BEST-LAID SCHEMES

BEST-LAID SCHEMES

Certainly it was a charming home, that in which Mr. Pearmain had installed his young wife: a stone cottage with mullioned windows from floor to ceiling, with pointed gables and divers roofs and vanes, and with an infinitude of prairie-roses and Virginia-creepers planted beside the walls, to grow in the future till the house should be a bower. And inside it was what all good house-keepers called fairy-land. Here Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain had given full scope to their notions, whose name was legion; not a bit of paint in the house to be cleaned, no carpets to secrete poison, but hard-wood, inlaid floors and rugs, and then a conservatory and grapery on a tiny scale, and closets without counting; while as for the kitchen, the conveniences there were simply miraculous. And when all this was done and inspected and occupied and enjoyed, it was no wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Pearmain looked about for something else on which to expend their whims and vagaries. Their way of life was so good that it would have been selfishness not to wish others to share it. Little Harry Pearmain was exactly three years old when they had fully decided to convert to that way their next neighbor, but lately arrived, a school-mate of Mrs. Pearmain’s who had married a dear old friend of Mr. Pearmain’s—little Mrs. Morley, whose black eyes had a strange sharp snap in them when things displeased her. And it was one morning when Mrs. Morley had come over to profit by her friend’s experience in the matter of dainty needle-work that the campaign began.

“I always meant, when I could have things as I chose,” said Mrs. Pearmain, as they sat and sewed, “to order my table so that not one ounce of flesh should ever sully it. I don’t proselyte my neighbors; because I believe in individual liberty; but since you inquire, I will say that I’ve tried it long enough to feel sure, and as there never has been a piece of meat cooked in my house, so there never shall be!” and she nodded her pretty head like a piece of mechanism.

“But what does Mr. Pearmain say?” asked the other.

“Oh, he agrees about it, fortunately, so there is no difficulty there. In fact, it was Mr. Pearmain’s remarks, before we married, that first led me to think seriously of the subject. He always used to call it cannibalism whenever the beef was cut and the blood followed the knife. And I thought so much of his opinion I began to turn the matter over.”

“Well, I declare! I don’t believe I shall ever think so much of any man’s opinion,” said Mrs. Morley. “And did Mr. Pearmain’s conviction really affect your appetite? What an idea! And you ceased eating meat in consequence of Mr. Pearmain’s conviction?”

“Well, in consequence of my own conviction,” said the priestess. “It grew disgusting to me. We boarded together, you know, and when my plate came, and I began to help myself to salt, Mr. Pearmain would glance at it, and say, ‘Dead flesh.’”

“I should think that would have been disgusting.”

“I did feel vexed a little at first, but presently I was saying the words to myself. And presently I couldn’t taste it at all.”

“The idea!” said Mrs. Morley, hunting for her lost needle.

“Oh, if you just run the matter over yourself, you won’t be so scornful, Teresa. If you remember every time you take a bit of mutton that you are eating death and corruption—”

“Well, I never!” said Mrs. Morley, catching her breath.

“Why, only think of it!” said Mrs. Pearmain, warming at her work. “How can you expect anybody to be good that is constantly fed and nourished and kept alive on a lower form of life?”

“But, bless my heart,” cried Mrs. Morley, struggling up from under the avalanche of words, “vegetables are a lower form of life, and one must live on something.”

“Vegetables are innocent life, at any rate, with no vile propensities or impure parts. And, moreover, we are half vegetables ourselves.”

“We? Oh, what in the world do you mean, Emily?” exclaimed Mrs. Morley, in a terrified manner, as if she had just received a revelation as to how fearfully she was made.

“Certainly. Didn’t you know that?” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a superior air. “The movements of our bodies that are voluntary are animal; those that are involuntary are vegetable, such as the circulation, and all the processes that go on while we sleep.”

“Isn’t it dreadful?” gasped Mrs. Morley.

“Dreadful? I think it’s beautiful. It’s a sort of union in ourselves of the three kingdoms—vegetable, animal, and spiritual; for when the nerves come in and control the great brute muscles—”

“But, really, Emily—”

“Now don’t be silly, Teresa. A woman of your power of mind has only to look at the thing rationally to feel just as I do. For, as I was saying, how can those people be good who receive all their increase from a lower animal form, from brutal instincts and actions—how can they help receiving those instincts and being tempted to those actions, and becoming, under the guise of men and women, a baser sort of animals themselves?”

“I don’t know—perhaps so,” said Mrs. Morley, a little moved, it may be, by the reference to her power of mind.

“There must be an inherent principle in man that will rise whether or no, or else we never should have gotten along as far as we have. But it would be so much faster, so much further, if it wasn’t for this food on which we sustain our growth. And while we eat it, I don’t see how the great perfect race can ever come at all. It never will come, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, resting on her elbow and looking through her friend as if to the far-distant future—“it never will come till people cease to eat flesh, and live on the things that nature provides without pain or slaughter. To think, every time you sit down to table, that some creature which enjoyed life has had to give it up for your appetite! That makes me sick!” said Mrs. Pearmain.

“Well, it’s very wonderful. I never thought of it before. I really will look it all over. But I don’t see what there is to live on—I should starve on bread and butter.”

“Butter! We only allow butter as a rarity.”

“Well, milk, then.”

“Milk, indeed! Do you suppose that, while cows are kept in the unnatural condition in which the milker keeps them, we should drink their milk? Oh no, indeed, seldom milk, seldom cream, do we touch.”

“My goodness! Then you’ve nothing left but eggs.”

“Well, once in a while an egg; but rarely. I never can get over feeling that to break an egg is the murder of an innocent.”

“Why, then, you can’t have cake, or—”

“What do you want that for?—unhealthy, indigestible, poisonous—no, we never have it.”

“Nor doughnuts?”

“Doughnuts!” with ineffable scorn.

“And you can’t have pies?”

“Never. But we have delicious sauces—apple, cranberry, grape, and all those.”

“But what in wonder do you do when you have company?”

“Oh, you have no idea of how many delicious ways there are in which the grains can be cooked, or of how many delicious forms of bread there are. You can get up a perfectly harmonious dinner of the various vegetables that really leaves you nothing to desire; mushrooms are as good as steaks; beans can be made to imitate roast beef; and with fruits and sauces, as I said, there is enough of everything, and those who want meat needn’t come to us.”

“I should die!”

“Not after you were used to it,” said Mrs. Pearmain, seriously. “You would learn to like the new way and detest the old.”

“It would set free a great deal of money, to be sure, to be used on other things,” mused Mrs. Morley.

“Oh, a great deal! And then you would be twice as healthy and strong, and your children would be an improvement on you. In fact, it is for the sake of Harry chiefly that we are so strenuous about following up the matter. It may not make a mighty difference with me, beginning after twenty, but I expect to see Harry—I can’t help seeing Harry—a very different person from other people’s boys. And if he could only find and marry, when he grows up, a woman who had been nourished on the same sort of food—just think, Teresa, what we might expect of their children! It would be the beginning of a race that would conquer the world, the beginning of that great perfect race which will do such wonderful things as pass our comprehension.”

“What makes you talk so ecstatically of that great perfect race, Emily? How do you know anything about it?”

“Why, don’t geology and those things show us that race after race of animals has passed away, and only left its bones behind it? And should we suppose that man would be an exception to the general fate? But as each race passes, something takes its place a little superior to it, sprung from it, perhaps; and this great perfect race is to take the place of man, sprung from man and woman, but from the first man and woman that ceased to eat death and corruption. Oh, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, her cheeks and her eyes glowing, “if it should be your child and mine!”

The last stroke did the work. Mrs. Morley, it might be said, threw up the sponge; she was a convert from that moment to Mrs. Pearmain’s theories. She went through the house that very day; she inquired into everything; she took notes of everything; she learned how to do everything; and she went home at night all prepared to convert Mr. Morley, and to give her Louise to be married to Harry—if it happened to be Louise.

Poor Mr. Morley! He loved his juicy steak; he rolled under his tongue the sweet morsel of the oyster out of a side bone; he considered pepper-pot a dish fit for the gods; he was fond of broiled liver and a rasher of bacon; a cold pickled shoulder of pork he thought good enough to invite the king to partake. In fact, he was a murderous cannibal, pure and simple, according to Mrs. Pearmain’s lights, who enjoyed his dinner without being, as he thought himself—and as we think, so we are—either exactly an epicure or a glutton.

But it was of no use. When Mrs. Morley unmasked her batteries that night, and went over Mrs. Pearmain’s plan of campaign, with a whole added troop of exclamation and emphasis and entreaty and embracing, he knew he must surrender. He made a faint resistance, but on the whole he didn’t believe it was to be a permanent affair with his little Teresa; he didn’t like to deny her anything just now either; it was probably only an incidental whim that would pass, and so he yielded handsomely, and promised that she should have her own way. And then the idea of marrying his girl to Pearmain’s boy was a pleasant one: Pearmain was rich and generous and good, the friend of years. Yes, he would promise.

“Kiss the book!” cried Mrs. Morley.

“No, I won’t do that,” said he. “I’ll promise, and my word’s as good as my bond.”

“Well, then, George, you’ve as good as taken an oath, and I expect you to keep it.”

“I mean to keep it,” he replied—“at least, till you release me.”

“That will be forever, then.” And she plumed herself like Victory just lit upon a banner.

But it was a dismal breakfast to Mr. Morley next day, when dry toast preceded oatmeal, and butterless baked potato without salt brought up the rear; a dismal dinner, when watery squash and lumpy turnip were the only variation of a table gorgeous with carrots and beets and silver. “I’ll give my whole mind to it,” said Mrs. Morley, cheerfully. “Mrs. Pearmain will lend me all her experience, and we shall have it very palatable yet.” But he hankered after the fleshpots.

It was shortly after the beginning of the new régime that Miss Louise Morley came into the world, and there was much rejoicing at the christening, although the christening-cake consisted of a sort of sweet bread with raisins in it, of which Mr. Morley partook so eagerly that he made himself ill, and became presently so prostrate that the doctor, being summoned, ordered—perhaps at his whispered suggestion—a course of beef-tea.

Mr. Morley attended to that beef-tea himself. He was not going to be put off with slops and dissolved Liebig; he had pounds of the thick red steaks laid before him on the slab in the kitchen, where he went, and fairly gloated over its preparation. But his rapture was of short duration. Mrs. Pearmain, running over one day on an errand, saw him whetting his knife, and flourishing it like a savage, and tiptoed away to find Mrs. Morley. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “you never can see the evil effects to better advantage. Look at him! That is the very way the primitive butchering people whetted their knives over a victim’s throat. Oh, it is dreadful! it makes me shudder. It is like a mania for blood; it is certainly near insanity; he will be murdering you in your bed.”

“I am ashamed of you, Emily!” said Mrs. Morley, tartly. “My George, indeed! Why, the doctor ordered it.”

“But the doctor didn’t order it forever. The very ferocity shows he has had enough of it. I should take it away and put him on cream-of-tartar water directly. Don’t be offended, Teresa; I am speaking for his good—and the children’s. These men—they have to be managed; Mr. Pearmain is a singular exception.”

Mrs. Morley did not allow her displeasure to overcome her principles; and when Mrs. Pearmain brought her visit to a close, Mrs. Morley brought the administration of beef-tea to a close too. For Mr. Morley’s intention being to be as good as his word, it needed only a little argument and some tears to convince him that the beef-tea was a breach of contract.

It would be hard to tell what Mr. Morley suffered in going about his business in town from day to day for many a month thereafter. The sight of the wild-duck, hanging, with his wide wings and brilliant breast, at a poulterer’s door, almost broke his heart; the men who came up out of the victuallers’ cellars, wiping their mouths, excited in him a feeling akin to hate; and he had to skip by the kitchens of the Revere House and the Tremont so rapidly, in order to escape the tempting smells which they cast forth, that finally he altogether eschewed Bullfinch Street, and every other that commanded a restaurant kitchen. For Mr. Morley’s particular vanity, as you know, was that he was a man of his word.

Every once in a while Mr. Morley made a feeble remonstrance, futile as feeble; for Mrs. Morley had the whole thing pat now, and was, moreover, a woman with whom it was idle to argue, for when obliged to abandon her position logically, she always did physically also, and either banged out of the room, or else came round where he sat, put an arm about his neck, and if kisses wouldn’t stop his mouth, stopped it, to the accompaniment of much laughing and teasing meanwhile, with his handkerchief.

“A devilish pretty breakfast!” said Mr. Morley once, pushing back his plate in a pet. “Pea-nuts!”

“I don’t complain of pea-nuts, George,” said Mrs. Morley. “On the contrary, I am thankful for them. They’re sweet and sound and well-baked; there are plenty of them. I am sure they are a very poetical food; and then they’re a national one; we can always think, you know, when we eat pea-nuts, that we are encouraging the poor freedmen down in North Carolina.”

“Oh, hang the freedmen!” groaned Mr. Morley. “How do you expect me to go in and out of the city every day on such food as this? I’ll have no strength left in a year—living on husks.”

“Look at those oxen, George, dragging that immense load after them. There’s strength—and it all comes from husks.”

“I’m not an ox!” roared Mr. Morley.

“No? Anybody’d say you were a Bull of Bashan.”

“Mrs. Morley, can’t you apply a little reason—”

“Not a scrap. Not now. You know this is a subject on which I don’t want conversation before Louise,” as that little damsel demanded her groats, and looked with wondering eyes from one to the other. “I don’t want her ever to hear her diet called in question.”

“Me likes me’s bwekus,” said Miss Louie, with some comprehension of the coil.

“It’s more than I do,” muttered her father.

“Take some of Louie’s groats, then. Like them, precious?”

“Berry mush,” said Louie, with some point, and pushing the dish towards her father, with a dim idea that her mother was abusing him.

“I really can’t understand what the difference is between eating these oats and eating the flesh of the animal that is made out of these oats.”

“A horse’s flesh, for instance. But you wouldn’t eat that if it was set before you.”

“I don’t know that I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Morley, grimly. “People who are starving eat anything. People wrecked and on a raft eat each other,” said he, looking at his wife as if it were not impossible he should eat her. “Sometimes,” said Mr. Morley, “I feel dangerous.”

“A depraved nature,” said Mrs. Morley. “See what flesh has done for you,” while he gave a glance at Louie that might have made a weaker woman shudder.

“She’s fat, isn’t she?” said Mr. Morley, whose mind really seemed now to run on morbid things, and with the air of one who smacks his lips. And then, as he caught the chubby hand and carried it to his lips, Mrs. Morley found herself watching him with a breathless scrutiny—for it really crossed her mind that Mrs. Pearmain might be right, and Mr. Morley’s wits might be a little wandering—until he had kissed the little dimpled fist and laid it down again. “For my part,” said he, “if I were to have a plate of roast veal set before me (and I used to despise it)—roast veal, brown, and swimming in gravy—swimming in gravy,” he repeated, unctuously—“I don’t think I should eat it like a civilized being—I’ve left off being a civilized being, eating nuts and prunes and things that don’t require any civilization: a savage never needed to reach the boiling-point to eat them—I should put my face down and wallow in it, and eat it like a dog.”

And then Mrs. Morley snatched Louie, and ran out of the room in virtuous wrath.

Unhappy Mrs. Morley! The path of virtue was a thorny one, but she persevered in it even with bleeding feet. And if she was not ready with an answer, she always had what her husband called her knock-down argument of leaving the room. And she had one last resort, better than the others, which she used at such times as those when Mr. Morley, recurring to the charge, wanted her to see that you might scatter pulverized marble over a soil forever and do it no good; but if you scattered the pulverized bones of beasts there the harvest became trebled, plainly showing that matter which had passed through a form of organized life was superior to that which hadn’t, and that inasmuch as animals were higher in the scale of organized life than vegetables, the grain that was converted into beef was nobler food than the grain that had never known that higher form, and so—Then Mrs. Morley had ready the best answer of all, and it consisted in simply maintaining silence so rigorously that nothing short of thumbscrews could extract a syllable from her, while she looked the serene embodiment of pretty scorn.

But Nature will take her revenges, and in her own way. One night Mr. Morley did not return from town. Mrs. Morley sent the carriage to every train; it came back with nothing but the Skye sitting up on the seat erect as a shako. Mrs. Morley sent one servant up to the Pearmains’, and another over to the Farwells’—they knew nothing of Mr. Morley. She could learn nothing from the train hands; the gentlemen going up and down every day had not seen Mr. Morley. She telegraphed to the town station with no better result; she telegraphed to the counting-room, and received no reply at all. It had never happened before. She was wild with alarm; lights were dancing about the house till cock-crow; she walked the floors all night. Mr. Morley had fallen unnoticed in the dark between the cars, she was sure, and train after train had rolled over his mangled remains, and her mind could not fix him in any single spot, so great an extent of surface was he covering. Or else he had been delayed in the counting-room till dusk, and had been garroted on his way to the station, and robbed and murdered and tossed up an alleyway. Or perhaps he had fallen and broken a leg, and, tortured with pain, lay in the black street at the mercy of passing wheels. Could it be possible that Mr. Morley had tired of her and her whims, and had left for parts unknown? Had Mr. Morley’s fancy ever strayed from little Louie’s mother? She could not say; for the man that hankered after butcher’s meat as he did was proof against no temptation. And yet—her George—as he did hanker, how she had made him suffer! If she only had him there, she would cook the reddest beef in the servants’ larder for him with her own hands! In a wild whirl her fears and fancies, her indignation and affection, chased each other up and down in her mind till day broke. And then, by the common accident of ill-luck, there was an informal conclave of the neighbors at the front gate, and Mr. Pearmain, going in, volunteered a journey to town in search of Mr. Morley, and was welcomed by the wretched wife with bursting tears. “If I only knew,” she sobbed, “whether he is dead or alive, I could endure it.”

“There is no need of any alarm of that sort, Teresa,” said Mrs. Pearmain, who had come down early. “Anybody without much moral force is sure to be a backslider. Mr. Morley has merely been eating meat, and is ashamed to face you.”

It was too true—at least the first part of the statement; the second part was a work of imagination: Mr. Morley would have been only too glad to face his wife, for, stretched on a bed of sickness, and tossing with pain and fever, his wife’s presence would have been like cold water to his burning lips. He had indeed fallen from grace. On his way to the station a friend—a long-unseen friend, worse than any garroter—had begged him to dine with him; he had listened, longed, hesitated, yielded; he could at any rate enjoy his friend’s society, if he could not dine, and could return to Teresa by a later train. Vain thought! When that mulligatawny soup steamed in its tureen, when that striped bass in its port-wine sauce lifted its handsome side, when that breast of a mongrel duck saluted his famished eyes, when that single sip of Château Yquem made him think the world well lost, Mr. Morley fell. Four hours of delicious banqueting; twenty-four hours of dust and ashes. The stomach so long used to husks spurned the rich offering of blood and gravies, sauces and condiments; and no drunkard after a debauch ever suffered in body and in soul what Mr. Morley was suffering after this not too luxurious good square meal. Mrs. Morley buried her head in her husband’s bosom when Mr. Pearmain, with the kindliness of a man and the severity of a regicide, having carried her to the place next day, closed the door upon the interview—and surely we cannot do less than Mr. Pearmain did.

Poor Mrs. Morley! It is to be hoped that her husband promised better fashions. But on what was she to rely? On his word? A broken reed—and he had broken it. Poor Mr. Morley! He was thoroughly wretched. He went about with a craven air, conscious of suspicion. What is life without respect? And he knew that his wife’s respect was doubtful, that the Pearmains’ was not at all doubtful, and felt that even little Louie might learn to despise him. And, meantime, all the neighbors, aware that something very much out of the way had taken place and had been hushed up, regarded him as the culprit of a veritable escapade, of some vague and awful departure from rectitude, and looked upon this quiet, sober, steady citizen, who paid his taxes, went to church on Sundays, voted the right ticket, and never did anything very wrong in his life—except when he gave his wife the trusteeship of his diet—as little other than a regular Don Juan.

Really one cannot help thinking that it was too bad of Mr. Morley. He had promised his wife, and lulled her into false security, declaring that his word was as good as his bond; and he was a business man, and knew what his bond meant. Moreover, he knew that his wife had grown to have the affair very much at heart, being, like all converts, wonderfully bigoted, and convinced that it was a matter of life and death. “Why do you worry so over it, Teresa?” asked Mrs. Pearmain once. “You have established your own and Louie’s habits. There is no likelihood of your failing for yourself, or of your not securing her great destiny for her—yes, her great destiny. And why not let him return to his idols?”

“My George! oh, Emily, how can I? I had rather go with him. What satisfaction to me is it to be any better than he is? I want his blood to be pure, his life long. I want him to rise with me, and if all this is to separate us and make us a different race at last, I will have fried pork on my table every day, and eat it too! I wish I had never heard a word about it all! I don’t see that it makes us a bit better. George and I used to agree about everything, and now we quarrel about everything!”

Evidently indignation was not the weapon with which to meet this outbreak, and Mrs. Pearmain wearily went over all her fantastic premises and logical sequences till she had at length triumphantly welded the chains afresh on Mrs. Morley’s reason, and Mr. Morley’s œsophagus.

Of course, while all these agitations went on, time went on as well, and Harry Pearmain and Louie Morley were not standing still: their childhood was passing too. They were really beautiful children, and whether or not animal diet is good for the rest of us, their bright eyes, round limbs, and rosy cheeks, their boundless grace and happy natures, showed that the opposite diet was good for them. But then, on the other hand, nobody could dispute the fact that little Fanny Farwell’s cheeks were just as rosy, her pretty flesh as sweet, her grace as airy; and Fanny had been fed on the richest of steaks and the fattest of oysters ever since she had cut her teeth. They were the three best friends in the world, and the only drawback to the felicity of certain of the parents was, that Harry always persisted in calling Fanny his little wife, and Louie his dear sister, although it is uncertain if he were stimulated to that nomenclature by the gibraltars and the silver pieces that Mr. Morley now invariably bestowed upon him whenever he heard it. Sister or wife in the future, they were exceedingly affectionate in the present; they ran across the grounds to each other with their games and their secrets, and Louie was as much at home in Harry’s house as Harry was in hers; and Mrs. Pearmain used to look exultingly at Louie as upon her especial work, portray the future to herself, and rejoice over a daughter-in-law after her own heart. Meantime Mrs. Farwell had some thoughts of her own, the character of which may be known by the pitiful way in which she used to smooth Fanny’s sunshiny curls as she remarked to her husband upon the inconveniences attending the preparation of two different tables, that it was a pity if what was good enough for our grandparents wasn’t good enough for our grandchildren, that, after all, women were nothing but the slaves of men’s caprices, and that the whole of these new-fangled reformatory notions had not succeeded in making Louie Morley half so pretty as her Fanny: though when she had had her say, it is not impossible that the complacent sparkle in her eye as she now and then overlooked the Pearmain property was due to the consideration that it was her Fanny who might one day queen it over that fair demesne. Mrs. Farwell, however, if she pondered these things in her heart, kept them there so well that it never entered the heads of the other two mothers that any power could possibly arrange matters differently from the way in which they had arranged them themselves. So the three happy things grew up together, the girls skating with the boy in winter, and bird-nesting with him in summer, the boy playing house with them, doing their examples and threading their needles at times, astonishing them with his daring feats in riding and shooting and wrestling, while Louie’s great black eyes and brilliant colors gave her a certain prominence in their counsels, and her dashing courage made her assimilate most to the boy’s ways, and Fanny’s tenderness and timidity and soft sweetness moved his heart in quite another fashion. They were happy years to the children; they were years of apparent contentment with the Pearmains; they were years of a perpetual and open struggle with the Morleys. If Mr. Morley missed a train, or was delayed by conversation at the station, if he were late in returning from town-meeting or from the lodge, Mrs. Morley’s nerves began to twitter and her heart to flutter; now he comes, and now he doesn’t come; this foot-fall was his till it went by, this one surely was, and her heart beat like a forge, and fell with a mighty blow at the disappointment. “It is killing me, I know it is,” she would say to herself. “All this hope and fear and doubt and worry keep my pulses going so that I shall have a dreadful heart-disease fastened upon me. It really does not seem as if the good our plan may do outweighs the evil it does do.” And then she would take her work and run up to Mrs. Pearmain’s for some words to fortify her. Mrs. Pearmain always had them. More than once she had intimated that that was her branch of the business, and had even admitted that the person who furnished all the ideas ought not to be expected to furnish practice too, like those old-fashioned temperance lecturers who aroused their energies with a good nip of brandy before converting their audience to do away with brandy altogether.

“Never mind, never mind, Emily,” she would say. “It is worth any amount of heart-ache. It isn’t that it will so much benefit you and me—it would do little hurt to our plan, I suppose, if we took our bone in our cupboard—but our example is necessary to keep the children at the mark.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Morley. “Length of days is as desirable for us as for the children; and when we discard Death from our diet, he has to stop long enough to seek some other approach, at any rate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pearmain, “that is true. I feel as if these children might acquire immortality—at least return to such age as Melchizedek’s and Methuselah’s. And just think what work might be accomplished in such lifetimes as that will bring about! Now a person no sooner knows how to handle his talent, his inventive skill, or his learning, than off he goes, snuffed out like a candle; but then the man who invents a spring for a railroad car at thirty, at three hundred will be ballasting a road to the moon. What a period it will be after a few such generations! There will be no such thing as typhoids and diphtherias and all that ilk; we shall have killed off the plants that nourish the germs of parasitical disease; the organs of our bodies, no longer clogged with foul matter, will run on undisturbed indefinitely; the reducing of the temperature of the blood and abstracting the stimulus of strong flesh will abolish another class of disease and all the hereditary horrors that spring from it; and I can’t see that there will be anything but sudden accident to stop the machine any more than to stop a planet.”

“Well, that is for them, not for us. They will never give us a thought, nor dream of all our trouble and struggle to achieve it for them. They will only despise us as we do the wretches who sawed human bones with flint for the sake of the marrow.”

“I think such a race will have no room for contempt. They will pity us with every fresh gain. Why, Teresa, I can even think the time may come when there will be no eating at all, but science will have learned the required elements of food, the nitrates and phosphates and all that, and supply them to us in gaseous shape, great reservoirs feeding our houses through pipes: we will open the tubes in the dining-room, and sit a certain length of time together there, talking gayly, stimulated by the gas we are all breathing together, of which the system will take only what it needs, and then go our ways again without soil, grease, or trouble.”

“But, goodness, Emily, our teeth, our stomachs!”

“Well, teeth are useful in various ways. And as for our stomachs, they may be turned to the secretion of—now don’t you laugh at me, Teresa—I have really read a paper about it—to the secretion of wing material—”

“Wings!”

“Yes, wings—why not? If the first fish that ever dreamed of being a bird had seen a penguin with his flippers, transmigrating fins, he wouldn’t have thought himself visionary. But being determined to be a bird, he became a penguin; and some penguin probably determined upon becoming an eagle. We only have to be determined, Teresa, and we can do anything—in time—allowing, you know, that the ‘eternal years of God’ are ours to work in.”

“We can determine upon being angels,” said Mrs. Morley, slyly.

“And become so in time. How do you suppose the bodily idea of angels arose, if not from the forefeeling of those wings? It isn’t for you and me, Teresa, but it is for Harry’s and Louie’s descendants to have as fine

as any angel of them all.”

“It will be very awkward for dress-makers,” said Mrs. Morley, her needle on her lip, and rather too well accustomed to wonders from her friend’s lips for much surprise.

“On the contrary, it will simplify dress-making.”

“But, Emily, it will take more than our Harry and Louie to bring all this about. Their children will have to marry among the flesh-eaters, and all our work goes for nothing.”

“I know it. And that perplexes me a great deal. Really it doesn’t seem right to throw up the matter for that. Still it was an awful oversight. Sometimes it almost reconciles me to the bouillon and chops that Dr. Bonnamy ordered last fall.”

“Last fall?”

“When I grew so poorly from eating the lemons, you know.”

“Oh yes, to keep your bones—”

“From turning to chalk. I went too far. Oh, if we could only live up to our theories!” said Mrs. Pearmain, with a sigh.

“I can, and I will,” cried Mrs. Morley. “And George Morley must.”

“Now if we had only found two other mothers to begin life as we did, we should have been quite secure,” said Mrs. Pearmain, reflectively. “Then there would have been no need of abandoning our experiment.”

“Abandoning! Who talks of abandoning?” cried Mrs. Morley, with snapping eyes. “If it is right to do, I shall do it irrespective of the possibilities of Harry’s and Louie’s descendants.”

“But it is for them we are doing it. And all that wars against us is appetite—no, not even appetite, but the mere sense of taste. Why in the world cannot science take up the thing, and invent flavors for us, so that with a few drops of this extract we can give the flavor of roast fowl to this vegetable, with a few drops of that turn our porridge into turtle-soup, and with another get all the satisfaction out of a biscuit that we should out of a chop? But no,” said Mrs. Pearmain, wearily, “it never will, and I for one am almost tired of going against the stream, when all our work is to end like those rivers which are lost upon the desert.”

Then it was Mrs. Morley’s turn to exhort, to assure her friend she had been overworked, and was morbid, and must have a dish of strong gruel made immediately, and must stimulate herself with some cress and onion and tomato-salad, and presently must go away from home on a little visit. “Change of scene to us is like change of food to others,” said Mrs. Morley, and Mrs. Pearmain thought there was a great deal of wisdom in what her friend said. And so Mrs. Pearmain went away to a water-cure, where, as the authorities could not find anything the matter with her back, they began to concern themselves about her brain, upon which she returned home in high dudgeon.

She had been gone just long enough. A great deal of mischief can be accomplished in three months when people are seventeen or eighteen years old—between which years Louie now hung; and Mrs. Morley’s attention had been called off by a series of tergiversations on Mr. Morley’s part that had threatened not only to make her a widow, but to destroy her system of operations. Her own nerves had been badly shattered by his behavior, and by the impossibility of knowing her fate from dinner to dinner, and subsequently by the long watching and waiting that his illness devolved upon her when indulgence in corned pork and cabbage at a restaurant had produced an inflammation of the stomach that nearly proved fatal to him. On his recovery a demon of hunger had seemed to be gnawing at Mr. Morley’s vitals, and all the fancy grits and groats in the market did not meet his demand. Mr. Morley no sooner returned to business than a porter-house steak learned to expect him on the noon of every day.

But you may be sure that this was very mortifying to Mr. Morley. “Skulking round a corner like a lean dog for his bone,” as he used to grumble, was enough to make a sneak of any man, and he had always been proud of his uprightness. The consciousness that he was sacrificing his birthright for a mess of pottage made him exceedingly morose; and, convicted of his own dereliction, he was daily and hourly trying to find some fault in Mrs. Morley that should balance it, till life became little but crimination and recrimination in the household where it had been expected to bring about the millennium. Not in all this time being able to summon the courage to fight it out with his wife, he was every now and then swearing off again, every now and then suffering a relapse, making himself a martyr to dyspepsia and remorse; and, forgetting all old ties, he was encouraging something like hatred of the Pearmains, with every pang that came from yielding the right, from abandoning the pleasant, or from indigestion. Good Mr. Pearmain went on his patient, plodding way without giving Mr. Morley and his struggles a second thought; but Mr. Morley, in turn, never gave a second thought to the atmosphere of conciliation that of late years had seemed to grow up about Mrs. Pearmain’s manners. Things were imbittered for him, too, by the knowledge that the world had so well prospered with him that he was fully able to gratify his wishes, but with all his good luck and good bank account was obliged to live on prison fare. He lived, though, only in the hope of one day breaking his bonds; and the thought that his darling girl was being reared to belong to anything belonging to the Pearmains grew daily more obnoxious to him.

Mrs. Morley, however, had but a slight knowledge of what went on in the little cosmos of her husband’s emotions; she had no doubt that he broke faith with her frequently in the matter of his diet; she used to make scornful observations as to the freedom of a man to do wrong unobserved, but she had no idea to what extent that faith was broken, and only once in a while dimly felt herself trembling on the edge of a rebellion before whose outbreak she would go under. She was not at all happy, only triumphantly right, and she nailed her colors to the mast, and swept bravely forward.

Mr. Morley had little pleasure at home in those years; somehow all conversation led to the one theme, as all roads lead to Rome. He found hardly any other satisfaction than in walking with Louie in the woods, or else taking his book on the windy upland of the hill behind the two estates of Pearmain and Morley, and in dreaming his life away in the sun, now and then bursting out of calm repose into a storm of expletives that must have startled the ground-mice and the birds, as he thought of the pleasure he might have taken with his dear little Teresa “if that Pearmain woman had never fallen foul of her.”

Once, just as he was relapsing into quiet after such a burst, an arm stole round his neck, and a soft dimpled brown hand, with a big pearl on it, laid itself over his mouth. “Aren’t you ashamed, you dear profane Pa Morley?” cried Louie, and her laughing face came round in front till the great black eyes looked into his little gray ones. “Where do you expect to die when you go to? What makes you swear so, sitting up here in the sun? Is it some tender reminiscence connected with a beef-bone? Listen! I’m going to tell you a great secret. Do you know, I think turtle-soup is almost as good as mock-turtle!”

“Louie!” he gasped.

“Yes, indeed,” she said, with the gayest sort of a mischievous laugh, pulling herself round by the sod to her father’s side. “I mentioned that to show you how high up I am in the graduating class. Turtle-soup and terrapin are like a degree cum summâ laudâ in the comestible line. I should like mutton-broth and gumbo every day when I didn’t have oyster-stew or chowder.”

It is true that in the instant, despite his own wishes, Mr. Morley recoiled as from a cockatrice inadvertently hatched in his bosom.

“Now, Pa Morley,” whimpered the sweet voice, in distress, “as if you weren’t really glad of it!”

“But—but, my dear—”

“Oh, now stop, please. I’ll tell you all about it. And it isn’t our fault at all. Ma drove us to it.”

“Our?”

“Well, yes, Harry’s or mine. When we found out what ma and Mrs. Pearmain were after—How would you like it, I want to know, Pa Morley,” she suddenly cried, “to have folks manœuvring about you in that way; to be set apart from everybody else in the world in that indelicate, indecent way; to be talked over as the—the—the beginner of a great future perfect race—”

“It’s nonsense! it’s nonsense!” cried Mr. Morley, springing to his feet.

“Now, pa, you just be quiet. I am. And I’m the party most directly concerned,” and she coaxed him down beside her again. “I don’t care anything about that great future race. This race is good enough for me. And I think ma and Mrs. Pearmain might be ashamed of themselves. And so does Harry.”

“What! you’ve talked it over?”

“We’ve heard them talking it over—oh, times! And, pa dear, now don’t you go to being cross; it’s of no sort of use to speak to them about it; and—and the fact is, I like Harry very much indeed, very much, and so does he like me, but there’s somebody I like worlds, worlds, worlds better.”

“Oh, there is, is there?” And her father caught her shoulders in his two hands, and held her at arm’s-length till the face drooped and the eyes veiled themselves, and the little brazen thing was blushing and half crying. “And I know who it is!” he cried, releasing his hold and clasping the pretty head all at once into his breast, to the great damage of crimps and starch. “You don’t suppose I’ve seen Dr. Bonnamy’s gig waiting round these lanes so long for nothing?”

“You don’t care, do you, pa?” she whispered, looking up from her resting-place.

“I don’t know about that,” he answered, smoothing the rich hair in a reckless way. “What am I going to do?”

“Threaten ma with a lunatic asylum, and make her behave herself.”

“No, no, ma has her rights. She believes in her principles thoroughly, and so do I. But the trouble is I never did have any backbone.”

“Nobody could have, or any other bone, living as we do.”

“I’m—I’m ashamed of it, but my senses are too much for me. Your mother ought to have married a better man.”

“For shame, Pa Morley! As if she could!”

“She’d have been a great deal happier, and perhaps have founded her great race. It does seem a shame that such a mighty plan should be thwarted just because I love gravy. She’ll say, Louie, that the reason you love soup is because of the rebellion of my senses against the—”

“Acquiescence of your reason.” And then they both laughed like two children. “It isn’t only soup, though,” said Louie. “I love everything that’s good, and take it whenever I can get it—chicken, calf’s-head, pork and beans—”

“O Lord! we might as well give up, then,” groaned Mr. Morley.

“We might as well give up,” repeated Louie, with great cheerfulness. “And you’ll help us, pa?”

“I? I? Why, how can I—”

“Oh, I know how! Just say you will.”

“If—if I dare to, my darling.”

“Well, I won’t trouble you much; not till after it’s all done, and can’t be helped. I love John Bonnamy, and I hate the great future race”—and all of a sudden she burst out crying inextinguishably, and it was all her father could do to kiss her and soothe her into calmness before walking away with her, her little elastic step hardly crushing the grass, into the wood where John Bonnamy was waiting.

It was an hour or two later in the day, just as the first tinge of sunset began to transmute all the summer world, when Mr. Morley came walking back alone over the brow of the hill, very quiet, very dazed, a little stunned it may be, a little wondering if nature were not on his side and requiting his wrongs after all. For what was this he had heard in the wood—as if Louie’s story were not marvel enough? Harry Pearmain, Fanny Farwell—those two children; he not a day more than twenty-one, she less than his Louie’s age—just seventeen; a secret whose seal no one dared to break. He didn’t know how to believe it all. It was like a dream. He felt that he must have a night’s sleep on it, and see if he dreamed it again, before he dared to think of it. He saw a great vista of release opening before him, if he could but find a sword to hew through the first hedge.

There was a shorter cut down the hill, that took him round under the Pearmain windows—those pretty mullioned windows all opening on the ground; he followed it. And he never knew what fate it was that suddenly made him turn, and tiptoe towards a certain window of them all, and pause there, looking in—whether some arresting sight had caught his eye and directed his feet while his conscious thoughts were otherwhere, or whether it was simply perverse curiosity. Whatever it was, he delayed there some seconds, his eyes glaring out of his head, his nose flattened against the pane of the narrow pantry window till it shone leprously white and blue. And in that plight, as if magnetized by the fixity of his gaze, Mrs. Pearmain turned and surveyed him.

“Oh, Mr. Morley! Mr. Morley!” she cried, as well as the circumstances allowed her to enunciate. “Don’t, don’t betray me!”

Mr. Morley chuckled. It was a moment of glorious recompense. Here was his sword. He pushed up the sash. “I’ll take a bite,” he said.

Mrs. Pearmain stared in a sort of stupor a moment. “I—I can’t help it, Mr. Morley,” she stammered then, with pale and shaking lips.

“It’s very well done,” said Mr. Morley. “It shows a good deal of experience—”

“Oh, the doctor ordered it long ago, and the habit grew upon me; and although I gave up hope for myself, I’ve tried to keep the way straight for the others—”

“Straight and narrow,” said Mr. Morley, wiping his mouth.

“—And I’ve talked and written about it, talked to every one, argued with every one—you know I have, Mr. Morley,” she cried, breathlessly, the tears gushing—“tried to convert every one—”

“Enough to strike a balance. I understand—whited sepulchres, Pharisees, and all that. You’ve been like the hero of the ballad who sat in the corner eating his Christmas-pie. You’ve been the means of starving me for nearly twenty years on oatmeal mush, while you’ve picked your bones and—”

“Mr. Morley! you can still insult—”

“Not at all, not at all. I don’t wish to insult you. On the contrary, I think you’ve shown the first ray of sense I’ve seen in you for twenty years. Only,” said Mr. Morley, lifting his finger impressively before his victim’s eyes, “now there’s to be no backing down.”

A stormy half-hour afterwards Mr. Morley might have been seen springing over the railing between the grounds as light as a boy, and he ate his supper of oatmeal mush with the relish of Jack sitting at the foot of the bean-stalk he was about to fell; for he never meant to partake of that viand again in his life.

The phaeton was coming round to the door to take Mrs. Morley, in the long twilight, to one of her poor women whom she helped on certain vegetarian conditions. The pony was rather gay, and pranced a good deal as Thomas held the bridle. “It is wonderful the strength these animals get out of grains,” said Mr. Morley, artfully.

“Wonderful!” said Mrs. Morley, falling delightedly into the trap.

“And the weakness other animals get,” continued Mr. Morley. “My dear, did you know that Mrs. Pearmain had been ailing for some time?”

“Triflingly,” said Mrs. Morley, drawing on her gauntlets.

“My dear, if you saw Mrs. Pearmain standing behind her pantry door, holding in one hand part of a cold sausage, the rest of which was in her mouth, and in the other hand a pickled martinoe—”

“Do talk common sense, Mr. Morley.”

“I call that very common sense—on Mrs. Pearmain’s part. As I was saying, in such case what should you think?”

“I shouldn’t think at all; I can’t reason on impossibilities.”

“Do you believe it would make any difference as to your tyranny over me?” urged Mr. Morley, with a laugh.

“Tyranny, George!” said Mrs. Morley, turning her still charming face wonderingly upon her husband.

“I said it advisedly,” replied Mr. Morley, with sudden acrimony.

“Is that tyranny to which your reason so fully consents?” asked Mrs. Morley, pulling off her gloves for a combat, in reverse of the custom of those knights who, before the fray, “pulled their ringing gauntlets on.”

“Teresa,” said Mr. Morley, with a firmness that surprised himself, “I adore your principles, but I abhor your practice. Don’t pull off your gloves, my love; that poor woman is famishing for her porridge. Go your ways, child; but if on your return you run over to Mrs. Pearmain’s I think you may learn something to—shall I say your?—no, to my advantage.”

And little Mrs. Morley went her ways, with her mind in a state of bewilderment, and shivering as she remembered that the ancients held high spirits to be a presage of sudden death.

“Louie,” said Mr. Morley, when his wife was out of sight, “it is very wrong to disobey your mother.”

“Yes, pa.”

“But if your mother has given no orders, you can’t disobey them.”

“No, pa.”

“And it is equally wrong to disobey your father.”

“Yes, indeed, pa, dear.”

“And if your father gives you orders, you can do nothing else than obey them.”

“Certainly, pa, of course.”

“Very well, then, I order you to take a goose which you will find in the servants’ larder, and tell Jane to dress it and roast it at once. And when that is done I shall have some further orders to give you.”

When Mrs. Morley returned from her visit the house stood dark, with open doors and windows, and the fragrance of the honeysuckles blowing all about it, but with nobody inside it. She remembered what her husband had said, and hastened across the lawn and up to Mrs. Pearmain’s lighted mansion, arriving there just as Mr. Pearmain descended from the coach that had brought him to the end of a long journey. She spoke with the worthy man, looked up at him admiringly in the dusk, and yet paused one instant to think that her George, of whom no one stood in awe, was a pleasanter person for a husband after all. In the next instant a sound of revelry smote her ears, smote Mr. Pearmain’s too, and they went in together. The sound came from the dining-room. What odor was this that never before had profaned that pretty room? What sight was this that saluted the outraged eye?

There stood Mr. Morley, at one end of the freshly laid and glittering table, with his fork in the breast-bone of the goose and his knife in the air. There sat Mrs. Pearmain, pale, with traces of tears, daintily picking apart, but with no appetite whatever, a slice of the brown breast. There sat Fanny Farwell, blushing like a rose, with Harry’s protecting arm just thrown across her shoulder. There stood Louie Morley at one side of her father, flourishing a drumstick, and her great black eyes dancing to the music of Dr. Bonnamy’s merry laughter as he stood upon the other side.

“My dearest love,” said Mr. Morley, laying down his knife and waving his hand towards the remnants of the goose, “allow me to reintroduce to you an old but unforgotten acquaintance—”

“Oh, indeed!” cried Mrs. Morley, too much stupefied to express indignation, “as if I had not seen a goose every day of my life for twenty years!”

“Not roasted. Pardon me; your looking-glass reflects, but does not roast. Permit me also to remark that in future this acquaintance shall always be a welcome guest at our table, to which—while I accord you personally all liberty of groats—so help me Heaven, I never mean to sit down again without a joint! I told you this afternoon that I admired your principles, my dear Teresa. If I had known Dr. Bonnamy earlier and better, I never should have made so foolish a speech, and we should have been spared some years of trouble. Let me see. You declare that I inject dead flesh into my veins when I partake of this delicious morsel,” refreshing himself with a bit of the goose. “Do you, when you manure your hill of corn with barn-yard compost, inject that disgusting material into your ear of corn? No; the chemistry of sun and air absorbs from that compost only the proper constituents of corn. The stomach is a fine laboratory; it acts in the same way; it sends no dead flesh to the veins, but it separates that food into its elements, and sends merely the proper constituents of life along to their absorbents. Moreover,” continued Mr. Morley, wiping his forehead, and amazed at his eloquence and temerity, “you urge me to live according to your ideas, because comparative anatomy shows that animals with cellulated colons are herbivorous, and man has a cellulated colon—man and the ape. Is that right, Dr. Bonnamy? I am now convinced that the first ape that forsook his herbivorous diet and smacked his lips over some smoking flesh began to differentiate into man; and you may send this cellulated colon to Mr. Darwin as the missing link—”

“Bravo, papa, bravo!”

“And now, Mrs. Pearmain,” said Mr. Morley, “shall I speak for you?”

“I—I can’t speak for myself,” said Mrs. Pearmain, bursting into tears, and seeing twenty husbands with twenty valises all about to leave her forever, and gazing at her with awful austerities of farewell.

“Mrs. Pearmain, as Dr. Bonnamy will assure you,” said Mr. Morley, “was ordered by that physician, in whom you all believe so heartily, to resume her pristine diet some years since. This she stoutly refused to do; but learning that her life depended on it, I have brought this bird over here, and, as I may say, have forced her to share it with us. The rest,” continued Mr. Morley, happier than he had been for years, “I hope explains itself. Let me introduce this young lady”—as the little thing shrank closer and closer to her proud and defiant young husband—“formerly Miss Fanny Farwell, but for this three months past waiting an opportunity to confess herself Mrs. Harry Pearmain. And that done, let me present to you, my dear wife, Dr. Bonnamy, who became your son-in-law an hour ago.” And, quite out of breath, Mr. Morley sat down.

The whole English language failed to do justice to the occasion. There was silence in heaven for half an hour—that silence echoed here for half a moment, perhaps, but it seemed longer.

“I hope you will all be very happy,” said Mrs. Morley, then, with majesty, but a tremulous voice. “And as you have shown yourselves so capable of it without me, I—”

“Now, mother, mother,” said Mr. Morley, bending over the goose and waving his knife and fork affectionately towards her, “you know it would have been of no sort of use to talk with you, and it was a great deal better to clear your skirts of all responsibility.” Mr. Morley stopped and regarded the others. Mr. Pearmain, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and silent till this juncture, had suddenly broken the spell, dropped his valise, and bent and taken his wife in his arms. “Emily, my darling,” he was saying, “why didn’t I hear of this before? Do you suppose I would have sacrificed your precious health, your life, for a whim?” And he kissed the weak woman tenderly before turning to the others. “And as for these children,” said he.

“Hear! hear!” cried Mr. Morley, hilariously.

“Hear! hear!” cried Louie, who had never been afraid of Mr. Pearmain. “And will you sacrifice us for a whim, ma?”

“My dear,” said Mr. Morley, pouring out a bumper, “here’s to the great future perfect race. Let us wish it long life and—posterity. We have only postponed it a generation.”