re-entered the hotel (the centre of obsequious servants) did she become
again the wife of Marshall Haney, and Mrs. Moss, noting the eager
attention of the waiters, was amazed and delighted at the look of calm
command which came over the girl's face.

"Art is fine and sweet as a side issue," said Julia to her husband, as
they were going in, "but money makes the porters jump."

Bertha, composed and serious, seated her guests at a table which had
been reserved for her near a window and charmingly decorated with
flowers. She put Moss at her left hand and Humiston at her right, and as
the Eastern man settled into place, he said: "Really, now, this isn't so
bad." His experienced eye had noted the swift flocking of the waiters,
and with cynical amusement he commented upon it. "These people must
_smell_ of money!" and in his heart acknowledged that he and Moss were
not so very different from the servitors, after all. "They're out for
tens, we're after thousands; that's the main point of difference."

Bertha, once the cutlets were served, was able to give attention to the
talk--Humiston's talk (he was celebrated as a monologist), for he had
resumed the discussion into which he and Moss had fallen. "I don't
believe in helping people to study art. I don't believe in charity. This
interfering with the laws of the universe that kill off the crippled and
the weakly is pure sentimentalism that will fill the world with
deformed, diseased, and incapable persons."

"You're a vile reactionary!" cried Moss.

"I am not--I'm for the future. I want to see the world full of beauty."

"Physical beauty?"

"Yes, physical beauty. I want to see vice and crime and crooked limbs
and low brows die out--not perpetuated. I believe in educating the
people to the lovely in line and color."

As he pursued this line of inexorable argument Bertha looked at him in
wonder. Did he mean what he said? His burning eyes seemed sincere--and
yet he did not fail to accept a second helping of the mushrooms. There
was power in the man. He pushed the walls of her intellectual world very
wide apart. He came from a strange, chaotic region--from a land where
ordinary modes and motives seemed lost or perverted. He took a delight
in shocking them all. Morality was a convention--a hypocritic agreement
on the part of the few to reserve freedom to themselves at the expense
of the many. "Art is impossible to little people, to those who starve
the big side of their nature