Her tongue felt like a leaden weight in her mouth. "Georgie is better." "Yes.' "She is all but well." "Yes." "The wedding is in June." This time she could not speak at all; she could not even see him. Her hands went out to him in a mute appeal that he should understand what she would say her love, her suffering, her gratitude, her homage. And he did not move. "There is nothing to thank me for, Marcia," he said. "I have not done what you asked." "Not done ?" Her hands dropped. "No. You had no right to ask it. I have set my judgment against yours, and the event has, as it happens, proved me right; I am here to tell you about it. But if it had proved me wrong, I should in the same circumstances do the same thing to-morrow. I want you to understand that quite clearly." There was no anger, no triumph in his voice, only that uninflected steadiness with which he always spoke. were none of your business-my work "What Georgie wanted was a husband. For a time, it is true, she was under the impression that only one particular husband could satisfy her, but that delusion has yielded easily enough to the treatment of placing before her several other possible husbands. Last night, at the dance I gave in the hope of clinching the matter, my diagnosis was proved correct. Georgie is engaged to young Dallington, a senior student of mine, with very few brains and a good deal of money. But if it hadn't been Dallington it would certainly quite soon "I don't understand anything," she have been somebody else. protested. "I will tell you. From the first, Marcia, I saw that your scheme was idiotic, unworkable. All it could have done was to make three people unhappy instead of one. But I also saw that it was no use telling you so. For what would have happened then? Deadlock I refusing to marry Georgie; you refusing to marry me. And so ad infinitum. Isn't that so?" "I suppose so," she answered, uncertainly. "Suppose?" His steady eyes demanded more of her; with an effort she gave it. "Yes, it is true," she amended. "Thank you. I was forced, therefore, to take another way; I was justified in taking another way-the way not of argument, but of proof. For you had attempted to control two matters that "There remains, Marcia, the question of my love for you. You may reject that love for any reason that seems to you sufficient; you have rejected it. But I am at liberty to go on loving you as long as I live, to remain unmarried for love of you, if I choose. That is no business of yours, and I do not admit your right of interference. You claimed that right, and so there is nothing more to be said. Only, if some day you should see that you were wrong-that your terms were too high-you would, I know, revise them; for you have a sense of justice. In that case, Marcia, I trust you to give me a sign. I am yours, you know, for always-yours or no one's. Goodby." Before that-before the threat of his going-she found herself somehow on her feet. For she loved him; she knew now for the first time what love was. It was the tremor, the longing, the glow that she had felt before; but it was also this strange rapture, this proud confidence based on a new thing on the bedrock of respect. . . . (She had not been able to do what she liked with him! She had met her match!) And instantly on the thought came panic lest she should, after all, lose what was now doubly dear. "Nigel!"-he stopped and turned, but he made no responsive movement as she came toward him-"I revise my terms. Immediately. Thankfully. Abjectly. Will-will that do-Petruchio?" His eyes searched hers swiftly. The man she had never seen before, the man adored by Colin and his fellows, the man who was wax in things that did not matter, adamant in things that did, vanished in a flash, and the lover took his place. His hands were on her shoulders; he was looking down at her with wonder, with something like awe. "Marcia!—you mean it? Surrender? -without bitterness, without humiliation? And without delay?" She nodded. "But you mustn't get a swelled head, you know," she warned him, rallying instantly. "If I surrender, it's not to you. Anybody may surrender honorably, mayn't he, to-the truth?" More than ever he looked at her as at something unbelievable, immeasurably precious. "The greatness of you," he said below his breath, "the greatness..." Then, with one of those swift descents that flesh is heir to, his eyes troubled. "Then you didn't mean the other, Marcia?-about-Petruchio? You know it's not a case of mastery?or, at least-only over myself?" She glinted mischief, behind her tears, and thrust forth a declamatory arm. "I am the master of my fate,"" she annotated; "I am the captain of my—”” He pinioned the arm. "Yes, but you do know you've nothing of that sort to fear from me?" he insisted. "Tell me. Say it." "Oh yes yes!" she assured him. "I know. You're modern-modern to your adorable finger tips that I first fell in love with. You'll refuse ever to be top dog in the good old-fashioned way— however desirable it might be for me. She sighed elaborately. "Well, I must content myself, I suppose, with the knowledge that I'm not top dog, eithernever was, where you are concernednever shall be. And that, after all, is an almost insane pleasure in itself, isn't it? -never, never to have to be top dog any more! It's like " She fell into smiling thought. "Yes?" She laughed. "Oh, I don't knownothing much! Well, then, it's likeI was thinking of one winter at school; one hockey season. As it happened, we made a very good start-simply couldn't lose anything for several weeks. So then, of course, we made up our minds that we wouldn't lose anything-not a single match. And it was terrible— nerve shattering; the strain got worse every week. We did manage to worry through the season undefeated, but it wasn't really worth it. The next year we were all secretly delighted when we lost the very first match." "Yes; but Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Silvain?" Granny Silvain stood in the doorway, examining them shrewdly. It was too late to profess that Marcia's cheek had not been laid against Nigel's waistcoat, so she left it there. "Well, I suppose I congratulate you both?" inferred Granny Silvain. "But, really-talking hockey already! You young people nowadays get through your affairs so expeditiously." "Some Marcia made a wry face. affairs, granny, are so painful that one's glad to get through them." "What do you mean, child?" Marcia pointed a finger upward in the direction of Nigel's head. "He denies it, granny. He says he never did and never will. But all the same, I have been, and you'll be pleased." UNPUBLISHED CHAPTERS FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN PART II FROM time to time during the last half of his life Mark Twain wrote or dictated chapters of recollections and comment which he classed under the general head of Autobiography. The early attempts were erratic, and not long continued, but in January, 1906, in conjunction with his biographer, he began a series of dictations. which continued steadily through that year, and intermittently during the years that followed, to the end of his life. Selections from these dictations which Mark Twain thought might appear with propriety during his lifetime were printed during 1906 and 1907. The greater portion of the manuscript, however, remains unpublished, and contains much of his choicest work. The Autobiography was not written as a continuous narrative. The author wrote or dictated whatever happened to be in his mind at the moment, regardless of chronology or sequence. About forty years ago I was a reporter on the Morning Call of San Francisco. I was more than thatI was the reporter. There was no other. There was enough work for one, and a little over, but not enough for two -according to Mr. Barnes's idea, and he was the proprietor, and therefore better situated to know about it than other people. By nine in the morning I had to be at police court for an hour and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before. They were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a change. Each day's evidence was substantially a duplicate of the evidence of the day before, therefore the daily performance was killingly monotonous and wearisome. So far as I could see, there was only one man connected with it who found anything like a compensating interest in it, and that was the court interpreter. He was an English man who was glibly familiar with fiftysix Chinese dialects. He had to change from one to another of them every ten minutes, and this exercise was so energizing that it kept him always awake— which was not the case with the reporters. Next, we visited the higher courts, and made notes of the decisions which had been rendered the day before. All the courts came under the head of "regulars." They were sources of reportorial information which never failed. During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required column-and if there were no fires to report, we started some. At night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights in the week, three hundred and sixty-five nights in the year. We remained in each of those places five minutes, got the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a text we "wrote up" those plays and operas, as the phrase goes, torturing our souls every night, from the beginning of the year to the end of it, in the effort to find something to say about those performances which we had not said a couple of hundred times before. There has never been a time, from that day to this (forty years), that I have been able to look at even the outside of a theater without a spasm of the dry gripes, as "Uncle Remus" calls it-and as for the inside, I know next to nothing about that, for in all this time I have seldom had a sight of it, nor ever had a desire in that regard which couldn't have been overcome by argument. After having been hard at work from nine or ten in the morning until eleven at night scraping material together, I took the pen and spread this much out in words and phrases, and made it cover as much acreage as I could. It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery-and almost destitute of interest. It was an awful slavery for a lazy man, and I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility. Finally there was an event. One Sunday afternoon I saw some hoodlums chasing and stoning a Chinaman who was heavily laden with the weekly wash of his Christian customers, and I noticed that a policeman was observing this performance with an amused interestnothing more. He did not interfere. I wrote up the incident with considerable warmth and holy indignation. Usually I didn't want to read, in the morning, what I had written the night before; it had come from a torpid heart. But this item had come from a live one. There was fire in it, and I believed it was literature and so I sought for it in the paper next morning with eagerness. It wasn't there. It wasn't there the next morning, nor the next. I went up to the composing room and found it tucked away among condemned matter on the standing galley. I asked about it. The foreman said Mr. Barnes had found it in a galley proof and ordered its extinction. And Mr. Barnes furnished his reasons—either to me or to the foreman, I don't remember which; but they were commercially sound. He said that the Call was the paper of the poor; it was the only cheap paper. It gathered its livelihood from the poor, and must respect their prejudices, or perish. The Irish were the poor. They were the stay and support of the Morning Call; without them the Morning Call could not survive a month-and they hated the Chinamen. Such an assault as I had attempted could rouse the whole Irish hive, and seriously damage the paper. The Call could not afford to publish articles criticizing the hoodlums for stoning Chinamen. I was lofty in those days. I have survived it. I was unwise, then. I am upto-date now. Day before yesterday's New York Sun has a paragraph or two from its London correspondent which enables me to locate myself. The correspondent mentions a few of our American events of the past twelvemonth, such as the limitless rottenness of our great Insurance Companies, where theft has been carried on by our most distinguished commercial men as a profession; the exposures of conscienceless graftcolossal graft-in great municipalities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, and other large cities; the recent exposure of millionfold graft in the great Pennsylvania railway system-with minor uncoverings of commercial swindles from one end of the United States to the other; and finally to-day's lurid exposure, by Upton Sinclair of the most titanic and death-dealing swindle of them all, the Beef Trust, an exposure which has moved the President to demand of a reluctant Congress a law which shall protect America and Europe from falling, in a mass, into the hands of the doctor and the undertaker. According to that correspondent, Europe is beginning to wonder if there is really an honest male human creature left in the United States. A year ago, 1 was satisfied that there was no such person existing upon American soil-except myself. That exception has since been |