The Price She Paid

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David Graham Phillips
THE PRICE SHE PAID

I

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one--the end of
a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and
never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances
and neighbors, with his wife and son and
daughter, he passed as a generous, warm-hearted,
good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything
to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever
thought or done a single thing except for his own
comfort. Like all intensely selfish people who are wise,
he was cheerful and amiable, because that was the
way to be healthy and happy and to have those around
one agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished
them to do. He told people, not the truth, not the
unpleasant thing that might help them, but what they
wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort.
His wife and his daughter dressed fashionably and
went about and entertained in the fashionable,
expensive way only because that was the sort of life
that gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he
wanted; he got it every day and every hour of a life
into which no rain ever fell; he died, honored, respected,
beloved, and lamented.

The clever trick he had played upon his fellow
beings came very near to discovery a few days after
his death. His widow and her son and daughter-in-law
and daughter were in the living-room of the charming
house at Hanging Rock, near New York, alternating
between sorrowings over the dead man and plannings
for the future. Said the widow:

``If Henry had only thought what would become of
us if he were taken away!''

``If he had saved even a small part of what he made
every year from the time he was twenty-six--for he
always made a big income,'' said his son, Frank.

``But he was so generous, so soft-hearted!''
exclaimed the widow. ``He could deny us nothing.''

``He couldn't bear seeing us with the slightest wish
ungratified,'' said Frank.

``He was the best father that ever lived!'' cried the
daughter, Mildred.

And Mrs. Gower the elder and Mrs. Gower the
younger wept; and Mildred turned away to hide the
emotion distorting her face; and Frank stared gloomily
at the carpet and sighed. The hideous secret of the
life of duplicity was safe, safe forever.

In fact, Henry Gower had often thought of the fate
of his family if he should die. In the first year of
his married life, at a time when passion for a beautiful
bride was almost sweeping him into generous thought,
he had listened for upward of an hour to the eloquence
of a life insurance agent. Then the agent, misled by
Gower's effusively generous and unselfish expressions,
had taken a false tack. He had descanted upon the
supreme satisfaction that would be felt by a dying man
as he reflected how his young widow would be left in
affluence. He made a vivid picture; Gower saw--
saw his bride happier after his death than she had been
during his life, and attracting a swarm of admirers
by her beauty, well set off in becoming black, and by
her independent income. The generous impulse then
and there shriveled to its weak and shallow roots. With
tears in his kind, clear eyes he thanked the agent and
said:

``You have convinced me. You need say no more.
I'll send for you in a few days.''

The agent never got into his presence again.
Gower lived up to his income, secure in the knowledge
that his ability as a lawyer made him certain of plenty
of money as long as he should live. But it would show
an utter lack of comprehension of his peculiar species
of character to imagine that he let himself into the
secret of his own icy-heartedness by ceasing to think
of the problem of his wife and two children without
him to take care of them. On the contrary, he thought
of it every day, and planned what he would do about
it--to-morrow. And for his delay he had excellent
convincing excuses. Did he not take care of his
naturally robust health? Would he not certainly out-
live his wife, who was always doctoring more or less?
Frank would be able to take care of himself; anyhow,
it was not well to bring a boy up to expectations,
because every man should be self-supporting and self-
reliant. As for Mildred, why, with her beauty and her
cleverness she could not but make a brilliant marriage.
Really, there was for him no problem of an orphaned
family's future; there was no reason why he should deny
himself any comfort or luxury, or his vanity any of
the titillations that come from social display.

That one of his calculations which was the most vital
and seemed the surest proved to be worthless. It is
not the weaklings who die, after infancy and youth,
but the strong, healthy men and women. The weaklings
have to look out for themselves, receive ample
warning in the disastrous obvious effects of the
slightest imprudence. The robust, even the wariest of them,
even the Henry Gowers, overestimate and overtax their
strength. Gower's downfall was champagne. He
could not resist a bottle of it for dinner every night.
As so often happens, the collapse of the kidneys came
without any warning that a man of powerful constitution
would deem worthy of notice. By the time the
doctor began to suspect the gravity of his trouble he
was too far gone.

Frank, candidly greedy and selfish--``Such a
contrast to his father!'' everyone said--was married to
the prettiest girl in Hanging Rock and had a
satisfactory law practice in New York. His income was
about fifteen thousand a year. But his wife had tastes
as extravagant as his own; and Hanging Rock is one
of those suburbs of New York where gather well-to-do
middle-class people to live luxuriously and to delude
each other and themselves with the notion that they are
fashionable, rich New Yorkers who prefer to live in
the country ``like the English.'' Thus, Henry
Gower's widow and daughter could count on little help
from Frank--and they knew it.

``You and Milly will have to move to some less
expensive place than Hanging Rock,'' said Frank--it
was the living-room conference a few days after the
funeral.

Mildred flushed and her eyes flashed. She opened
her lips to speak--closed them again with the angry
retort unuttered. After all, Frank was her mother's
and her sole dependence. They could hope for little
from him, but nothing must be said that would give
him and his mean, selfish wife a chance to break with
them and refuse to do anything whatever.

``And Mildred must get married,'' said Natalie.
In Hanging Rock most of the girls and many of the
boys had given names taken from Burke's Peerage, the
Almanac de Gotha, and fashionable novels.

Again Mildred flushed; but her eyes did not flash,
neither did she open her lips to speak. The little
remark of her sister-in-law, apparently so harmless and
sensible, was in fact a poisoned arrow. For Mildred
was twenty-three, had been ``out'' five years, and was
not even in the way to become engaged. She and everyone
had assumed from her lovely babyhood that she
would marry splendidly, would marry wealth and social
position. How could it be otherwise? Had she not
beauty? Had she not family and position? Had she
not style and cleverness? Yet--five years out and
not a ``serious'' proposal. An impudent poor fellow
with no prospects had asked her. An impudent rich
man from fashionable New York had hung after her
--and had presently abandoned whatever dark projects
he may have been concealing and had married in
his own set, ``as they always do, the miserable snobs,''
raved Mrs. Gower, who had been building high upon
those lavish outpourings of candy, flowers, and automobile
rides. Mildred, however, had accepted the defection
more philosophically. She had had enough vanity
to like the attentions of the rich and fashionable
New Yorker, enough good sense to suspect, perhaps
not definitely, what those attentions meant, but
certainly what they did not mean. Also, in the back of
her head had been an intention to refuse Stanley Baird,
if by chance he should ask her. Was there any
substance to this intention, sprung from her disliking
the conceited, self-assured snob as much as she liked
his wealth and station? Perhaps not. Who can
say? At any rate, may we not claim credit for our
good intentions--so long as, even through lack of
opportunity, we have not stultified them?

With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred's
failure to catch a husband seemed to be somehow her
own fault. Other girls, less endowed than she, were
marrying, were marrying fairly well. Why, then, was
Mildred lagging in the market?

There may have been other reasons, reasons of
accident--for, in the higher class matrimonial market,
few are called and fewer chosen. There was one reason
not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a girl
so superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting
husband. As has been hinted, Hanging Rock was one
of those upper-middle-class colonies where splurge and
social ambition dominate the community life. In such
colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath
such a girl as Mildred, and those who had the
looks, the manners, the intelligence, and the prospects
to justify them in looking higher socially--in looking
among the very rich and really fashionable. In the
Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the
snobbishness of Fifth Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse
Square, with the added torment of the snobbishness
being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol,
there is a coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for
money, for luxury, for display, that equals aristocratic
societies at their worst. No one can live for a winter,
much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some
impossible combination of chances could there have been
at Hanging Rock a young man who would have
appreciated Mildred and have had the courage of
his appreciation. This combination did not happen.
In Mildred's generation and set there were only the
two classes of men noted above. The men of the one
of them which could not have attracted her accepted
their fate of mating with second-choice females to whom
they were themselves second choice. The men of the
other class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions,
hung about the rich people in New York, Newport,
and on Long Island, and would as soon have thought
of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of
exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent
pieces. Having attractions acceptable in the best
markets, they took them there. Hanging Rock
denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we
human creatures being never so effective as when
assailing in others the vice or weakness we know from
lifelong, intimate, internal association with it. But
secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that
suburban society were approved, were envied. And
Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever
it got the chance.

In her five years of social life Mildred had gone
only with the various classes of fashionable people,
had therefore known only the men who are full of the
poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred
in an environment as impregnated with that poison
as the air of a kitchen-garden with onions. She knew
nothing else. The secret intention to refuse Stanley
Baird, should he propose, was therefore the more
astonishing--and the more significant. From time to
time in any given environment you will find some
isolated person, some personality, with a trait wholly
foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice
and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing
for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a
royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery
for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a
prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but
still longingly--of an existence where love and ideas
shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training,
in spite of the teaching and example of all about her
from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the
world, Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained
something of these dream flowers sown in the soil of
her naturally good mind by some book or play or perhaps
by some casually read and soon forgotten article
in magazine or newspaper. We have the habit of
thinking only weeds produce seeds that penetrate and
prosper everywhere and anywhere. The truth is that
fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of
rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and
fecundity. Pull away at the weeds in your garden
for a while, and see if this is not so. Though you may
plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if you
but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have
been planting and cultivating.

Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a
reproach upon her that she had not yet succeeded in
making the marriage everyone, including herself, predicted
for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was
the most savage indictment possible of the marriageable
and marrying men who had met her--of their
stupidity, of their short-sighted and mean-souled
calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to
take what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted,
instead of what their snobbishness ordered. And if
Stanley Baird, the nearest to a flesh-and-blood man of
any who had known her, had not been so profoundly
afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid
of them; so, it is idle to speculate about him.

What did men see when they looked at Mildred
Gower? Usually, when men look at a woman, they
have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense of
something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward,
through some whim or some thrust from chance
they may see in her, or fancy they see in her, the thing
feminine that their souls--it is always ``soul''--most
yearns after. But just at first glance, so colorless or
conventionally colored is the usual human being, the
average woman--indeed every woman but she who is
exceptional--creates upon man the mere impression of
pleasant or unpleasant petticoats. In the exceptional
woman something obtrudes. She has astonishing hair,
or extraordinary eyes, or a mouth that seems to draw a
man like a magnet; or it is the allure of a peculiar
smile or of a figure whose sinuosities as she moves
seem to cause a corresponding wave-disturbance in
masculine nerves. Further, the possession of one of
these signal charms usually causes all her charms to
have more than ordinary potency. The sight of the
man is so bewitched by the one potent charm that he
sees the whole woman under a spell.

Mildred Gower, of the medium height and of a
slender and well-formed figure, had a face of the kind
that is called lovely; and her smile, sweet, dreamy,
revealing white and even teeth, gave her loveliness
delicate animation. She had an abundance of hair, neither
light nor dark; she had a fine clear skin. Her eyes,
gray and rather serious and well set under long straight
brows, gave her a look of honesty and intelligence.
But the charm that won men, her charm of charms,
was her mouth--mobile, slightly pouted, not too narrow,
of a wonderful, vividly healthy and vital red. She
had beauty, she had intelligence. But it was impossible
for a man to think of either, once his glance had
been caught by those expressive, inviting lips of hers,
so young, so fresh, with their ever-changing, ever-
fascinating line expressing in a thousand ways the
passion and poetry of the kiss.

Of all the men who had admired her and had edged
away because they feared she would bewitch them into
forgetting what the world calls ``good common sense''
--of all those men only one had suspected the real
reason for her physical power over men. All but Stanley
Baird had thought themselves attracted because she
was so pretty or so stylish or so clever and amusing to
talk with. Baird had lived intelligently enough to
learn that feminine charm is never general, is always
specific. He knew it was Mildred Gower's lips that
haunted, that frightened ambitious men away, that
sent men who knew they hadn't a ghost of a chance
with her discontentedly back to the second-choice
women who alone were available for them. Fortunately
for Mildred, Stanley Baird, too wise to flatter
a woman discriminatingly, did not tell her the secret
of her fascination. If he had told her, she would no
doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would
inevitably have lost it.

To go on with that important conference in the
sitting-room in the handsome, roomy house of the Gowers
at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower eagerly seized upon his
wife's subtly nasty remark. ``I don't see why in
thunder you haven't married, Milly,'' said he. ``You've
had every chance, these last four or five years.''

``And it'll be harder now,'' moaned her mother.
``For it looks as though we were going to be wretchedly
poor. And poverty is so repulsive.''

``Do you think,'' said Mildred, ``that giving me the
idea that I must marry right away will make it easier
for me to marry? Everyone who knows us knows our
circumstances.'' She looked significantly at Frank's
wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock
the woeful plight of her dead father-in-law's family.
The young Mrs. Gower blushed and glanced away.
``And,'' Mildred went on, ``everyone is saying that I
must marry at once--that there's nothing else for me
to do.'' She smiled bitterly. ``When I go into the
street again I shall see nothing but flying men. And
no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon
and a witness with him.''

``How can you be so frivolous?'' reproached her
mother.

Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her
mother, who had long since been made hopelessly dull
by the suffocating life she led and by pain from her
feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except
when she had them soaking in cold water. Mrs. Gower
had been born with ordinary feet, neither ugly nor
pretty and entirely fit for the uses for which nature
intended feet. She had spoiled them by wearing shoes
to make them look smaller and slimmer than they were.
In steady weather she was plaintive; in changeable
weather she varied between irritable and violent.

Said Mildred to her brother: ``How much--JUST how much
is there?''

``I can't say exactly,'' replied her brother, who had
not yet solved to his satisfaction the moral problem of
how much of the estate he ought to allow his mother
and sister and how much he ought to claim for himself
--in such a way that the claim could not be disputed.

Mildred looked fixedly at him. He showed his uneasiness
not by glancing away, but by the appearance of
a certain hard defiance in his eyes. Said she:

``What is the very most we can hope for?''

A silence. Her mother broke it. ``Mildred, how
CAN you talk of those things--already?''

``I don't know,'' replied Mildred. ``Perhaps
because it's got to be done.''

This seemed to them all--and to herself--a lame
excuse for such apparent hardness of heart. Her
father had always been SENDER-HEARTED--HAD NEVER
SPOKEN OF MONEY, OR ENCOURAGED HIS FAMILY IN SPEAKING OF IT.

A LONG AND PAINFUL SILENCE. THEN, THE WIDOW
ABRUPTLY:

``YOU'RE SURE, Frank, there's NO insurance?''

``Father always said that you disliked the idea,''
replied her son; ``that you thought insurance looked
like your calculating on his death.''

Under her husband's adroit prompting Mrs. Gower
had discovered such a view of insurance in her brain.
She now recalled expressing it--and regretted. But
she was silenced. She tried to take her mind of the sub-
ject of money. But, like Mildred, she could not. The
thought of imminent poverty was nagging at them like
toothache. ``There'll be enough for a year or so?''
she said, timidly interrogative.

``I hope so,'' said Frank.

Mildred was eying him fixedly again. Said she:
``Have you found anything at all?''

``He had about eight thousand dollars in bank,''
said Frank. ``But most of it will go for the pressing
debts.''

``But how did HE expect to live?'' urged Mildred.

``Yes, there must have been SOMETHING,'' said her
mother.

``Of course, there's his share of the unsettled and
unfinished business of the firm,'' admitted Frank.

``How much will that be?'' persisted Mildred.

``I can't tell, offhand,'' said Frank, with virtuous
reproach. ``My mind's been on--other things.''

Henry Gower's widow was not without her share of
instinctive shrewdness. Neither had she, unobservant
though she was, been within sight of her son's
character for twenty-eight years without having
unconfessed, unformed misgivings concerning it.
``You mustn't bother about these things now, Frank
dear,'' said she. ``I'll get my brother to look into
it.''

``That won't be necessary,'' hastily said Frank. ``I
don't want any rival lawyer peeping into our firm's affairs.''

``My brother Wharton is the soul of honor,'' said
Mrs. Gower, the elder, with dignity. ``You are too
young to take all the responsibility of settling the
estate. Yes, I'll send for Wharton to-morrow.''

``It'll look as though you didn't trust me,'' said
Frank sourly.

``We mustn't do anything to start the gossips in
this town,'' said his wife, assisting.

``Then send for him yourself, Frank,'' said Mildred,
``and give him charge of the whole matter.''

Frank eyed her furiously. ``How ashamed father
would be!'' exclaimed he.

But this solemn invoking of the dead man's spirit
was uneffectual. The specter of poverty was too
insistent, too terrible. Said the widow:

``I'm sure, in the circumstances, my dear dead
husband would want me to get help from someone older
and more experienced.''

And Frank, guilty of conscience and an expert in
the ways of conventional and highly moral rascality,
ceased to resist. His wife, scenting danger to their
getting the share that ``rightfully belongs to the son,
especially when he has been the brains of the firm for
several years,'' made angry and indiscreet battle for no
outside interference. The longer she talked the firmer
the widow and the daughter became, not only because
she clarified suspicions that had been too hazy to
take form, but also because they disliked her intensely.
The following day Wharton Conover became unofficial
administrator. He had no difficulty in baffling
Frank Gower's half-hearted and clumsy efforts to
hide two large fees due the dead man's estate. He
discovered clear assets amounting in all to sixty-
three thousand dollars, most of it available within a few
months.

``As you have the good-will of the firm and as your
mother and sister have only what can be realized in
cash,'' said he to Frank, ``no doubt you won't insist
on your third.''

``I've got to consider my wife,'' said Frank. ``I
can't do as I'd like.''

``You are going to insist on your third?'' said
Conover, with an accent that made Frank quiver.

``I can't do otherwise,'' said he in a dogged, shamed
way.

``Um,'' said Conover. ``Then, on behalf of my
sister and her daughter I'll have to insist on a more
detailed accounting than you have been willing to give
--and on the production of that small book bound in
red leather which disappeared from my brother-in-law's
desk the afternoon of his death.''

A wave of rage and fear surged up within Frank
Gower and crashed against the seat of his life. For
days thereafter he was from time to time seized with
violent spasms of trembling; years afterward he was
attributing premature weaknesses of old age to the
effects of that moment of horror. His uncle's words
came as a sudden, high shot climax to weeks of
exasperating peeping and prying and questioning, of
sneer and insinuation. Conover had been only moderately
successful at the law, had lost clients to Frank's
father, had been beaten when they were on opposite
sides. He hated the father with the secret, hypocritical
hatred of the highly moral and religious man. He de-
spised the son. It is not often that a Christian gentleman
has such an opportunity to combine justice and
revenge, to feed to bursting an ancient grudge, the
while conscious that he is but doing his duty.

Said Frank, when he was able to speak: ``You have
been listening to the lies of some treacherous clerk
here.''

``Don't destroy that little book,'' proceeded Conover
tranquilly. ``We can prove that you took it.''

Young Gower rose. ``I must decline to have anything
further to say to you, sir,'' said he. ``You will
leave this office, and you will not be admitted here again
unless you come with proper papers as administrator.''

Conover smiled with cold satisfaction and departed.
There followed a series of quarrels--between Frank
and his sister, between Frank and his mother, between
Frank's wife and his mother, between Mildred and her
mother, between the mother and Conover. Mrs. Gower
was suspicious of her son; but she knew her brother
for a pinchpenny, exacting the last drop of what he
regarded as his own. And she discovered that, if she
authorized him to act as administrator for her, he could
--and beyond question would--take a large share of
the estate. The upshot was that Frank paid over to
his mother and sister forty-seven thousand dollars, and
his mother and her brother stopped speaking to each
other.

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