S

OMETIMES when I sit looking at the fire of an evening, my mind travels back to those years when there was no Felicia. It is a strange thing, too, about that time; it is all very well to say that the past does not alter, but it seems to me no more stable a quantity, no more to be depended upon, than is the present or the future. Its events are governed by its own shadowy lines of change, and a year of one's life in retrospect may seem noble or ignoble, or interesting or flat, or all of them one after another. In fact, the past, instead of remaining as steady as one would expect, shifts around, slavishly reflects one's moods, twists and distorts itself according to one's pleasure. It is as though memory were a fire, and one's memories the smoke of it, eddying upward, swift-changing, and unstable.

When Felicia and I were first married, for instance, there was a time when there was no staler country than that of my past, except those parts of it which had been graced by Felicia's dear presence. Its fair places were distasteful to me; its tender memories I turned my back uponFelicia had no share in them. Indeed, I turned my back on all that country, some of whose places were so fair, as though it were all made up of those spots which the best of us have-things that we would like to forget. I washed out, as near as I might, all my life since I was grown up, except such small parts of it as Felicia wanted for playthings. I kept my childhood, for instance. Women are fond of the childhood of the men they love this is because they always look on us as big children, and as one tells of the things one did when one was just breeched-how one kicked at the kitchen door three hours steadily because one wanted it opened for one instead of taking the trouble of turning the handle oneself-they nod their heads wisely and smile to themselves, and this little smile means, "He hasn't changed a bit since he was seven years old."

VOL. XLV.--40

Yes, I was as false to my past as you were when you were married, though, besides the pleasant memories and besides the gay and pleasant visions which I so rudely slapped in the face, I had one memory to whom I never did violence. It was not my first love-you may be sure I locked her up in as black a place as I could find. She was a little girl who looked like apple blossoms-if apple blossoms can have a turned-up nose-and who talked slang; a pretty minx, but a brazen one. No, I would have nothing to do with her during my engagement and marriage.

The name of my memory was Rosalie Carlton, and I was never for a moment false to her. She had an existence that was different from all the other commonplace, workaday memories, and this I tried to express to Felicia, who asked, "Was she pretty?"

"No," I replied, "she wasn't exactly what you call pretty-she was better than pretty; she didn't need to be pretty." "Ho," said Felicia rudely, "I know that kind."

I ignored her. "Life," I said, "in the presence of Rosalie, played itself in a higher key. So much more seemed to happen in a day when she was with one. She gave a significance to little things. In her gay, high-spirited presence the small things of life had another meaning."

Even as I pronounced these words, they jangled at me with a guilty familiarity. I seemed to have heard myself saying them before.

"That was

"H-m-m,” mused Felicia. the first compliment you ever paid me which made me notice you.”

There came to me an exact memory of the stealing of Rosalie's tribute for Felicia. I remembered all the circumstances of it. "Well," I temporized basely, "you and Rosalie are somewhat alike; only you are -ah-very much more so."

After all, language is a poor thing, and the nature of man is still poorer, and as there are many fair women in the world, it

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appears that there are not enough pretty speeches to go around, so that each one shall have a brand-new set all to herself. You must needs write to your Felicia things not unlike those that you wrote at sixteen to your first love. You spell better, and you know more about your native tongue, but you tell them both that you die daily without them, and that you have never loved any one else, nor will you ever. And it makes no difference how many times you write these things-they are always true. This is one of those subtleties that women cannot understand.

I had other reasons for clinging to the memory of Rosalie. I had, after all, to have some one to oppose to the remi

niscences which Felicia constantly flaunted before me. And here let me note the basic difference between men and women. You do not find a woman making her past into a blank waste for the sake of her husband, however new he is. She doesn't forget one of her old loves. They turn up in every sylvan path; they slide past one in a canoe as one goes down the river. There is no moonlit night that is not haunted by the echo of their voices-not if you have married a girl like Felicia. Their impudent letters are forever turning up when one does not want to see them. And far from being ashamed of this, Felicia seems actually proud of it. With many of them she keeps up a friendship-I have to have the creatures at dinner and be polite to them.

Like other husbands, I have my dark moments, when I wonder how it was that a commonplace fellow like me, no better than another, got such a bird of paradise for a wife. "My poor Felicia," I say to myself, "how badly, my child, you did for yourself. You should have married a great statesman; you should have been the inspiration of an artist." I go on like this until I become sorry for Felicia and ashamed

of myself for having interfered with the brilliant future which might have been hers. Then one of the Might-Have-Beens turns up, and I will say for myself that, so far as I yet have seen, poor as I am, I am far and away better than any of those popinjays who had the impudence to look upon Felicia; though she seems strangely lacking in a perception of their inferiority. In those moments I look upon myself in the light of Felicia's rescuer. But clever as she is, she seems to expect me to share her naïve delight in her own conquests, even though they were conquests of such poor things. She tells me long stories about them, and the incidents which she spares me her friends hasten to tell me. Sometimes I get almost to the point of saying: "Forbear, woman! Stop talking about these tiresome young men! Stop talking of the futile manner in which you spent your time before you met me and found your life-work. It would be much more becoming in you, Felicia, to pretend that you spent your time waiting in an ivory tower until I appeared to you, just as Ino, I do not pretend-just as I spent those years in wandering around the monotonous earth searching for you."

So it is small wonder that, to Felicia's babble of old beaux, I occasionally oppose some touching little incident connected with Rosalie.

"In the days before I met you, my dear," I confided to Felicia, "she was like a bright thread run through the homespun of my life." Again, I would tell how her gay, audacious presence had flickered in and out of my life like a will-o'-the-wisp. "The tides of life ran higher when Rosalie was there," said I to Felicia.

"Ho!" said Felicia.

But I would go on quite undisturbed: "I do not know what chance it was that separated us. I suppose it was ordained that you and I should meet, for I was still under Rosalie's spell, though some estrangement had come between us, when

ARMAND BATH

I first saw you." But Felicia would receive my confidences with unsympathetic sniffs, which were highly unbecoming.

As I said before, the past is an unstable land, dull or droll or interesting quite apart from one's own volition. One fine day, while I was looking backward, I noted a little unwonted color glowing here and there in what had been for some time a colorless waste. A graceful form or two flitted about.

"What are you doing there?" said I. "I had forgotten all about you. And you, Country of the Past, so dun and so uninteresting, please remember that there is no color in you."

It paid no attention to me. I would forget it for a time, and when next I chanced to look its way, it would have grown more alluring. Trees blossomed out and birds sang there. I was quite shocked with it for acting in this way, and annoyed, too, for where, I ask you, was my superiority to Felicia, who had seemed so much less idealistic to me when she played about in her past with happy unconcern? But it would have its own way with me, and as the months slid along, and years, it lured me back to itself more and

more.

I know, of course, what the cynical will think. But it is not true. I love Felicia as much as I ever did-more; and if of an evening I now and again stole back and revisited some of the pretty places of my youth, and if now and again this or that forgotten friend came to visit me, this was no treachery, I am sure, to Felicia. I repeat, and with emphasis, I love Felicia more every day, a great deal more than I did in that time when I made myself odious to all the world but her. Men, when they first fall in love—and women, too-think this odiousness a proof of affection, but it is not any more than the fakir's dust and rags are a proof of holiness. If love of this kind endured, then indeed would the world become a waste; the reason it passes and changes into something decenter is that the business and pleasure of society may continue.

That one gets over this acute stage, however, is no index of diminution of affection, as the very young in love seem to believe. Secure in this knowledge, I played

around with my memories, and brought a few of them for Felicia's inspection. There was a set of young people I had belonged to, young men and maidens, whose doings. seemed to me worthy of being remembered. I told Felicia about us, and how clever we all were.

"We were really intellectual," I told her, "say what you like. We may not have been as quick in the wits as your friends, but we had intellects of a solid kind, in those days." I would go on and tell her of our doings and sayings. But Felicia didn't seem interested. She perversely took a violent dislike to two of the girls, and told me flatly, moreover, that we sounded like a set of solemn owls.

"Was Rosalie Carlton one of them?" she asked suspiciously.

“No,” I said. "Rosalie was different. Rosalie was by herself. She had wits, if you like the real thing. There was a certain mystery about her, too, a curious quality that one never got to the end of." "What was the name of that other clever girl that you spoke about?"

'Catherine Katon," I told Felicia. "I've heard that name somewhere," she said. "I'm sure she's living in town now. I'll try and find out."

"Oh, will you?" I exclaimed.

"Indeed, yes," said Felicia, "I will. I'd love to meet her."

And though I have been married long enough so that I should suspect the Greeks even bearing gifts, I kissed Felicia for a kind-hearted dear.

In a short time Felicia had brought it about. Years had passed since I had seen Catherine Katon, or any of the pleasant circle of friends whose heart she was, and I confess that my own beat a trifle. She had grown a little older, but not much. She was the same distinguished, graceful person whom I remembered-just the kind of friend, in short, that one would pick out of one's past to show one's wife, better than any one I could have thought of, except Rosalie; for Catherine Katon to Rosalie was, after all, what a good modern portrait is to one of those subtle, strange pictures by Luini.

"She's charming, isn't she?" I asked Felicia, at the end of our first interview.

"Delightful," Felicia cordially assented. "I have asked her to dinner with the So

and-Sos, and she is to go with us to The Society Thursday night."

We saw her often. The dinner came off, and the Society; after that followed an afternoon tea on both sides; and after that a dinner on both sides, for Catherine Katon's parents had come home from abroad to make their dwelling place New York; then there followed three or four more courtesies from one or the other of I do not know how many times during the next three weeks I saw Catherine Katon. It seems to me a hundred. For after the first pleasure of meeting her was over, an idea occurred to me which I strangled as soon as born. Mutely I challenged Felicia, to see if the idea had occurred to her, too. She was as placid as a bowl of milk.

us.

But somehow the edge had gone out of life. Our little doings were no longer so amusing, and yet they should have been, for wherever I turned, there was the friend of my youth, a charming picture of a wellbred gentlewoman, disposed, moreover, to treat me with all kindness. What more could I want? Yet I did want something more. I wanted, hang it, I wanted to be amused when I went out-I didn't want to talk about my soul all the time.

Then, again, what loomed larger and larger to me as the days went on were the large number of subjects which couldn't be discussed with Miss Katon. Everywhere there were signs, "Path Barred!" The conversation flowed in one deep stream, with high dikes on every hand, and the stream of talk was composed of classic art, literature, and music-classic till one busted. Was it possible that as a youth I had stood weeks and months of this? Was it possible that I should have to spend weeks and months of it now; for Felicia talked classical music and the Age of Shakespeare until I could have wrung her wicked little neck; talked it without batting an eye, and tried to continue the discussion after we got home. My heavens! can't a man sit down and get out his pipe and evening paper without his wife lugging a volume of Shakespeare under his nose, or asking him if he doesn't think if Schopenhauer had lived fifty years later his point of view would have changed? For those were the sort of questions with which my old friend's mind busied itself.

VOL. XLV-41

At the end of a month, when Felicia announced that she had asked Miss Katon to dinner for a certain night, "That's too bad," said I, "for I have a committee meeting directly after."

"I will ask her for the next night," said Felicia.

Here my manhood asserted itself.

"You will not, Felicia," said I, "not the next night, nor the night after that, nor any night this side of a month. Miss Katon is one of the finest women I know, but——” "Oh," said Felicia, "I thought I had found out at last what sort of things you like."

"I do. I like her very much, butFelicia gave a little sigh. "Husbands are hard to please," she said plaintively.

I looked at her sternly.

"You know too much," said I, and I left the room abruptly. It is neither kind nor decent for a wife to know the things that Felicia does.

In that flash of intelligence that had passed between us I saw what she had been up to all the time. For the second time she had rendered a part of my past waste ground to me, only this time the ghosts could never flicker back again. She taught me over again that people as well as places can grow small when one sees them again after a lapse of years.

We see Miss Katon from time to time. She is a very nice girl indeed, and I am proud to number her among my friends, but she no longer is the guiding light she used to be, nor does she make me despise the intellects of certain other light-minded ladies of my acquaintance. No, I can no longer remember her as a guiding light, and it is Felicia's fault that this is so. And as to my other companions, who circled round Miss Katon, I turned hastily from them. I did not like to think of the highminded and sophomoric utterances that we exchanged. I do not like to think that I was ever interested by anything that ought by rights so to have bored me.

Come, quick! Let us hurry away from this little garden which the guile of Felicia has so devastated. Even now, if I linger here, perhaps some broken stalk of a memory will fling at me a high-minded platitude. Come away!

However, I now had Felicia unmasked.