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 The Limited Powers of Cities

3 Party Machines and the Immigrants

Machines and Machine-Style Politics
Outtake: Machines Had Two Sides

The Origins of Machine Politics

Did Machines “Get the Job Done”?
Were Machines Vehicles of Upward Mobility?
Did the Machines Help Immigrants Assimilate?.
The Social Reform Alternative
Ethnic Politics in Today’s Cities

4 The Reform Crusades

The Reformers’ Aims
Outtake: Municipal Reform was Aimed at the Immigrants

The Fertile Environment for Reform

The Campaigns Against Machine Rule
“Efficiency and Economy” in Municipal Affairs
The Business Model
Commission and Manager Government
Did Reform Kill the Machines?
The Reform Legacy

5 Urban Voters and the Rise of a National Democratic

Majority
City and Nation in the Twentieth Century
Outtake: Urban Ethnics Became a Mainstay of the Democratic Party

A New Political Consciousness

The Changing Political Balance
 The Depression and the Cities
Cities Gain a Voice
The Urban Programs of the New Deal
The New Deal Legacy.

PART II THE URBAN CRISIS OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY
6 The City/Suburban Divide
A Century of Demographic Change
Outtake: Anti-Immigrant Passions Have Reached a Fever Pitch

Streams of Migration
Racial Conflict in The Postwar Era
The Suburban Exodus
The Rise of the Multiethnic Metropolis
Has the Urban Crisis Disappeared?

7 National Policy and the City/Suburban Divide

The Unintended Consequences of National Policies
Outtake: Highway Programs Contributed to the Decline of the Cities

The Politics of Slum Clearance

How Local Politics Shaped Urban Renewal
Racial Segregation and “The Projects”
National Policy and Suburban Development
Suburbs, Highways, and the Automobile
The Damaging Effects of National Policies

Federal Programs and the Divisive Politics of Race

 The Brief Life of Inner-City Programs
8
Outtake: Racial Divisions Eventually Doomed Urban Programs

The Democrats and the Cities

The Republicans and the New Federalism
President Carter and the Democrats’ Last Hurrah
Republicans and the End of Federal Assistance
Political Reality and Urban Policy
The Cities’ Fall from Grace
The End of Urban Policy

9 The Rise of the Sunbelt

A Historic Shift
Outtake: The Electoral College Favors the Sunbelt

The Concept of the Sunbelt

Regional Shifts
Why the Sunbelt Prospered
The Changing Politics of Sunbelt Cities
Regional Convergence and National Politics

PART III THE FRACTURED

METROPOLIS

10 The Rise of the Fragmented Metropolis

Metropolitan Turf Wars
Outtake: There Is a Debate about Gated Communities

How the Suburbs Became Segregated

The Imperative of Racial Segregation
 Walling Off the Suburbs: Incorporation
Walling Off the Suburbs: Zoning
The Challenge to Exclusionary Zoning
The New Face of Enclave Politics

11 Governing the Fragmented Metropolis

The Byzantine (Dis)Organization of Urban Regions
Outtake: The Costs of Sprawl are Hotly Debated

The New Urban Form

The Concerns about Sprawl
A History of Metro Gov
The New Regionalism
Smart Growth
The New Urbanism
The Prospect for Reform

12 The Metropolitan Battleground

The Competition for Fiscal Resources
Outtake: Hundreds of Little Hoovers Make the Economic Crisis Worse

Cities in the U.S. Federal System

Where the Money Goes
Where the Money Comes From
The Municipal Bond Market
The Rise of Special Authorities
Fiscal Gamesmanship

13 The Renaissance of the Metropolitan Center

The Unexpected Recovery of the Central Cities
Outtake: Baltimore’s Revival Is Debated
 The Decline of Downtown
Globalization and the Downtown Renaissance
The New Urban Culture
Tourism and Entertainment
Old and New Downtowns

14 Governing the Divided City

A Delicate Balancing Act
Outtake: Multiethnic Coalitions Are Hard to Keep Together

The Recent Revolution in Urban Governance

The Benefits of Incorporation
Striking a Balance
The Decisive Turning Point
The Racial and Ethnic Future

15 City and Metropolis in the Global Era

Urban Politics in a Time of Change
The New (but Actually Old) Growth Politics
The Delicate Art of Urban Governance
The Politics of the Patchwork Metropolis

Index
 PREFACE
The first edition of City Politics was published in 1979, and since that time the
book has undergone changes as profound as the subject matter with which it
deals. To keep it current and relevant, we have always taken care to describe
significant new developments both in the “real world” and in the literature of
the field; in this ninth edition, for example, we include material on the recent
debates over immigration policy, voting rights, the continued fiscal problems
that cities face, and the urban impacts of inequality. In making these changes,
we have included enough citations so that students will be able to conduct
further research of their own.
Over the years, City Politics has been used in college courses at all levels,
from community colleges to graduate courses in research universities. City
Politics has reached across disciplines, too; it has found its way into courses in
urban politics, urban sociology, urban planning, urban geography, and urban
history. We have relied upon three elements to make it relevant to such a broad
audience: a strong and original thematic structure with a blending of the vast
secondary literature with primary sources and recent scholarly materials, new
data, and our own original research. To make the complex scholarship of the
field as accessible and interesting as possible, we build the book around an
admittedly sweeping narrative. As far as possible, each chapter picks the story
up where the previous one left off, so that the reader can come to appreciate
that urban politics in America is constantly evolving; in a sense, past and
present are always intermingled.
Three threads compose the narrative structure of the book. From the
nation’s founding, a devotion to the present, the private marketplace and a
tradition of democratic governance have acted as the twin pillars of American
culture. All through the nation’s history, cities have been forced to strike a
balance between the goal of achieving local economic prosperity and the task
of negotiating among the many contending groups making up the local polity.
An enduring tension between these two goals is the mainspring that drives
urban politics in America, and it is also at the center of the narrative that ties
the chapters of this book together.
The governmental fragmentation of urban regions provides a third
dynamic element that has been evolving for more than a century. A complete
account of American urban politics must focus upon the internal dynamics of
individual cities and also upon the relationships among the governmental units
making up urban regions. Today, America’s urban regions are fragmented into
a patchwork of separate municipalities and other governmental units. With the
rise of privatized gated communities in recent decades, this fragmentation has
become even more complicated. In several chapters of this edition of City
Politics, we trace the many consequences that flow from this way of
organizing political authority in the modern metropolis.
We divide the book into three parts. Part I is composed of five chapters that
trace the history of urban America in the first long century from the nation’s
founding in 1789 through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This “long
century” spans a period of time in which the cities of the expanding nation
competed fiercely for a place in the nation’s rapidly evolving economic
system. At the same time, cities were constantly trying to cope with the social
tensions and disruptions caused by wave after wave of immigration and a
constant movement from farm to city. These tensions played out in a struggle
between an upper- and middle-class electorate and working-class newcomers.
The New Deal of the 1930s brought the immigrants and the cities they lived
within into the orbit of national politics for the first time in the nation’s history,
with consequences that reverberated for decades.
In Part II, we trace the arc of twentieth-century urban politics. Over a period
of only a few decades, the old industrial cities went into a steep decline, the
suburbs prospered, and a regional shift redistributed population away from the
industrial belt to other parts of the country. For a long time, urbanization had
been driven by the development of an industrial economy centered in a few
great cities. But the decline of industrial jobs and the rise of a service economy
profoundly restructured the nation’s politics and settlement patterns; as a result,
by the mid-twentieth century the older central cities were plunged into a social
and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. In the years after World
War II, millions of southern blacks poured into northern cities, a process that
incited a protracted period of social unrest and racial animosity that
fundamentally reshaped the politics of the nation and of its urban regions.
Affluent whites fled the cities, carving out suburban enclaves in an attempt to
escape the problems of the metropolis. The imperative of governance—the
need to find ways of brokering among the contending racial, ethnic, and other
interests making up the urban polity—became crucially important.
Part III of the text focuses on the urban politics produced by the
deindustrialization and globalization processes of the 1980s and beyond. The
emergence of a globalized economy is one of its defining features. Older
central cities and entire urban regions that had slipped into decline began to
reverse their fortunes by becoming major players in the post-industrial
economy. At the same time, the fragmentation within metropolitan regions has
taken on a new dimension because cities fiercely compete for a share of
metropolitan economic growth. Today, central cities and their urban regions
are more prosperous, but at the same time more fragmented than ever, and one
consequence is that social and economic inequalities are being reproduced on
the urban landscape in a patchwork pattern that separates urban residents.
These developments can best be appreciated by putting them into historical
context. As in the past, urban politics continues to revolve around the two
imperatives of economic growth and the task of governance. As in the nation’s
first century, cities are engaged in a fierce competition for new investment.
The great tide of immigration that took off in the nineteenth century shaped the
politics of cities for well more than a century. The intense period of
immigration that began in the 1970s has yet to run its course, and it, too, will
reverberate through all levels of the American political system for a long time
to come. Any account of urban politics in the present era will be greatly
enriched if we recognize that we are a nation of immigrants, and always have
been. The several new features incorporated into this ninth edition include:

• A comprehensive discussion of the bitter debates over immigration policy

• An expanded discussion of the controversies over voting rights
• New material on the fiscal crisis that still faces many cities
• An expanded and updated discussion of minorities and urban governance
• An updated discussion of recent trends in inequality
• Incorporation throughout the text of recent data from the U.S. Census
Bureau

Dennis R. Judd would like to thank Sam Bassett and Anahit Tadevosyan for
their valuable research assistance and intellectual companionship. We also wish
to thank Melissa Mashburn, our editor at Longman, for helping to keep the
book on track.
Dennis R. Judd
Todd Swanstrom
 CHAPTER 1
City Politics in America:
An Introduction
Three Themes
The political dynamics of America’s cities and urban regions have remained
remarkably similar over time. From the nation’s founding to the present, a
devotion to the private marketplace and a tradition of democratic governance
have been the pivotal values defining American culture. Finding a balance
between these two imperatives has never been easy; indeed, the tension between
the two is the mainspring that energizes nearly all important political struggles
that occur at the local level. The politics of growth becomes obvious when
conflicts break out over public expenditures for such things as airport
construction, convention centers, and sports stadiums. Projects like these are
invariably promoted with the claim that they will bring prosperity to everyone
in the urban community, but such representations do not lay to rest important
concerns about whether these are the best or the most effective uses of public
resources. The fact that there is conflict at all lays bare a second imperative: the
politics of governance. Public officials and policymakers must find ways to
arbitrate among the many contending groups and interests that demand a voice
in local government. The complex social, ethnic, and racial divisions that exist
within America’s cities have always made governance a difficult challenge. A
third dynamic has evolved in step with the rise of the modern metropolis over
the past century: the politics of metropolitan fragmentation. During that period,
America’s urban regions have become increasingly fragmented into a
patchwork of separate municipalities. One of the consequences of the extreme
fragmentation of political authority within metropolitan regions is that it helps
perpetuate residential segregation, and makes it nearly impossible to devise
regional solutions to important policy issues such as urban sprawl.
The growth imperative is so deeply embedded in the politics of American
cities that, at times, it seems to overwhelm all other issues. Urban residents
have a huge stake in the continued vitality of the place where they live; it is
where they have invested their energies and capital; it is the source of their
incomes, jobs, and their sense of personal identity and community. Because of
the deep attachments that many people form for their local community, its
continued vitality is always a high priority. Throughout American history,
“place loyalty” has driven civic leaders to devote substantial public authority
and resources to the goal of promoting local economic growth and prosperity.
In the nineteenth century, for instance, cities fought hard to secure connections
to the emerging national railroad system by providing huge subsidies to
railroad corporations. Today, the details are different, but the logic is the same:
since the 1970s, cities have competed fiercely for a share of the growing
market in tourism and entertainment, the “industry without a smokestack.” To
do so, they have spent huge amounts of public money for such things as
convention centers, sports stadiums, cultural institutions, and entertainment
districts. These kinds of activities, all devoted to the goal of promoting local
economic growth, are so central to what cities do that it would be impossible to
understand urban politics without taking them into account.
The imperative of governance arises from the social, racial, and ethnic
differences that have always characterized American society. America is a
nation of immigrants, and for most of the nation’s history, anxiety about the
newcomers has been a mainstay of local and, for that matter, national politics.
Attempts to curb immigration can be traced back to the 1830s, when the Irish
began coming to American shores in large numbers. Episodes of anti-
immigrant reaction have flared up from time to time ever since, especially
during times of economic stress. Ethnic and racial conflicts have been such a
constant feature of American politics that they have long shaped national
electoral and partisan alignments. This has been as true in recent decades as at
any time in the past. At the metropolitan level, bitter divisions have often pitted
central cities against suburbs, and one suburb against the next.
The extreme fragmentation of America’s metropolitan areas has its origins
in the process of suburbanization that began unfolding in the late nineteenth
century. For a long time, the term “urban” referred to the great cities of the
industrial era, their diverse mix of ethnic groups and social classes, and their
commanding national presence as centers of technology and economic
production. The second “urban” century was very different. Increasingly, the
cities of the industrial era became surrounded by rings of independent political
jurisdictions – what came to be called suburbs. Beginning as early as the
1920s, the great industrial cities centers went into a long slide even while the
suburbs around them prospered. Ultimately, an urban geography emerged that
was composed of a multitude of separate jurisdictions ranging from white and
wealthy to poor and minority, and everything in between. Recently the central
cities have begun to attract affluent (and especially younger) residents and the
suburbs have become more representative of American society as a whole.
Even so, a complicated mosaic of governments and even privatized gated
communities continue to be important features in the daily life of urban
residents: where people live greatly influences with whom they come into
contact with, their tax burdens and level of municipal services, and even their
political outlook. Within metropolitan areas there is not one urban community,
but many.
The three strands that compose city politics in America—the imperative of
economic growth, the challenge of governance, and the rise of the fragmented
metropolis—can be woven into a narrative that allows us to understand the
forces that have shaped American urban politics, both in the past and in our
own time. Reading a letter to the editor of the local newspaper protesting a
city’s tax subsidy for a new stadium (a clash of values typical of the politics of
growth); walking down a busy city street among people of every color and
national background (which serves as a reminder of the diversity that makes
governance a challenging task); entering a suburban gated community (and
thus falling under the purview of a privatized governing association, still
another of the many governing units that make up the metropolis): all of these
experiences remind us that there are consistent patterns and recurring issues
that shape the political dynamics of urban politics in America.
The politics of Growth
Local communities cannot be preserved without a measure of economic
vitality, and this is why growth and prosperity have always been among the
most important priorities for urban residents and their civic leaders. Founded
originally as centers of trade and commerce, the nation’s cities and towns came
into being as places where people could make money and find personal
opportunity. From the very beginning, European settlement in North America
involved schemes of town promotion. The first colony, Jamestown, founded in
1607, was the risky venture of a group of English entrepreneurs who
organized themselves into a joint stock company. Shares sold in London for
about $62 in gold. If the colony was successful, investors hoped to make a
profit, and of course the colonists themselves had gambled their very lives on
the success of the experiment. Likewise, three centuries later, when a flood of
people began spilling beyond the eastern seaboard into the frontier of the new
nation, they founded towns and cities as a way of making a personal bet on the
future prospects of a particular place. The communities that grew up prospered
if they succeeded in becoming the trading hub for a region and an export
platform for agricultural and finished goods moving into the national
economic system. For this reason, the nineteenth-century movement across the
continent placed towns at the leading edge of territorial expansion:
America was settled as a long, thin line of urban places, scattering outward and westward from the
Atlantic seaboard. The popular imagination has it that farmers came first and villages later. The
historian’s truth is that villages and towns came first, pulling farmers along to settle the land around
and between urban settlements.1

Each town was its own capitalist system in miniature, held together by the
activities of entrepreneurs in search of profit and personal advancement. The
restless pursuit of new opportunities encouraged the formation of what urban
historian Sam Bass Warner has called a national “culture of privatism,” which
stressed individual efforts and aspirations over collective or public purposes:
“[The] local politics of American cities have depended for their actors, and for
a good deal of their subject matter, on the changing focus of men’s private
economic activities.”2 The leading philosophy of the day promoted the idea
that by pursuing their own individual interests, people were also contributing
to the welfare of the community.
On the frontier, the founders of cities and the entrepreneurs who made their
money in them recognized that in order to ensure their mutual success, they
would have to take steps to promote their city and region. Local boosters
promoted their city’s real or imagined advantages—a harbor or strategic
location on a river, for example, or proximity to rich farming and mining
areas. They also boasted about local culture: music societies, libraries, and
universities. And they went further than boasting; they used the powers of city
government to promote local growth. Municipalities were corporations that
could be used to help finance a variety of local undertakings, from
subscriptions in railroad stock to improvements in harbors and docks. There
was broad support for such undertakings because citizens shared in the
perception that local economic vitality was absolutely necessary to advance the
well-being of the urban community and everyone in it.
Today, support for measures to promote the local economy continues to be
bound up with people’s attachments to place and community. Without jobs and
incomes, people simply cannot stay in the place that gives life to family,
neighborhood, and local identity. The environmental and social effects of the
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010 illustrate this
point. As the disaster unfolded, it seemed certain that thousands of jobs would
be lost in a long arc stretching from southern Louisiana to the Florida coast. At
the time, tourism was expected to drop by half on Florida’s Gulf Coast, costing
the state at least 200,000 jobs.3 In Louisiana, fishing, shellfish, and other
industries seemed to be on the verge of being wiped out. When people talked
about the disaster to news reporters, they spoke not only of the loss of
livelihood, but also, with great emotion, about its effect on family values and
community traditions—about the loss of a “way of life.”
No matter how calamitous, the oil spill was not likely to make coastal
communities disappear overnight, no matter how hard it may have been to
recover (fortunately, the long-term consequences of the spill were not as
severe as many feared). People identify with the community within which they
live, and they are often reluctant to move even in the face of genuine hardship.
The resilience of community was illustrated in the 1970s and 1980s when
massive losses of businesses and jobs hit the industrial heartland of the
Midwest and Northeast. The rapid deindustrialization of a vast region
threatened the existence of entire communities. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
region experienced a 44 percent loss in manufacturing jobs from 1979 to
1988, three-quarters of them related to steel. Unemployment levels reached as
high as 20 percent, not only in Pittsburgh, but also in Detroit and several other
cities of the industrial belt.4 Some people fled for more prosperous areas of
the Sunbelt, but a great many of them elected to stay. Rather than giving up, in
city after city public leaders took measures to rebuild their economies; indeed,
in most places the cause of local renewal took on the character of a permanent
crusade. Communities of the Gulf Coast reacted in a similar way. People
resisted leaving; instead, they put their efforts into regenerating their local
economies and strengthening their communities because they were not willing
to abandon the traditions and cultures that brought meaning to their lives.
It might seem that the intimate connection between material well-being and
community identity would leave little room for disagreement over the premise
that cities must do everything they can do all the time to promote local
prosperity. But this commitment does not always translate into support for
every politician and developer ’s bright idea or ambitious proposal. Disputes
break out because policies to promote growth cannot benefit everyone equally;
they are not always sensible or plausible; and there are always winners and
losers. For renters and low-income residents, the gentrification of their
neighborhood may bring higher rents and home values that ultimately force
them to move. Growth in the downtown corporate and financial sectors may
create some high-paying jobs for educated professionals but leave many
central-city residents with low-paying jobs or on the unemployment rolls. A
downtown that encroaches on nearby neighborhoods may benefit the
businesses located in the new office towers but may also compromise the
quality of life for nearby residents. People who do not care about sports may
resent helping to pay for a new football stadium. Different perspectives such as
these explain why there is frequent disagreement about how to promote
growth, even though everyone believes that local prosperity is a good thing.
The use of eminent domain by local governments illustrates the kinds of
disputes that can divide communities. All across the nation, cities have
aggressively used their power to take private property for “higher uses” to
make way for big-box stores, malls, condominium projects, sports stadiums,
and a great many other initiatives. For most of the nation’s history, local
governments have possessed the authority to take property without the owners’
consent if it serves a legitimate public purpose.5 Public officials have liberally
interpreted this power as a useful tool for economic development, but
homeowners and small businesses who find their property condemned so that
it can be sold to a big developer look at it with a skeptical eye. On December
20, 2000, a group of homeowners led by Sussette Kelo filed a suit challenging
a decision by the city of New London, Connecticut, to cede its eminent domain
authority to a private corporation that wanted to raze their homes. Things came
to a head on June 23, 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court
rulings in favor of the development corporation. The Court’s decision ignited
a firestorm of protest that swept the nation. In response to the public furor, by
the fall of 2006, state legislatures in 30 states had enacted legislation to restrict
the use of eminent domain, and hundreds of towns and cities had done likewise.
In the fall elections of 2006, voters in 12 states passed referendums prohibiting
the taking of property for private development if it did not serve a clear public
purpose.6
The lesson from the Kelo v. New London case is that despite the fact that
almost everyone embraces the goal of local economic growth, sometimes the
policies to promote it clash with other values, such as individual property
rights, the health of a neighborhood, or a preference for less governmental
intrusion. Everyone may seem to share the same interest in promoting the
wellbeing of the urban community, but they frequently disagree over how to
make that happen.
The Politics of Governance
International migration is transforming societies around the globe, and the
United States is no exception. More immigrants came to the United States in the
1990s than in any previous decade in the nation’s history, and the flow has
continued into the twenty-first century. The social and political effects of large-
scale population movements are often on display in big global cities such as
Miami, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and in many smaller places as
well. For this reason, in the global era, as in the past, city politics often pivots
around issues of racial and ethnic identity and feelings of community
solidarity at least as much as around issues of economic development.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, when colonial-era values still prevailed,
men of wealth and high social standing made most of the decisions for the
urban community. In the cities, “leadership fell to those who exercised
economic leadership. All leadership, political, social, economic, tended to
collect in the same set of hands.”7 Business owners, professionals, and
aristocrats ran municipal affairs without challenge. The members of this social
and political elite shared a mistrust of what Thomas Jefferson called
“mobocracy,” a word he used to signify his opposition to rule by popular
majority. Governance was remarkably informal. Local notables served on
committees formed to build public wharves, organize town watches, and build
and maintain public streets, and even the most essential services, such as crime
control and fire prevention, generally relied on the voluntary efforts of
citizens. Such a casual governmental structure fit the pace of life and the social
intimacy of small communities.
By the industrial era of the 1850s, cities were growing at breakneck speed,
and they were also becoming socially stratified and ethnically complex. Waves
of immigrants were crowding into densely packed neighborhoods. They came
from an astonishing variety of national cultures, from England, Ireland,
Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and later from Italy and a broad swath of
eastern European countries. From time to time, ethnic tensions rose to a fever
pitch, and tipped over into violence time and again. In the industrial cities, the
colonial-era style of politics could not survive the change, and in time, a new
generation of urban leaders came onto the scene. They came from the
immigrant precincts and entered politics by mobilizing the vote of the urban
electorate. Their rise to power set off decades of conflict between wealthy and
middle-class elites and the immigrants and their leaders, a story we tell in
Chapters 3 and 4.
In the twentieth century, large movements of people continued to flood into
the cities, but the ethnic and racial composition of these urban migrations
changed dramatically. The immigrant flood tide ended in the early 1920s,
when Congress enacted legislation that nearly brought foreign immigration to
a halt. By then, however, a massive internal population movement was already
picking up speed. In the first three decades of the twentieth century and again in
the years following World War II, millions of African Americans fled the
hostile culture of the South for jobs and opportunity in the industrial cities.
They were joined by successive waves of destitute whites fleeing the
unemployment and poverty of Appalachia and other depressed areas, and by
Mexicans crossing the border to escape violence and poverty in their own
country. These streams of migration virtually guaranteed that twentieth-century
urban America would be riddled with violent racial conflict. One consequence
of the rising tensions in the cities is that millions of white families left their
inner-city neighborhoods and fled to the suburbs. A social and racial chasm
soon separated cities from suburbs, and echoes of that period continue to
reverberate to this day.
A vivid example of the continuing racial divide was on display in New
Orleans in the late summer of 2005. When the storm surge from Hurricane
Katrina breached the dikes surrounding New Orleans on August 29, 2005, 80
percent of the city was flooded and nearly 100,000 people were left to deal
with the consequences. Wrenching images of human suffering filled television
news programs: 25,000 people trying to live under impossible conditions in
the Superdome, 20,000 more in the Convention Center, residents fleeing
across bridges and overpasses and desperately waving from rooftops. More
than 1.5 million people were displaced, 60,000 homes were destroyed, and
1,300 people died.8 African American neighborhoods located on the lowest
and least desirable parts of the city bore the brunt of the destruction. The racial
segregation that made this possible is a legacy of New Orleans’ past, and
despite the civil rights advances that protect the rights of minorities to live
where they choose to, it is a pattern that has not disappeared—in New Orleans
or anywhere else.
In the meantime, bitter conflicts have, once again, broken out over foreign
immigration. The massive flows of immigrants in recent decades have made
cities culturally and socially dynamic places, but they have also meant that
ethnic identity has continued to fuel conflict in national and city politics. The
passage of Senate Bill 1070 by the Arizona Senate on April 23, 2010,
provoked a furious reaction across the country. The Arizona law authorized
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
and which is not a sinister quality only to be raved about as “a rag
and a bone and a hank of hair,” had for the time being become
supreme in Thurley. Dan did not understand this—any more than he
understood why he was unhappy when he was near Thurley and
always thinking about Lorraine and why, when he returned home,
fortified a thousand times by the blessed memories of Thurley’s
beauty and the stolen moments he had claimed, he was unhappier
still.
Dan would return to his immaculate, prosaic living-room where
Lorraine would greet him and inform him all in the same breath that
Lydia Hoyt was engaged and Lorraine would give a kitchen shower—
and did Dan notice how the veranda posts sagged, hadn’t he better
have a man come up and see about them?—oh, yes, there was
something wrong with her car, well—she had let Owen drive it
because he had deliveries to make ’way out in the country—
beefsteak was three cents higher a pound than last week and two of
the church deacons had resigned because they couldn’t have their
way about the music.
After which Dan would slip away to unpack his bag and Lorraine to
prepare his supper. There would be an abundant, well cooked meal
on the prosaic table with its nightmares of hand painted peppers and
salts and cut glass monstrosities, the water pitcher heavily banded
with gilt. After eating his fill, Dan would depart to smoke in peace
and wonder what Lorraine would think of Thurley’s new frocks and
the baskets of flowers which forever adorned her rooms, of the
bizarre friends and their weird ways—he would end, however, with
the somewhat hopeless consolation that Lorraine had about as much
imagination or capacity for artistic enjoyment as the old lady who,
upon seeing mountains for the first time, merely said querulously,
“Dear me, if any one ever started to roll—”
For Lorraine would have probably remarked, after viewing
Thurley’s apartment, “How in the world does she ever get the work
done!” letting the panorama of joys and possibilities sweep on
uncomprehended.
 Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was
not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a
sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his
house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager
or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the
field-daisy! Each has its own place.
But when spring began to hint of its appearance and Dan had
been in New York over Easter, while the Corners gossiped about his
absence, although Lorraine bravely occupied the front church pew
and wore her new silk gown, Dan came home prepared to tell
Lorraine that he would probably be away very often during the
summer.
He waited until the work was “done up” and Lorraine brought her
everlasting handiwork to join him in the den. The den itself was
sufficient to make Dan’s nerves rebel—it had been furnished a few
months after their marriage, an upstairs bedroom transformed into
an inquisition chamber, as he told Thurley.
Dens in such hamlets as the Corners offer no raison d’être save
when a cartoonist gets a peek at them or the family scapegoat turns
up unawares and is made to occupy the combination divan and
folding lounge.
Lorraine fondly pictured the den as an ideal place for Dan to come
and rest—“A real man’s room,” she explained, “where they smoke
and play cards—and talk about things!” It was adorned by Indian
heads, an oak table with a prim scarf done in poppies and
maidenhair fern, a lounge with pillows made from cigar ribbons and
college pennants, all placed in undying positions of rectitude, glass
candlesticks with pink shades, a shining little ash tray and match
box, a shelf of detective stories and old magazines, an easy chair in
old rose velours, two fragile rocking chairs, some grinning
lithographs of cowboys, African savages, Christy girls and bulldogs
placed at exact intervals about the pink flowered walls and dimity
curtains criss-crossed and crisp from recent washing to shut out the
light!
 Seated here, this April evening, a hundred thoughts clamoring for
consideration before the task of telling Lorraine he was to be in New
York a great deal, Dan pretended to play solitaire and keep up a
desultory conversation about the way a neighbor trained a pumpkin
vine over his woodshed and captured the village improvement prize!
The absence of sympathy between them seemed a relentless,
chilly wind whipping on his treasonous speech, all the more so
because Dan had no truly logical excuse. On the face of it, what
more could a man demand? That is, if one were magnanimous about
the Indian heads and sofa pillows, what right had he, a small town
shopkeeper, to wail his heart out for a genius?
“Oh, ’Raine,” he said abruptly, shuffling the cards with a fillip, “I
may have to run off for a few days in a couple of weeks—all right?”
Lorraine did not answer; she bent her head over her work.
Dan looked at her sharply. “Isn’t it all right?” His voice had that
dangerous gentleness at which she always winced.
“Is she coming back this summer?” She dropped the sewing.
Dan put aside the cards and came beside her. Under the flare of
the reading light her face seemed thinner and more childish. There
was a miraculous subtlety of features, a hidden delicate something
which he could not analyze; he felt boorish, brutal, as absurd as
when he was one of Thurley’s guests at a party and every one really
made polite game of him.
He kept looking at Lorraine, wondering why this change had come
about; tired purple shadows were under her eyes, the eyes
themselves were soft, shining things seeming to look far beyond
him.
She raised her hand, crumpling the sheer, white slip on which she
was sewing.
“You mean Thurley,” he stammered, “well—I—I don’t know, dear,
you see the Fincherie is Miss Clergy’s house and of course ... oh,
’Raine ... now, I understand,” his eyes staring at the tiny, gossamer
dress!
 CHAPTER XXX
With an armful of projects under way, Hobart had little time for
Thurley during the winter. He met her with a sort of “You’ve got
beyond me but I don’t think I’ll bother to chase after” attitude,
praising her when she did well or keeping his silence when she did
some showy, foolish thing, food for press agents. He was
noncommittal as to Dan Birge’s visits—as Miss Clergy had been,
since the latter looked upon them as a particularly choice part of her
revenge, for here was a man debarred from marrying the woman he
loved, yet following her hopelessly whenever she permitted, Pied
Piper fashion.
When Lissa had hinted of unsavory things to him, Hobart
dismissed the matter with a careless speech and a shrug of the
shoulders. This he had learned to do long ago, whenever Lissa came
prattling of some imaginary scandal which pleased her tarnished
mind. There had been the time she tried to convince Hobart that
Collin really did not paint his own pictures, but hypnotized Polly into
doing it and thus kept her starving in a garret, hopelessly in love
with Collin and Collin playing a modern Svengali. Lissa had
endeavored for many days to make Ernestine believe that Caleb was
the storm center of a liaison with a Broadway actress, thus ferreting
out Ernestine’s state of mind concerning Caleb and promptly running
to Caleb to tell him, ever so confidentially, that Ernestine was in
danger of drinking herself to death, poor woman,—too bad she
loved that wretched gypsy violinist who had played with her in
concert work—could nothing be done about it? The world had soon
learned not to value Lissa’s information, paying no heed to her hints
of Sam Sparling’s dreadful actions or that Bliss Hobart did not go to
his hermitage in the Maine woods—why, there was the silliest little
movie actress at San Diego—living in a perfect castle, too—
 So Hobart, well versed in tactics, when Lissa approached him on
the subject of Dan and Thurley, managed to switch the conversation
on to the information that Mark had danced so poorly his position as
premier was threatened and Lissa had better adopt the diet of a
Belgian refugee if she still wished to look her best in tailored things!
Lissa, ousted for the time being, would depart to vent her wrath on
the shoulders of her maid or Mark, who was, in truth, dancing poorly
because he was bored and he felt dancing was not a man’s life-work
when other things kept whispering themselves to him—and, hang it
all, why did a clean cut, wonder girl like Thurley let Lissa pull her
around by the nose anyway?
In a spirit of half earnest, half flippant revenge for Hobart’s
neglect, Thurley sang poorly at a salon concert at which Hobart was
the host. She so resorted to Lissa’s mannerisms that Caleb took
notes on his cuff for future use.
Thurley knew the concert was a failure since she was to be the
one to make it a success. She refused to meet Hobart’s disappointed
gaze, pretending to be engrossed in listening to a Russian agitator
telling of his escape over the frontier.
The next morning, when Thurley was debating whether or not it
would be convenient to have Dan visit her so soon again, if this
summer was to be spent in shocking the natives or, as Caleb had
urged, selecting a site for a permanent country home and seeing it
well on its way to completion by fall, she lifted the telephone
receiver to answer its ring and heard Bliss Hobart’s voice—his
teacher voice—saying,
“Come over at ten, Thurley, you’ve a lot to answer for.”
“Suppose I won’t come?” she retorted, delighted at the prospect.
But he had disconnected. She deliberately made herself late by
overdressing. A mad hatter’s model of a bonnet in blue and a frock
of rose taffeta with a coat to match furnished her with the proper
scenery, she admitted to herself. She slipped in to where Miss Clergy
industriously sat knitting army socks and told her she was off for a
coaching lesson.
“A coaching or a dancing lesson?” Miss Clergy asked
mischievously.
“Both,” Thurley declared.
She found Hobart in his inner study; he was playing an old gavotte
and greeting her with a curt nod.
“Well—is a luncheon to follow the lesson? You must have thought
I’d keep you all morning. I’ve a pupil at eleven.”
Thurley sat on one of the little peasant chairs and pouted
becomingly.
“I dress to suit my mood. Some mornings I have a desire for a
winding sheet; this morning I wanted rose taffeta and sapphire
velvet.”
Hobart smiled. “Does Miss Clergy ever row about your adorers?”
Thurley flushed, saying in a more natural voice, “Not exactly. To
her mind it is the more enhancing—keeping mankind at bay. And it
settles a distressing question for me.... I daresay I’d make a cropper
of marriage, most of us do. This way, I do as I like,” turning to
contemplate the empty fireplace. “Must I be coached this morning?”
she added. “My throat feels scratchy and I have a benefit concert to-
night.”
“It wasn’t your voice—but yourself.” He ended the song and,
rising, took an opposite chair before the fireplace. “I am going away
earlier than usual this year because of some work in England;
making art aid the war. If I don’t see you again, let me give you a
little moral coaching which is all you need to set you right.”
She would have interrupted, but he held up a protesting hand.
“Age before camouflage,” he pleaded. “For a long time, Thurley, I
have been watching you. You have come now to where you feel that
an utter disregard of morals is really preparation and a necessary
frame of mind in order to win the violet crown—”
“What do you mean by the violet crown?” She did not look at him.
“One of my pet names.” He became boyish in manner as he
always did when prevailed upon to speak of the things nearest his
heart. “I’ve a lot of pet names—and secrets—tucked under this salt
and pepper hair of mine. A long time ago, I sang rather well,—nice
people have said I sang as well as yourself, with as much ease and
as little training. That was why I understood you. My mother was an
Italian and my father an American, but we lived in Italy to please my
mother and, after my father died, she felt she could not bear to
leave the blessed memories, for they had been ideally happy.” He
seemed lost in a reverie from which he roused himself with an effort
to continue:
“After my mother was gone and I was singing as well as yourself
and every one making quite a fuss over me and wanting me to tour
America,” he seemed to dread even the saying of the words, “I loved
a woman who was older than myself and who sang, too, but not
well—more like Lissa. I loved her very dearly and, of course, I
believed in her. But she was an art intriguer and not a worker and
she said she loved me merely because my golden voice meant real
gold—for her to spend.... After awhile,—I suppose I became a
tedious, dreamy lad too occupied with ideals,—she found a man with
a great deal of money and no more knowledge of music or art than
a lapdog has.... Without telling me, she went up to Paris and they
were married and she laughed at my moonings and made fun of my
ideals.... For a long time I was ill, absurdly so, and when I was well,
my voice was gone,” he tried to speak lightly, “but in its stead I had
a vision.... Does that sound too superlative? It does to myself, for it
is one of the things words spoil the full meaning of; it would take
music to express it, a sonata inspired by the three oldest sounds in
the world—”
“What are they?” Thurley asked, feeling the simple girl from
Birge’s Corners again, a de luxe Topsy!
 “The wind, the death cry of a warrior and a woman’s sobs,” he
answered so quickly she knew it had been clear to him for a long
time. “No one will ever write the sonata, so words must do their
best. At least, I choose to whom they shall be said. For it is as if you
were looking into the very soul of me, as a mother does when she
first sees her newborn child, the instant when the mysterious bond
between them is formed for all time, despite all happenings.”
Thurley leaned forward in her chair, her blue eyes serious. “I shall
understand,” she promised.
“I have never told any one all I shall tell you to-day, because I
could not bear to have them jangle and disagree in silly, stupid ways
—like an auctioneer trying to prove that the contents of a shrine
were not of intrinsic value but merely worth while as souvenirs!
Because I think it is worth while, I shall tell you. All the others,” he
shook his head, “were not worth it! Nor could I have told you at the
beginning—you could not have understood. Now, you are at the
crossroads, flirting with each direction, undecided which way you are
going to travel.”
“I shall understand you,” she repeated. To herself she added,
“Because I love you!”
“It seemed to me as I pulled myself together after the fever and
cast about for another way of being useful, that true art was not
symbolized by a laurel wreath but by a violet crown—I daresay the
notion started from my admiration of the wonderful enamelled cups
used in cathedrals—lavender and sapphire. So I named the symbol
for genius, the crown typifying supremacy, violet, as the ecclesiastics
interpret it—humbleness, for those who possess true genius must be
ever mindful of the sparrow’s fall. It has seemed to me the violet
crown could be, figuratively, won only by such a nation as America,
which, like the Child in the temple, commanded respect and
consideration of the elders—or the Old World with its shallow
reasonings as to art. For the Old World has, to my mind, treated art
and its artists somewhat after the fashion of Barmecide’s Feast—the
Arabian Nights’ tale of the prince who bade the beggar sit at the
snowy table a-glitter with golden service and, lo, when the platters
were lifted, the plates were devoid of food! So it is with true art—we
have had wonderful achievements, but we have not yet made
ourselves realize the moral significance and responsibility of art and
artists, that has been as devoid of justice as the golden plates of
Prince Barmecide were of food—” He paused.
Thurley was eager to speak. “Why, then, can I understand your
vision?” hoping for but one reply.
“Because you are one of the vanguard! Another of my secrets!
There are never many of the vanguard, and we are not always rich
or great or talented. Sometimes the vanguard of civilization are
humble and their earthly record most uninteresting. But have you
never thought to yourself there were just a few, rare souls who—
who understand? Who can smile at the trials the world seeks to
escape from and sometimes sob at the vapid joys for which the
world strives so unceasingly? The vanguard can make the most out
of little and belittle the most. They seem to glimpse the coming trials
of the nation and her resultant triumphs; they are never given to
cowardice of flesh or spirit. As a general’s military vanguard moves
further along the battleline, so we, the altruistic vanguard, must be
ever ahead of the times in thought, deed and prophecy. It is not
always a pleasant rôle—to blaze the trail. The vanguard are usually
misjudged, ridiculed and never idle—”
“So the first vanguard was the group at Calvary who gave
defiance to the mob.” Thurley forgot the personal issue between
them.
He nodded, well pleased. “In science, theology, economics, art, so
on, we always find a few members allying themselves distinctly with
each great cause and these few dare to see and to say wherein lie
the errors of the past and the possibilities of the future. Let you and
me, Thurley, as artists help America as a nation to the winning of
the violet crown.”
“This war—” she began.
 “Ah, not this physical war, for it will be over within a short time—
so to speak. America will enter and soon surface peace will result.
But long, long afterwards—when art assumes fairly normal
proportions and consideration and the world lapses back into the old
ways—what then? Some one has said the French have taken this
war as an immortal martyrdom and the British as a bully, well worth
while game—then let our nation take it as the chance to win the
violet crown—first by the necessary sacrifice and change in
extravagant, thoughtless living which will prepare our minds to be
ready for the great moral battle long after the fields of Flanders are
recreated into fragrant orchards.”
“Then you did not want to preach to me,” Thurley sighed with
relief.
“This is all a part of it,” he warned, “for you have strayed far from
the vanguard. First, to finish about myself. For I have been glad the
world lost an excellent tenor because he might have been a foolish
one. I am better placed as I am; but you, Thurley, are running
amuck. Why this shallow flippancy? This false basis of theories,
mistaking shadow for substance? Because you hear such and such a
great diva bore a child for a crown prince—that this artist acts under
the influence of morphine and that one paints only when addled
from absinthe—you must not pursue these phantoms of self-
indulgence—and you who sit there looking confused yet combative,
you are at this very moment halfway inviting an intrigue with an
honest country lad—Dan Birge! Can you not remember that scullery
maids as well as prima donnas dabble their virtue in cheap stains;
there is nothing distinctive about it?”
Instantly at war with herself, yet happy because Hobart was
speaking to her, Thurley, of her personal tangles, she began a
spirited defence, using Lissa’s blasé theories.
He waved them aside, answering in a brusque manner, a contrast
to his dreamy fashion of a moment ago, “You say, ‘I am different—
on an independent train!’ Then so are we all, rich man, poor man,
beggar man, thief.
 “Why applaud, throw gold, even title a man or a woman who,
despite remarkable ability, has betrayed every simple tenet of faith
and mocked at the very subject matter which gives them their laurel
wreath? We need a new standard for art, Thurley.
“As the air has been conquered for a flight, a dozen things of
science, a broader version of theology, let us make the standards of
personality of importance in considering genius. Ultimately we
should not lose. The artists themselves would be the spiritual
gainers, if forced to live up to the ideals they so conscientiously and
glibly prescribe for every one else. You hear of a tradesman who
abuses his family and his business invariably falls off as a result. Yet
we encore a man who has cynically betrayed a young girl and laugh
indulgently when reading of his drunken escapades. ‘But what a
Romeo!’ we say. ‘We must excuse him—an artist, you know.’ There is
an end of it. Is it not true that in politics nothing damns a candidate
more than a whisper against his good name—his name, mark you,
not his abilities? In religion, what ruins a clergyman more than the
rumor of the little choir girl—? In everything else the world has
attempted to deal out justice regarding the equation of personal and
professional life, but at the mere mention of talent, genius—
temperament—even a bobbed-haired musical comedy actress—the
public sinks giggling like a schoolgirl into an orchestra chair and
becomes ineffectual, blind, duped—immoral!”
Thurley made no comment, but she rose and showed her nervous
tension by walking rapidly up and down the floor.
After a pause Hobart added, “If we are to make American art
permanent, we must make American artists hold to the best in
themselves. That, Thurley, is my vision! That is what you must do,
for you are of the vanguard and you have true genius. Of course
there would be a time of temporary disillusionment for art, with
every one scrambling about and crying, ‘Help-ho—surely, not me!’
After the readjustment, when the craft of artists realize that the
public demands clean-breathed lives of them and the surplus of
amateurs have been beaten back into the ranks, I see an art so
ennobling and enduring that all other glories pale beside it—an art of
which America alone is capable—virile, innocent not ignorant,
mystical yet practical. In truth America’s sixth race can be the
inspiration of the bleeding, older world. That, Thurley, by degrees,
must be our part in reconstruction—the winning for America of the
violet crown.”
Thurley paused in her walking of the floor.
“But when one is so young and—when—” She faltered, all the
wild-rose self of her returning, like a child reluctant to confess its
misdoings.
Hobart took her hands in his. “The personal twist to any problem
is for the person to solve; no one else can estimate it as well. Only
to you have I told my vision, confided my hopes. Do not disappoint
me,” he would have added more but the rap at the door recalled him
to the eleven o’clock lesson.
“Au revoir,” he said gaily, “and if I do not see you until fall—”
“You must see me; you cannot leave me at the crossroads.”
“You are making yourself walk backwards to them,” he
contradicted.
“You did not finish about yourself,” she refused to be conscious of
his appointment, “the woman you—loved—that part of the story—”
“I told you all I have ever allowed myself to remember,” he
corrected, the inner illumination vanishing and the rather cynical
man of the world in elegant morning dress remaining.
 CHAPTER XXXI
Thurley went directly home instead of keeping a luncheon
engagement with Ernestine. She wanted to spend the afternoon in
remembering all he had said. The greatness of his vision and the
new standard for art had not impressed her as much as the moment
when he had taken her hands—or told of his false love. Then Miss
Clergy’s promise crossed the clearness of her reflection, blurring it
badly; Dan’s bucolic letter on her desk marred her thoughts as well—
so did the flowers from Mark, the handsome gift book from some
one else; a myriad of incidents and engagements came to spoil the
reverie. As sacred to her as the vision which had been shared with
her, Thurley kept telling herself, “I am of the vanguard ... and I love
him ... no other man can tempt me ... I love him, therefore I can live
up to his vision and help him ... for he is sadly limited. He merely
expresses what some one else must do.... I love him,” and when the
charming question hinted itself to her,—“Suppose this man of a great
vision and grave purpose, burned clean of youthful tragedy, should
love you—what then?”—Thurley admitted that vows were brittle
things and that if the circumstances so fell out she would not
hesitate to prove the statement.
The next morning when she was writing Hobart a note trying to
express something of all she felt towards his vision and his influence,
as Dante said of Virgil, “their guide, their master and their friend,”
Lissa dropped in for a call.
“Bliss sails at noon for England,” she informed Thurley. “Isn’t it
wonderful to be all important, war or no war? They want him to
patch them all up with patriotic art—I suppose he’ll come back an
earl in spite of himself—”
Whereat Thurley felt as heartbroken as a girl deserted by her
bona fide lover, as she tried to chat pleasantly and not betray her
disappointment. She entered again the squirrel cage of doubts and
subterfuges until she felt as absurd at having seriously considered
being one of the vanguard as one who admits having won a
husband through a matrimonial agency.
Lissa’s way was quite comfortable—uneasy lies a head which does
not wear a becoming hat was the greatest depth of her philosophy!
So Thurley dragged the summer through, wondering why Dan had
ceased to write to her, imploring her to return to the Corners or
permit him to visit her in New York. In the true sense Thurley was
glad Dan had not written, although no woman can ever quite forgive
a man whose interest in her ceases. She was piqued, on her mettle
to sing her best and disprove Hobart’s flowery vision, as she had told
herself it was, to sing so well and live so flippantly that she could say
to him with truth, when he returned, “Your vision is impractical,” and
when a certain multi-millionaire, a chewing-gum king he was, to
make it the more humorous, made love to Thurley and plied her with
attentions, Thurley did not hesitate to flirt with him publicly until
Sunday newspapers, despite the war, devoted a page of pictures and
lurid writing with repeated exclamations about “the young diva
whose vow never to marry has not kept her from being soul mate to
the chewing-gum king!”
The chewing-gum king was boresome after a little; horse-racing,
good wine, pretty women without brains, clothes trees upon which
to display his wealth, were the extent of his possibilities. And
Thurley, without hesitation, proceeded to pass him over to willing
rivals who had watched the apparent progress of the affair with
scantily concealed envy.
Miss Clergy had not gone to the mountains but stayed with
Thurley, who flitted restlessly from one watering spot to another,
appearing at the private affairs for war charities, now and then
running into Caleb or Ernestine or Collin who, likewise, seemed to be
having a table d’hôte vacation, a little of everything and none of it
satisfying.
 Hortense Quinby, again in charge of Thurley’s apartment, and
Polly Harris proved the only exciting events in the long holiday.
Without warning Hortense left Thurley as suddenly as she had
attached herself to the retinue, a desertion which brought Thurley
into town to see why this sudden resignation of a now valued
member of her staff.
She found Hortense in a khaki uniform with innumerable brass
buttons and a mock knapsack across her chest, her restless eyes
sparkling with a new eagerness as when she had pleaded to become
necessary to some one who was already famous. Hortense was to
do land duty in behalf of the French war orphans, only, as she told
Thurley forcibly, until America entered the war and overseas duty
confronted her. At last she could prove her worth to the world! The
land duty in behalf of the orphans, as nearly as Thurley could make
out, was to appear publicly as often as possible to solicit
subscriptions from all who passed by,—a more exciting form of the
occupations of old men to be seen on side streets, a restaurant sign
harnessed on both chest and back, announcing the wonders of pot
roast and noodles for fifty cents—pie extra.
“But just when you’ve learned to be of such use to me,” Thurley
urged, “the way you keep everything going—why, Hortense, weren’t
you happy?”
At which Thurley was treated to the initial outburst of Hortense’s
emotional spree.
Briefly, it was this: The chance for the great adventure was
presenting itself to women whose lives had had neither adventure
nor romance. And if romance and adventure had not been theirs, it
was their duty as individual souls to create it, woo it, pursue it,
anything to obtain some smart and stinging knowledge of the world
at large. It was better to wear out than to rust out, this strange,
middle-aged rebel said, her long, thin hands fondling the buttons of
her toy uniform.
 “Ah, but I thought it was for the orphans,” suggested Thurley, who
had, unostentatiously, paid for the support of half a dozen of them.
Well, it was the orphans, true enough—but the orphans were a
means to an end—there, that was the situation! Being third rail to
fame was not satisfactory, it was like leading a hungry man outside a
restaurant window wherein are displayed three-inch steaks flanked
by asparagus and keeping him there, close to the food it is true, but
separated by a window glass which, if he breaks it, means jail!
Being associated with genius had merely whetted her appetite for
expression, nor was she alone, she added, all over America were
women realizing that the opportunity for self-expression, freedom of
speech and action was theirs; they would proceed on the quest for
adventure, something to be an everlasting antidote against the drab
pattern of their ladylike lives! Few suspected this rebel germ was
quickening in the flat, thin chests of conscientious, rubber heeled
librarians, middle aged, a trifle unwholesome spinsters like Hortense
—but it was true. Whether or not it was milk for French orphans,
which was a worthy cause playing into the hands of the restless
searchers, a cause was being given them and take it they would!
So Hortense, for the time being, passed from Thurley’s life with
Thurley pondering after she had stamped from the room with a
ringing, military tread and given Thurley her headquarters address,
adding that she would see trench life or commit suicide!
When Thurley sought out Polly to beseech her to come and look
after things, particularly now that Thurley was to begin coaching for
her new title rôle in Liszt’s “Saint Elizabeth,” she found Polly giving a
party royal in her attic, celebrating being left a small legacy by a
maiden aunt. The aunt had also left Polly a letter expressing her
opinion that her niece had been nothing if not a fool to have left a
good home with a decent furnace for a tenement and a daily diet of
macaroni.
As Thurley looked at the hilarious feast, well under way, she
laughed in spite of herself and wondered whether or not the aunt’s
shade was walking restlessly! For Polly in a new frock as brown as
Spanish fish nets on the Santander sands, was pouring out claret
with a lavish hand and pressing alligator pear salad and jellied
chicken on her nearest guest, the table abundantly strewn with
every eatable known to luxury.
“Polly’s pretending her opera has been a success, I do believe,” a
more practical guest whispered to Thurley. “She’s determined to
burn her money up as fast as she can; she’s loaned us all ten dollars
—”
Thurley found Polly quite determined to pay no heed to her aunt’s
letter.
“Why should I remember I come of gentle people?” she asked, her
brown eyes sparkling naughtily. “I’d rather have one or two glorious
parties, treat myself to all the music I want for a season than to go
snailing back to Painted Post and live in a cottage completely
surrounded by neighbors. I’ve run wild too long, Thurley dear—don’t
look so disappointed. Why, you beautiful, lovely thing, what right
have you to show me the error of my ways, you with a king’s
ransom on your fingers this minute? Yet, Thurley, when I look at you
and summon my Scotch second sight to lend me wisdom, you seem
fey to me, fated as the Scotch know the world. Shall I tell you your
possibilities?”
“It’s the claret,” Thurley insisted. She did not want to talk about
herself because she did not seem a struggling, interesting human
being like the rest.
“No, it’s not claret but second sight. Bliss knows I have second
sight; he’s often asked me for opinions—for everything but my
operas,” she added a trifle bitterly. “Now you do seem fey, as if you
ought to become a rosy-cheeked matron, the sort that has a big,
brick house just packed with young people who all confide in you,
and a nice, gentle sort of relatives, linen closets with lavender bags
between the snowy piles, jam closets, rooms with old, soft rugs and
mellowed furniture, all kinds of books and pictures and nothing so
wonderful that art dealers would ever employ burglars to borrow.
Just the kind of things that years afterwards would cause your
children to say, ‘Oh, that was mother’s—I shall never give it up,’ or
‘Here is her shawl. How she laughed at herself for huddling so
eternally in it! Let’s keep it in the cedar chest she had as a bride,
she’d like to have it so, I’m certain!’ You understand, Thurley dear,
the lovely common things inspired by some one not common! There,
that’s quite as smart as Caleb himself could have said it.”
Forgetting her errand and Hortense, Thurley repeated, “It’s the
claret, Polly—and you’re quite mad....”
She rushed home to practise scales diligently, remembering with
every thump of the keys that she was never to marry—tum-tum-
tum, and that Bliss Hobart was a visionary dreamer—tum-tum, art
never could be placed on a moral, idealistic basis, never—ti-ti, she
had no idea of trying to be one of the vanguard because how
useless it would be when one was tied to a ghost lady—tum-tum-ti,
that wretched bohemian of a Polly had unsettled her—ti-ti-ti,
anyway, Bliss had said he would not consider a vow to a ghost lady
as binding—tra-la-la, yet after confiding his great secret, why did he
rush off without a good-by, expecting her to do what? Why didn’t he
go scold Ernestine or Caleb or Collin, some one besides herself—ta-
ta-tum, she finished with a final thump and a superbly clear note
which brought Miss Clergy to the door to applaud.
For the first time Thurley turned from her in recoil. She seemed a
jailer preventing Polly’s vision from coming true—and what a lovely
vision it had been!...
“Thurley, are you ill?” Miss Clergy was asking.
“I’m tired of everything,” she answered, without controlling her
temper, “of singing and New York and myself—and you,” like a walli-
walli windstorm she swept out of the room, remaining alone until
she could laugh off her outburst by a light, humorous explanation of
a tight slipper or the alarming story told by the weekly weight on
undeniably uniform scales!
 When Hobart did return, he was a tired and not easily enlivened
man whose summer had been spent overseas planning things
calculated to counteract the effects of “military poison ivy,” so he
said enigmatically. He met Thurley with seemingly weary interest
and a disapproving shake of the head when she tried again to
convince him that her way and Lissa’s way was the best—as well as
the easiest—and the chewing-gum king only one of a handful of “pet
robins!”
Then he looked at her in her sophisticated maze of gold cloth and
gave a boyish laugh. “If you told me you were totally depraved, I
should only laugh,” he said. “You are trying to fool yourself into
thinking yourself a first water adventuress, so how can you expect to
fool me? Come, come, what terrific things have you allowed to
happen to your voice! We shall have to send you to the nursery to
begin again! So Lissa coached you! I knew the voice assassin’s
marks of violence.”
He busied himself with getting Thurley’s voice in shape for her
opening night. They did not talk again of the vision or Thurley’s snap
judgment regarding life. Once Thurley ventured to say he looked
tired and he answered that when a man is used to really ‘living’ for
three months of the year, to be shunted into another channel tells on
his disposition, but he would weather it all right and he was very
glad to have been of service.
“I think one of the hardest things in the world,” he added, “is to
be the man highest up! To have no one to whom you can go and
dump your budget of woes and worries. Sometimes I long for a
limited, brainless task, devoid of responsibility, sure of an
uninterrupted lunch hour and a sick benefit.”
Wondering over his words, Thurley reached her apartment to find
a letter from Dan, hesitating before she opened it to wonder what
had made him break the long and unexplained silence. Then she
found her answer.
 Dan and Lorraine had a son! Dan had written Thurley to tell her
he loved his wife as he had never loved any one before—not even
Thurley. He had confessed to Lorraine his unloyal, wayward impulses
and she had forgiven him. Their joy over Boy was so great that he
wanted Thurley to be friends “with the family.” He ended almost
naïvely, he hoped that she would understand and be happy for them
all!
So a new, engulfing envy, seconded by Polly’s little prophecy,
beset her and during the winter and spring there was but one
outcome, Thurley worked as she had never worked before, deaf to
pleas about her health, bitter towards her admirers, aloof from
Hobart and the others of the family, working without pausing, as if
to drown the very whisper of the things nearest her heart.
With the declaration of war came a multitude of surprises and
readjustments regarding the family. To Thurley’s surprise her own
interest was poised, critical as if the war were past history and not in
the making. Miss Clergy was “not interested,” the Civil War had
written itself for all time on her ghost heart. Mark was not going, he
declared; Collin took the rôle of a misguided pacifist; Caleb plunged
headlong into a war novel, “The Patriotic Burglar,” upon which he
was to realize a fortune and retrieve some very asinine losses on the
stock exchange. “The Patriotic Burglar” was to be called upon to pay
his income tax, and how explain the income of a hundred thousand
a year, partly obtained by the theft of Clementine Van Schaick’s pearl
necklace! Now Clementine was a little volunteer worker at the
income tax office—enter High Ike, the patriotic burglar, they meet—
and here romance fairly skidded under the speed of Caleb’s
typewriter. No soldier was to be without a copy, commissioned
officers would be expected to carry five at least, and that was as far
as the war affected him!
Ernestine took the pessimistic view one would have expected of
her. The country was going to the dogs, she declared, really
mistaking her own intensive selfishness for the failure of the country.
 Hobart, who had already been fighting “art battles” abroad, had
little time in which to express opinions and Thurley, having word
from Hortense Quinby that she expected to sail for overseas shortly,
began to reflect on the social readjustment which would result from
the needed advertising of charities, loans, what not, since the only
logical advertisers and workers would be the hitherto domestic
women who would now step beyond the firesides and lift up their
voices.
Thurley came to think more concerning Hobart’s vision, the final
victory for America in establishing a new morale for permanent art
than she did of the need for guns and men, although she generously
wrote checks and sang gratis. As for Lissa, she believed in having
things to do credit to her patriotism and her complexion
simultaneously. A toque of blue poppies, a red tulle veil worn à la
odalisque and a besashed and bepleated bit of white scenery for a
frock, the American version of Nanette and Rintintin, faithful mascots
who saved Paris from the Hun, worn on a silver cord, these
completed her opinion of the war and in this outfit, to Thurley’s
surprise and amusement, she appeared one warm May day to say
languidly,
“Being meatless day, I’ve taken the rat from the cat and am here
for a cocktail. There’s a dear! Oh, hum, all my pupils are rushing off
to be motor corps girls or kitchen drudges or something like that.
When I have to appear enthusiastic and call them all little Joans of
Arc, I feel like saying, ‘How can I conserve a cup of mush spilled on
the kitchen oil cloth?’ and let them go forth properly shocked to the
last bit of braided uniform! What does Bliss say about the opera? I
should think with all those horrid German singers sent packing there
would be a big opportunity for us home-growns. Bliss has always
been obstinate about my appearing. I’m as sure of success as you
are.”
Before she left, Thurley understood the part Lissa meant to take in
the war—to go overseas apparently to sing for the boys and in
reality discover and capture a widower duke for her second husband.
 “Why not?” she asked. “I’m sure women have the right to seek
their fortune?”
“Not at such a time. They should be sure they are needed before
they go across to eat up sugar and beef and wheat—even to take up
space. There should be an examining bureau where every one could
be proved a hundred per cent needed.”
“Ridiculous! Think of the chance to know titled women. I wouldn’t
wonder if I went to London after the war—a few titled patronesses
and one is established! Of course you are bound to meet them over
there, when they are all scrubbing floors and cooking. It’s so easy to
become socially elevated these days! Look at the people right in
America who have slaved at the Red Cross rooms to become socially
exposed! Oh, I know the majority are self-sacrificing, but the other
side is worth a place in history, too.”
After she left and Thurley opened the window to banish Lissa’s
heavy and synthetic perfume, she thought of her cold-blooded
determination to find a duke, a disabled duke would do if his title
was sound, and marry him or become friendly with blue-blooded
women of England who welcomed all who came to serve!
To condemn a class is not only useless but ethically a grave error.
No one has ever given it credence save fanatics or disgruntled, long-
haired socialists. But to argue both sides of the question, giving each
fair representation and admit the errors and the virtues of both—
that is common sense.
So Thurley sat this May afternoon while the city throbbed with its
new turmoil, thinking of many things, all of which related to Hobart’s
prophecy—that America must win the violet crown, definite
recognition by the Old World that America had established new
standards for art, independent of the frayed and tarnished rules
which had, in a sense, caused present bloodshed. As a nation’s art
progresses, the nation’s virility weakens, so history has proved,
Thurley reasoned. When art reached a state of so-called perfection,
commercial, physical and religious supremacy of the nation dimmed
—because the foundation for that art was not made of common
sense rules but fantastic and self-indulgent exceptions. Let the
foundation for art be moral even if limited to begin with, inspired by
self-sacrifice and with sincerity its determining motif and that nation
can advance in art without fear of decadence. She went to the
window to close it, looking down at the busy, broad street where
strange posters met her gaze, women in uniforms, women stopping
pedestrians to beg for the cause, women making speeches, boys
screaming out something and waving banners, while echoes of a
popular military song floated up to her,—all gay anesthesia for the
horror of the war. The great and needed romance of war had taken
its clutch on America; reality was left unhampered for the battlefield.
That was the great division of the forces. From now on anything
tinged with military trimmings would be accepted. Fortunes won by
a trifling penwiper made of red, white and blue cheesecloth! An
actress however infamous of character and threadbare as to ability
would be lauded and her salary tripled when she screeched camp
ditties or waved a flag! Pictures with the flag would sell, pictures
with soul and peaceful backgrounds would be shoved aside, books
such as Caleb’s would flood the market, military diaries would come
in droves to the editors’ payroll. For the time being art would be a
necessary factor in arousing emotions and sustaining interest. It
always had been so, it always must be so at such a crisis.
It occurred to her that if Hobart’s vision could have been realized
before this crisis what a mightier, more direct influence true art
would have in rousing the commoner. For it would be an art of
spiritual sincerity and no one would be forced to discriminate among
a myriad of near-art wares and mercenary efforts in patriotic guise.
The peasant whose taste for opera and pictures is unsullied until he
mingles with the conglomeration which this over-generous nation
offers is to be preferred!
And afterwards, Thurley thought,—strangely enough, when peace
had come—would the vanguard of art be brave enough to banish
forever the surplus wares, false standards and begin anew?—for
these swashbuckling profiteers would be loath to cry quits.
 CHAPTER XXXII
An hour later Thurley discovered herself in bed, a doctor watching
her and Miss Clergy in the doorway, her face gray with
apprehension. A nurse whispered she had fainted while standing at
the window; that there was no need for alarm. The doctor added
that she had brain fag, nothing serious if she would go away to
some place where she could be pulled together. After more suave
remarks and those little sugar-coated pellets left behind, he
departed and Thurley sent the nurse and Miss Clergy away, tossing
restlessly and wondering if she could make them understand that
she would not go to a milk-fed sanitarium where nurses sneaked
about in rubber-heeled shoes and one had to exclaim over sunsets
with the other patients, to say nothing of bulletlike little biscuits and
health foods and the talk on “Iceland Moss” given by a convalescent
missionary!
When a wild rose tries to become a hothouse variety there is
certain, some time during the transition, to be a bad scratching of
thorns which was all that ailed Thurley.
In the morning Bliss Hobart dropped in to see her and Thurley
brightened so visibly that the nurse left the room, grinning
superciliously.
“Bother opera things,” Bliss said. “I’m really glad you fainted
yesterday; you fainted enough for me, too, didn’t you? I was just
considering getting up on top of Grant’s Tomb and dancing a
Highland fling—masculine form of nerve fag.... I say, Thurley, do you
know you’re coming with me to my hermitage? I’m leaving to-night
and we’re to bully Miss Clergy into being chaperone.” Here they both
laughed at each other like children and the pellets almost lost the
sugar coating in wrath at the small part they played in curing this
wild rose person! “Oh, yes, you are coming. I was just leaving for
Blessed Memory myself when they told me you were ill. A month
there will set you right.”
“You mean the place you disappear to—”
“And Lissa hints of a harem, a dope den, a gambling lair and what
not? Yes, ma’am, Blessed Memory is its name. You’ll be there this
time to-morrow. Remember, rouge boxes and high heels not
admitted.”
He left her to thank her kind fortune she had had sense enough to
faint and bruise herself slightly. Why, oh, why, had she never
thought of doing so beforehand? She was humming as she waited
for her maid to come and get a steamer trunk.... Miss Clergy
watched from the corner of the doorway unawares. But what she
thought she kept to herself.

Blessed Memory, buried in the wildest part of Maine, with the

nearest post office entirely unpronounceable, proved to be an
advance sample of paradise. Being perfect there was nothing
complex about it—and very little to tell concerning it. Time flew, the
hours tumbling over themselves like babies at play. It was exactly
like the thirsty traveller coming upon the ice-cold mountain spring
and drinking his fill with no comment but the satisfied and grateful,
“A-a-h, man alive!” So it was with Thurley.
It seemed that Hobart had come into the wilderness prepared to
prove that he could make it habitable, as he told her. After he had
built a shack, found his food and water, lived by himself for weeks at
a time to experiment with bark, twigs and logs—learning the call of
wood beasties and forgetting the cries of men—he permitted himself
a few extravagances in the way of tools and furnishings until Blessed
Memory, as he called the small, silvery shingled house set in a sand
dune like a great moonstone in palest gold, came to be a reputable
habitation where he took refuge each year, “living,” he said, in order
that he might “exist the rest of the time.”
 Miss Clergy was ill at ease in her nunlike bedroom without
ornament and scant of furnishings. But she found thought for
reflection in watching Thurley and Bliss as they went off to try for
fresh fish. Her queer, bright eyes would blink rapidly as if a
succession of unpleasing thoughts had attacked her conscience and
she refused to give way to them. When they would return and hallo
for her to answer, she would usually take refuge in the plea of
eternal neuralgia and leave them to their own ways for the
remainder of the day!
The rooms contained old-style braided rugs and a spinning wheel
which, to Hobart’s delight, Thurley knew how to use, thanks to
Betsey Pilrig, old blue china and pewter, a square piano on which
Hobart played jingling tunes while Thurley sang them as gloriously
as when she played missionary with Philena. The beds were
mahogany, so was the fire settle, and there was an outdoor Dutch
oven which her host insisted on using, a pump and a well and a tiny
barn where his wheezy little automobile rested when it was not
chasing up and down country roads in search of supplies.
He had no real neighbors nor did he wish for them. He had bought
enough acres on all sides of Blessed Memory to secure him freedom
from molestation. He wanted to feel, so he explained, that even
lavender and black velvety butterflies, great, golden bees and
humming-birds might come and go at will.
There were no books or even writing materials in the house.
“When I have to go in to town for supplies, I get my extremely
urgent mail and reply to it while at the post office,” he explained.
“But I wish nothing inky about the hermitage.”
Thurley, who had first viewed the little house and the wild
surroundings with dismay as to what she would ever do with herself,
fell to work within a few days and became a busy Martha engrossed
with house and outdoor work, plying the axe while Hobart was away,
replanting flower beds, picking berries, climbing trees to sit astride
some sturdy limb and dream of nothing, actually to forget language,
as it were, entering the realm of delicious thought, rejoicing in
merely singing sounds as did the birds, instead of clumsy words
needing to be phrased and accented.
“I never knew any one could be so busy in such a wilderness,” she
told Hobart one late afternoon when they had tramped clear to the
sea-coast and sat resting before they journeyed homeward with the
aid of barn lanterns.
“Because you and I and other creatures who live by their wits
most of the time and have the tasks of physical existence performed
for them, need to remember that one can almost see and feel the
truth of eternity ... the eternal seasons, Thurley, the ever-dying,
ever-reviving blossoms, the migration of the birds, the continual
progress and continual decay of all forms of life—that is what makes
us really seem so busy. Because most of the time we are nibbling at
a fragment of this supreme truth, boxed up in a steam-heated
apartment with a man and a maid and an engagement tablet to be
our aids, we sing some silly opera and return to the apartment
convinced we are quite indispensable to mankind. We need to come
to such a place as this and humbly realize eternity. That is why I
named the little house Blessed Memory, because I carry the thought
with me when I lock the door for the long, white winter.”
Thurley was silent, the most sympathetic answer she could have
made. She was mentally quoting,

“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,

“Bright hollows of billowy foam”

—as suitable for the scene.

It was a quiet sea haven they had found. Bliss had tramped there
many times, he told her. Around them were wet sea wrack and
pungent bog myrtle, tall protruding cliffs with the green grass
clinging to them and dusky birds incessantly slipping about. The sea
itself was a shadowy, gray wilderness broken with rosy trails which
led to darkish mystery. In the sky a star trembled.
“Tell me more,” she demanded childishly.
 “What about? I must seem as bad as a complete reading course
shipped on without warning,” he began, playing with pebbles, “but
do you know what I was thinking, Thurley? That the art vanguard
are certain to succeed, that this time of strife should not be for
merely freedom of seas and colony disputes—it is the time of discord
in which all matters shall have their hearing. And then, one sees
absurd glimpses now and then that make one want to shout for joy
—”
“What?
“Oh, a life insurance agent with a well worn copy of Keats in his
inner pocket or the apparently frivolous hairdresser who reads
Ruskin’s essays with the girl who sells fountain pens during lunch
hour—or a very famous prima donna who finally admits that the
shadow can never be the substance and that works without faith are
dead, too!”
Thurley was thinking in disconnected fashion. “Tell me, will the
war level class as well, so that it will result in there being no very
rich or no poor?”
He shook his head. “We must always have wealth demonstrate
herself with freedom; we must always have class. Let each man be
what he was best intended; we cannot have one class, one rule, one
creed any more than one dimension. The Cause who made such
eternal contrasts as the snowbound north and orchid-decorated
tropics, the sagebrush desert and the French vineyards—has the
example not been set us for all time? There must be wealth and its
opposite poverty and the sunny, useful medium running between the
two and understanding each alike. Remember, player and worker are
like the wings of a bird, equal and necessary. Class must exist the
same as vicarious atonement—the mother bearing the child, soldiers
fighting for stay-at-homes. The ancient but sometimes forgotten or
denied unity of the race is the belief in immortality.”
It was dark; the sea with the white rocks rising out of the water
here and there gave the effect of the black and white cathedral front
at Siena. Hobart lit their lanterns and urged a homeward journey.
“I don’t want to go,” Thurley begged. “Tell me more—”
“Yet you try to make me think you do not believe my vision,” he
said, “that you will not be like the soldier in the old song, who did
not halt but ‘he gave the bridle-reins another shake.’”
“Tell me why artists have different lives from the world in general,”
she retorted.
“There are some isolated, superb but lonely souls whose work
robs them of human ties and leaves them chaste yet wistful. True,
again, on the firm yet terrible foundation of expiated sins is genius
often laid—the splendid blossom of the tree of experience. The
greatest leaders have often, to their enemies’ delight, pleaded guilty
to a youth of folly, small faults, petty actions—and yet there has
come an awakening and with the handicap of the past as a ballast,
they forge on to the heights. I sometimes think handicaps are as
necessary for an artist as ballast for a balloon. Without them we
would sail upwards beyond ordinary comprehension and the whole
purpose would be of no avail. Let us stay sufficiently earthbound to
insure usefulness and proper responsibility.... Come, Thurley, even if
the poets say the children of dark and the children of light tread the
same pathway, our lanterns may fail us and we would have to
scramble to find the house.” He helped her up.
“You mean, too,” she said, not content to stop the argument, “that
artists should set the example—as well as prescribe one—”
“Those who are not sufficiently developed to perceive the higher
cosmic laws must have man-made laws to teach the first great
principle—which is to obey. Obedience either forced or voluntary is
the first requisite in moulding character. Those of us who can
glimpse the higher laws must also keep annoying man-made ones to
help those less developed by our example.”
Thurley began picking her way along the beach, singing softly:
 If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!
If all the trees were one tree—what a great tree it would be!
If all the axes were one axe—what a great axe that would be!
And if all the men were one man—what a great man Bliss would
be!

Three weeks later when Hobart drove Thurley into the nearest
station, he asked almost timidly if she felt it had been worth while.
“So worth while,” she said, “it showed me what I must not do.”
Miss Clergy gave a sigh of relief as she was settled on the local
train running down to the main line.
“You look like a little girl again,” she told Thurley. “I’m sure it was
very kind of him.... Did you ever fancy he might fall in love with you?
Imagine how distressing it would be for him—knowing your
position!”
Thurley resigned herself to the inevitable, and as they jolted
onward she thought of how very great and how very small was love
and that from atom to apostle the personal equation would come
blundering in on one’s most sacred thoughts.
 CHAPTER XXXIII
The remainder of the summer found Thurley undecided as to what
she should do next and not having Hortense as an aide-de-camp and
with Polly still squandering her legacy, Thurley stayed in town to
collect her faculties and study new rôles.
She found that women were chattering about “finding the group
spirit,” pointing with envy and emulation to the soldiers who had
found “the group spirit” and were working together for the cause.
The germ of unrest, masquerading under the altruistic title of “group
spirit,” was prevalent among all the women Thurley knew and those
of whom she heard.
Even Ernestine came to explain incoherently that she had
cancelled the season’s engagements to sail for France—“to help”—
anything that was needed, play or amuse or scrub floors, Thurley
dear, and was noncommittal as to her disorganized interests at home
or her personal qualifications to serve in this capacity. Thurley
accepted Ernestine’s good-by with a sense of amusement. Thurley
herself did not feel she was slacking although it would have been
difficult to explain just why she did not. She, too, had brought the
“blessed memory” with her from the hermitage, acting as ballast for
the chaos which prevailed about her.
A feeling of age had also claimed her. She seemed to see beyond
these struggling, enthusiastic but deluded women who were sincere
in their efforts, yet forgetful that to serve one’s immediate circle of
dependents is the best way in which to serve the larger cause.
Thurley saw ahead to the psychological struggle taking place in one
year, three, five—who knows?—when these restless spirits, suffering
from repression of emotion or ennui had rushed pell mell with a
bevy of excuses and accomplishments into the teeth of the fight and
the fight had unexpectedly ceased and their adventure was at an
end.
She did not try to argue with Ernestine to stay at home and when
Mark came to say good-by, a few mornings later, saying he was to
dance and give athletic drills overseas, she said very faintly,
“But is war a pink tea? If I were a soldier and I saw an able-
bodied man dancing about in a toga to give an imitation of Greek
handball, I’d ask him to get into the trenches with me or quit. After
all, Mark, you are going because Lissa is going!”
“Lissa is after a duke,” Mark said lightly. “How about one of these
floor-scrubbing duchesses? What about yourself? You might capture
an earl,” drawing on his cream-colored kid gloves. “Fancy Bliss, who
blew in yesterday fit as a fiddle, declaring he would stick along at
the old game right here.”
Thurley’s face must have showed her joy.
“Oh-ho, so Lissa is right,” Mark laughed. “She always contended
that it was Bliss whose word was law with you!”
Thurley put up her hands in protest and dismissed him, sending
Lissa a good-by present and evading a possible interview. It did not
seem as if she could endure these vapid persons who were rushing
over to gain fame, excitement, copy or a worth-while matrimonial
alliance! She saw, in truth, the result of Bliss Hobart’s words, that
were the foundation of art of sterner stuff regarding personalities,
these cluttery amateurs and intriguers would be, perforce, engaged
in some industry and not foot-loose to follow the procession. The
really great souls whose work would ennoble the cause could go
forth unquestioned and certain of results.
The morning’s mail brought her consolation—a note from Collin,
characteristically brief and with a pencil sketch of himself, very
knock-kneed and bulging of eye, clad in uniform.

Dear Thurley (he wrote)