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"We must remember that democracy isn't a complete thing all tied up in pretty ribbons . . . -Page 730.

it's strife."

about his novel; I shan't really believe them if you don't."

Walters seemed anxious that she should be satisfied as to all the details of publication. She expressed frank dissent when Welborn spoke of cuts that would be necessary for purposes of serialization. "It can be done, of course," she agreed reluctantly, when Welborn had mentioned passages which he thought might be compressed. "You see I do papa's typewriting and I know the story by heart. I can see that by dovetailing some of those earlier chapters the story would start more briskly. And it's important to break the instalments so the reader will have something to carry him over the month. I always hate serials myself; you lose the flow and movement of a thing.'

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"But there will be no such trouble with 'The Heart of Life'!" Welborn declared. "It marches like a mighty phalanx!"

Walters, lapsing into silence, left these matters for her to settle with Welborn. He roused himself presently to protest against illustrations, but on this point she sustained Welborn's plea that pictures were essential for the magazine but could be dispensed with in the book. She showed familiarity with the work of the illustrators Welborn suggested, and left the table to bring a late magazine containing some drawings by Brockton, a new man who had illustrated a series of articles on the steel industry. Walters conceded their excellence and it was agreed that Welborn should telegraph Fenton to engage him.

"I hope I may wire Mr. Fenton that we have agreed on terms and that he may begin laying plans for the publication? You see we have to be forehanded in planning numbers."

The terms Fenton had authorized were more generous than were usually conceded to a new writer, but Walters seemed little interested in this phase of the mat

ter.

"One good thing about your coming is that it keeps papa at home for a day. It's very hard to get him to take a holiday." Walters listened absently as Helen explained, in answer to a question in Welborn's eyes, that her father was busy every day in one of the great steel plants, and that his writing was done at night.

"Only two hours every evening! That's all I'll give him," she said. "It's remarkable how much he does in those hours after a hard day's work. And there are pages and pages in that manuscript that have been rewritten a dozen times.”

"You see," Walters roused himself to say, "I have a very stern critic here. It's not my standard but hers that keeps me up to the mark.”

"You must have other manuscripts; we want to see anything you have," said Welborn. "The public is going to be impatient for more of Frederic Walters's work."

Walters referred this to his daughter with a glance of uncertainty.

"Oh, there are other things that seem to me quite as good," she said. "Perhaps 'The Iron Hand' would interest Mr. Welborn."

Walters consented that "The Iron Hand" might be submitted, and upon this promise they rose from the table.

Suppose you go up to the study and I'll come along later. Don't smoke too much, papa!" she admonished as they left the room.

The room above, designated as a study, was a bedroom-one of three the cottage afforded. Walters took a chair behind a long oak table and drew out a box of cigars.

"I prefer a pipe myself, if you don't mind." The cigars were of good quality, and as the box was newly opened it was patent that they had been procured for Welborn's benefit. He seated himself in a low wicker chair which he assumed to be the special property of the daughter, and Walters, his pipe alight, resumed the discussion of books and writers. Welborn had as yet only touched upon the changes

"If you think this all right, Helen, we'll consider it settled," he remarked indifferently. "Yes, I'm sure we're in good hands," he and Fenton had agreed would improve said the girl.

She brought a simple fruit pudding and lighted the lamp of a patent coffee-machine.

"The Heart of Life," thinking this was better done in the daughter's absence. Writers, he had found, were sensitive in such matters and disposed to resent criti

cisms that involved additional labor. As he plunged into the subject he found Walters watching him intently. There was an odd look in his eyes-his lips quivered into a queer smile; but he merely nodded. "The chapters you refer to are- -?" Welborn drew a memorandum from his pocket and explained the feeling he shared with Fenton that there were a few chapters in "The Heart of Life" that could be improved.

"I think you are right," Walters conceded, fingering his pipe nervously. "I think I get your idea—that the grip relaxes in those places. Very likely you are right. I shan't quarrel with you. I have other attempts at the same chapters that I can substitute."

In spite of this amiable acceptance of his suggestions, Welborn was aware of a distinct disappointment in Walters's manner of agreeing to the changes. He settled back in his big chair and a look of age and weakness crept into his face. He ignored Welborn's eager denial that he or his chief were disposed to insist upon alterations; it was all a matter of Walters's own feeling; they merely thought that he should have the benefit of their views.

"Oh, I see it; I saw it all along, I think!" Walters protested tamely. "I'll attend to it; I want it to be as good as it can be made. You see," he said, sitting upright again, "I believe myself capable of viewing the book with entire detachment; I wanted that kind of thing to be done, and I'm not considering myself really I am not," he declared earnestly. "I felt that the iron in these hills, the sweat on the faces of thousands of men should be got into a book. It was in the effort to get the secret of this phase of life that I have lived here. I wanted to find out what men think whose backs are bent under heavy toil; I've spent many years trying to learn just that and I think possibly I know. I want it to be in that book. There are other attempts at the same thing; some earlier manuscripts. I want you to read 'The Iron Hand' Helen mentioned-I'll be curious to know what you think of that. But my other stuff I'm going to destroy-it's bloodless, colorless. There's none of the terrible passion of it all in those earlier things." He was more roused now than at any

previous moment of the three hours Welborn had spent with him. He rested his arms on the table, clutching his pipe. Welborn's thoughts turned again to Harlow, and he was debating whether he should wire Fenton to join him on the morrow, to settle the question, when Walters, lowering his voice, made any appeal to Fenton unnecessary.

"I'm a sick man with little more time left me. I saw a doctor a month ago who warned me; my heart's gone bad. I may drop off at any time. There are one or two things I want to say to you—I'll be brief about it. My name is Harlow. Fenton knew me well in the old days; he was my best friend!"

The disclosure was so abrupt that Welborn was unable to frame any comment. He wished to urge Harlow to return with him to New York to see Fenton, to consult physicians-to seek a change of air and scene; but, with a sigh, Harlow continued:

"You will pardon me if I ask you a question I've been waiting to ask some one from-from the big world outside. It's about Helen. She knows no other life than this-" he indicated the town with a sweep of the arm. "She has had just such schooling as is open to any laborer's daughter. Her friends and acquaintances are limited to her schoolmates-our neighbors' sons and daughters. You will pardon me if-if I ask you just how she impresses you? I will put my question concretely can you imagine her adjusting herself to other conditions, to the higher social levels, we will say?"

The question was dismayingly direct and Welborn hesitated; but Harlow's eyes were upon him with an intentness that brooked no evasion.

"She is very beautiful," he replied slowly; "and she bears all the marks of a cultivated woman. She has charm and distinction-she is wonderful!"

He hated himself for not finding better phrases with which to satisfy the parental pride, but Harlow continued, unheeding:

"Fenton and one or two others of our little group will look after Helen; I have no fears as to that. What bothers me— the thing I shrink from speculating about

is the effect on her of the change. It's going to mean a lot to her. I can't see

through to the end of it. There's money, quite enough to take care of her. Tom Moreton, in Boston, another of my classmates, has had charge of my affairs ever since I went into exile. I couldn't stand seeing Fenton; but here's a letter I've written him." He took a long envelope from the table and handed it to Welborn. "Neither he nor Helen is to know, you understand-not till—”

He waited for Welborn to thrust the

packet into his pocket and continued, still bending across the table and clenching his cold pipe.

"I wanted my daughter to know life on this side of the barricade. My own lacks prompted that feeling. At thirty I felt acutely that I was a failure-a splendid sort of failure, I dare say they thought me; and then it flashed upon me that life-the heart and soul of it-I couldn't know, from the very nature of my upbringing and training. And so for twenty years I have lived in places like this, doing as nearly as I could a man's work-hard physical labor. Helen knows nothing of me that is not in her own memory. She used to ask questions; she is far too keen not to have surmised that I have known other ways of living. But for years she has seen me go daily to labor when the whistles blew. Strange to say, I developed a certain knack and skill that won me promotions; I was a foreman in the rail-mill you see off yonder. I might have gone higher, but I wouldn't have it-it was the taste of labor I wanted. I turned in my keys to the superintendent yesterday and I'm done with it all. But, Welborn, it has been sweet, a wonderfully broadening and inspiring experience! I have been enormously happy, except that I have troubled about Helen. And of course it's a grave question, now that it's all over, whether it's been fair to her. And yet she's amazing, astonishing in what she's got out of it. She has a wonderful mind -you can see she has the sense of things she has never seen. Her penetration is greater than mine; she has been a revelation to me in that. She knows all that I know-vastly more! My experiments with her have worked out exactly as I expected they would, or, that's the way it strikes me. She isn't handicapped by the memory of a different order of things

as I have been; she has lived the life, eaten the bread, worn the garb of a daughter of labor. Later she will see the other side a reversal of my own experience, you know. If I had begun with what she has I might have gone far. As it is"

He shrugged his shoulders and turned his eyes upon the wall to avoid inviting any response from Welborn.

"As it is," said the young man gently, "The Heart of Life' marks a new era in our literature; it plants the banner on a height nobody now in sight can reach."

"Now that I've got to leave her," Harlow resumed, earnestly, "I see clearly that it was a great risk; that I had no right to drag her with me through my years of self-discipline and vicissitude. It wasn't fair; and yet I was honest about it-I wanted her to know the world's rough hand. It has been in my mind for years that if I was ever able to do some really big thing I would slip back into my old life and see her established. But it's too late now; I haven't the strength nor inclination to break with things here. I'm really a part of all this; my early years have faded out-all but the friendshipsFenton, Moreton, one or two others. I must leave her to Fenton: I knew his wife as a girl; she and my wife were brought up together, and she will understand Helen, and what her mother would have wanted for her."

Helen came up-stairs humming softly, paused at the door, and stole quietly into the rocker which Welborn placed for her by the table.

"I'll be selfish and take the only comfortable chair in the room," she laughed. "I can always manage papa better from my throne, as he likes to call it."

She had brought some sewing with which she busied herself. Her ignorance of her father's doom, the change imminent in her own affairs, Harlow himself, emerging from the depths that had long engulfed him, bearing a pearl in his hand, only to find death awaiting him— combined to the making of a situation so poignant in every aspect that Welborn wished to escape from it. But Helen's appearance had exerted a tonic influence upon Harlow.

He reached across the

table and caught her fingers, laughingly chiding her for her long delay. No further reference was made to the manuscript; he asked her, as though this were a part of a routine, established for their hours of leisure, about their neighbors and the town's affairs. A basket-ball match was impending between a team of Wycherly high-school girls and a rival in a near-by town. Helen had been acting as coach for Wycherly.

"Helen, you know, was a star athlete in her school-days. You can't imagine how strong she is. She could pitch us both out of the window, Welborn. But for the sad limitations of sex she would have been a great ball-player. The only serious trouble I ever had with her was in getting her to give up playing baseball with the boys."

He was prepared to dwell at length upon her prowess, in a vein of mockery that only veiled his pride, but she quickly turned the talk into other channels. The great lord of the mills had given money for a new recreation building, and Harlow, it seemed, was one of the committee to plan it. Helen talked spiritedly of this; of the theatre in which she hoped they would be able to give plays without outside aid, and of a choral society over which she was particularly enthusiastic.

"Papa and I think the people in a town like this capable of doing almost anything in the way of self-expression if only they are encouraged to take the initiative. It's in them, you know." And then, as though fearing she were making too much of this, she laughingly added: "You know there's a piano in every house on this street!"

Welborn realized that she had, indeed, understanding and penetration, but he was aware also that she was acquainted with the thought, hostile and friendly, of the world beyond the iron circle that hemmed her in. His eyes had swept the shelves that lined the room; they were crammed with books of the twentieth century, many of them recognizable as the comment and opinion of the ablest critics of the social structure.

Welborn mentioned socialism, and as Harlow was dreaming again she answered for her father that he had carefully

avoided suggesting any remedy for the evils pictured in "The Heart of Life."

"What papa has tried to do is to tell the truth; he has no ambition to become a propagandist." And then, with humor kindling in her eyes: "You ought to hear him abuse the purpose novel! All he wants is to make the cinders burn his pages; he thinks that if people don't see and understand it's not his affair to drop a hot one down their backs to make them sit up!"

"There is one problem in which all other problems merge," observed Harlow with a sad wistfulness. "It's the small matter of making happiness possible for the greatest number. We shall never realize that until the barriers between the classes are beaten down. I'm not a Joshua to trumpet under the walls; my aim is merely to show what's on the other side. I was disposed to make a concession to popular taste in putting what you call heart interest into the story, but Helen wouldn't have it! no sentiment; no moonlit love scenes! She said all the characters must walk through the fiery furnace!"

"Don't believe him, Mr. Welborn! Papa never flinches when it comes to strict realism. Whenever I suggested cheering up the picture he became very cross and scolded me horribly!”

It was four o'clock when Welborn rose to go, explaining that he was running into Pittsburgh to spend the night with friends, but that he would return the next afternoon.

"I'll attend to those changes we were speaking of," said Harlow as they parted. "Helen will help me and we can probably give you most of the manuscript to carry back with you."

Helen accompanied Welborn to the door and gave him her hand on the threshold, smiling happily. He turned away from her thanks and walked the few feet of brick walk that led to the gate bewildered and awed by the day's occurrences. As he looked back she stood framed in the doorway, the embodiment of youth and strength, with the September sunlight falling goldenly upon her fair head. His heart stirred strangely not only for what she was-her pictorial values, her wit, her understanding of things, to which Harlow

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