The Man Who Failed

I

As Robert Brockton started across the bridge toward Brooklyn, he turned and glanced hopelessly at the skyscrapers behind him. In the gathering darkness they loomed, huge symbols of the triumphant force of New York. Brockton shrank from them because he knew that he was a failure; a failure in this country of ambition, this city of success.

The knowledge had come to him that afternoon in a flash of self-comprehension, and, in the blindness which followed, he had clung to one resolve: he would face the truth.

‘Your department has n’t made good,’ Adams had said. He was the head of the firm, a short-spoken but kindly man. ‘I know it’s new, and we ’ve taken that into account. But —’ He paused and finished with a regretful upward inflection, ‘we want results.’

The room swam before Brockton. In the next moment, he lived over his joy at his recent promotion. ‘I’m — I’m not satisfactory?’ he asked.

‘That’s it,’ replied Adams reluctantly. ‘We’re going to put Fehrmann in your place,’ he hurried on. ‘I like you, Brockton, but you’re not the man for the position. There’s not enough go to you. Only last week you let that contract with Palmer slip through your fingers.’

Brockton nodded. What Adams said was true.

‘Then I am to go back to my old place?’ he asked.

‘Well — no, the fact is, there is n’t anything for you.’

It was then that Brockton realized his failure. He did not speak; he had forgotten Adams’s presence. In the silence, his employer studied him. Brockton, in the late thirties, had irongray hair; straightforward, intelligent gray eyes, set wide apart beneath the forehead of a thinker; a nose strong enough, and a mouth and jaw sufficiently well-proportioned. It was the expression which puzzled Adams: keen, but not practical; quick, but too sensitive; far-sighted, but not shrewd.

The senior partner, owning to himself with annoyance that he had promoted Brockton not because of his fitness, but because he liked him, broke the silence.

‘We’ve divided the work you used to do among four or five men. They crowd it in with their regular routine and it saves a salary. That’s why there’s no place for you.’ He leaned back in his chair and continued, ‘ When we organized the draughting department, I put you at the head of it because I wanted to give you a lift. You’d been with us five years. It was a big move up for you. Jameson thought you were n’t suited to this work; he wanted Fehrmann all the time. But I said I’d give you your chance.’

‘I’ve had it,’ said Brockton. His shoulders drooped and he leaned heavily on the desk beside him. He was confronted with his own inability, and he despised it with all the intensity of his American training.

Adams spoke again as he was leaving. ‘I’m sorry for this; but the highest possible efficiency in every line is what we must keep in view. Brockton, — you don’t make a bull’s-eye hit every time. That’s the kind of man we’ve got to have.’

Out between the bridge-towers Brockton halted while the homewardbound throng hurried on in the early winter twilight. Leaning on the rail looking down the river, he remembered the first time he had stood there, when, a boy of fifteen, he had made a trip to New York. To-night he looked back pityingly on that boy as he remembered the youthful determination, ‘Some day I’ll come to New York and live.’

The desire to succeed was his birthright, as it is that of every American. It is in the blood of the race, descendants of pioneers who made homes in a wilderness and conquered a continent. Brockton had been brought up on the gospel of success. He had believed in it; he still believed in it. And therein lay the bitterness of his failure.

He felt a despairing contempt for himself, for he knew that this was not his first lost opportunity. The others, he had told himself, were accidents, queer turns of fate; and he had fought on, pulling himself together after each rebuff. But through years of plodding, waiting, and hoping, he had kept a firm grip on his courage, believing that some day fate would relent. Now he saw clearly that the thing which held him back was not fate, but — himself. Each time he had failed because he lacked the power to dominate other people, to bend their wills to his.

As he started onward, leaden-footed, he remembered his wife’s happy face that morning. ‘You need n’t hurry home to-night,’ she had said. ‘Dinner will be a little later. You know we’re going to celebrate.’ He had forgotten; it was his birthday. He was thirty-nine years old, and — a failure.

The Brocktons’ home was an oldtime flat in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn Heights. They lived there because it was cheap and comfortable and so near Brockton’s New York office that he could walk back and forth. They had had need to count car-fares on his forty dollars a week, but since his promotion, with a raise to seventy-five, they had been planning to leave the crowded neighborhood.

Edith Brockton met her husband at their door. ‘ Robert,’ she cried gayly, ‘we’re ready and dinner’s waiting. How dare you be late to-night?’

She looked very pretty as she stood with the light from the chandelier shining on her soft brown hair, while pleasure brought unusual color to her cheeks. She was five years younger than Brockton, with a buoyant disposition which had kept her face unlined. She had a child’s sunny smile, offset by a courageous chin and a quick, energetic glint in her eyes.

She drew Brockton into the pleasant living-room, where several cherished bits of old mahogany were placed so as to cover worn spots in the carpet. The two children, in white frocks and their best sashes, welcomed their father joyously.

Edith caught her husband’s hand. ‘Don’t think it’s silly, Robert,’ she whispered, ‘but I’ve tried to have everything especially nice to-night because this year has meant so much to you, with the promotion, and more money, and all our wishes coming true.’

After dinner, Brockton drew close to his wife. ‘Edith,’ he said quietly, ‘send the children out. I’ve something to tell you.’

‘ What is it, Robert? ’ she questioned, anxiously, when they were alone. As she faced her husband, she wondered how she could have failed to notice his strained manner and the drawn look in his face.

‘I’ve lost my position.’

Edith stood still an instant, unbelieving. Then she ran to him and putting her arms around him looked up into his face. ‘Rob, my poor boy!’ she whispered. Then, after a pause, ‘How did it happen?’

‘I told you from the first that Fehrmann wanted the place,’ said Robert quietly. ‘ He waited — he had Jameson back of him — and he got his chance. They’re going to give him the department — Edith, they’ve done away with my old position. I’m turned out.’

For a time, neither of them spoke. Then she said softly, ‘I’m so sorry, Robert. It does n’t seem right. You deserved the promotion after five years of drudging for the firm. But don’t mind it, dear; this is a setback, but better times are coming. You’ll get to the top still. You’ll win; you must. And then we’ll look back and laugh at all the troubles.’

Her words touched Brockton. For a moment, he longed that she might go on believing in him. Then loyalty to her made him ashamed of his wish; he could not let her think him other than he was.

‘Edith,’ he began, ‘it was my own fault. I lost the place because I could n’t make good. That’s the truth.’

He felt her arm tremble. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said unwaveringly. ‘You’re over-sensitive, Robert. You are n’t fair to yourself. Don’t — don’t talk that way.’

Brockton gently pushed her arm away and made her sit on the sofa beside him. ‘ Dearest, do you remember what your father said before we were married? He said that I would never — succeed, make money. I was angry, but before I could speak you took my hand and told him that you believed in me; that you were glad to be poor with me; and that you only asked for time to show him that he was wrong. I was so proud of you. — Edith, what gave you such confidence?’

‘Why, I cared for you, Robert, so, of course, I believed in you. Everybody — that is, everybody worth while — succeeds in the end. Look at father, and your brother in Los Angeles, and my brother, Ed. Of course, your father died young, but he’d have had a reputation if he’d lived. Robert, I wish you would n’t speak of what father said; at least, not now. You’ve had a dreadful day, and things look worse to you than they are. To-morrow, you’ll feel different.’

‘Edith, Edith, don’t!’ groaned Robert. ‘Don’t fill both of us with fresh hopes that I’ll only disappoint. We ’ll have to admit the truth. Your father was right; I shall never succeed.’

She shrank away from him. ‘Robert!’ she cried, rising. If she had discovered him stealing money she would have cried out in the same way.

Brockton, scarcely heeding her, continued, ‘You said I’d drudged these last five years. I have; and all the years before. And all the while, we’ve thought the work beneath me; that I only needed the opportunity to make a big success. Every time the chance went over my head or slipped through my fingers, we blamed it on luck. I won’t blind myself any longer. I won’t be such a pitiable fool as not to know my own limitations. I’ve done the drudging because I can do it, and do it well. But when I try something larger, push into the thick of the fight, I’m beaten. I’m a second-rate man; that’s why I can’t get on.’

His confession had cost him much, and he ended wearily. But his wife stood silent, uncomprehending. For twelve years her faith in his ultimate success had never faltered. She was ignorant of the competition in the midst of which her husband worked. She believed in Robert simply because he was Robert, and she had been happy to work and wait with him.

She had planned and scrimped and drudged, had worn shabby clothes, had been her own cook, nursemaid, and dressmaker. With it all, she had never grown too tired to encourage him and to share his enthusiasms. Tonight, for the first time, in the face of fresh disaster she was powerless to comfort him; his own words had choked back her sympathy. Underneath all her feminine softness, lay the dogged temperament of her hardheaded father. She was confronted with a man who could admit that he was beaten, and this man was her husband.

II

During the next month, Brockton sought for a position, while Edith, at home, worked early and late to make the money last. Fortunately, they had not begun to make the changes they had planned after Robert’s promotion, and they counted on the few hundred dollars they had laid by to tide them over. In addition, the firm had given Brockton four weeks’ salary. He and Edith set this aside as an emergency fund; they had nothing else to fall back upon. Of course, there were always Edith’s father and brother, and Robert’s brother in California, upon whom they could call. But they had never done so. They tacitly agreed that this time it would be impossible.

Edith dismissed the weekly laundress and did that work herself. This, with the cooking, sweeping, dusting, sewing, dishwashing, and bedmaking, made a weary round which was never quite completed.

The tasks irked her. She had done them before, cheerfully, to help Robert; but she had spurred herself on with dreams of better days. Now, she was disheartened, disappointed. Little by little, she unconsciously drew away from him. She kept the house with scrupulous care and she tried to talk with him cheerfully, but their old companionship was gone.

Thus Brockton found himself alone and discouraged, despising himself, searching for work. It was not easy for him to find it. His pride was hurt and he could not ask the few influential men he knew to place him. Several times his hopes were raised, but each chance fell through. He found that his age was against him. He did not know why until one day, on a street-car, he heard a man say, —

‘I want young men in my business. By the time a man’s thirty-five, he ought to be fixed so that he does n’t have to come to me for a job, if he’s any good. If he is n’t, I don’t want him, anyway. A young ambitious fellow, just starting, will do more work for less money.’

Brockton winced. He knew that he was one of the men whom people spoke of as ‘a good fellow, but — unsuccessful.’ And he knew that that phrase conveyed more contempt than ‘He’s clever, but his methods are questionable.’

It seemed to him that the men and women about him were wrapped up in the worship of achievement. It was in their everyday speech. ‘There’s plenty of room at the top.’ ‘Make good.’ ‘Nothing succeeds like success.’ ‘There’s no place for the average man; it’s the crackerjack who gets there.’

He knew that this spirit had been fostered in them by their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, so that, to-day, in changed conditions, with chances fewer and bigger, their descendants crowded each other on to the very limit of their capacities. Yet for the man who could not endure this ‘speeding up,’ they had only the disdain of the strong animal for the weak.

At one moment, Brockton resented this adoration of attainment; in the next, he raged at his own inability to cope with it. Why could he not do what other men — his brothers, his acquaintances— had done? Why could he not be one of the fittest who survive?

Late one afternoon, nearly a month after he had begun his search for work, Brockton unlocked his door and stepped into the narrow hall. He walked wearily down it toward the kitchen.

‘Edith,’ he said, stopping on the threshold, ‘I’ve settled.’

His wife sat huddled on a chair by the dumb-waiter. Her face was buried in her hands. ‘I’m glad,’ she replied, without looking up.

‘It’s with Brooks and Company. They ’ll only pay thirty-five dollars, but it’s sure and steady. I thought I’d better take it.’

Edith nodded indifferently.

Robert crossed the room. ‘What is it, Edith? What’s the matter?’

‘I’m so tired,’ she answered faintly, ‘and my head aches.’ She leaned against the wall and began to sob helplessly.

Brockton looked at the rack of clean clothes before the washtubs and at the irons set on the back of the range to cool. He took Edith in his arms. ‘Poor little girl,’ he whispered; ‘I’ll get the dinner and Alice can help me.’

Edith raised her head. ‘Oh, Robert, I forgot,’ she said. ‘Brother Ed is in town on business. He sent a message to say he’d spend the evening with us. I ’ll sleep a little, but call me in time to get ready for him. — And see that the children change their dresses; those they have on are so worn. — And — Robert, don’t let Ed know I did the ironing. He would n’t understand.’

Brockton closed the door, his face flaming.

As the bell rang that evening, Edith said hastily, ‘Robert, you need n’t tell Ed about — that is, you can just say you’ve changed and are with Brooks and Company.’

Edward Norton forced upon the observer an impression of his importance. He was a year or two younger than Brockton, a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced man, expensively dressed by a good tailor. He greeted the family gayly. ‘How are you, Robert? Hello, Edith. Father and Mary sent their love. See here, Edie, you look rather played out. What’s up?’

Edith’s chin lifted as she answered, ‘Oh, I’m all right. A bit tired, that’s all.’

‘Give her a little vacation, old man,’ Norton suggested easily. ‘Take her down to Old Point Comfort for two or three days.’

Then, dismissing the subject, he seated himself in the most comfortable chair with Alice on the arm and Betty in his lap. They adored their wonderful uncle, who came in a taxicab and never appeared without a present.

‘No, thank you, I can’t stay long. I’ve got to catch the sleeper back to Detroit to-night. I came in a hurry, to carry through an important deal. Well, I clinched it.’ He broke off and looked around the room. ‘Your place here is always so cosy,’ he commented, patronizingly.

Brockton thrust his clenched hands into his pockets. He had seen Norton’s home, and he knew how shabby the little room must look to him. He suddenly hated this self-satisfied, prosperous man who sat telling of his latest achievement in the varnish business.

Norton interrupted his story. ‘ By the way, Robert,’ he remarked, ‘ I called up your office to-day to tell you I ’d come over this evening. But I could n’t get you. They said you’d left.’

Brockton bit his lips and nodded. ‘Yes, I’m with Brooks and Company,’ he said shortly.

There was unmistakable condescension in Norton’s ‘Well, they say it’s a good firm.’ Then he went on with the account of his own affairs.

Brockton scarcely heard what he was saying. He was fighting the desire to rise and strike his brother-in-law in the face; to inflict on him a physical pain in return for the mental torture that he himself was suffering. Every word that the man spoke stabbed his already wounded pride. He had despised himself enough, without having to see his contempt reflected on the face before him. He glanced at his wife and children.

Edward Norton’s recital was reaching its climax. ‘But—’ he said triumphantly, ‘I saw through their game and —’

The two little girls sat awed. They did not understand the story, but they knew that it was a fight and that Uncle Ed was coming out on top. Edith leaned forward, her cheeks burning, her eyes shining. In her face Brockton saw the look of admiration which he had not been able to call up since the night when he had owned himself a failure.

He was dizzy with rage and jealousy. The air in the room suffocated him and he rose, saying, ‘I hope you’ll excuse me, Ed, but I promised to see Mr. Sherman to-night about the work at the office.’

A moment later, he had parried their protests and was plunging into the rain and darkness outside.

He walked rapidly to the next turning and hurried on, not heeding where he went. He wanted to get away from it all — the conflict, the responsibilities. Of what use was he? Edith and the children would be well taken care of; better than he could do it. Why should he keep up an unequal struggle? He had made a mess of his life. Why try to mend it? Why should the wise, beneficent Providence, of whom people spoke, send him into the battle of life so equipped that he could not win? He shut his teeth defiantly. A God who dealt thus with a man was cruel. As he strode down the sloping street, he gazed up at the dark sky and the dim, deserted buildings and felt himself alone, an uncounted, useless atom in an uncaring universe.

He stopped short and looked about him. He had come out upon an empty wharf. He knew now why he had come, and he drew back in horror at himself. He was a coward, a traitor to his duty. He had made a failure and he had not courage enough to take the consequences. Afraid of the blackness around him and within him, he turned and fled.

III

A few minutes later, as Brockton wandered in a dark street, the light from the open door of a church fell upon him. Something, perhaps an impulse from his far-away ancestors of the Middle Ages, drew him toward it. It was not his church; the puritan trend of his training looked upon its rites as idolatrous. But he felt the blight of sin and weakness too strongly to care about dogmas or genuflections. He stepped into a pew and the quiet of the place stole over him. Here, at least, he was safe — from himself.

Presently, he found himself praying, calling out to the God he had defied. A cry in the dark, it was not the appeal of thought, or of religion, or even of superstition — but of instinct. His ideals, his hopes, his love, his courage, all had failed him; he could not trust himself. The power, whatever it might be, which had placed him in the world, was all he had left to turn to. He did not question now; he simply asked for strength to live as a man should.

A woman in shabby mourning sat in the pew in front of him, reading from a little leather-covered book. Soon, she rose, dropping the book upon the seat. Stopping as she faced the altar, she knelt. Then she went down the aisle.

Brockton reached into the next seat and took up the little volume. Of the Imitation of Christ, was printed on the worn cover. The book fell open as he held it. On the page before him he read, ‘Jesus hath now many lovers of his heavenly kingdom, but few followers of his cross.’ He read on, heedless of the people who came and went about him. ‘ Set thyself, therefore, like a good and faithful servant to bear manfully the cross of thy Lord.’ Finally he reached the quotation, ‘ If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’

The book slipped from his fingers. A consolation, old as the centuries yet always new to the individual, had come to him. Adversity, suffering, sorrow, were not meaningless accidents in life; through them men might, build characters the greater for the difficulties they had overcome; clinging to this faith they might reach the heights where neither death nor life, nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, could vanquish them.

As Brockton’s key clicked in the lock, the door opened and Betty threw herself into his arms. ‘Father, what made you stay so long? ’ she cried. ‘ Uncle Ed’s gone and mother’s sick. I thought you’d never come.’

The doctor said little, beyond, ‘She has a fever. Overwork, I should judge.’ The next day, he took Brockton out into the hall. ‘It’s typhoid,’ he said.

Every evening Brockton slept until nine o’clock and then took his place beside the bed to relieve the nurse.

Edith was delirious. She talked of being ‘at home’ and called Robert ‘father.’ She imagined that she had a dress to make for Alice and could not finish it. When she knew Robert, she seemed to care very little that he was with her. She rarely spoke. Once, as she lay quiet, he took her hand and held it, hoping that she would speak to him. After a moment she drew it away without a word.

Brockton blamed himself for Edith’s illness. He acknowledged remorsefully that, intent on his own disappointment, he had let her wear away her strength. He had failed again, and this time it was love which was slipping from his grasp. He loved Edith, yet, in an access of self-pity, he had forgotten to take care of her. He knew that his hours of watching were a poor atonement.

On the night when the disease had reached its crisis, he stood at the foot of his wife’s bed. It was past midnight, and she had lain for hours in a stupor. The nurse was snatching a brief rest. The doctors had said that there was a bare chance of recovery. Brockton knew what that meant.

He looked at the frail figure in the bed, and tried to face the thought that Edith was dying. They had been too busy with life to speak much of death. It was very near them now. It seemed to Brockton that he might have borne it better if Edith had looked at him and said, ‘I have been happy with you, Robert.’ But she was leaving him without a word. He felt that this was because she had not cared to speak. He sank to the floor. ‘I can’t let her go,’ he whispered.

He heard a soft sound in the room and turned, wondering. Alice was coming toward the bed, barefooted.

‘I wanted to look at mother,’ she said. Then she clung to him, crying softly. ‘Oh, father, Betty’s too little to understand, but I do. I’m afraid. If— if mother dies, what will happen to us? Father, do you think — God cares about us?’

He took her in his arms. He had asked himself these questions. As he began to comfort her, the answers came to him. Alice listened, and in a few moments she was asleep.

His heart filled with pity for the childish selfishness of Alice’s cry for her mother. But suddenly he realized its likeness to his own wild appeals for Edith’s life. He wanted her; he could not do without her, he had said. Now he felt the littleness of his petitions. How could he dare to beg that he might keep her? If she should come back at his call what could he, who had disappointed all her hopes, give her in return? He saw the grayness of the years before him. Was it love which begged to have her share them with him? He choked back his half-uttered supplication.

Early in the morning the doctor came again. ‘She’s better,’ he said. ‘It was one chance in a thousand.’

IV

Edith recovered slowly. At first she lay, too weak to think, vaguely glad of the quiet around her. Then, one morning, she woke to a renewed interest in her surroundings. She opened her eyes and saw the sunlight streaming in through the window. The brightness pleased her and, for a few moments, she was content to bask in it, untouched by any sensation save that of comfort.

Then she looked about the narrow room — at the battered furniture, the painted floor, and the worn rug. The shabbiness of it all was sickening. A flood of memories swept over her, carrying her back into life.

She remembered that she had been among marred, cheap, ugly things for years. She had loathed them, but she had looked upon them as a sort of cocoon from which she and Robert would emerge into the sunshine of success. Now she recalled the thirty-five dollars a week which Robert had been glad to take because it was ‘sure and steady.’ They had gone into the game of life to win. She had staked everything on her husband and she had lost. She drew the coverings over her eyes and wished that she had not come back.

As the days went by, she thought of the future continually. She had lived with poverty too long to have any illusions about it. She knew that it meant monotony and self-denial for her, the loss of all softness from the lives of her children. When Betty and Alice came into her room she pitied them as she looked at their worn little frocks and weather-beaten school hats. Betty was wearing ’hand-me-downs’ from Alice, and Alice’s dress had been made over from one of her mother’s. After all, makeshift clothes were the least of their hardships. Edith yearned to give her children the little things which refine life. During her illness they had had nowhere to play but the street. Their voices were already becoming shrill.

She looked forward and saw them put through the great mill of the board of education, and ground out at twenty as school-teachers on six hundred a year. They might possibly escape the gray celibacy of that life by marrying clerks and going back to the gray drudgery of housework.

At last she understood why she had been taught to worship success. It was because success brings money, and money, in this country, is the maker of class distinctions. Without it, a man must throw in his lot with the underdogs. She saw herself and Robert as they would be in the years to come. They would degenerate into one of a thousand limp, disheartened, middleaged couples, Robert with bent shoulders and listless step, and she with rough hands and clothes three years behind the fashions; while over their faces would come the peculiar, blurred look left by unfulfilled longings.

Rebellion flamed up in her. She hated her unlovely surroundings, her humdrum duties, her hopeless future. She hated Robert because he had brought this fate upon her.

Edith nursed her rebellion during the long, idle days while Brockton was at the office; but in the twilight, when her strength seemed to ebb, the sound of his step as he opened the hall door brought her a sense of comfort to which she would not own.

One day he brought her a small bunch of violets. He had scrimped his luncheons for a week to buy it.

‘You should n’t spend your money for them, Robert,’ she said bitterly. ‘You know we can’t afford such things ’

She knew that her words had hurt. She had spoken wantonly, meaning to wound both him and herself. For, as he stood beside her, she had longed to take his hand and draw it close to her, and then to fall asleep with the sense that he was near.

It was this reaching out toward him which surprised Edith. She had told herself over and over that she could not care for an incompetent; that a man who owned himself beaten was not worthy. And she had believed that she could not love a man whom she did not respect. She had seen women who loved weak men, and she had despised them for it.

She was afraid of herself. She often pretended that she was asleep when he came into the room.

Brockton set himself to face the future alone. He would ask neither sympathy nor trust of Edith; but he would do all he could to shield her from the poverty to which his inefficiency had bound her. He could not give her the pleasures they had so often planned, but loyalty, tenderness, and help he owed to her. He never spoke to her now of his work. He chatted or read to her. Sometimes, laughing at his own awkwardness, he struggled with the housework.

Edith resented his light-heartedness. Had success meant so little to him, she wondered, that he could willingly forego it? It annoyed her to see him sweep and dust. It was not a man’s work. Against her will she found herself thinking of him. She remembered how, in the old days, he had craved her encouragement and how gladly she had given it. Now, when she had none to give, she began to realize that he no longer needed it.

Brockton reached home one evening to find Edith lying on the sofa in the living-room alone. He heard the children’s voices in the kitchen where Alice was preparing her mother’s supper-tray. Betty ran back and forth from the dining-room, helping and hindering the washerwoman, who cooked for them.

To Edith, the day had seemed unbearably dreary, but when Brockton crossed the threshold a feeling of warmth and contentment stole over her.

‘Robert!’ she cried softly, ‘come here.’

She reached up impulsively and, drawing his face down to hers, kissed him. She had not meant to do it; something in his presence impelled her. She lay now with her eyes closed; and Brockton, thinking that she wanted to sleep, stole from the room.

She had shut her eyes to steady herself. She was dizzy with the self-revelation, which had come to her. She knew now that she loved Robert —not the gifted man she had once thought him; not the success she had hoped he would become; but this obscure Robert, the man who had failed. She loved him; she could not help it. As she acknowledged this, she felt that she had sunk from the heights of her superior standards down into the ruck of women whom she scorned. She was one of the myriads who go on loving without asking whether that which they love is worthy; who go on giving toil and patience and affection because it is their fate to give. She looked ahead into the years which she had told herself that she dreaded, and she knew that she would willingly wash dishes, scrub, and mend, and grow plain and faded, if only she might have Robert. She despised herself, but she was happy.

V

One bright, warm Sunday in May, she and Robert started with the children on an excursion to the country. It was Edith’s first outing, and a treat long promised to Betty and Alice as soon as their mother should be strong enough. They crossed the North River and landed on the New Jersey shore, nearly opposite Grant’s Tomb.

There, on a sunny hillside overlooking the water, they spread a shawl for Edith and set down their picnic-boxes. Spring, with its tender greenness, was all around them. The children ran off to play, while their father sat beside Edith, who lay with her eyes closed, smiling.

Brockton looked across the river and saw New York. It lay stretched out for miles beneath him, a varied, colorful, mighty panorama. He, knowing the bitterness of its struggles, smiled. It was the city which had beaten but could not vanquish him. He was no longer afraid to think of himself as an unknown speck upon its surging tide. He looked back wistfully upon his old ambitions, yet he could think of them without resentment; for he had come to question the ideals of this colossal city. It seemed to him that, often, the clanging dulled men’s ears, the dazzle dimmed their sight, and the heat of the combat shriveled up their souls; instead of being freemen, they were prisoners in their citadel of power. And before his visionary eyes there towered above the city, dwarfing its contests, transcending its aims, a wonderful kingdom in which, despite his own narrow cares and disappointments, he might live each day.

Edith looked up and his expression caught her gaze. In his face she saw the light of a new courage — a courage come through facing defeat. Watching it, Edith thrilled with pride, for she felt that he had done what was very far beyond her. How had he dared to go on, she wondered? What was the power which made it possible for him cheerfully to live from day to day without hope? She looked up into his face again and read the answer to her question.

In his look was mastery; not of the men and things about him, but of himself. As she gazed, a mist seemed to fade from before her eyes. She knew that all these months she had been groping toward the understanding which came rushing in upon her. For the first time in her life Edith was caught up in the radiance of a vision. She saw that the goal on which she had been taught to set her heart was not the only one in the great race; that, among all the conquests in the world, one of the rarest was the triumph over self. This, then, was Robert’s victory, this his greatness.

She sat up and touched her husband’s arm. ‘Robert,’ she cried, ‘you are splendid!’

And the man who laid down his life had found it.