.18: students throughout the State] students uts
• 56.19-20: businesses] business uTs
• 56.21: capital] state capital UTS
• 57.4-5: As Langtry felt . .. was due] The unpopularity of Langtry’s course had been charged uts; J As the unpopularity of Langtry’s course had been charged to RTS
• 57.5: a new] and a new uTs
• 57.6: There] As there uTs
• 57.6-7: the board] so the Board uts, RTs
• 57.10: his lectures] history uts, RTS, c
• 57.10: Langtry] he uts
• 57.19-20: introduced] had introduced uts
• 57.22: on the faculty] in the University uts
• 57.24: still had] had c
• 57.24: about.] about. It might, perhaps, be something to do with the Oxford prize, and the foolish fuss and publicity that had come along with it. uts
• 58.9: were very] were c
• 58.11: him] him always uTs
• 58.14-15: the standard] some standard uts
• 58.17: athletics] the athletica) athletica UTS, RTS
• 58.20: q The] The uts
• 58.20: heat, too, was hard on him] heat was hard on him, too UTS, RTS
• 58.24: the door] his the door uTs
• 59.1: vivid] very vivid uTs
• 59.6: were aware only of] saw only) K1 uTS
• 59.21: the edge of a] traced a uTs
• 59.22: tip] end c
• 60.6: she at least] she c
• 60.12-13: night, when I worked] night uts
• 60.20: this over] about this uts
• 60.25: succeed] pay UTS, RTS
• 61.17: use this money for] do with this money uTs
• 61.22: Tom] he uts, rts, c
• 61.23-24: allowance for me] allowance uTs, RTS
• 61.24-25: know—he ... about it] know what he thought, for he never talked to me about his will uts, rts; know what he thought, for he never spoke to me about his will c
• 62.2: that gas] his discovery c
• 62.17: movement] movement that was like a spring toned down to a mere rising from a chair uTs
• 62.18: owed] owe UTS, RTS, C
• 63.9: oughtn’t] ought not a
• 63.19: other friends] friends uts
• 63.23: is advised] advised uTs
• 64.1: Oh, yes!] I do. uTs, RTS, C
• 64.6: money] rents and royalties uts
• 64.7: be sorry] regret it uts
• 64.9: shan’t] won’t UTS, RTS, C
• 64.12: couch.] couch. “Thank God we got it over,” he was thinking, “and I’m quite sure I didn’t hurt her feel ings. UTS
• 64.13: enough,” he was thinking.] enough.” uts
• 64.14: He] All the same, he uts
• 64.16: would feel] felt uts
• 64.17: had always seemed] seemed uts
• 64.18: When] shoulders forward. {discontinuous; canceled} K1 UTS
• 64.23: jaunty] quick jaunty uTs, RTS, c
• 65.1: had been] was) K1 UTS
• 65.10: don’t!] don’t. uts, RTS, C
• 65.13: to like] he liked c
• 65.15: in the life classes at] study at) k1 uTs; in life classes at c
• 65.20: Nowdays] Nowadays uts, RTS, C,A
• 66.6: brake] break uTs, RTS
• 66.17: There] But there uts, rTS
• 66.17: back, however] back uTs, RTS
• 66.20: this] it uts
• 66.21: Lillian] that Lillian ) K1 uts
• 66.22: at the time] in ) at that time uts
• 66.22: couldn’t] could never quite uts
• 66.22-23: Kathleen’s] this uts
• 67.5-6: just ahead] ahead c
• 67.8: Professor] Doctor uTs
• 67.9: cutting] going to cut UTS, RTS
• 67.10: work.] work. We’re a little early. uTs
• 67.10: drop] go uTs, RTS
• 67.12: its] he’s uTs, RTS
• 67.19: reply to him.] reply: c
• 67.23: toys; they] toys, but they have little to do with mental growth. They uts
• 67.23-24: the real] the ) our {canceled} ) k1 uTs
• 68.3: more] the more uTS
• 68.18: in a] in the c
• 68.22: glittering] with the glitter of UTs, RTS, c
• 68.22: revelations. And] revelations from every man’s imagination to every man according to his needs. There was all he could hold of love and wrath and amazement, whether he was Dante or a chimney sweep. And uts; {rTs=K1 except “a man” inserted for “he” and not properly canceled}
• 69.2: (They . . . course)] they... course uTs
• 69.4-21: “Moses . . . heaven?] {not in c}
• 69.4: “Moses] Moses uTs
• 69.7: elaborate] the most elaborate uTs
• 69.7: give] make them up-standing, give UTS, RTS
• 69.8: feeling of dignity] sense of importance UTS, RTS
• 69.10: a religious] an important religious uTs, RTS
• 69.13: with more space and mystery] {k1 canceled and then marked stet} RTs
• 69.13: light] light) accent) k1 UTS
• 69.16: enthralling. With] enthralling. When a great man took the wrong woman in his arms, the heavens were darkened. Statesmen paid enormous sums in gold for a thorn or the bones of a saint. The imaginative values were recognized by kings and councils. Very little behind uts; enthralling. Very little behind rts
• 69.24: filed] came UTS, RTS, C
• 70.2-3: wants you to run out] wants you to go ) wants to take you UTS
• 70.10: building. “I] building. “It might teach him something. I uts
• 70.10: he] you uts
• 70.12-20: You cheapen . . . it again.”] beings, Godfrey. You cheapen yourself. It makes me a little ashamed.” “I was rather rambling on today, friends. I’m sorry you happened along. There’s a fellow in that lot, Tod Miller, who isn’t slow, and excites one to controversy.” “All the same,” murmured his wife, “it’s hardly dignified to think aloud in such company. It’s in rather bad taste, I think.” “Thank you for the tip, Lillian. I won’t do it again.” uTs; {RTS=KI ex cept “excites one” for “he excites me”; not in c}
• 70.25: fuss] fuss a little uTs, RTS
• 71.4: some distance] already well uts
• 71.5: his] going at a fine speed, his uts
• 71.6: on his head a] a vermilion ) K1 uts
• 71.9: deep] strong uTs, RTS, c
• 71.10: in the] at the c
• 71.11: strong red] strong uTs
• 71.11: the] the almost uts
• 71.12-13: his head looked] it made his head look uts
• 71.13: small] small in it) k1 RTS
• 71.14: heads] heads on the heads uts
• 71.15: helmets.] helmets. The old man looked like a red Indian, Scott observed to himself as he plunged in after him. uts
• 71.16: By] At uts
• 71.16-17: dressed and lying] lying uts
• 71.17: sand,] sand, dressed, uTs
• 71.25: notice] placard ) k1 uTs
• 72.3: Doctor] I say, Doctor uts
• 72.3: you] you really uTs
• 72.15: I get you.| I see, l see. urs, RTS
• 72.17: time] long while uts
• 72.18-19: gulls as they flew by] gulls uts
• 72.22: was] were UTS
• 73.1: work.] work; and not quite good enough uTs
• 73.3: that] it uts, rts
• 73.5: subject, and he loathed doing them] subject, it was his way of saying it, his optimistic squint the public liked-and he loathed doing it uTs; subject, it was his way of saying things, his optimistic squint that the public liked-and he loathed doing them ) K1 RTs
• 73.5: Scott] He uts, rts
• 73.7: talents] talent uTs
• 73.14: mouth] pretty mouth uTs
• 73.14: that] what uts, RTs, c
• 73.15: suffered.] suffered. St. Peter thought he understood both the young men his daughters had married. Scott had been in his classes, and he always liked him because he was good looking and uts
• 73.16-17: an historical] a historical c
• 73.18: asked] had asked rts, c
• 73.23: the Saladin] Saladin c
• 74.1: argument. The] argument, such as one uses with a child uts
• 74.4: curled and] curled, his uts
• 74.6: and Mrs.] and at Dinner Mrs. uts; as Mrs. a
• 74.6: said dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke. But] said something about heavy-handed caricature being rather tiresome now-a-days, when even cartoonists were becoming subtle. But uts
• 74.7: his] the uts
• 74.8: picture, and] picture the two young men left in his mind, and uTs
• 74.8-9: both the young men] both of them uts
• 74.11: bright] warm UTs, RTS, c
• 74.16: goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay] golden rod, and of intensely {“intensely” canceled} red-gold sunlight, it lay uts, RTs; goldenrod. The sunlight lay c
• 74.18: stuffed blue chairs] blue stuffed chairs ) K1 uTs
• 74.18-75.5: There was... selection.] {not in uts, RTS}
• 75.6: In a] In the urs, rts
• 75.6: beside the] beside a uts, RTS
• 75.6-8: sat Lillian . . . it seemed] with a little lacquer table between them, sat Lillian and Louie, bending uTs, RTS
• 75.7: lacquer] lacquered a
• 75.8-9: Lillian held up lovingly] Mrs. St. Peter held a lovingly uts; Mrs. St. Peter held up lovingly rts
• 75.12: than any] from any A
• 75.18: these] emeralds uTs
• 75.24: her hand] hand uts, rts
• 76.8: we shall] we uTs, RTS
• 76.10: shall attend] are going to uTs
• 76.15: Louie said] he added uts
• 76.19: Not] But not rts
• 76.19-20: on to] on uTS
• 76.24: beautiful] handsome uts
• 76.25-77.1: do about that] do) with) K1] rTs
• 77.2: tenants?”] tenants? That garden is a composed entity, it can feel. It would suffer under slovenly backyard conditions. Now I leave you two to your plots.” UTS
• 77.4: looked back] looked uts
• 77.6: had been] was rather uts
• 77.7: dresses, and] dresses, so like a Roman toga that only a woman with a good figure would look well in it, with uTs
• 77.8: hair. She] hair which was only a paler shade of gold now that there was some gray in it. She uts
• 77.10: have noticed] have uts
• 77.13: attitude] a particular attitude uTs, RTS, C
• 77.15: amused] greatly pleased uts
• 77.19: had thought] would have said uts
• 77.20: Scott McGregor] Scott uts
• 78.2-3: began to think that he understood his own] had to admit that he knew his uts
• 78.5: because] just because UTS, RTS
• 78.11: for the] the c
• 78.13: if] when uTs
• 78.13-14: sometimes dropped] dropped c
• 78.14: railroad] Harvy house uts, rts; Harvey House c
• 78.15: away] back uTs, RTS
• 78.16-17: positively cruel in its contempt] {“in the open contempt it expressed” added interlinearly uTs}
• 78.20: to like it] positively pleased uts, RTS
• 78.23-24: planned for . . . interests] planned for them uTs
• 79.5-6: It was splendid, St. Peter told himself] {“St. Peter told himself” typed in interlinearly} uts
• 79.9: sensible] sound uts
• 79.9: thought her] thought c
• 79.10: ready for] for c
• 79.10-11: dinner, Louie was gone. He] dinner, he uts, RTs
• 79.15-16: He’s not been here long enough] He’d better wait.) He’s not been here long enough. uts
• 79.16: he ought to] he’d better uts
• 80.3: glancing] looking uts, RTS, c
• 80.9: was sure] knew uTs
• 80.12: said. “He’s] said, and he’s uts
• 80.17: he found her] she was uts, RTs; had found c
• 80.20: in] on uTs
• 81.1: Early] Very) k1 uTs
• 81.2: that day] during the morning uTs
• 81.4: in the] that uTs
• 81.4: and] to uTs
• 81.6: bungalow] new bungalow uts, RTs, c
• 81.7: Pierce-Arrow] luxurious car c
• 81.12: her brows] the brows uts
• 81.12: nose. The curl of] nose and curl to uts
• 81.13: was] that was UTS
• 81.15-16: wide, slightly stooping] wide uTs
• 82.18: the motor] When the car uTs
• 82.18: wished he could] longed to uts, RTs, c
• 82.19: and] and as uts
• 82.19: noiselessly, for] noiselessly as possible {“as possible” canceled}, for {= k1} RTS
• 82.24: pale] white uts
• 83.1: “Have] “Have uts
• 83.2: storm] snow UTS
• 83.8: eyes] pale blue eyes uTs
• 83.12: stole] stole and muff uts, rTS, c
• 83.12: is it] are they UTS, RTS, C
• 83.13: it’s] they’re UTS, RTS, C
• 83.15: back] off uts
• 83.16: down] down and began to cry UTS, RTS
• 83.20-21: St. Peter] St. Peter {“her father” added interlinearly, then canceled} uTs
• 84.16: suggestions] suggestion UTS
• 84.17: you’ve] you have a
• 84.22: shown] showed uTs, RTS
• 84.24: shown] showed uTs, RTS
• 85.1: While] When uTs, RTs, C
• 85.9: together.”] together. It’s bad taste.” uTs, RTS
• 85.10: hers] they uTs, RTS
• 85.15: the] that uts
• 85.18: it. It’s] it. They are the kind of clothes everybody would have if they could. But it’s uts
• 85.21: to me. What] to me. I relied absolutely on her judgement. What uTs
• 85.22: about anything] about what anyone said or did uts
• 86.7: the same, anyway,” her father protested] the same, anyway UTS
• 86.8: process earned] patent brought in uts
• 86.11-12: experiments] work uTs
• 86.21: Come now!] Come, now. UTS, RTS, C
• 86.22: you] that you uTs
• 86.23: space] his) k1 uts
• 87.12: as] when uts
• 87.14: had to be] was uTs
• 87.19: all] in the uts
• 88.3: was very independent] had a strong preferance [sic] for doing things for herself uts
• 88.5: asked for help] would ask for help uts
• 88.6: When they were little girls, Kathleen] She uts
• 88.7: wait on] do things for uts
• 88.8: coat] coats UTS, RTS, C
• 88.10: grown] young women UTS, RTS, C
• 88.11: until] until after uTs, RTS, c
• 88.14: Rosie’s] Rosie for uTs
• 88.19: as the Angelus was ringing] at six o’clock when the factory whistles were blowing uTs
• 88.20-21: his lamp] lamp-light uts
• 89.6: this] this that UTS, RTS
• 89.9: lectures. He] lectures at the University ) k1 uTs
• 89.13: The St. Peters] They uts
• 89.13-14: the Blackstone] his hotel) K1 uTs
• 89.14: before going] and later he would take the Professor and Mrs. St. Peter uTs
• 89.23: Rosamund called him] Marcellus brought him his tea UTS
• 90.1: Louie came and put] Having got rid of the cup, Louie put uTs
• 90.1-2: shoulders, exclaiming delightedly] {“exclaiming delightedly” interlinearly} uTs
• 90.7: South] North uTs, rts
• 90.13: early; you] early, for you uts
• 90.13-14: for to-night] tonight uTs
• 90.13-14: to-night. You] tonight.” / “Have I?” / “You uts
• 90.15: fry] fry tonight uts
• 90.17: Very well] How nice of you us; Oh, very well rts, c
• 90.24-25: ladies, to express his satisfaction] ladies, and enjoyed {illegible word} thing {illegible word} uTs
• 90.25-91.1: Professor had forgotten . . . hospitality] Professor had forgot his scruples about accepting lavish hospitalities uts; Professor {rest of uts reading canceled, then marked stet} rts
• 91.2: glad to have] glad not to have a uts
• 91.3: go away to] go to uTS
• 91.4: remarked to] told his uts
• 91.8: isn’t it] don’t you think so uTs, RTS, c
• 91.9: eight o’clock] eight thirty rts
• 91.11: gracious] melting UTS, RTS, c
• 91.17: too.] too. I wonder if she is? uts
• 91.25: fragile] little uts
• 92.6: recalled] it recalled uts, RTs, c
• 92.6: sweet] pure UTS; pure) vague) K1 RTS
• 92.9: turned] observed uts
• 92.9: wife. “A fine cast, don’t you think?”] wife that it seemed to him an extremely good cast uTs; wife that it ) the cast) K1 RTS
• 92.11: good as any] good as any {canceled and restored} RTS
• 92.12: heard] heard in the old days c
• 92.14: things!] things, uTs, RTS, c
• 93.14: the glasses] her opera glasses) k1 UTS
• 93.17: been] beat uts
• 93.18-19: tenor’s last aria] serenade uTs
• 93.23: his] the uts
• 93.23: shipwreck] shipwreck in early life uTs
• 94.7: Louie] Louie and Rosamund uts
• 94.11-12: some of the .. . to dinner] the members of the faculty immediately concerned and invited them to dine uts; several of his friends ) some of the faculty there {“there” canceled} and immediately invited them to dinner {=K1} RTS
• 94.24: everybody up] up everybody uTs, RTS, C
• 95.2: anyone] anybody uTs
• 95.9: is] was UTS
• 96.10: extravagance,” he muttered] extravagance. I’m going to have some of that money for my own self,” he declared uts, RTS, C
• 96.16: would be] was to be uTs
• 96.17-18: in the old house] in his study in the old house uts
• 96.18-19: some sandwiches] a lunch) k1 uTs
• 96.20: kept] had uts
• 96.21: forms] bust uts
• 96.22: trip to] stay in UTS
• 97.2: dozens] dozen uTs
• 97.2-3: sherry that . . . came home] sherry he had been drinking because he could get it cheap, and because he had engaged passage home uts
• 97.4: got the wine through] could get the wine in uTs; got the wine in RTs, c
• 97.8-9: between her] between the ) k1 uTs
• 97.13-14: looking] look uts, rTs, c
• 97.15: Doctor] Dr. uTs, c
• 98.3: unlike] different from UTS, RTS,C
• 98.3: step] quick step uTs
• 98.4: me] me of something uts
• 98.5: ask you a question] ask you uTs
• 98.6: Mystical Rose] rose of roses uts; Rose of Roses RTS, C
• 98.7: Ivory] David uTs, RTs, c
• 98.17: The Magnificat] It c
• 98.17: doth] shall uts, RTS
• 98.20: Virgin] Holy Virgin uts
• 98.25-99.1: to her] the) K1 uTs
• 99.1: our Lord] the Saviour uTs
• 99.7: climbed] went up uTs, RTS, c
• 99.11: often in the] so often in uTs; so often in the rTs, c
• 99.15: upon] she left upon uTs
• 99.15-16: she made . . . plausible!] those terrible women were made entirely plausible, on occasion he found them arch and gay uts she managed to make) KT RTS
• 99.17: the] these uts
• 99.24: under] being under uts, c; {“being” canceled, then marked stet=uTs} RTS
• 99.24-25: preparation downstairs] preparation UTS
• 99.25: while] time uTs, RTS
• 100.2: drama] incidents ) k1 UTS
• 100.2: beneath him] downstairs uTs
• 100.3: played . . . those incidents] played with them delightedly uts; played with delightedly with all those incidents RTS
• 100.5: her] her long uts, RTs
• 100.7-8: dramatic . . . birds] birds c
• 100.10: interwoven] embalmed uts
• 100.10: memories] memories, birthdays and anniversaries and Halloweens ) Halloween parties and pumpkins and Christmas suspense and surprises UTS; memories,-birthdays and anniversaries, Halloween pumpkins and Christmas suspense and surprises RTS
• 100.12: went] sat down and went uts
• 100.15: rang out and told] told uts
• 100.18: peered with interest into] opened the little) k1 uTs
• 100.19-20: a wicker . .. Gibraltar] {not in c}
• 100.20: strawberries] Malaga grapes uTs
• 100.20: Gibraltar] Gibraltar-and looked into it with interest UTS
• 100.25: From the chest he] He opened the chest and uts
• 100.25: round] round red uTs
• 101.1: was thinking] began thinking uts; began to think RTS
• 101.2: Paris, when he] Paris, when he was a boy, among others, of one All Souls’ day, which he remembered well for the most trivial reasons. He uts
• 101.3: living at] living in) kt uTs
• 101.4-5: boys. There... had gone] boys, and he went uts
• 101.5: train and] train to spend his holiday. He walked over from the Gare St. Lazare to the Pantheon, not a long walk if one took the short cuts, and uts
• 101.7-8: inside] into UTS, RTS, C
• 101.8: After breakfast] And then uts; Then rts, c
• 101.9-12: The sky .. . sunlight.] {not in c}
• 101.13: on] and on uTs
• 101.14: nothing but] but uTs
• 101.17: Pantheon itself] Pantheon uTs, RTS, c
• 101.23: were] they were uTS
• 102.2: spread out] arrange UTS, RTS, C
• 102.4: price] price of the flowers UTS, RTS, C
• 102.7: a bunch] one uts
• 102.8: no] not) K1 uTS
• 102.12: into] in uTS
• 102.15: The man] He uts
• 102.21: such a] such uTs, RTS, C
• 102.23: A moment later he was strolling]/ He was wandering) strolling uts; A moment later he was strolling RTS, C
• 102.24: bouquet] flowers uTS, RTS
• 102.25: filed past him] filed uts
• 102.25-103.1: rain. The . . . came] rain, a whole school of orphan girls, uTs
• 103.2: uniforms] dresses all just alike uts
• 103.3: nuns] sisters uTs
• 103.9: the girl’s] that eager, uts, RTS, c
• 103.10: spent] eventually found) k1 uts
• 103.11-12: back to the Gare St. Lazare] over to the station uTs
• 103.13: home] back uts
• 103.14: dinner.] dinner. He was living with the Thieraults to teach the sons English. M. Thierault had a business in Marsealles [sic] and New York. uts
• 103.15: When he] When St. Peter uts, rTS
• 103.15: Thieraults] family uts
• 103.16: Madame] Mme. uTs, rTs
• 103.19: she never . .. but he] never fond, but kind and loyal, he knew where to find her uts; never fond, but kind and loyal —he could depend upon her rts, c
• 103.23: still lived at] was in Paris. ) still in uts
• 103.23-24: had a business in Marseilles. When] in Marseilles, and when uts; had a business in Marseilles, and when RTs, C
• 104.1-105.11: It was one... him through.] Their children wrote to him on his birthday and sent Christmas cards to his daughters. There was no pleasanter way to keep Christmas day than to remember the Thieraults uts; {first sentence = uts} Always on Christmas day he remembered the Thieraults rts
• 104.4: him, and he] him. He c
• 104.21: spare] sparse c
• 104.22: On the] On that strange c
• 104.24: St. Peter’s] his c
• 105.3: Nevadas] Nevada c
• 105.8-9: definitely . .. themselves] the mountain ranges did c
• 105.12-13: It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the new house, but he was] { He went home uTs; The Professor went home rTs
• 105.14: frame] state UTS, RTS
• 105.15-17: He quite . . . was dressing] On the contrary, he found, while he was dressing, that he quite looked forward to it UTS, RTS
• 105.18: That evening ... house] He went down stairs just as his two daughters were coming in, they had uTs; That evening his two daughters rts
• 105.20: her father noticed] he saw uTs, RTS, C
• 105.22: to find courage to say] to say UTS
• 105.23: her] her out uts
• 105.24: jewels] new necklace uTs, RTS, C
• 106.1: looking] looking, with all my eyes uts
• 106.2: you see] you know uTs
• 106.11: wore] had on uts, RTS
• 106.14: displeasure] something) k1 UTS
• 106.15-17: back into .. . for Mamma?”] away to take a handkerchief from the pocket of } bag she had left with her coat uTs; {K1 except “Mother” added and canceled before “Mamma”} rts
• 106.18: cocktails. Scott] cocktails, and Scott uts
• 106.20: journalists] fellows uts, RTS, c
• 106.21: you] you journalists uTs, RTs, c
• 106.25: can drink hard liquor] like whiskey uts; can drink hard stuff) k1 RTS
• 106.26: stuff] stuff, and that’s hard to get uts
• 107.5-6: Mrs. St. Peter pleaded] pleaded Mrs. St. Peter uts
• 107.7: so wrathful] wrathful c
• 107.12: alone with] with uTs, rTS
• 107.17: make, I’m] make. I don’t kno [sic] }k1 uTs
• 107.25: his] both uTs, RTS, C
• 108.3: stood before her and tapped] tapped c
• 108.6: Professor.] Professor. “You are more adaptable about dinner than either Scott or I.” uts
• 108.11: silver bracelet] bracelet uts, RTS, c
• 108.21: it] Tom c
• 108.23: one] person UTS, RTS, C
• 108.24: The] You are the c
• 109.8: THAT winter] In January uts, rTs, c {except full capitals}
• 109.8: an Association] th [sic] ) a society uTs; the Association RTS
• 109.9: Louie] Louis uTs, c
• 109.10-11: visiting engineers] engineers UTS
• 109.19: lunch!] lunch. uts, C RTs
• 109.23: Louie] Louis c
• 110.1: he was] was UTS
• 110.12: Outland] Outland in the flesh uts
• 110.13: He] St. Peter uts, RTs
• 110.16: led from] led into the garden from uTs
• 110.17: “Are] He took off his Stetson. “Are uTs
• 110.17: Peter?” he inquired] Peter?” uts
• 110.20: face, which was covered] face was covered uTs
• 110.20: moisture] perspiration) K1 UTS
• 110.21-22: his manly] his voice) k1 UTS
• 110.23: shouts] grumble uTs, RTs, c
• 111.1: the young man’s] his uts
• 111.2: which] that uts, RTS, C
• 111.2-4: been... exposed] been exposed c
• 111.15: I’ve] I have a
• 111.15: the] my uts
• 112.1: did.] did? c
• 112.2-3: red-fruited thorn-trees] spotted laurel uTs, RTS, c
• 112.3: it?”] it? Oh, anywhere.” uTs; it. Begin anywhere.”) K1 RTS
• 112.7: thorough] good uts
• 112.14: Spanish.”] Spanish.” The boy reddened. “But,” he added hopefully, “I’ve studied some history. We read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire out loud, in English.” uTs
• 113.1: in it] in uTS, RTS
• 113.5-6: And, by the way,] And c
• 113.10: “How old are you?” {not in uts}
• 113.18: grave. “I’m] grave. He leaned forward on the nail keg and clasped his hands between his knees in the attitude of an old man. “I’m uts
• 113.19: fixed] fixed about money uTs
• 113.25: bossing a] on the uTs, RTS, C
• 114.3: learned] got uTs
• 114.3: story that] story out of him that uts
• 114.5: they were] he was) k1 uTs
• 114.6-7: informally adopted] “sort of adopted” uts
• 114.7: took care] had taken care uTS
• 114.11: As soon] They were Irish Catholics and the mission priest took an interest in Tom. As soon uTs
• 114.11: Tom] he uts
• 114.12: enough to work] enough, he uts
• 114.14: “What's a call boy] “And what's that uts
• 114.16: Fé, and a lot] Fe. A lot c
• 114.19: freights] freight uts, RTS, c
• 114.20: a brakeman] brakeman uts, rts
• 114.22: to four] or uts
• 114.23: with nothing] nothing uts
• 115.1-10: you out in time... the garden and] you out in time to make it. The boy has to be on to things in the town. If you’re not at home, he has to know where to get you. He has to know when there’s a poker game on, and how to slip in easy. There’s likely to be spotters around, and if a man is) man’s reported for gambling, he’s fired. A call boy has to protect his men, and sometimes he has to pull them out of places.” / “Places?” / “Places I wouldn’t like to mention before you. But I found out that when a man wasn’t sleeping where he ought to sleep, there was usually a reason at home.” The boy spoke with deep gravity, as if he had reflected deeply upon irregular behaviour. / Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and uts {canceled and replaced with p. 86 1/2, whose variants follow}
• 115.1: up in] out in uTs, RTS, c
• 115.2: be on to] on uTs
• 115.11: her] the) k1 uTs
• 115.12: Outland started] The boy started up uts; The boy started RTS, C
• 115.14: his] the boy’s) Outland’s rts; Outland’s c
• 115.15: telescope] telescope travelling-bag A
• 115.16: house and... the hall] house uts
• 115.17: bulk.] bulk. He put it down under the hatrack in the hall. uts
• 115.20: as he] and as he uts, RTs
• 115.25: and her] her uts, rts, c
• 116.1: Mrs.] And Mrs. uTs, RTS, c
• 116.6: girls] girls as if he had never seen women before uTs
• 116.13: We] My wife uTs, RTs, c
• 116.13: hear more] hear uTs, RTS, c
• 116.23: potato] potatoes uTs
• 117.1: on quietly] quietly on uTs, rTS
• 117.5: have brought] brought uTs, RTs, c
• 117.14: ones.] ones, UTS, RTS, C
• 117.14-15: it out] it UTS, RTS,C
• 117.17: ruins] cliff dwellings uts
• 117.18: trail . . . {ellipsis in text} pinions] trails, pinons uTs, RTS; trail pinions c
• 117.19: rock] limestone uTs
• 117.20: moccasin] moccasined C
• 117.21: come] frown {for “grown”} uTs
• 117.24: side of the jar] side uts, RTS, C
• 117.25: “That’s] “That’s uts, rTs, c
• 118.3: those people] them uTs
• 118.5: “That] “Oh, that uTs
• 118.7: me!] me. UTS, RTS,C
• 118.12: Egypt] Rome) k1 uts
• 118.12: jars] things uts, RTS, C
• 118.13: this one to have] to have that one get uts; to that one to have rts
• 118.24: Taking] He took uts
• 118.25: he walked] and going over uTs
• 119.1: were, and] were sitting held uts
• 119.4: or of] or c
• 119.4: summer] summer, about the size of chestnuts) walnuts UTS
• 119.8: look green] green uTs
• 119.16: that] that {lined out, then marked stet=x1} uts
• 119.25: just] exactly uts
• 120.5: still true] was all one could say about him) still true of him uts
• 120.6: yet] and yet uTS, RTS
• 120.10: (but no white space) With a good tutor, young Outland] {white space, J} St. Peter turned young Outland over to a good tutor. He uTs; {and white space, but text=K1} c
• 120.12: for him.] for him. Though he had a good memory, he had had to study. uTs
• 120.14: tutor had] tutor said he had rts, c
• 120.18: and the] that the uts
• 120.21: husband did] husband uTs, RTs, c
• 120.22: took care] saw UTS, RTS, C
• 121.3: country in] in UTS, RTS, c
• 121.7: think!] think? c
• 121.8: “How is that?”] “How’s that?”) k1 uts
• 121.15: St. Peter] Her father uts
• 121.15: asked her] asked uts
• 121.15: ever said] happened to say uTs
• 121.16: happened that] was uts
• 121.19: Tom’s father] he uts
• 122.1-2: And she died in] and she died right there in uts
• 122.8-9: Kathleen and Rosamund] They
• 122.16: wages] pay) K1 UTS
• 122.16: take care of] look after uTs
• 122.24: it off] off uTs, RTS, c
• 122.25-124.2: After the . . . open windows] After that first day, when he had introduced himself to them, Tom almost never spoke of his past life to the Professor or his wife. His freedom with the little girls was perhaps a cure for homesickness. Something seemed to come out of their interest and sympathy that warmed him; he liked to hold them close to him in that way. They never bored him. He seemed to look forward to an hour with them more than to any other recreation. He enjoyed their prettiness and freshness as if they were flowers. Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom’s face, now so much fairer than when he first came, if Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed it violently, crying, “Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy went to the snake dance, and then afterward tell us about the terrible rattlesnake that bit Henry!” He would manage to hold on to her hand while he replied to her father’s questions about his work, but as soon as possible he always escaped to the garden behind the laurel bushes. Then from the open windows uts; After that first day, when he had introduced himself, Tom almost never spoke of his past life to the Professor or his wife. His freedom with the little girls was perhaps a cure for homesickness. Their interest and sympathy warmed him; he liked to hold them close to him in that way. {from this point rts=UTS until} went to the Ship Rock, and then {the rest of rts = uTs through} the open windows rts {uTs and rTs canceled and replaced with new text, Ts pp. 93 %; its variants follow}
• 122.25: the first] that first uts, RTS
• 123.9: afford] find ) k1 uts
• 123.15: There] {discontinuous text} member of the family. There uts
• 123.24: found the water hole dry] went to the Shiprock and } K1 UTS
• 124.2-3: the Professor . . . laughter and] the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and the Professor would hear the laughter and uts
• 124.4: and that singularly] and the very uts
• 124.6: modulations.] modulations. { On winter evenings, when Tom was in the house, St. Peter often found a pretext for coming down from his study for a few moments to play evesdropper [sic] for a moment, or to look in on the group popping corn by the diningroom fire. uts; {RTs=uTs except “for a few moments” deleted, “eavesdropper” spelled correctly, and “for” deleted; the entire passage then canceled.}
• 124.9: mathematics] mathematics. After lingering near them he would go back to his work with a safe, happy feeling about them all. Tom was a valuable addition to his family circle. uts, rts, c {except c has final ellipsis instead of period}
• 125.3: ascending] coming up UTS, RTS
• 125.6: her in] her in with a kiss uts
• 125.7: “Kitty] “Kitty uts
• 125.11-12: the sewing-chair] sewing chair uts
• 125.12: walked] went uTs
• 125.14: and clean] a clean uTs
• 125.15-16: called on you] been up uts
• 125.16: here alone] alone c
• 125.17: more than once] several) k1 UTS
• 125.17-18: away again] away UTs, RTS
• 125.21: so] quite so UTS, RTS, C
• 125.23: It’s about] It’s partly about uts
• 126.18: speak] go uTs
• 126.20: head] head over her fur neck piece uTs
• 127.2-3: before he advised Augusta; and] and told Augusta to have nothing to do with it, and uts
• 127.4: do the same thing over again] only do it again uTs; do the same thing again c
• 127.4-5: Rosamund said they] She said she uTs
• 127.5: Augusta] her uts
• 127.12-13: a sewing-woman; that she gave] sewing-woman, and gave uTS
• 127.21: make it up] cover it uts
• 127.24: blunderers] injustice uTS, RTS
• 128.2: hundred dollars] hundred uts
• 128.5: rest] other three UTS, RTS, C
• 128.5: she] he) K1 uTS
• 128.7: give either] give uts
• 128.12-13: with a pale yellow stripe] by exposure to an ardent sun. (to intense sunlight.) {all typed interlinearly} with pale yellow stripes uts
• 128.21: “Just like a livery stable!] “Oh yes, like a livery stable uTs; “Just like a livery stable, wasn’t it! rts; “Just like a livery stable. c
• 128.22: cow-ponies] cow ponies that had never seen a curry comb uts
• 128.25: Old Mexico] Mexico uTs, RTS, c
• 129.2: He] You know, he uts
• 129.3: Legion] Legion, that it was the kind of society to look for him in uts
• 129.7: Do you know, Kitty] {k1 canceled, then marked stet} RTS
• 129.8:myself] myself, Kitty rts
• 129.13: was supposed] was lying in the hammock, or supposed uts
• 129.17: drugged] being drugged uts
• 129.19: you] you, even UTS, RTS
• 129.23: mesa] mesa and Tom’s people uts
• 130.4: Always] But always UTS, RTS
• 130.5: Always had] always that uts, rts; Always that c
• 130.6: eyes ... {ellipsis in K1}] eyes,-and to me in his hand more than anywhere else uTs; eyes. c
• 130.8: room.] room. That was a very curious and unusual illusion uts
• 130.12: She put on her jacket] Kathleen threw her head forward uts; Kathleen put on her jacket rts
• 130.13-14: on the landing, looked after her] at the head of the stairs UTS
• 130.14: When] After uts, RTS, C
• 130.15: still stood there, motionless] remained there looking after her, very still uts; remained there, very still c
• 130.22: Dean] chairman uts
• 130.22: remarked] had remarked a
• 131.4: requesting an interview] desiring ) requesting an in ) K1 UTS
• 131.11: I’m] for I’m uts
• 131.14: Pendulum] Pendulum, Lillian uts
• 131.15: on a] to a) K1 UTS
• 131.16: under the] to the c
• 131.16: just so often] periodically uts, RTs, c
• 131.18: at her husband’s back] studied her husband’s back, thoughtfully uts
• 131.21: Doctor] Doctor uts, rts; Dr. c
• 131.22: girl] plain girl uts, RTs
• 131.22: whom] who uTs, RTS
• 131.24: only] only the) k1 uts
• 131.25: live] love UTS, RTS
• 132.3: arranged] they arranged uTs
• 132.4:with her at] at uTs
• 132.6: conduct] show uTs
• 132.10: led] conducted uTs
• 132.18: Doctor] Dr. uts, RTS, c
• 132.22: on worse] on UTS, RTS, C
• 133.1-2: what I haven’t got] when I’ve never got anything out of it myself uTs
• 133.10: working with] helping ) k1 uts
• 133.10: Tom] He uts; Outland rts
• 133.11: theory] idea) k1 uTs
• 133.17: advanced] lowered uts, RTs
• 134.3-4: Rosamund’s lawyers] Rosamund and her lawyers UTS
• 134.4-5: had no} had uts
• 134.9: then] the thing uts
• 134.16: couldn't!"-- ] couldn't" -- C
• 134.20: he] we UTS, RTS
• 135.8: gas] discovery c
• 136.4: all] all that c
• 136.7: go,] go, and give it flesh and blood uts
• 136.12: took] had taken uTs, RTs
• 136.14: there!] there. uts, RTS, c
• 136.16: friendship] feeling uTs
• 136.16: hands] hands, so he wouldn’t fight uts
• 136.17: consideration for] for uTs, RTS, C
• 136.17: him. You might] him.” / “What could I have done, Mrs. Crane?” / “You could uts; him. You could RTS, C
• 136.19: having] going into uTs
• 136.22: building] buying ) k1 uTs
• 136.23: you’ve] you have a
• 136.25: don’t remember] forget) k1 uTs
• 137.1-2: St. Peter... patiently] St. Peter, who was still wandering about as if looking for a door of escape, turned to her abruptly uts, RTs, c
• 137.6: can] should) k1 uts
• 137.7: should be] should uts
• 137.8: feel] feel about it) k1 uTS
• 137.18: I] I know uTs, RTs, c
• 138.3: had fought] had been thrown together by the face [sic] that they fought uts
• 138.4: had resisted] fought uTs
• 138.5: was undermining] undermining uts
• 138.7: seemed determined] wanted uts
• 138.9: studies] courses uTS
• 138.12: tried to diminish] tried to increase the number of credits that had to do with trade and to diminish UTS
• 138.12: credits required] required credits uts
• 138.15: professors] men uTS
• 138.16: studies] studies altogether uTs, RTS, c
• 138.21-22: influence of politicians in university affairs] courses into which politicians were steering the University UTS
• 138.22: The honour went, instead,] The office was given UTS
• 139.4: and they] and uts
• 139.6: it] they uts
• 139.6: couldn’t ask] could never have asked uts; couldn’t RTS
• 139.6-7: the presence] because Crane lived on a diet and because the presence uTS
• 139.8: Dr. Crane] Crane uts; / Dr. Crane c
• 139.12: and] or c
• 139.14: St. Peter couldn’t help] Noone [sic], St. Peter felt, could uTs
• 139.15: ill] frail) k1 uts
• 139.17: these] those c
• 139.22: disturbed him too much] made him uncomfortable uTs
• 139.22: dancing] and dancing a
• 140.1: is too dreary! All evening] makes me uncomfortable. All the while uts
• 140.2: coming down] coming c
• 140.5: graduated] had been graduated c
• 140.6: worked] had worked uts
• 140.7: had been] {“had been” canceled and restored} rts
• 140.8: Though] Although a
• 140.10: percentages] percentage c
• 140.14: law] law about it uts
• 140.15: be tempted by] want nothing but uts
• 140.15-17: which an . . . But he] he would get by bringing an action which involved the Outland patent. He uts
• 140.23: his house] home uts
• 140.24: depressing] dreary uTs, RTS, c
• 141.5: laboratory] building uts
• 141.10: and he] and had uts, rts; and c
• 141.11: something like] like uts
• 141.12: after it] after the building uts
• 141.13-14: grinding down] buying over) k1 UTS
• 141.19: the contractors] committees and contractors UTS, RTS,C
• 141.20: Legislative committee] Legislature uts, rTs; legislature c
• 141.20: to] and) K1 uTs
• 141.21: pains] work uTs, RTS, C
• 142.5: washing] much washing a
• 142.8: apparatus] aparatus [sic] of any kind uts
• 142.14: copied] made uts
• 142.20: and the] the c
• 142.21: face was] face c
• 142.21: matted] crinkley) crinkly uts
• 142.21: beard] beard, cut short and square uTs
• 142.25: startling] coarse) K1 UTS
• 143.6-7: His colleague] Dr. Crane uts
• 143.10: this] all this uts, rTs, c
• 143.13: meant] meant to) K1 uTs
• 145.3: We'd] We had a
• 145.6: I'd] I had a
• 145.14: shoulders] shoulders as if they hurt him uts
• 145.14: “Yes] / “Yes uts, RTS
• 145.20: the] his uts
• 145.22: about] about the narrow room uTs
• 146.2: when he was] when c
• 146.4: must] ought to uTs, RTS
• 146.16: this] his c
• 147.1: work] creditable work uTs
• 147.4-5: your time] time uTS
• 147.24-25: law, I'd. . . your case] law for this, I want to see you get it uTs
• 148.2: Crane said] Crane had said uts, RTS
• 148.8: in an] in uTs
• 148.18: beyond gratifying] except as it gratified uts, RTS, C
• 148.20: The] The uts, rts, c
• 148.22: was] seemed uTS
• 148.24-25: The university, his] The University was a good deal of a fraud. His uTs, RTS
• 148.25: his... everything] everything c
• 149.2: possible] very possible, he thought uTs, RTs
• 149.3: the little] this) k1 uTs
• 149.8: he] {discontinuous text} him, he uts
• 149.11: semester] semester, in February uTs, RTS, C
• 149.12: Rosamund] the Marselluses uts
• 149.12: her] Rosamund uts
• 149.12: buy things] select ) make some purchases uTs; buy ) select furniture ) K1 RTS
• 149.16: going] going with them uts
• 149.19: St. Peter’s] the Professor’s uts, RTS, C
• 149.21: must be done] was necessary UTS
• 150.1: accompanied ... where] went down to Chicago with them, but there uts
• 150.1-2: was to join] was to leave his wife for the first time since their marriage. He joined uts
• 150.3: China] China, now home for a vacation UTS
• 150.3: and go] was to go UTS
• 150.5: leave them—with] go, and that with uts
• 150.8-9: father-in-law . . . and Rosamund] father-in-law, of whom he was unquestionably very fond. After lunch, however, they uts
• 150.10: LaSalle Street station. When] station, and St. Peter was surprised to find that after uts
• 150.13: was] had been uts; been RTs, c
• 150.13: away] away when he was uTs
• 150.14: St. Peter] that he uts
• 150.17: He] “Now for the shops, my daughter,” he uts
• 150.18: diligent, Rosie] diligent uts
• 150.21: for] from uTs
• 150.22: came upon] found uts
• 151.2: Scott] him uTs
• 151.2: he] coming upon the Professor so suddenly; he uts
• 151.2: the Professor] he uts
• 151.3: Doctor] Professor uTs
• 151.11: never before] never uTS
• 151.13: he] and he uts
• 151.16: used as] made ) K1 UTS
• 151.18: have no mercy] are absolutely merciless) k1 UTS
• 151.19: was] is C
• [TS 119.1-9]: been extinct for probably a thousand years. You’d think such ghostly house furnishings would have been cleaned up by the sun and wind, become pure conceptions. But before the boy knew it, they had cost him his best friend and nearly spoiled his life for him {discontinuous passage canceled in Ts}.
• 151.24: for it] as it uTs
• 151.24: night] day uts
• 152.1: freezing] bitter uTS, RTS, c
• 152.1: St. Peter] He uts
• 152.9: new fur] fur UTS, RTS, C
• 152.10: coat in Chicago] coat uts
• 152.15-17: to the... his room] {uTs =K1 except “went into the” for “into his”}; swiftly to make him a cocktail. She sensed an unusual weariness in him, and felt, as it were, the bitter taste on his tongue. / After they had finished dinner Lillian talked of his trip again. c
• 153.8: for a poor professor] for me uts
• 153.18: humiliating] humiliating {“odious” added interlinearly and canceled} uts
• 153.22-154.18: Mrs. St. Peter . . . his life.] {not in c}
• 153.25: his daughter] a daughter uTs, RTs
• 154.3: When] After uts
• 154.5: hearth to read] fire to read and smoke uTs, RTS
• 154.5: saw] noticed UTS, RTS
• 154.6: had slid] slid uts, RTs
• 154.6: was looking] sat looking uTs, RTS
• 154.16: insupportable] unsupportable uTs, rTs
• 154.17: observed] unconsciously studied uts; unconsciously observed rTs
• 154.25: a very attractive project] something very attractive uTs
• 155.2: said] had said uTs
• 155.4: them] him uts; him of) his) k1 RTs
• 155.7: As] When uTs, RTS
• 155.7: Louie] before the Professor had time to light his cigar, Louie uTs, RTS
• 155.8-9: take Doctor . . . the summer] make Dr. and Mrs. St. Peter a present of a summer in France uTs {c=K1 except “Dr.”}
• 155.9: decided] fixed uts
• 155.20: also] already uts, RTS, c
• 155.21: see the] see uTs
• 155.22: whom you] you UTS, RTS, C
• 155.24: Lapérouse for him] Lapérouse uts
• 156.6: want] always want UTS
• 156.10-11: variety] a little variety uts
• 156.12: Emile Faguet] M. Jules Lemaitre uts, RTS
• 156.20: Papa] Father uts
• 156.24-26: “I’m afraid ... may exist.”] {not in c}
• 157.2: the City of Mexico] Mexico c
• 157.2-3: could perfectly well] could c
• 157.3: our] all our uTs
• 157.7-11: “That sounds... can be!”] {not in c}
• 157.12: Louie] Louis c
• 157.18-20: The family .. . expensive.] {not in c}
• 157.19: to write] the write uTS
• 157.20: too] much too uTs
• 158.2-25: Beaux-fils .. . in it.] {not in c}
• 158.7: her distinction] her good looks) K1 uTs
• 158.11-12: seemed . . . proper] seemed as natural and proper to Louie uts
• 158.12-13: It was an element that] That element uts; This element RTS
• 158.13-14: as long as it resulted in] when it was uts
• 158.14: was not] not uTS
• 158.15: too. He] too. And Tom Outland had found the same quality irresistable [sic] in Rosamund. St. Peter uts
• 158.15: due] largely due uts
• 158.16: even more than] and uts
• 158.17: she and his] his) k1 uTs
• 158.18-19: some of the] other uTs, RTS
• 158.19: They hadn’t much] They had little uts
• 158.20-21: compromises. If] compromises and made a sport coat do for an evening coat. It uts
• 158.21: couldn’t get] didn’t have uts, rts
• 159.2-3: some respects] in this respect uTs
• 159.6: for the] for a little gentleness toward the uts
• 159.7: less . . . reason] less on Louie’s account than on any other UTS, RTS, C
• 159.9-10: anybody . . . sorry. He] anybody’s feelings, though he believed that Louie would be truly disappointed, and partly because, as he said, he liked the Professor’s society. St. Peter uts; anybody, though he believed that Louis would be sorry. He c
• 159.13-162.2: The desk . .. memories.”] {not in c}
• 159.15: St. Peter . . . decision] he told his decision to his family uTs
• 159.20: give] give such uTS, RTS
• 160.1: family] family so uts
• 160.5: some] another uTs, RTS
• 160.5: becoming] growing UTS
• 160.21: happier] the happier uts, RTS
• 160.23: crossed the room] left her chair uts
• 160.23: of his chair] of his uts
• 161.7: wholly] altogether uts
• 161.10: to go back] to uTs
• 161.13-14: students. And] students. I’ve lived a double life, at least, and uts
• 161.14-15: One pays] You pay uTs
• 161.16: when it’s gone he] and then he uts, rts
• 161.17: joke —] joke between them, uTs; joke; rts
• 161.19: Peter] Peter, an old family name uTs
• 161.19-20: had always] had uts, rts
• 161.20: a] the) K1 UTS
• 161.24: told his wife] said) K1 uTs
• 162.3: the spring] April uts, RTS, c
• 162.4: work in the old] work in his study in uTs, RTS
• 162.9: purple] heavy purple uts, RTs, c
• 162.14-15: It’s a] It’s such a uTs
• 162.17-18: readily understand] under) k1 uts
• 163.1-2: dressing-gown] somking [sic] coat) k1 UTS
• 163.19: eyes] eye UTS, RTS
• 164.9: foolish, Louie] foolish c
• 164.18: just now] now uTs
• 164.23: his shirts] shirts uts, RTs, C
• 164.24: lip] lips c
• 165.3: you've] you have a
• 165.4: get into her head] get c
• 165.9: naughty things] things rts
• 165.12: nicely] very nicely uts
• 165.15: to it] in it uTs
• 165.23: certainly] surely uTs
• 165.24: sure] certain ) K1 RTS
• 166.3: Louie] Louis c
• 166.9: I] But I uts, rts
• 166.12: “Professor, I'll] “Ah, Professor, you do support a man! similis mater, filia similie, eh? I'll uts
• 166.12-13: put it up to him. If] offer him chiffonier, and if uts
• 166.20: humour too well, and] humor, and uts
• 166.20: jokes] things ) k1 uTs
• 166.21: them] them too well uts
• 166.24: expressed such] had such a uTs, rTS
• 166.24-25: kindness] kindness toward her uTs, RTs
• 167.1: Louie] When Louie uts
• 167.1: back looking] back and sank into the seat beside the Professor, he looked uts
• 167.1-2: and sank] and he sank uts
• 167.18: around] round ) k1 uTs
• 167.22: utter, of] utter or c
• 167.25: Louie] Louis c
• 168.1-7: Lillian... bachelor life] St. Peter was spraying his rose vines one June morning. His University duties were over, at last. Lillian and the Marselluses were in France, he had already begun to get letters from them. He was a bachelor, and was living in the old house, having {page ends} uts; {passage canceled and replaced with new text, whose variants follow}
• 168.4-5: After his university duties were] After the University work for the year was UTS
• 168.5: back] over UTS, RTS, c
• 168.8: day,] day long) k1 uTs
• 168.10: difficult] a difficult one uTs, RTS, c
• 168.13: give part of this] give this uts, RTS
• 168.13-14: to Tom . . . annotate it] to editing and annotating Tom Outland’s diary uts
• 168. 17: in it] in the diary uts
• 168.19: sketch] portrait uTs, RTS, c
• 168.19: of Outland] of the boy uts
• 168.20: his] Outland’s uts
• 169.1: had insisted] had, almost from the first, insisted UTS, RTS
• 169.5: he was apt to be] there was something uTs, RTS
• 169.9: “chivalry] the chivalry uts, RTS, c
• 169.9: say] call it uts
• 169.14-22: St. Peter... honourable.] St. Peter thought it the logical result of Tom’s strange bringing up and his early associations. This dream of disinterested love and self-sacrificing friendship persists down among the day-laborers; of the world {last three words canceled} the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Outland had brought it along with him into University circles, where advancement through personal influence is considered honorable. uts {this passage at top of Ts p. 134 canceled and replaced by last half of / ts p. 133 4, whose variants follow}
• 169.14: logical] natural) K1 uTs
• 169.18-19: railroad trains and boats and] boats and) k1 uTS
• 169.21: was] is UTS, RTS, C
• 169.23: Outland was a senior] Outland’s senior year uTs, RTS, C
• 170.2: study and] study with him and ) K1 uts
• 170.3: began to] to make uTs, RTS
• 170.16: coming to] dropping in at UTs, RTS, C
• 170.19: Sunday] Sunday in May uts, RTS, C
• 170.22: intensely] intense uTs, RTS
• 170.23: and hurried] hurrying uTs, RTs, c
• 171.1: spring] the springs UTs, RTS, c
• 171.2: was] were UTS, RTS,C
• 171.6-7: Washington . . . “You] Washington. But it’s even worse in a city.” | “Oh,” said Mrs. St. Peter. “I thought you were talking about the west coast. You uTs; Washington.” J Mrs. St. Peter looked up ) K1 RTS
• 171.17: few weeks] month uTs, RTS, C
• 171.22: accept] take uts
• 171.22-24: evening . . . prospects, the] evening, Tom was sitting hot and perplexed in the midst of a family council, wearing white flannels, St. Peter remembered, and fanning himself with his straw hat. The uts
• 171.24: summed up] was summing up uTs
• 171.25: ought to] should uts
• 171.25: work in] work in work in uTs
• 172.4: Tom] the young man uts
• 172.5: it’s all] it’s somehow all uts, rts
• 172.16: his hand] his warm hand uTs, RTs
• 172.17: together] together with all her might uts, rts, c
• 172.22-173.20: / Again . .. asked] Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had accepted the instructorship under Crane. / It was that summer, after Tom’s graduation, that forged the strong links between him and St. Peter. It was then that the Professor began to tell himself that this was the most interesting mind he had ever come in contact with. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, The Professor was doing his own cooking, working in his garden, and writing on volumes four and five. Outland was busy in the Physics laboratory, just acorss [sic] the campus, and they saw each other almost every evening. On Fridays and Saturdays they went swimming and the Professor gave the house over to a cleaning woman. / It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He had got a chioce [sic] assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. When he cooked a roast, a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked uts; {rTs=uTs except third sentence canceled; the whole passage canceled and replaced with most of Ts p. 137, whose variants follow}
• 173.1: During that summer] It was during that summer UTS, RTS
• 173.1-2: St. Peter] that St. Peter uts, RTS
• 173.2: his] that uTS, RTS, C
• 173.2: reserve] reserve; that he ) he began to admit to himself that here was, on the whole, the most interesting mind he had ever worked with uts, rts
• 173.3-4: the Professor] St. Peter uts, rts
• 173.5: three and four] four and five uTs, RTS
• 173.7: St. Peter] the Professor uts, RTs
• 173.13-14: and had] having uts, RTs, c
• 173.17: his pick] the pick c
• 173.23-24: evening] night uts
• 174.2: told] told him uts, rTs, c
• 177.3: string] a string UTS, RTS
• 177.3: It began] It all began uts
• 177.4: Pardee] {space left blank uts}
• 177.5: I started out to hunt] I went out) around hunting UTS
• 177.7: just] the night uts, RTS
• 177.7-9: and one... on in] there was sure to be a poker game, and one of the fellows had tipped me off that it would be in uts
• 177.9: Ruby Light] Jack Rabbit uts
• 177.9-178.6: I knew ... place.] {not in c}
• 177.10: knew] thought uts
• 177.13: ice house] outhouse uTs
• 177.13-14: a’dobe] a back) K1 UTS
• 177.16: six or seven] a dozen or so UTS
• 177.16-17: a crowd ... standing] as many more standing uTs
• 178.1: bird-cage] cage uTs
• 178.2: covered with] covered up with uTs, RTS
• 178.9: hand] game uTs
• 178.10: watch, keeping time for them. Among] watch in my hand {discontinuous text between Ts pp. 139 and 140} I’d come for were in it, so I stood by the door with my watch, waiting for them to finish the hand. Two) Among uTs
• 178.11: game, and one] game. One uts
• 178.13: night. The] night, and he hadn’t the hundred. The UTS
• 178.13-14: crowd was] boys were uTs
• 178.14: who had] who’d uts
• 178.18: fireman] man) K1 UTS
• 178.19: come up town] come uptown to play poker uTs; come over ) K1 RTS
• 179.1: heavy-built] heavily built c
• 179.5: others] more uTS
• 179.12: that] the c
• 179.15: was] was just UTS
• 179.18: short, but] short-somebody’d sneaked in chips he hadn’t bought-but uts
• 180.1: overalls] overall uts, RTs
• 180.8: often] sometimes A
• 181.7: The bed] His bed uts, rts
• 181.8: on the] a) on his uts, rTs
• 181.8: was a] was the only other) was the uts
• 181.13: it all] all c
• 181.15: Ruby Light] Jack Rabbit uts
• 181.21: At last the] The uts
• 181.22: the desert and the ’dobe] the ’dobe uTs, RTS, C
• 182.9: called] called to uts
• 182.10-12: After... chattering.] {not in c}
• 183.12: bank. We] bank, and uTs, rTs; bank, and we c
• 183.13: into] in on uTs
• 183.15: fast friends] friends a
• 183.17: and nothing] nothing c
• 183.17-184.7: There... of him.] {not in c}
• 184.22: attention] attentions a
• 184.11-13: He ought... botany.] {not in c}
• 184.11: have] have been) K1 uTs
• 184.14: able to be] up and uts, RTs, c
• 184.22: then] and uts, rTs
• 184.23: Cruzados] Santos uTs
• 184.23: and keep... until] until c
• 185.1: The Blue Mesa] That mesa uTs
• 185.2: so much] more uTs
• 185.3: flat country] flat, semi desert country uTs
• 185.3: country. To] country than they do anywhere else. For one thing, you can see them better in that clear air and brilliant light, and their stability is a comfort in a sandy land that is half blown away every spring. To uts; country—and their stability is a comfort in a sandy land that is half blown away every spring. To C
• 185.3: northwest] northwest of Pardee uTs
• 185.4-5: peaks that always sat there.] peaks, like the mountains in geography books. uTs
• 185.6: almost] verging on UTS, RTS, C
• 185.8: a naked] a single) k1 uTs
• 185.9-10: at one end] on one side uTs; on one end RTs, c
• 185.15: while] as uTs
• 185.20: was a cinch] amounted to a summer vacation uTs, RTS
• 185.22: hands) men uTs
• 186.1-19: He always... tired of.] {not in c}
• 186.3: him. He] him. He distrusted courts and governments. He uTs
• 186.4-6: hanging of... Dreyfus case] Dreyfus case, and the hanging of the Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember uts
• 186.7-9: The only . . . work] We came near it sometimes, about my share of the work uts
• 186.9: He] Blake uts
• 186.19: never tired of] was never tired of reading uts
• 186.20: Rapp, the foreman] Rapp c
• 186.21-22: Blake stayed with] We left Blake and uts, RTs
• 186.24: cabin .. . supplies] cabin c
• 187.2: Cruzados] Santos uTs
• 187.4: grama] long uTs, RTS, c
• 187.6: up and looked] up c
• 187.7-20: There... forever] {not in c}
• 187.7: around] about uTs, RTS
• 187.9: behind] behind us uTs, RTS
• 187.10: tall... cactus] tall cactus plants uTs, RTS
• 187.11-188.20: streaks of . . . for the river] streaks of water-brush, yellow as gold. All along the river the cottonwoods and quaking asps had turned ) already turned bright yellow, and just across from us, overhanging us, indeed, the Mesa was pile [sic] of purple rock all broken out with red sumack and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs. From the cabin, night and day you could hear the river, where it made a bend round the foot of the Mesa and churned over the rocks. It was the kind of place a man would like to stay in forever. ¢ We took ) opened the wooden shutters and put clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away our bacon and coffee and canned stuff on the kitchen shelves. The only disadvantage was that Blake and I could never enjoy all this comfort at the same time; one of us would always have to be out with the cattle. ] Rapp advised me to keep the herd to the east as long as the grass held out and the open weather lasted. “There’s no [sic] enough pasture down here to take them through a long winter,” he said. “Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather's warm and they feel skittish, that mesa over there makes trouble. They swim the river and bolt straight up into that mesa, and that’s the last you ever see of them. We've lost a lot of critters that way. There’s a big bunch of wild cattle up there now, and when the wind’s right our cattle over here get the scent of them and try to make a brake [sic] uts, RTS {the passage canceled and replaced with Ts p. 147, whose variants follow}.
• 187.12: rabbit-brush] water-brush uts, rTs
• 187.21-22: sweep out] air UTS, RTS
• 188.5: some distance] twelve miles uts, RTS
• 188.12: bring] get uTs
• 188.14: into the] into that uTs, RTS
• 188.16: The mesa] that mesa uTs
• 188.18: there. When] there. You'll have to) K1 uTs
• 188.20-21: close ... down] close when you bring ‘em down here UTS, RTS; close c
• 188.22-23: to get .. . out] to drive them out UTs, RTS, C
• 189.1: all the] clear all the uts, rts
• 189.1: round. The] round. I’ve ridden round the base ) k1 uTS
• 189.3: bend] that and undercuts it uts; bend and under cuts it RTS, C
• 189.17-18: the north and east] the east uTs
• 189.19: herd] cattle uts, RTS, C
• 189.20: cabin. The] cabin. It was too cold to sleep in the open now, even when the cattle were quiet. The UTS
• 189.22: lump] lump) mass) K1 uTs
• 189.23: Its] It’s uts, rts
• 189.25: flanks] flank, uts, RTS
• 190.2: more than a] a matter of two UTS, RTS, C
• 190.5: from the top] from top uTs
• 190.5: river] river at its foot UTS, RTS, C
• 190.8: didn’t] did not a
• 190.10: mesa] lump uTs
• 190.14-15: were fringed with] broke out in uTs, RTS
• 190.24: would be gold] would gold uts
• 190.24-25: tarnished gold-foil] gold foil uts, RTs, C
• 190.25: loom] look c
• 191.3: camp] camp and the pinon grove uTs
• 191.3: in its] in c
• 191.12: expecting it. . . brush] expecting the brush to get on fire uTS
• 191.17-18: burst in the sky] thunder c
• 191.21: turkeys] rabbits uts, RTS, c
• 191.22-23: rabbit-brush] water-brush uts, rTs, c
• 191.23: of light] the sun uTs
• 192.2: examine them] do any digging uTs
• 192.3: ridges] most prominent of these ridges uTs, RTS, C
• 192.4: day I] day was my turn with the cattle, but the first time I was back at the cabin, I uts
• 192.4: the] this uts
• 192.5: rabbit-brush] water-brush uts, RTS, C
• 192.9: all of it] all uts, rTs, c
• 192.11: pick-ax] pick-ax that) K1 uTs
• 192.13-14: Blake ... cattle] Blake and spent the night with him on the range uTs
• 192.14: knew there] knew that there uts
• 192.15: we felt] we both felt uts
• 192.17: here in ancient times] here at one time uts
• 192.24: day. I liked] day. I felt as if I coul[d]) K1 uts
• 193.1: morning... water that] morning that) k1 uts
• 193.4: was like] looked like uts
• 193.6: north of our camp] above the north end of the mesa UTS, RTS, C
• 193.7: mesa] base uTS, RTS, C
• 193.8: under] around uTs
• 193.8: flank] flank. On that} K1 uTs
• 193.9-194.5: On that... with him] During that ride I got a much better idea } notion of the actual structure of the base was a miture [sic] of hard blue rock and of a much softer stone. In places, on the north and west, there were deep watercourses which could certainly be climbed, but nowhere did these gullys reach to the top of the mesa. The top seemed to be one great slab of very hard stone lying, like the old-fashioned marble table top, on a mass of softer rock. The water dry [sic] channels worn by water extended hundreds of feet up the base, but always stopped under this great rim-rock, which projected out over the erosions like a grainte [sic] shelf. It was because of this unbroken top layer that the butte was unapproachable, evidently. I came back at night convinced that if Blake and I ever got into the mesa, we must go by the rout [sic] the cattle took, through the river and up the one canyon that broke dow [sic] to water level. / The foreman dropped down on us early in December with generous supplies for Christmas, and he brought with him uts, rts {the whole passage canceled and replaced by ts, pp. 151.15—-151.5, whose variants follow}
• 193.11: hard blue rock] bluish stone) k1 uTs
• 193.13-14: climbed... went, but] climbed, but uts
• 193.14: they] these uts, rTS,c
• 193.17: an] the uts
• 193.22: inaccessible] unapproachable uts
• 193.24: took, through] took, swim the river where it curved through uts
• 194: {Chapter III in K1; no new chapter uTs, RTs, c}
• 194.4 provisions] supplies uts, RTS
• 194.4: This time he] He uts, rts
• 194.6: the] a uTs
• 194.10: years was a table] years a UTS, RTS, C
• 194.11-12: cooking] cook uTs
• 194.12: were] was C
• 194.13: they weren’t] it wasn’t c
• 194.14: had to] had had to uts
• 194.14-15: They dropped] They had dropped uts
• 194.16: wages] pay UTS
• 194.22: He says he’s} He’s uts
• 195.15: cut] all cut out uts; cut out RTS
• 195.16: had learned] had uts; used RTs, c
• 195.19: any bed] a bed c
• 195.19-196.3: And he .. . behaviour.] (not in c)
• 195.22: all,] all, merely uts
• 195.25: him. He] him. On the contrary, he uts
• 195.25: tell about] to about uts
• 196.1: steward] table steward uTs, RTS
• 196.1: liberal] fine) k1 uTS, RTS
• 196.8: Ever since] Since uTs, RTS
• 196.9: camp] range we saw) K1 UTS
• 196.10: down to the river to] down to uts
• 196.16: joined us] came uTs
• 196.18: said] said they would uts, RTs, C
• 196.19: the herd] them uts
• 196.19-20: when Blake... on duty] when I was on duty uTs
• 196.25: furious . . . a march] furious) cut up {interlinear addition canceled} that they’d stolen a march uTs
• 197.1: me, and] me, after I’d had my warning, and uts, RTS
• 197.1: swore to myself I’d] swore I'd uts
• 197.2-3: back... herd a] back. Blake and I had some words about it. It was clear we couldn’t both go. The whole herd might take a notion to clear out. | We drove the cattle uts
• 197.3-4: miles east, to] miles to the east next morning, to uTs
• 197.5: cabin, and asked] cabin, asked uts
• 197.5: put me] put c
• 197.6: lunch. I told] lunch, and told uts
• 197.6: plan, but] plan. I uts
• 197.7: tales. If] tales, but if uts
• 197.7-8: night, then he] night he uts
• 197.16: inside] in my) K1 UTS
• 197.16: in] off) k1 uTs
• 197.21: while] little uts, RTS
• 197.25: though] although a
• 198.4: clear] well-worn uts
• 198.4: Horses] You can’t trust horses) k1 uTs
• 198.6-7: easiest .. . grades] easiest grades uTS; lowest grades RTS, C
• 198.8: the] that) k1 uts
• 198.8: purple-grey] blue-gray) k1 uTs
• 198.10: growing] that grew uTs, RTS
• 198.11: that morning] against it uTs, RTS, c
• 198.14: nostrils] {illegible}) k1 uTs
• 198.23: weren’t] were not a
• 198.25: eight hundred to a] fifteen hundred to two uTs, RTS,C
• 199.5: as big as haystacks] twelve and fifteen feet high uts
• 199.7: hobbled] picketed uts
• 199.9-10: foot there] foot uTs
• 199.13: breath, I] breath and wipe my wet face, l uts, rTs
• 199.20: composition: pale] composition. It was altogether, like one big building: pale uts
• 199.22-23: middle] midst ) k1 uTs
• 199.23-24: tower. { It was beautifully] tower, beautifully uts, RTS
• 199.24: proportioned, that tower, swelling] proportioned, swelling UTS, RTS
• 200.2: the swell of the] that swell of uTs, RTS
• 200.6: cedars] pinons uTs, RTS, c {pinions}
• 200.9: sat looking] looked) K1 uTs
• 200.10-11: falling snow-flakes] veil of lightly falling snow uTs, RTS, C
• 200.19: at it] at the village c
• 200.25: like a rifle] like rifle uts, rts
• 201.2: powerful tribe] tribe uTs, RTS, c
• 201.5: him I’d] him at once that I’d uts, rts, c
• 201.7: off] off like that uts, RTs, c
• 201.9-10: way. / After] way. After uTs, RTS
• 201.10: when we ... Blake] when Blake had lit his pipe, I told him uTs, RTs, c
• 201.13: ditches. Like] ditches. / This explained the irrigation ditches. Like uTs {pieced page, with the repeated sentence canceled in rts}
• 201.14: these people had had] they had uts
• 201.17-18: must have been] is uts
• 201.20: was] were UTS
• 201.24: midnight. It] midnight, as it uts
• 202.18: day, but he] day. He uts, rts, C
• 203.6: rim] surface UTS, RTS, C
• 203.7: away, and in] away, while the hard rock does not wear at all, but continues to lie in a slab, like a roof, over the wash-out formed beneath it. In uts, rTS {except “hard” canceled}; away, while the hard rock does not wear at all, but continues to lie in a slab, like a roof, over the washout formed beneath it. In c
• 203.8: cavern] cavern, always keeping the form of an inverted arch, deep in the centre, the two ends sloping up gradually and meeting the rim rock uTs, RTs; cavern, always keeping the form of a broad arch c
• 203.9-10: three hundred and sixty] 360 uTs, RTs {“spell out” in margin}
• 203.10: seventy] 90 uTs, RTS {“spell out” in margin}; ninety c
• 203.11: fifty] 60 uTs, RTs {“spell out” in margin}; sixty c
• 203.14: would go] would ask for a few weeks off. We would go uTs
• 203.15: into] over to UTS, RTS, C
• 203.17: must once] must ) K1 UTS
• 203.17: could] could once uts
• 203.18: an easier way] a way UTS, RTS
• 203.19: devote] give up ) K1 UTS
• 203.20: railroad] railroad town UTS, RTS, C
• 203.23-24: to make] to let outer) k1 uTS
• 204.7: tombs of the Pharaohs.”] tombs and the pyramids. And luck so has it that you have the Pharoahs [sic] next door to us.” UTS
• 204.8: may] might uts
• 204.9: It’s bad] It’s a bad uts, RTS
• 204.10-11: your head] cool uTs, RTs, c
• 204.20: brandy] kind of uts, RTs, C
• 204.20: made.] made. I remember one statement he made over a and over. uTS
• 204.21: would often] would uts
• 204.24: imagination] imaginations UTS, RTS, C
• 204.25: party] party, but old Henry’s modest pride was such that we could never laugh until we were out of his sight UTS, RTS, C
• 205.2: showed] was UTS, RTS, C
• 205.2: interest] interested uTS, RTS, C
• 205.6: our] the) K1 uTS
• 205.6: very reasonable] reasonable c
• 205.8: early in] on the sixth of uts, RTS, C
• 205.8: with us] over UTS
• 205.9: and spade] and a spade uts
• 205.12-13: Lying beside one] Beside the first uTs, RTS, c
• 205.14: toe-notches] toe-notches ) foot-holds {canceled= KI} UTS
• 205.17: low] very low uts
• 205.19: the Cliff City] the cavern in which the Cliff city sat uTs; the Cliff city sat rts
• 205.22: yard ran] yard that looked over into the canyon below, there was uTs
• 205.22: wall] wall, fitted together with clay uts; wall plastered together with clay rTs, c
• 205.23: the weather] weather uTs, RTS, C
• 206.4: village] village under the rim rock ) in the cavern {canceled = k1} uTs
• 206.5-6: vegetation . . . soil. It] vegetation. It uts
• 206.6: bare] solid uts
• 206.6-7: old, flat-topped cedars] pinons uts, RTs, C {pinions}
• 206.9: were] was UTS
• 206.9-10: touch, smooth] touch, and smooth uTs, rTs
• 206.11: intact] not broken away uTs
• 206.11-12: except where] except UTS
• 206.12-14: corner ... were] corner. There we could see that the walls were uTS
• 206.13: stones,] stones and uts
• 206.14: out] out side uTs
• 206.14: were tinted] always tinted uTs; tinted RTs, C
• 206.17: except] but except uTs
• 206.19: housekeepers] housekeepers. The place) k1 uTs
• 206.20: sacked] taken and sacked uTs
• 207.4: the cluster of houses] them all uts
• 207.6: twilit] twilight c
• 207.7: rim rock... cavern] floor of the cavern and the rim rock met UTS, RTS
• 207.8: like .. . There] as the sloping of an attic meets the floor. As I’ve said, there uTs; as the sloping roof of an attic meets the floor. There rts
• 207.10: sun] sunlight uts, RTS
• 207.12: spring] cold, clear spring uts, RTS, c
• 207.12: welled] came up uts
• 207.14: dripped] trickled uts, rts
• 207.15: afterward] after this uts
• 207.17: mesa; he] mesa, and he uts; mesa; He) k1 RTS
• 207.18: him, and he] him. He uts
• 207.19: sunlight. The] sunlight: the uts
• 208.1: the back] this back uts, rts, c
• 208.10-11: plum seeds, and a] plum seeds and peach seeds, and a uTS, RTS
• 208.13: Late that afternoon] We went back to) k1 uTS
• 208.14: to rest for a few days] pretty well beat out uts
• 208.15-16: a long winding] an easy uTs
• 208.18: running] ran uts
• 208.19: pinions on the summit] pinons uTs
• 208.20-21: found . . . road] found the old trail uts; found the old road RTS
• 208.22: road] trail uts
• 209.1: cliffs. About] cliffs, almost down to the plain itself. But about uts
• 209.2: above the river] from the bottom uts
• 209.3: had fallen} had been broken uts
• 209.3-4: from a landslide] by an earthquake uts; from an earthquake rTs
• 209.10-11: cut from... Canyon] cut down to Cow Canyon, the one by which we made our first entrance uts
• 209.12: manhole, and in] manhole. In uts
• 209.12: this] this way c
• 209.15: this ladder we] this we uts
• 209.16: trail, and] trail, into) K1 uTs
• 209.16: dropped] drop uts
• 209.17: meant always to] meant to uTs
• 209.17-18: grazing] picketed) k1 uTs
• 209.18: ‘Taking . . . make] At any time we could make uTs; Then) By this route {“we” canceled by mistake} could at any time make RTs, c
• 209.19: mesa] mesa by this route uTs
• 209.20: now] by this time uTs
• 209.20: our] your UTS, RTS
• 209.22: Tarpin] Pardee uts, RTs
• 209.25-210.1: on his pack-mules] on pack horses uts
• 210.2: save a hotel] save hotel uts
• 210.5: our money was nearly gone] we were low in money UTS, RTS, C
• 210.6: built on top] on top uTs, RTS, C
• 210.8: now ready] ready now uts
• 210.8: for] to begin uts; to commence RTs, c
• 210.12: wrote] put uTS
• 210.15: Tarpin] Pardee uts, rts
• 210.17: the day’s work] what we’d found that day, and of anything new or interesting that we’d noticed in Cliff City or its surroundings uts, RTs; what we’d noticed in Cliff City and its surroundings c
• 210.22: After all, the old man] You see he uts, rts, c
• 211.2: room; in this were a] room, with a UTs, RTS
• 211.2: things] things in it uts, RTs
• 211.3: full of] of uts, RTS, c
• 211.4: instruments} instruments and explained them) K1, UTS
• 211.5-6: needles... catheter] needles and wooden forceps c
• 211.7: they] that they uts
• 211.13: fitted (the doors] fitted and the window frames ) K1, UTS
• 211.18: a painted border, little tents] a border of little tents UTS, RTS
• 211.18: Indian] Navajo uts
• 211.20: our] this little uts, RTs
• 211.22: was the setting] was setting uts
• 211.23: hung] was hung uts
• 211.24: beyond] into) k1 uTs
• 211.25: facing an] into the uTs
• 212.1: there, and who] there, who uts
• 212.2: looking down upon] facing uTs
• 212.3: by] on uTs
• 212.9: found] found of uts
• 212.9: moccasins, and what] moccasins, what uTs
• 212.11: fleece] wool uTs
• 212.13: one] them uTs, RTS, C
• 212.17: shoot at them] shoot uts, RTS, C
• 212.22: City; we found her in] City, but in uts, rts
• 212.24: Eagle’s] Swallow's uTs, RTS, C
• 212.24: Nest. She] Nest. We went up there one Sunday for a holiday. She uTs, RTs, c
• 213.6-7: had plenty . . . hair] a great deal of coarse black hair, plenty of teeth, not one missing uTs
• 213.7: Her teeth] They uts
• 213.8: that we thought she] that she uts
• 213.10: put] {K1 canceled, then marked stet} rts
• 213.11: blanket] sheet) k1 uTs
• 213.11: kept] put uTs
• 213.13: three other] other c
• 213.17: found it] found that it uts
• 213.21: posture] position uTS, RTS, C
• 214.1: the absence] thei[r]) x1 uts
• 214.3: Probably] We) k1 uts
• 214.9: met with] had uts
• 214.11-12: untouched .. . Pardee] untouched bank account in Pardee uTs
• 214.15: us trouble] us bad) k1 uTs
• 215.5: get up there] make it uts
• 215.5-6: He was... head just] When he got up, his head was barely uTs
• 215.7: cavern, groping] cavern, and while he was groping UTS
• 215.7: to] up uTs
• 215.7-8: by, when a] up by, a uts; up by, when a RTs, c
• 215.18: coroner] coroner and Father Duschene uTs, c {except “Duchene”}; coroner and Father Deschene RTS
• 215.18-20: Father... with him,] {notin uTs, rTs, c}
• 215.22: to keep us company] to cheer us up uTs
• 215.25: minds] mind uTs, RTs
• 216.5: old cedars] pinons) k1 uTs
• 216.6: in the middle] in middle uts
• 216.6: deep trail] deep stone trail) k1 uTs
• 216.14: go there] go uTS
• 216.17: Ripley] Purcell uts, rTs
• 217.7: come to an end] ceased uTS, RTS, C
• 217.18-19: from the . . . those] from those) k1 uTS
• 217.20: believe] think ) k1 uTs
• 217.20: observations] observation UTS, RTS, C
• 217.24: There is evidence] It is very evident } It is evident uts; It is evident rTs, c
• 218.7: Convenience often] Convenience is a) K1 UTS
• 218.13: seen a collection] seen collections uts
• 218.19: number] numbers c
• 219.1: mills, and] mills, uts
• 219.12: had] has uts
• 219.21-22: mesa, honeycombed with habitations] mesa, honeycombed with domestic habitations uTs, RTs; mesa C
• 220.5: together,] together and uTs, RTS
• 220.6: perished] die) k1 uTs
• 220.12: security. They built themselves] security. and) security. It built itself uts
• 220.19: Institution] Institute uTs, RTs
• 220.25-221.1: on the railroad] for the Santa Fe uts, rTs, c {accent added rts}
• 221.2: journey] trip) K1 uTs
• 221.4: Pardee] Tarpin uTs
• 221.5: often hinted] always insisted) k1 uts
• 221.12: aspens] asps UTS, RTS, C
• 221.14-15: We wanted .. . order.] {not in c}
• 221.16: litter] disorder uTs
• 221.19: carefully] very carefully uts
• 221.20: some] most UTS, RTS, C
• 221.20: deductions] remarks) k1 uTs
• 221.22: Eagle’s] Swallow's uTs, RTS, C
• 221.22: in which] where uts
• 222.1-23: Mother .. . I did.] {not in c}
• 222.1: Mother Eve] This mummy uTs
• 222.3-4: could throw any light on] had anything to do with UTS
• 222.6: the] our uTs
• 222.10-11: In primitive society] In most primitive peoples uts
• 222.14: Tarpin] Pardee) k1 rts
• 222.14-15: It took . . . outfit] We spent several days outfitting UTS
• 222.15: journey] adventure) k1 uTS
• 222.20: twenty] ten uTS
• 222.24-25: bank to stake me] bank uTs
• 223.3-10: Fora... secrets.] {not in c}
• 223.6: good] great uts, RTS
• 223.13: flashing] bright uts
• 223.18: give] to give UTS, RTS, C
• 224.1: very positive] positive c
• 224.10: brought] carried uTs
• 224.13: all the] I had the) k1 uts
• 224.13: Blake and I] we uTs, RTs, C
• 224.14: We had] We had had rts, c
• 224.21: my best bowl] one of my best bowls uTs
• 224.24: he] I) k1 uTs
• 225.3: office] offices c
• 225.6: Institution] Institute uTs, RTS
• 225.9: to. He said] to; said uTS, RTS; to—said c
• 225.12-13: unpack,] pack; uts
• 225.14: wasn’t] was not a
• 225.23-24: luncheon] a luncheon engagement uTs, RTS, c
• 226.1-2: be taken out on] get taken on to uTs, RTs; get taken out on c
• 226.8-9: the patient] patient c
• 226.10: out] out to lunch uTs, RTS, C
• 226.21: such gentle] gentle a
• 227.4: know he] know that he uts, rTs
• 227.5: is to] has an appointment to uTs, RTS, C
• 227.9: cheap place] poor luncheon uts
• 227.10-11: order .. . will] do the ordering. The luncheon will UTS, RTS, C
• 227.11: maybe] probably ) k1 uts
• 227.19: went with me] went UTS
• 227.25: But the] But a c
• 228.2: bother] lunch uTs, RTs, c
• 228.10: went to dine] dined c
• 228.13-14: pottery —it... —to] pottery to c
• 228.25: d’Yquem] Yquem c
• 229.2-3: and that... the rest] and I could see that pleased him uTs
• 229.9: Chelly] Chelles rts
• 229.13: the] his uts
• 229.14: were] had been uTs, RTS, c
• 229.15: in] as a UTS, RTS, C
• 229.16: was] had been uTs, RTS, c
• 229.19: names and titles of] names of) k1 uTS
• 229.20: had met] met uTs, RTS, C
• 230.1: astonishment] amazement uTs
• 230.6: more about] about uTs, RTS, C
• 230.16: known. The] known. They had) K1 uTs
• 230.17: War] War and Navy uts, rts; War or Navy c
• 230.19-20: big building] building a
• 231.2: friends J] friends that I uts
• 231.5: weren't discussing] didn’t talk about uts
• 231.6: should] would uts, rTs
• 231.11: got] had uts
• 231.11-12: invitation .. . for] invitation c
• 231.13-14: should wear. / The] was going to wear. The uts
• 231.18: was going to] should uts
• 232.1: dress they considered] dress was) K1 UTS
• 232.2: spilt] spilt his c
• 232.3: Mrs. Bixby’s] her uts
• 232.5: weeping] crying UTS
• 232.7: dress] skirt uTs
• 232.11: wasn’t] was not a {twice in the line}
• 232.16: my] those UTs, RTS, c
• 232.18: around] round a
• 232.20: those] the most uTs
• 232.22: Navy. Thousands] navy, thousands uts
• 232.23: couple] people uts
• 232.25: hazy] clear uts, RTS, c
• 233.1: and the] the uTs
• 233.5: come again in] come in uTs
• 233.5: days] days later uTs
• 233.6: Ripley] Pursell uts, rts
• 233.6: time for me] time uTs
• 233.8: Ripley] Purcell uts, rts
• 233.11: required] took uTs
• 233.24: appointed] appointments c
• 233.24-25: or sent to] or to UTS, RTS, C
• 234.4: for] of UTS, RTS
• 234.5: pushing. They] pushing. In the ) K1 uts
• 234.11: admitted] told me uts
• 234.14-15: and maybe . . . decoration] and getting a decoration, maybe uTs
• 234.18: going] getting UTS, RTS, c
• 234.20-21: was genuinely concerned] cared very much uTs
• 234.22-23: Embassy, who] Embassy. He uts
• 235.1-2: down ... studied] about the grounds with me, down along the river, and study uTs; about the grounds with me, and down along the river. He studied rts; about the grounds together and down along the Potomac. He studied c
• 235.2: asked] ask uTs
• 235.4: a fine] such a nice UTS; a nice RTS, C
• 235.5: sure] sure that uTs
• 235.7: money. He ... than I.] money. uts
• 235.13: sensible] wiser UTS, RTS, C
• 235.17: wiser] sadder and wiser UTS, RTS
• 236.10: leaked] got uTs
• 236.13: It'll] Te will a
• 236.14: money] any money UTS, RTS, C
• 236.21: he meant] he was) k1 uts
• 237.2: mules] horses uts
• 237.4: fancy] top UTS, RTS, C
• 237.5-6: up to the mesa] out UTS, RTS, c
• 237.6: curios] stuff uts
• 237.7: mules] horses uTs
• 237.8: Jenny] my little calico pony, Trixie uts; Nick ) k1 RTS
• 237.12: near a] near two UTS, RTS, C
• 237.21: him] Hook uts
• 238.4: load] put uts
• 238.9: got] took uTs
• 238.11: All] All that A
• 238.17: together, it was] together. That is uts
• 238.19: all summer] all that summer uTs, RTS
• 239.1: way to the mesa] way out UTS, RTS
• 239.7: inch] foot uts
• 239.7-8: delicate curve] curve A
• 239.11: where] when uTS, RTS, C
• 239.16: mesa, the] mesa, it was late afternoon. The uts
• 239.18: as red] red UTS, RTS, C
• 239.22: my God, what] what c
• 239.22: Soft] warm, soft uts, RTs; Warm, soft c
• 240.2: horizon] sky uTs
• 240.3: cedars that were] pinons, their tops uTs, RTS; pinions that were c
• 240.4: I, though] my head uts
• 240.4: trunks were] trunks uts
• 240.9: rising] rising into the pale gold air uts
• 240.13: toward him] up uTs, RTs
• 240.21: know] knew c
• 240.24: expenses] expense UTS, RTS, C
• 241.2: around] round uTs
• 241.12: I could smell] I smell uts
• 241.14: I didn’t go] I did eat, but food only strengthened my sense of loss. I hadn’t gone uTS, RTS, C
• 241.15: for] but uTs, RTs
• 241.15: in there were] were c
• 242.1: our discovery] good behaviour uTs, RTS, C
• 242.2: weren't] were not A
• 242.3: yours!] yours. UTS, RTS, C
• 242.10: would never pass up] never gave up on UTS
• 242.23: lay-off] lay-off and keep it under my eye uTs
• 242.25: when... over] with that exposition over c
• 243.1: get home] home c
• 243.2: could] could almost uTs, rTs
• 242.21: million] millions uTs, RTs, c
• 244.2: rough and ignorant] ignorant enough uTs, RTS, c
• 244.8: best mule] best horse uts; Jenny) k1 RTS
• 244.9: Jenny] Trixie uTs
• 244.10: so] two UTS
• 244.11: hours] some hours uTs
• 244.13: those] these uts, RTS
• 244.21: than] omitted uts, RTS; from a
• 245.1: Eagle’s} Swallow’s uTs, RTs, c
• 245.7: said] told him uts
• 245.7: took something] got up) K1 uTs
• 245.13-14: money, and . . . against me] money uTS
• 245.18: and began putting] putting c
• 246.1-2: was quietly ... spoke] went to the cupboard over the stove and put some ) K1 UTS
• 246.2: got] took uTs, RTS, C
• 246.17: got over] forded) k1 uTS
• 246.20: world!] world. uts, RTs, c
• 246.20: walked] went ) k1 uTS
• 247.1: on] in UTS, RTS
• 247.14: He] Then he uts, rts, c
• 247.19: creak] squeal) k1 uTS
• 248.1-251.5: THE ...sleep.] {not in c}
• 248.4: up to the cabin on] up on uTs
• 248.5-6: though... come] to turn up uTs
• 248.9: Blake had bought] he had sold Blake uts
• 248.11: give me no information] tell me nothing uts
• 248.14: back sometime] back uts
• 248.20: along] all along ) K1 uTs
• 249.1: hobbled my horse] turned my horse loose uts
• 249.5: so much] much uTs, RTs
• 249.8: a solitary] a big solitary uTs, RTS
• 249.9: bottom of the valley] grassy bottom uTs, RTs
• 249.9-10: sage-brush] vegetation UTS, RTS
• 249.10: around me] of the valley) k1 uTs
• 249.13: lay in a gold haze} stood out) was hazy gold uts; was in a gold haze Rts
• 249.14: it, too, was] it was UTS, RTS
• 249.15: held the red light] was rosy ) K1 uTs
• 249.16: glow] color uTs, RTS
• 249.22: This] That uts, rts
• 250.4: discovery] discovery of the mesa) K1 UTS
• 250.5: this] that uTs
• 250.7: the] my uTs, RTS
• 250.18: hundred] thousand uTs, rTs
• 250.20: tide] tide, I think uTs, rTs
• 250.23: of having lost] of lost uTs, RTS
• 251.3: borne] born uTs, RTS
• 251.6: Eagle’s] swallow’s uTs; Swallow’s rTs, c
• 251.7: it’s probably] it’s uts, RTS, c
• 251.9: backward. I didn’t] backward. I was all the time full of the sense of the life of which those articles had been a part, I didn’t uts
• 251.9: things] it uts
• 251.19: cedar] pinon uTs, RTs; pinion C
• 251.19-20: be frightened . . . heartlessness] feel frightened at my own want of heart uts, rTs; be frightened at my own want of heart c
• 251.20-252.8: But the. .. spring.] {not in c}
• 251.20: of the] of uts
• 251.22-23: all about Blake] Blake uTs, rts
• 251.24: long passages] passages A
• 251.25: forgotten] forgot uTs
• 252.6: rude] round a
• 252.7: dark] dark cool uts
• 252.12: Next] The next a
• 252.14-15: word of] word to c
• 252.17: and I] and uts, RTs, c
• 252.17: men] men all along the way uts
• 252.24: requites] requited RTs
• 253.2-3: it. | In] it. In uts
• 253.3: I quarrelled] I had quarrelled uts
• 257.1-3: ALL the... chance] The most disappointing thing about life, St. Peter thought, was the amazing part that blind chance played in it. After one had attributed as much as possible to indirect causation, there still remained so much, even in a quiet and sheltered existence like his own, that was irreducible to any logic uts; All the most important things in his life had been determined by chance, St. Peter thought rts
• 257.2: sometimes reflected] thought uTs, RTs; knew c
• 257.6: had been] were) K1 UTS
• 257.6: with] of) K1 uTs
• 257.10: world] world in their lives uTs
• 257.13: do housework] do her own housework uTs, RTS
• 257.14: conditions] circumstances UTS, RTS
• 257.14: became] was UTS, RTS
• 257.16: Tom] Then Tom uts
• 257.16: he] St. Peter uts, RTS
• 257.16-17: couldn’t possibly have] could never have uTs, RTS
• 258.4-5: heard . . . stranger.”] heard. c
• 258.6: Brahms’ the Brahms uts, RTS
• 258.9: seemed to him] always seemed to him uTs, RTs; seemed c
• 258.11: St. Peter] As for himself, the Professor uts; The Professor RTS, C
• 258.12: over —] over again for fear uTs
• 258.13: luck again] luck uTs
• 258.17: came] had come uTs
• 258.18-19: youth. J Through] youth. Everything about that young man had the quality of unexpectedness. Through uts; youth. Through rts, c
• 258.22-23: is always] must be uTs, RTS
• 258.24: to see] to be always finding something and always losing something, to get uTs, RTS; to be always finding something and always losing something, to see c
• 259.2-3: those that went before] the first two uts, RTS
• 259.3: of Outland] Outland had thrown himself so generously into the narrative, had actually gone over the scene of the action with him on foot and on horseback uts
• 259.8: By the . . . the third] When he was beginning the third uTs
• 259.13: adolescence.] adolesence [sic] Tom could take a sentence from the manuscript of Father) Frey Garces and go and find the exact spot on which the missionary crossed the Rio Grande on a certain Sunday in 1775. Given one pueblo, he could always find the route by which the priest reached the next. uTs; adolesence. Tom could take a sentence from Garces’ diary and {rest of reading as in uTs} RTS {marginal note in Ts to insert the circled passage “Tom could . . . next” on p. 3 [=303], which was done}
• 259.15: Fray] the uts
• 259.18-24: horseback. Tom could . . . next. { It] horseback. It uTS
• 259.21: 1775] 1575 C
• 259.21-22: could always] could c
• 259.24: went] had gone uTs, RTS
• 259.25: Mesa, climbed] Mesa; had gone up uTs; Mesa; had climbed rts
• 260.1: up] on uTs
• 260.1: Eagle’s] Swallow’s uts, RTS, c
• 260.3: years ago] years) K1 UTS
• 260.3: set out for] went to UTS, RTS
• 260.4: errand.] errand. Their hardships over, they went for a few weeks to the Grand Canyon,-not now in the compant [sic] of their priest, sworn to poverty. They took a suite in that sumptuous hotel in the pine woods and lived like princes instead of like two poor scholars. uts
• 260.5-6: The next... They] They went, the next summer, to Old Mexico, and they) The next summer Tom and the Professor were in Old Mexico, and they uts
• 260.7-8: Outland was delayed] Tom was held up uts; Tom was delayed rTs
• 260.8: securing] getting UTS, RTS
• 260.9-12: 1914. Father .. . home to] 1014 [sic]. | The next spring Father Deschene came to Hamilton to see his old pupil. He was on his way back to Belgium, to uts; 1014. { The following ) His old teacher, Father Deschene, stopped in Hamilton on his way back to Belgium,-hurrying home to rts
• 260.12: rugged old man] priest) rugged old priest uts; rugged missionary RTS
• 260.16: Rochambeau] Rochambeau. Eventually he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and was killed on the Somme, about a year after he left Hamilton ) home. uts
• 260.17-261.4: To this .. . itself.] {not in a}
• 260.17: regretted] was sorry UTS
• 260.17: had never] never uTs, RTS
• 260.18-19: had wanted] wanted uTs
• 260.19: go] stand ) k1 uTs; go {typed word canceled, then restored in ink} RTs
• 260.20: to] in) K1 UTS
• 260.21: horse-chestnuts] horsechestnutsleaves [sic] } KI UTS
• 261.2-3: had not chance] if) k1 uts
• 261.5-23: And suppose . . . to others.] for golden armour, increased renoun [sic], but not for longer years. St. Peter could not see Tom building Outland, or playing life away with a worldly wife, or being a public spirited citizen in Hamilton. What would have happened to his mind, once the trap of success had been sprung on it, once there had closed about it that net of fine cords, stronger than steel and more greedy and rapacious than the sucking arms of the polypus? What change would have come in his blue eye, in the fine, long, warm palm ) hand with the backspringing thumb, which had never handles [sic] things that were not, to him, the symbols of ideas, which had worked with the very machinery of thought? A hand like that, had he lived, would ) must have been put to other uses. The town, his fellow scientists, the state, his wife, would have required many duties of it. It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame hundreds of false excuses. It would have had to “manage” a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting. All organized society would have conspired to make it just like other hands. As it was, he had created, and gone. He had made a new thing in the world, and all the base rewards, all the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to other hands. uts; {RTs=uTS except “not the symbols” and “had left to others.” Entire passage canceled and replaced with ts p. 205, whose variants follow.}
• 261.5-6: had been . . . not gone] had not gone uTs, RTS
• 261.6: teacher? St.] teacher? His going was fantastic, just as his coming had been, and it was fantastic, surely, for aman to amass a fortune after he was dead. St. uTs
• 261.13: handled . . . ideas?] uts; worked with the very machinery of thought? ) k1 RTs
• 261.20: exacting. He] exacting. All organized society would have conspired to make it just like other hands. As it was, he uts; exacting. As it was, he rTs
• 26.20-21: escaped all that] escaped uTs, RTS
• 261.21: something new] a new thing uTs, RTS
• 262.1-6: All those . .. mesa, in] All those summer days, while St. Peter was sending cheering accounts of his activity to his family in France, he was doing nothing at all. His little biography of Tom Outland was clear enough in his mind, but it was not in his hand. There was no urge in his arm to put it down. He was, in desultory way, annotating the diary, or daybook, Tom had kept on the mesa, in uTs {RTS=uTs except “it was not in his hand” canceled. Passage canceled and replaced with Ts p. 206b, lines 15, whose variants follow.}
• 262.3-4: had begun] was uTs
• 262.4: to annotate] annotating UTS
• 262.4: diary] diary or daybook uTs, RTs
• 262.6: details} detail uts, RTs
• 262.7: with the weather and anything] with anything ) k1 UTS
• 262.8: There was a minute] He had made a careful uts; Outland had made a careful rts
• 262.12: St. Peter] the Professor uTs, RTS
• 262.16-17: form and colour] color and form uTs, RTs
• 262.17: objects] object uTs, RTS
• 262.21: conceal] restrain UTS, RTS, C
• 262.22: using] permitting himself uts, rTs
• 262.23: When the . . . round] By the first of August uTs, RTS
• 262.23: the Professor] St. Peter uTs, RTS
• 263.2-3: little more than a] about a uTs
• 263.3-4: besides—something he] besides; he had been doing what he uTs, RTS
• 263.4: before] before in his life uts
• 263.5-264.4: {ts p. 208 missing; we assume that the second p. 206=207}
• 263.5: St. Peter] He c
• 263.21: Kansas . . . Valley] Kansas c
• 263.24: and to share] and share c
• 264.3-4: left behind . . . After] left in the Solomon Valley. Even on the voyage over they had grown quickly apart, and after uTs; left in the Solomon Valley. After RTs
• 264.4: adoption into] arrival at uTs; arrival in Rts
• 264.5-6: remembered . . . homesickness] was conscious of that boy only very rarely, at long intervals, in moments of intense homesickness UTS, RTS
• 264.6-7: Ormsley, St. Peter] Donnelly, Godfrey uts
• 264.7: that boy] that such a boy uTs, RTs
• 264.8: But now that the] Now that this uts; Now that the RTS
• 264.9: the Professor] he uts, rts
• 264.10: this Kansas boy,] this boy, had ) this boy, uts; RTS
• 264.11: lives, and] lives, that it was the life inevitable and consequential, uTs
• 264.14: chain] series UTS, RTS
• 264.14: him. All] him,-happened, that is, to the) his secondary self. All uts, RTS
• 264.19: during the years] the years uts, RTS
• 264.23: it] to uTs
• 264.23-24: maturity. From] maturity, took a definite shape and purpose. From uTs, RTS
• 264.24: been a catching] been catching uTs, RTs
• 265.7: Because there were children . .. and brain] Because there were children, and love and fervor in the blood and in the brain uts, RTs; Because there was fervour in the blood and brain a
• 265.8-9: His histories ... no more] He was convinced that his histories had nothing ) no more uTs, RTS
• 265.10: result] part UTS, RTS
• 265.12-13: who had . . . this summer] who came back to St. Peter that summer UTS, RTS
• 265.14: in earth and woods and water] in weather and swimming and roots and trees and queer stones, and with working in the earth uTs, RTS
• 265.14-17: Wherever . . . alike to him] {not in ts}
• 265.16: alike] all alike a
• 265.18: terribly] very ) K1 UTS
• 265.20: all] all the uts, rTs
• 265.22: so; he] so. He knew that he uts, rts
• 265.22-23: father. He] father, that he uts, rts
• 265.23: earth. When] earth. He was concerned chiefly with the surface of the earth over which he moved. When UTS
• 266.2: curly root . . . across his] root that thrust itself curly across the UTS, RTS
• 266.3-4: maple-leaves ... began] maple leaves began c
• 266.4: and were soft] and soft uTs, RTS
• 266.5: faces, —he said:] faces, uts
• 266.7: sad pleasure] soft pleasure, like the drowsy pleasure of warm autumn weather uTs, RTS
• 266.8: When] This boy, when uts
• 266.8-9: recognizing, he was bringing] recognizing, remembered. He took pleasure in bringing uTs; recognizing, he was remembering. He liked to bring rts
• 266.9: up out of himself long-forgotten] up all sorts of long forgotten UTS, RTS
• 266.10: memories of his . . . of his] facts, about his earliest childhood, his uts; facts, about his early childhood, his RTS
• 266.11: His grandfather] His paternal grandfather uts
• 266.12-13: continuous meditation] meditation uTs, RTs
• 266.15: would try to rouse] would rouse uts, RTS
• 266.15: from] always from UTS, RTS
• 266.15-16: politeness, and would ask] politeness, would come to the surface with a blink, like a fish coming up from deep water, and ask uts; politeness, would come to the surface with a blink, and ask rts
• 266.17: yesterday] yesterday, from the same motive uTs
• 266.23: he himself] he uts
• 266.24: Napoleon] old Napoleon uts, rts
• 266.25: last] end uTs, RTS
• 267.1: estate... might] estate. Grandad had probably been going over it all with a little boy he left somewhere in the Canadian woods. St. Peter had a growing conviction that he himself might uTs, RTs
• 267.2-3: as his... days] as old Napoleon was in those days,the old tree-hewer lived to be ninety uts; {rTs=uTs except 24 “old” deleted}
• 267.4: knew] had always known uTs, RTS
• 267.5-6: one, and . . . determined] one; that the life a man lived was a combination of that curious wedlock, and the complexion of it was determined uTs, RTs
• 267.7: original self and his nature] original endowment and his nature ) sexual nature uTs; original endowment and his nature RTs
• 267.9: had not] did not ) K1 uts
• 267.10: unchanged by] unchanged, unwarped by uts, rts
• 267.14: made for him] made him uts
• 267.16: occur] happen uTs, RTS
• 267.16-17: and he suspected it] and that it uts
• 267.20: mind which] mind quite novel to him but which UTS, RTS
• 267.23: nearing] near UTS, RTS
• 267.25: matter-of-fact, that] matter-of-fact and come-to stay, that UTS, RTS
• 267.25: gave it little thought] did not at first question it uTs, RTS
• 268.5: THE family . . . about] {canceled uts}
• 268.5-269.16: THE family... letter to him] {Ts p. 213 missing}
• 269.17: went] were UTS
• 269.18: bought] got uts, RTs
• 269.19: had laid in dozens] laid in six dozens
• 269.21: Aix-les-Bains] Aix-le-Bains uTs, RTS
• 269.21-22: found a... for him] got him a gorgeous dressing gown UTS, RTS
• 269.22: St. Peter] The Professor uts, rTs
• 269.23-24: all. He . . . generous] all; glad they were there, and that he was not there. Every letter renewed his satisfaction in both things. Such generous uTS, RTS
• 270.2: read them over] read them uTs; read over RTS
• 270.3: After] But after rts, c
• 270.3-4: lie on .. . hand, but] lie down to smoke and read. Often he lay there for ) until it was time to go home, holding the letters affectionately in his hand, but uTs; lie on the sand, holding them, but rts
• 270.6: ripe yellow] yellow ripe uTs, RTS
• 270.7-8: mass of golden bees in] swarms) a mass of golden bees settled in uTs, RTS
• 270.8-9: Usually . . . unread] He carried the letters home with him, unread uTs; He generally carried the letters home, unread rTs
• 270.10: His family wrote . . . plans] These affectionate letters were all full of plans uts
• 270.11: were going to] were to UTS, RTS
• 270.13-14: in front of] before uTs, RTS
• 270.15-16: the frail ... about] the feverish and frail generations breaking in foam about uTs, RTS
• 270.16: the war] last war, and he would like to satisfy uTs; last war RTS
• 270.18: down into Outland’s country] down to Outland’s mesa and country of his Spanish Adventurers uts; down to Outland’s mesa and country rts
• 270.18: watch] see UTS, RTS, C
• 270.19: sculptured peaks and] sculptured on frontier peaks and uts; sculptured mountains, on frontier peaks and rTs
• 270.20: those] the uts, RTS
• 270.20-21: vistas dear] vistas that are dear UTS, RTS
• 270.22: Else why] Why uts, RTs, c
• 270.26: defeat?] captivity? Why had his people gone from the St. Lawrence inland, from one frontier to another, then to Michigan, then to Kansas? They were a roving breed, evidently. uts, RTS
• 271.1-272.16: {ts pp. 215-220 missing; 221 unnumbered but segues into 222 so counted as 221.}
• 271.16: study, Scott] study c
• 272.16-17: bed? | He] bed? He disliked the ‘modern’ attitude about death. It wasn’t optimism, it was mere vulgarity, and he detested the fashion of ignoring death and pretending it did not occur. One of his colleagues died last winter. His wife belonged to a school of ‘Thought’ did not admit such an occurrence. The poor man had been removed as discreetly as a dead mouse from her house full of sun parlors and flowers. | Himself, he regarded death with awe and sadness, and without expectation of another life. There had been a time when he believed in the survival of personality, but now he understood that illusion. While a young man is full of the life-stuff of the race, it cries out in him, “I shall go one [sic] forever!” And it is right. But when the tide has gone down in him, he knows himself to be merely a vessel which for a time contained an immortal essence. He uts; bed? He disliked . . . his colleagues had died the winter before. His wife belonged to a school of “Thought’ which did not admit such an event. The poor . . . without expectation of another life. He rts
• 272.17: a time when] how uTs, RTS
• 272.18-19: had terrified . . . He] used to seem unbearable to him; how he uTs, RTs
• 272.20: his body] he uts, RTS
• 272.21: hers] her body uts, rTs
• 272.21-22: give it comfort] give comfort to his uts, RTS
• 272.22: of eternal] of that eternal uts, RTS
• 272.25-273.20: One morning .. . on the Berengaria.] On the table there lay two letters; one from Lillian, one from Louie. They had come in the morning, before he started for the University, when he had not had time to open) read them. They were still unopened, and he put off the moment because they were of a suspicious thinness. They didn’t feel as if they were full of pleasant gossip, but as if they contained sudden decisions. Perhaps it was the dread of these decisions that made the idea of the mournful Norseman’s house so sweet. Eventually he took them up, ripped them open with his forefinger and had it over. Yes; all plans were changed, all dates canceled. The family were hurrying home to prepare for the advent of a young Marsellus. They would sail on the sixteenth, on the Berengaria. urs; One morning two letters came; one from Lillian, one from Louie. They came early, before he started for the University, and he did not open them until he returned at noon. Both letters were of a suspicious thinness,they didn’t feel as if they were full of pleasant gossip, but as if they announced sudden decisions. Eventually .. . all plans were changed by the happiest of expectations. The family ... Berengaria. RTs
• 273.10: so light] light c
• 273.23: She] Augusta uTs
• 273.25-274.1: done. She . . . and see] done. She knew more about the running of the establishment than anyone else, and even if she were very busy she would manage to see uTS; done. She knew . . . else, and she would see RTS
• 274.1: everything] it uTs, RTS
• 274.2: in order] to rights uTs, RTS
• 274.3: were sailing] sailed uts, RTS
• 274.5-6: hat and light overcoat] light overcoat and hat uTs, RTS
• 274.6: down the stairs] downstairs rts
• 274.9-10: though the... . and his] though his uts, rts
• 274.12-13: he was repeating to himself] he thought uts, rts
• 274.16-17: family, he] family, God knew he did! He uts
• 274.23: Her] His wife’s uts, rts
• 274.24: like a]a UTS, RTS
• 275.1: to an] to ac
• 275.2: holding] holding) grasping uTs
• 275.3: violent] strong uTS, RTS
• 275.6: They] They almost uts
• 275.7: greatest] bitterest) heaviest uTs; heaviest RTs
• 275.11: out] falling out uts
• 275.12-13: indeed. | St. Peter] indeed. He uts
• 275.13-14: go out... He sat] go out of the house all morning, nor out of his study. He kept starting and listening for footsteps on the stairs. | All day Jong St. Peter sat UTS; go away from the house that afternoon, did not leave his study. He sat rTs
• 275.14-15: desk . . . reviewing] desk, going over uts; desk, reviewing RTS
• 275.15-16: trying to... fact that] trying to account for himself; to find where he had made his mistake uTs; trying to account for himself, to find where he had made his mistake, that rts
• 275.16-18: mistake . . . cared for] mistake. He had always got on well with himself, never had any experience of struggle with his own nature. His struggles were all to get things that nature insistently and {“and” canceled} demanded, and the pursuit and acquisition of them had been a keen pleasure. His consciousness had behaved unconsciously, like his heart, like well oiled machine [sic] that was set going and only had to go. And now it had broken down on him. What was a man to do when he had lost the incentives that made him get up in the morning and lie down at night. Well, he might live a purely reflective life. He might live with the weather and the sun and his trees, like his old landlord, for instance, but he could not be one of a prosperous, ambitious, expanding family. uts; mistake. He had . . . get things which that [sic] nature insistently demanded . . . like his heart. What was a man. . . expanding family. ) k1 {except “so intensely” for “intensely”} rts
• 275.19: Late] (Chapter here) VI Late uts
• 275.19-21: the heaviness . . . Great] the air in his study became so heavy that St. Peter went down into the garden, which was already rustling ominously. Great uTs {xTs=uTs except “he” substituted for “St. Peter”}
• 275.21: clouds] storm clouds uTs
• 275.22-276.1: lake, and... hour, but] lake, and the air was growing cold. In half an hour the storm broke and drove him indoors. The rain was soon over, but uTs {rTs=uTs except “a storm” for “the storm”}
• 276.2: blow] blow from the lake uts, rTs
• 276.2: The wind] It uts, RTs
• 276.3: protection, he thought] protection, certainly uts
• 276.4-5: strange to be dreading] strange ) curious to dread UTS; strange to dread RTs
• 276.5: did dread her] did uts, rts
• 276.6: He believed. .. Though] At any rate, it was pleasant to feel confident that she wouldn’t intrude tonight, that nobody would. Though uts; It was pleasant... Though rts
• 276.8: dusky and chilly. He] dusky. He opened the window, lit uts, RTS
• 276.8: lay down] stretched himself rts
• 276.9: fire] stove UTS, RTS
• 276.10: watching it, vacantly; without] vacantly watching it, Outland’s blanket drawn up over him. Without UTS, RTS
• 276.11: asleep.] asleep. | uTS, RTS
• 276.13: be aware] be dimly aware uTs, RTS
• 276.16-25: When ... himself?] {not in uts, rTs}
• 277.2: his] the uTs, RTS
• 277.2-3: a hot... feet; he] and hot water bottles. He uts; a hot water bottle at his feet. He rts
• 277.3-5: midnight, for . . . hour] midnight; for Augusta’s church across the park was chiming, and after midnight it did not ring the hour) midnight; for just as he awoke the clock of Augusta’s church across the park was chiming) striking} and he counted the strokes. After midnight it did not ring the hour. uTs
• 277.7: in a shawl] a shawl uts
• 277.8-10: handbag. Presently . . . her. | “Just] handbag. | Presently he spoke to her. “Just uts, rts
• 277.10: in, Augusta] in c
• 277.11: came over to him] came over to the couch uTs; went over to him rts
• 277.14-15: gravely ... reproof] gravely c
• 277.19: ask you for] get uTs; ask for RTS
• 277.21: got] came RTS
• 277.21-22: evening, and I came right over] evening, and I came over as soon as I’d had my supper uts; {clause canceled after “so” substituted for “and”} rts
• 277.22: opened] cam [sic] in uts
• 277.22: door J] door downstairs I uts, rts
• 277.23: gas] the gas uTs
• 277.23: knew] thought uts
• 277.23-278.1: to its old tricks] to one of its tricks uTs
• 278.1-2: out and... When] out and left the window open in here, I opened the windows downstairs to clear the air out before I came up. But when uTs; out and left the window open in here. When rts
• 278.4: up] upstairs uTs
• 278.6-7: wind. You . . . here] wind. You were lying on the floor there. It was perfectly frightful in here,” Augusta lowered her voice, hesitated a moment and went on: UTS, RTs {except RTS cancels “there”}
• 278.9: Yes, after I’d turned] Then I turned uts; When I’d turned rTs; Yes, sir, after I’d turned a
• 278.9-10: everything up, I went] the window and went uTs
• 278.10: Doctor] the {canceled} Doctor uTs
• 278.11-12: I’d better . . . was] it better not to say what was the trouble uTs, RTS
• 278.12: asked] told uts, RTS
• 278.13: ill] bad uts
• 278.13: round] around c
• 278.17: of it] anything about it uts, rts
• 278.18-19: and a strong arm as well] as well) K1 uTs
• 279.4: Could] Can uts
• 279.5: again? I can stay] again? Doctor Dudley told me to go home after seeing you comfortable, but I can just as well stay uTs
• 279.9-281.16: “That’s because .. . daughters had] {ts pp. 227-228 missing}
• 279.11: good] great c
• 280.15: at the table] at breakfast c
• 280.25: fear] dread c
• 281.13: obligations] obligation c
• 281.16: gone] over c
• 281.17: certain wayward] certain uTS, RTS
• 281.18: But] But {canceled and restored} rts
• 281.18-19: on that shopping expedition in] when he was shopping with her in uts, RTs
• 281.20: could] can uTs, RTS
• 281.20: Augusta, however;] Augusta, uTs, RTS
• 281.23-282.1: All the .. . mind. He] This morning, no, it was now yesterday morning, after Lillian’s letter had unloosed terror) dread {canceled} upon him, he had sat a long while at the table where Augusta was now reading, and thought and thought; trying to see where he had made his mistake, what he had done amiss, that he now wanted to run away from everything he had so intensely cared for.] He must have been very stupid yesterday. It was clear enough. He uTs; {passage canceled} rts
• 281.23-24: where now] where c
• 282.5: is] was) K1 UTS
• 282.7: like that.] like that. It was the unaccustomed that had put him off his bearings. All this summer he had felt a conviction that somebody ) something {interlinear alternative} was going to die. Somebody was; the old Godfrey St. Peter, the man Lillian married, was dead. uTs
• 282.8-13: Though . . . protest.] Though he had been low spirited all summer, he told the truth when he told Dr. Dudley that he had not been melancholy. He had no more thought of suicide than he had thought of embezzling. He had always regarded suicide as a grave social misdemeanour,-except when it occurred in very evil times, as a form of protest. It was a crime against the species, because it was a repudiation of its common obligations. uTs; {RTs=UTS except “regarded it” for “regarded suicide”; whole passage canceled, then marked stet in margin and last sentence canceled. ts ends.}
• 282.10: than] as a remedy than c
• 282.25: his] this c

Word Division

List A records compounds or possible compounds hyphenated at the ends of lines in the copy-text and resolved by the editors as one word, as two words, or as hyphenated compounds. See the Textual Essay (p. 425) for the criteria for resolving these forms. List B contains the endline hyphenations that are to be retained as hyphenations in quotations from the Cather Edition text; page and line references are to that text. Note that hyphenated words that obviously resolve as one word (“com-/ pound,” for example) are not included in either list.

List A
14.20	landlord
17.21	smoking-jacket
21.21	sewing-machine
22.2	sewing-machine
23.9	note-book
25.13	to-day
33.2	filing-cabinets
35.6	bathroom
38.12	should-blade
41.9	onlooker
45.7	bedroom
46.5	fire-place
52.1	hill-side
52.24	headache
57.15	football-playing
64.11	orris-root
64.12	box-couch
69.17	glassworkers
70.6	bathing-suit
75.15	dinner-table
78.14	lunch-counter
83.21	hazel-coloured
87.16-17	square-dealing
89.4	pine-tree
94.4	seamen
97.1	innkeeper
100.20	strawberries
101.14-15	quicksilvery
101.15-16	weather-worn
101.24	anxious-looking
102.3	chestnut-leaves
103.4	black-bonneted
109.13	newspaper
112.2	red-fruited
116.21	housewifery
129.17	gambling-house
149.22	long-established
155.16	foster-brother
157.1-2	shipping-line
168.3	rose-vines
168.12	self-conscious
173.10	cleaning-women
177.17	whitewash
179.20-21	bank-notes
180.9	working-men
185.1	landmarks
186.17	hocus-pocus