Chapter 6

Walter Eastman, on his way to town next morning, to his law office, considered earnestly his young sister-in-law's admonition given him just after breakfast, that he must that day borrow for her a sufficient sum of money to enable her to take the course of instruction in a school for librarians, giving as security a mortgage on her share in Berkeley Hill. And the conclusion to which his weighty consideration of the proposition brought him was that instead of mortgaging their home, he would bring Daniel Leitzel, Esquire, out to Berkeley Hill to dinner.

"Margaret's never had a chance. She's never in her life met any marriageable men. It's about time she did. She hasn't the least idea what a winner she'd be, given her fling! And the sooner she's married," he grimly told himself, "the better for me, by heaven!"

Walter was too disillusioned as to the permanence and reality of love to feel any scruples about letting Margaret in for matrimony with a man twenty years her senior and of so little personal charm as was the prominent Pennsylvania lawyer, Mr. Leitzel, so long as the man was decent (as Leitzel so manifestly was) and a gentleman. It would have taken a keener eye than Walter Eastman's to have perceived, on a short, casual acquaintance, that the well-mannered, able, and successful corporation lawyer was not, in Walter's sense, a gentleman. For Daniel had, ever since the age of ten, been having many expensive "advantages."

And so it came to pass that that same evening found Mr. Leitzel, after a dainty and beautifully appointed dinner at Berkeley Hill, alone with his host's young sister-in-law, in the wonderfully equipped library of the late eminent Dr. Osmond Berkeley.

His comely hostess, Mrs. Eastman, had excused herself after dinner to go to her babies, and Eastman himself had just been called to the telephone.

Daniel, always astutely observant, recognized their scheme to leave him alone with this marriageable young lady of the family, while Margaret herself never dreamed of such a thing.

Daniel was always conscious, in the presence of young women, of his high matrimonial value. He had always regarded his future wife, whoever she might be, as a very fortunate individual indeed. His sisters, in whom his faith was absolute, had, for twenty-five years, been instilling this dogma into him. Also, Daniel was mistaking the characteristic Southern cordiality of this family for admiration of himself. Especially this attractive girl, alone with him here in the great, warm, bright room, packed with books and hung with engravings and prints, manifested in her attentive and pleasant manner how irresistible she found him. Daniel loved to be made much of. And by such a girl as this! The blood went to his head as he contemplated her, seated before him in a low chair in front of the big, old-fashioned fireplace, dressed very simply all in white. How awfully attractive she was! Odd, too, for she wasn't, just to say, a beauty. Daniel considered himself a connoisseur as to girls, and he was sure that Miss Berkeley's warm olive skin just escaped being sallow, that her figure was more boyish than feminine, and her features, except, perhaps, her beautiful dark eyes, not perfect. But it was her arresting individuality, the subtle magnetism that seemed to hang about her, challenging his curiosity to know more of her, to understand her, that fascinated him in a manner unique in his experience of womankind. Subtle, indeed, was the attraction of a woman who could, in just that way, impress a mind like Daniel's, which, extraordinarily keen in a practical way, was almost devoid of imagination. But everything this evening conduced to the firing of what small romantic faculty he possessed: the old homestead suggestive of generations of ease and culture, the gracious, soft-voiced ladies, their marked appreciation of himself (which was of course his due), the good dinner served on exquisite china and silver in the spacious dining-room (Daniel, in his own home, had never committed the extravagance of solid mahogany, oriental rugs, and family portraits, but he had gone so far as to price them and therefore understood what an "outlay" must have been made here). And then the beautiful drawing-room into which he had been shown upon his arrival, furnished in antique Hepplewhite, the walls hung with Spanish and Dutch oils. And now this distinguished looking library in which they sat. Almost all the books Daniel possessed, besides his law books, were packed into a small oak bookcase in his own bedroom. But here were books in many languages; hundreds of old volumes in calf and cloth that showed long and hard usage, as well as shelves and shelves of modern works in philosophy, science, history, poetry, and fiction. What would it feel like to have been born of a race that for generations had been educated, rich, and respectable—not to remember a time when your family had been poor, ignorant, obscure, and struggling for a bare existence? In New Munich the "aristocracy" was made up of people who kept large department or jewellery or drug stores, or were in the wholesale grocery business; even Congressman Ocksreider had started life as an office boy and Judge Miller's father had kept a livery stable. This home seemed to stand for something so far removed from New Munich values! And these two ladies of the house—he was sure he had never in his life met any ladies so "elegant and refined" in their speech, manner, movements, and appearance.

Daniel's recognition of all this, however, did not humble or abash him. He had too long enjoyed the prerogative that goes with wealth not to feel self-assured in any circumstances, and his attitude toward mankind in general was patronizing.

It never occurred to him for an instant that a family living like this could be poor. Wealth seemed to him so essentially the foundation of civilization that to be enjoying social distinction, ease, comfort, and even luxury, with comparative poverty, would have savoured of anarchy.

Margaret, meantime, was regarding "Walter's odd little lawyer-man," who had been quite carelessly left on her hands, with rather lukewarm interest, though there were some things about him that did arrest her curious attention: the small, sharp eyes that bored like gimlets straight through you, and the thin, tightly closed lips that seemed to express concentrated, invincible obstinacy.

"No wonder he's a successful lawyer," she reflected. "No detail could escape those little eyes, and there'd be no appeal, I fancy, from his viselike grip of a victim. He'd have made even a better detective."

The almost sinister power of penetration and strength of will that the man's sharp features expressed seemed to her grotesquely at variance with his insignificant physique.

"There never has been a great woman lawyer, has there?" she asked him, "except Portia?"

"'Portia?' Portia who? I had not—you mean, perhaps, some ancient Greek?" asked Daniel. "Ah!" he exclaimed, '"The quality of mercy is not strained!' Yes. Just so. Portia. "Merchant of Venice," he added, looking highly pleased with himself. "I studied drama in my freshman year at Harvard."

"Did you?"

"Yes. My sisters had me very thoroughly educated. Very expensively, too. But this 'Portia'—she was of course a fictitious, not a historic, character, if I remember rightly. Women haven't really brains enough, or of the sort, that could cope with such severe study as that of the law." He waved the matter aside with a gesture of his long, thin fingers.

"I'm not sure of that," Margaret maintained.

"But the courtroom is no place for a decent woman," said Daniel dogmatically.

"But she could specialize. These are the days, I'm told, when to succeed is to specialize. She wouldn't need to practise in the criminal courts."

"I trust," said Daniel stiffly, "you are not a Suffragist. You don't look like one."

"How do they look?"

"I never saw one, for we don't have them in New Munich, where I live. But I'm sure they don't look so womanly as you do."

"I hope that to look womanly isn't to look stupid," said Margaret solicitously.

"Why should it?—though to be sure a woman does just as well if she isn't too bright."

"If to be womanly meant all that some men seem to think it means, we'd have to have idiot asylums for womanly females," declared Margaret. "I suppose"—she changed the subject and perfunctorily made conversation—"a lawyer's work is full of interest and excitement?"

"Well," Mr. Leitzel smiled, "in these days, a lawyer for a corporation has got to be Johnny-on-the-spot."

"I have always thought that a general practitioner must often find his work a terrible strain upon his sympathies," said Margaret.

"Oh, no; business is business, you know."

"And necessarily inhuman?"

"Unhuman, rather. A man must not have 'sympathies' in the practice of the law."

"He can't help it, can he?—unless he's a soulless monster."

Daniel looked at her narrowly. What a queer expression for a young lady to use: "a soulless monster."

"Your brother-in-law, for instance," he inquired with his thin, tight little smile, "does he, as a general practitioner, find his cases a great strain on his sympathies?

"Oh, he hasn't enough cases to find them a great strain of any kind."

"So?" Daniel lifted his pale eyebrows. It was, then, inherited wealth, he reflected, that maintained this luxurious home, and if so, this Miss Berkeley, probably, shared that inheritance. His heart began to thump in his narrow chest. His calculating eye scanned the girl's figure, from her crown of dark hair to her shapely foot.

Now it is necessary to state just here that Daniel's one vulnerable spot being his fondness for young pets of any species and especially for children, together with his deep-seated aversion to the idea of his money going to the offspring of his brother Hiram (for, of course, he would never will a dollar of it away from the Leitzel family), this shrewd little man never appraised a woman's matrimonial value without considering her physical equipment for successful motherhood. He had even read several books on the subject and had paid a big fee to a specialist to learn how to judge of a woman's health and capacity for child-bearing. The distinguished specialist had laughed with his amante afterward at the way he had "bluffed and soaked the rich little cad."

"I certainly did make him pay up!" he had chuckled. "And as he'll never find just the combination of physical and mental endowments I've prescribed for him, I've saved some woman from the fate of becoming his wife! Money-making is his passion—a woman will never be—and his interest in it is matched only by his keenness and his caution. He's a peculiar case of mental and spiritual littleness combined with an acumen that's uncanny, that's genius!"

It was, in fact, Daniel's failure to discover a maiden who answered satisfactorily to all the tests with which this specialist had furnished him, together with his sister's helpful judgment in "sizing up" for him any possible candidate for his hand, that had thus far kept him unmarried; that had, he was sure, saved him from a matrimonial mistake.

As to his view of his own fitness for fatherhood, had he not always led a clean and wholesome life? Was he not expensively educated, clever, industrious, honest within the law, and eminently successful? What man could give his children a better heritage?

Yet the day came when the wife of his bosom wondered whether she committed a crime in bearing offspring that must perpetuate the soul of Daniel Leitzel.

"This estate," Daniel cautiously put out a feeler to Miss Berkeley, "belonged to your grandfather?"

"To several of my grandfathers. It came to us from my uncle."

"A lawyer?"

"Dr. Osmond Berkeley, the psychologist," Margaret said, thinking this an answer to the question, for she had never in her life met any one who did not know of her famous uncle. "My goodness!" she exclaimed as she saw that Mr. Leitzel looked unenlightened, "you don't know who he was? He's turning in his grave, I'm sure!"

"I never heard of him," said Daniel sullenly.

Margaret smiled kindly upon him as she said confidentially: "Between ourselves, I don't myself know just exactly what a psychologist is. I've been trying for nine years to find out—though my uncle earned his living by it—and a good living, too."

"Didn't he ever explain it to you?"

"Oh, yes. He told me a psychologist was 'one who studies the science which treats inductively of the phenomena of human consciousness, and of the nature and relations of the mind which is the subject of such phenomena.'"

Daniel looked at her uncertainly. Was she laughing at him? "It's just mental science, you know," he ventured. "I studied a little mental science at college. It was compulsory. But I studied it so little, I didn't really know very much about it."

"If you had studied it a lot, say under William James or Josiah Royce, I'm sure you'd know even less about it than you do now. My own experience is that the more one studies it, the less one knows of it."

"Are you a college graduate?" Daniel asked with sharp suspicion; he didn't care about tying up with an intellectual woman. The medical specialist had said they were usually an?mic, passionless, and childless.

"No," Margaret admitted sadly. "I never went to school after I was sixteen." Daniel breathed again and beamed upon her so approvingly that she hastened to add: "But I lived here with Uncle Osmond, so I could not escape a little book-learning. I'm really not an ignorant person for my years, Mr. Leitzel."

"I can see that you are not," Daniel graciously allowed. "Are you fond of reading?" he added, conversationally, not dreaming how stupid the question seemed to the young lady he addressed.

"Well, naturally," she said.

"Yes, I suppose so, with such a library as this in the house. It belongs to—to you?"

"What? The books?" she vaguely repeated. "They go, of course, with the house. Do you accomplish much reading outside of your profession, Mr. Leitzel?"

"No."

"Not even an occasional novel?"

"I never read novels. I did read 'Ivanhoe' at Harvard in the freshman English course. But that's the only one."

Margaret stared for an instant, then recovered herself. "I see now," she said, "why you have done what they call 'made good.' You have specialized, excluding from your life every other possible interest save that one little goal of your ambition."

"'Little goal?' Not very little, Miss Berkeley! The law business of which I am the head earns a yearly income of——"

But he stopped short. If this girl were destined to the good fortune of becoming Mrs. Leitzel, she must have no idea of the size of his income. Nobody had, not even his sisters. He often smiled in secret at his mental picture of the astonishment and delight of Jennie and Sadie if suddenly told the exact figures; and certainly his wife was the last person in the world who must know. It might make her extravagant.

"The annual earnings of our law-firm," he changed the form of his sentence, "are sufficient to enable me to invest some money every year, after paying the twenty-five lawyers and clerks in my employ salaries ranging from twenty-five hundred dollars a year down to five dollars a week. So you see my 'goal' was not little."

"I suppose even your five-dollar-a-week clerks have to be especially equipped, don't they?" Margaret asked, with what seemed to him stupid irrelevance, since he was looking for an exclamation of wonder and admiration at the figures stated.

"Of course, we employ only experienced stenographers," he curtly replied.

"This specializing of our modern life, narrowing one's interests to just one point; one can't help wondering what effect it's going to have upon the race."

"Eugenics," Daniel nodded intelligently. "You are interested in eugenics?" he politely inquired. "It's quite a fad these days, isn't it, among the ladies, and even among some gentlemen, if one can believe the newspapers."

"It's not my fad," said Margaret.

"You like children, I hope?" he quickly asked.

"Do I look like a woman who doesn't?" she protested, not, of course, following his train of thought. She rose, as she spoke, and went across the room to turn down a hissing gas-jet. Daniel's eyes followed her graceful, leisurely walk down the length of the room, and as she raised her arm above her head, he took in the delicate curve of her bosom, her rather broad, boyish shoulders, the clear, rich olive hue of her skin. The specialist he had consulted years ago had said that a clear olive skin meant not only perfect health, but a warm temperament that loved children.

"Anyway," thought Daniel with a hot impulse the like of which his slow blood had never known, "she's the woman I want! I believe I'd want her if she didn't have a dollar!"

It was upon this reckless conclusion that, when she had returned to her seat, he suddenly decided to put a question to her that would better be settled before he allowed his feelings to carry him too far.

"But," thought he as he looked at her, "I've got to put it cautiously and—and delicately."

"Miss Berkeley?"

"Yes, Mr. Leitzel?"

"I've been thinking of buying myself an automobile."

"Have you?"

"A very handsome and expensive one, you know."

"Ah!"

"Yes. But now I'm hesitating after all."

"Are you?"

"Yes. Because there's another expense I may have to meet. I'm going to ask you a question. Which, in a general way, do you think would cost more to keep—an automobile or—or a—well, a wife?"

"Oh, an automobile!" laughed Margaret.

Daniel grinned broadly as he gazed at her; evidently she suspected the delicate drift of his idea and was advising him for her own advantage. Nothing slow about her!

"Wives are cheap compared to automobiles," she insisted.

"You really think so?" He couldn't manage to keep from his voice a slight note of anxiety. "Living here with your married sister, you are in a position to judge."

Margaret began to wonder whether this man were a humourist or an idiot. But before she could reply, their tête-à-tête, so satisfactory to Mr. Leitzel, was interrupted. Mr. and Mrs. Eastman returned to the library.

Now as the formality of chaperoning was not practised in New Munich, Daniel, with all his "advantages," had never heard of it. When, therefore, the Eastmans settled themselves with the evident intention of remaining in the room, their guest found himself feeling chagrined, not only because he preferred to be alone with Miss Berkeley, but because the conclusion was forced upon him that he must have been mistaken in assuming that they had designedly left him with her after dinner.

This conclusion was confirmed when Miss Berkeley, quite deliberately leaving the obligation of entertaining him to her elders, changed her seat to a little distance from him, and in the conversation that followed took very little part. She even seemed, in the course of a half-hour, rather bored and—Daniel couldn't help seeing it—sleepy. Could it be, he wondered with a sinking heart, that she was already engaged to another man? How else explain this indifference?

But as the evening moved on, and the married pair, in spite of some subtle hints on his part, still sat glued to their chairs, though he could see that they, too, were tired and sleepy, he surmised that their "game" was to hinder Miss Berkeley's marriage!

"They'd like to keep her money in the family for their children, I guess!" he shrewdly concluded.

The easy indifference to money that was characteristic of the whole tribe of Berkeleys would have seemed an appalling shortcoming to Daniel Leitzel had he been capable of conceiving of such a mental state.

With a mind keen to see minute details, interpreting what he saw in the light of his own narrow, if astute, vision, and incapable of seeing anything from another's point of view, he came to more false conclusions than a wholly stupid and less observant man would have made.

When after another half-hour Miss Berkeley, evidently considering him entirely her brother-in-law's guest, rose, excused herself, said good-night and left the room, Daniel could only reason that Mr. Eastman had purposely withheld from her all knowledge as to who his dinner guest was.

"I'll circumvent that game!" he concluded, opposition, together with the indifference of the young lady herself, augmenting to a fever heat his budding passion. "I'll let her know who and what I am!"

Indeed, by the time he left Berkeley Hill that night, so enamoured was he with the idea of courting Miss Berkeley, he did not even remember that in a matter so important he had never in his life gone ahead without first consulting his sisters' valuable opinion. That phase of the situation, however, was to come home to him keenly enough later on.