rested on the central
figures of the group, and gradually the others disappeared from his
view and his mind. After all, neither Mrs. Newell's schemes nor his own
share in them could ever unsanctify Hermione's marriage. It was one
more testimony to life's indefatigable renewals, to nature's secret of
drawing fragrance from corruption; and as his eyes turned from the
girl's illuminated presence to the resigned and stoical figure sunk in
the adjoining chair, it occured to him that he had perhaps worked
better than he knew in placing them, if only for a moment, side by side.

IN TRUST

IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I
used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his
plans.

They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the
ultimate aesthetic redemption of the whole human race; and
provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions
of our fellow country-men who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now
live and die in surroundings of unperceived and unmitigated ugliness.

"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost
inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away--I want to make 'em
hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he
would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby
black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the
fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.

"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested
with youthful brutality; and Paul, pulling himself up, cast a surprised
glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in
which we sat.

His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth
Street, where his grandfather Ambrose had lived in a setting of black
walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his
guests, as they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson
carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the Niagara--the
Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty
years ago by my old friend Ezra Stimpson--" by token of which he passed
for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and a poem had once
been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty "On a picture in
the possession of Jonathan Ambrose, Esqre."

Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal
liver and hard-headed