The old woman laughed corroboration.

  "And the strangest of all, down in the South Seas, black slaves,

  little kinky-haired cannibals with bones through their noses.

  When they did not mind, or when they stole, they were tied up to

  a cocoanut palm behind the compound and lashed with whips of

  rhinoceros hide. They were from an island of cannibals and

  head-hunters, and they never cried out. It was their pride. There

  was little Vibi, only twelve years old--he waited on me--and when

  his back was cut in shreds and I wept over him, he would only

  laugh and say, 'Short time little bit I take 'm head belong big

  fella white marster.' That was Bruce Anstey, the Englishman who

  whipped him. But little Vibi never got the head. He ran away and

  the bushmen cut off his own head and ate every bit of him."

  Saxon chilled, and her face was grave; but Mercedes Higgins

  rattled on.

  "Ah, those were wild, gay, savage days. Would you believe it, my

  dear, in three years those Englishmen of the plantation drank up

  oceans of champagne and Scotch whisky and dropped thirty thousand

  pounds on the adventure. Not dollars--pounds, which means one

  hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They were princes while it

  lasted. It was splendid, glorious. It was mad, mad. I sold half

  my beautiful jewels in New Zealand before I got started again.

  Bruce Anstey blew out his brains at the end. Roger went mate on a

  trader with a black crew, for eight pounds a month. And Jack

  Gilbraith--he was the rarest of them all. His people were wealthy

  and titled, and he went home to England and sold cat's meat, sat

  around their big house till they gave him more money to start a

  rubber plantation in the East Indies somewhere, on Sumatra, I

  think--or was it New Guinea?"

  And Saxon, back in her own kitchen and preparing supper for

  Billy, wondered what lusts and rapacities had led the old,

  burnt-faced woman from the big Peruvian ranch, through all the

  world, to West Oakland and Barry Higgins Old Barry was not the

  sort who would fling away his share of one hundred and fifty

  thousand dollars, much less ever attain to such opulence.

  Besides, she had mentioned the names of other men, but not his.

  Much more Mercedes had talked, in snatches and fragments. There

  seemed no great country nor city of the old world or the new in

  which she had not been. She had even been in Klondike, ten years

  before, in a half-dozen flashing sentences picturing the

  fur-clad, be-moccasined miners sowing the barroom floors with

  thousands of dollars' worth of gold dust. Always, so it seemed to

  Saxon, Mrs. Higgins had been with men to whom money was as water.

  CHAPTER III

  Saxon, brooding over her problem of retaining Billy's love, of

  never staling the freshness of their feeling for each other and

  of never descending from the heights which at present they were

  treading, felt herself impelled toward Mrs. Higgins. SHE knew;

  surely she must know. Had she not hinted knowledge beyond

  ordinary women's knowledge?

  Several weeks went by, during which Saxon was often with her. But

  Mrs. Higgins talked of all other matters, taught Saxon the making

  of certain simple laces, and instructed her in the arts of

  washing and of marketing. And then, one afternoon, Saxon found

  Mrs. Higgins more voluble than usual, with words, clean-uttered,

  that rippled and tripped in their haste to escape. Her eyes were

  flaming. So flamed her face. Her words were flames. There was a

  smell of liquor in the air and Saxon knew that the old woman had

  been drinking. Nervous and frightened, at the same time

  fascinated, Saxon hemstitched a linen handkerchief intended for

  Billy and listened to Mercedes' wild flow of speech.

  "Listen, my dear. I shall tell you about the world of men. Do not

  be stupid like all your people, who think me foolish and a witch

  with the evil eye. Ha! ha! When I think of silly Maggie Donahue

  pulling the shawl across her baby's face when we pass each other

  on the sidewalk! A witch I have been, 'tis true, but my witchery

  was with men. Oh, I am wise, very wise, my dear. I shall tell you

  of women's ways with men, and of men's ways with women, the best

  of them and the worst of them. Of the brute that is in all men,

  of the queerness of them that breaks the hearts of stupid women

  who do not understand. And all women are stupid. I am not stupid.

  La la, listen.

  "I am an old woman. And like a woman, I'll not tell you how old I

  am. Yet can I hold men. Yet would I hold men, toothless and a

  hundred, my nose touching my chin. Not the young men. They were

  mine in my young days. But the old men, as befits my years. And

  well for me the power is mine. In all this world I am without kin

  or cash. Only have I wisdom and memories--memories that are

  ashes, but royal ashes, jeweled ashes. Old women, such as I,

  starve and shiver, or accept the pauper's dole and the pauper's

  shroud. Not I. I hold my man. True, 'tis only Barry Higgins--old

  Barry, heavy, an ox, but a male man, my dear, and queer as all

  men are queer. 'Tis true, he has one arm." She shrugged her

  shoulders. "A compensation. He cannot beat me, and old bones are

  tender when the round flesh thins to strings.

  "But when I think of my wild young lovers, princes, mad with the

  madness of youth! I have lived. It is enough. I regret nothing.

  And with old Barry I have my surety of a bite to eat and a place

  by the fire. And why? Because I know men, and shall never lose my

  cunning to hold them. 'Tis bitter sweet, the knowledge of them,

  more sweet than bitter--men and men and men! Not stupid dolts,

  nor fat bourgeois swine of business men, but men of temperament,

  of flame and fire; madmen, maybe, but a lawless, royal race of

  madmen.

  "Little wife-woman, you must learn. Variety! There lies the

  magic. 'Tis the golden key. 'Tis the toy that amuses. Without it

  in the wife, the man is a Turk; with it, he is her slave, and

  faithful. A wife must be many wives. If you would have your

  husband's love you must be all women to him. You must be ever

  new, with the dew of newness ever sparkling, a flower that never

  blooms to the fulness that fades. You must be a garden of

  flowers, ever new, ever fresh, ever different. And in your garden

  the man must never pluck the last of your posies.

  "Listen, little wife-woman. In the garden of love is a snake. It

  is the commonplace. Stamp on its head, or it will destroy the

  garden. Remember the name. Commonplace. Never be too intimate.

  Men only seem gross. Women are more gross than men.--No, do not

  argue, little new-wife. You are an infant woman. Women are less

  delicate than men. Do I not know? Of their own husbands they will

  relate the most intimate love-secrets to other women. Men never

  do this of their wives. Explain it. There is only one way. In all

  things of love women are less delicate. It is their mistake. It

  is the father and the mother of the commonplace, and it is the

  commonplac
e, like a loathsome slug, that beslimes and destroys

  love.

  "Be delicate, little wife-woman. Never be without your veil,

  without many veils. Veil yourself in a thousand veils, all

  shimmering and glittering with costly textures and precious

  jewels. Never let the last veil be drawn. Against the morrow

  array yourself with more veils, ever more veils, veils without

  end. Yet the many veils must not seem many. Each veil must seem

  the only one between you and your hungry lover who will have

  nothing less than all of you. Each time he must seem to get all,

  to tear aside the last veil that hides you. He must think so. It

  must not be so. Then there will be no satiety, for on the morrow

  he will find another last veil that has escaped him.

  "Remember, each veil must seem the last and only one. Always you

  must seem to abandon all to his arms; always you must reserve

  more that on the morrow and on all the morrows you may abandon.

  Of such is variety, surprise, so that your man's pursuit will be

  everlasting, so that his eyes will look to you for newness, and

  not to other women. It was the freshness and the newness' of your

  beauty and you, the mystery of you, that won your man. When a man

  has plucked and smelled all the sweetness of a flower, he looks

  for other flowers. It is his queerness. You must ever remain a

  flower almost plucked yet never plucked, stored with vats of

  sweet unbroached though ever broached.

  "Stupid women, and all are stupid, think the first winning of the

  man the final victory. Then they settle down and grow fat, and

  state, and dead, and heartbroken. Alas, they are so stupid. But

  you, little infant-woman with your first victory, you must make

  your love-life an unending chain of victories. Each day you must

  win your man again. And when you have won the last victory, when

  you can find no more to win, then ends love. Finis is written,

  and your man wanders in strange gardens. Remember, love must be

  kept insatiable. It must have an appetite knife-edged and never

  satisfied. You must feed your lover well, ah, very well, most

  well; give, give, yet send him away hungry to come back to you

  for more."

  Mrs. Higgins stood up suddenly and crossed out of the room. Saxon

  had not failed to note the litheness and grace in that lean and

  withered body. She watched for Mrs. Higgins' return, and knew

  that the litheness and grace had not been imagined.

  "Scarcely have I told you the first letter in love's alphabet,"

  said Mercedes Higgins, as she reseated herself.

  In her hands was a tiny instrument, beautifully grained and

  richly brown, which resembled a guitar save that it bore four

  strings. She swept them back and forth with rhythmic forefinger

  and lifted a voice, thin and mellow, in a fashion of melody that

  was strange, and in a foreign tongue, warm-voweled, all-voweled,

  and love-exciting. Softly throbbing, voice and strings arose on

  sensuous crests of song, died away to whisperings and caresses,

  drifted through love-dusks and twilights, or swelled again to

  love-cries barbarically imperious in which were woven plaintive

  calls and madnesses of invitation and promise. It went through

  Saxon until she was as this instrument, swept with passional

  strains. It seemed to her a dream, and almost was she dizzy, when

  Mercedes Higgins ceased.

  "If your man had clasped the last of you, and if all of you were

  known to him as an old story, yet, did you sing that one song, as

  I have sung it, yet would his arms again go out to you and his

  eyes grow warm with the old mad lights. Do you see? Do you

  understand, little wife-woman?"

  Saxon could only nod, her lips too dry for speech.

  "The golden koa, the king of woods," Mercedes was crooning over

  the instrument. "The ukulele--that is what the Hawaiians call it,

  which means, my dear, the jumping flea. They are golden-fleshed,

  the Hawalians, a race of lovers, all in the warm cool of the

  tropic night where the trade winds blow."

  Again she struck the strings. She sang in another language, which

  Saxon deemed must be French. It was a gayly-devilish lilt,

  tripping and tickling. Her large eyes at times grew larger and

  wilder, and again narrowed in enticement and wickedness. When she

  ended, she looked to Saxon for a verdict.

  "I don't like that one so well," Saxon said.

  Mercedes shrugged her shoulders.

  "They all have their worth, little infant-woman with so much to

  learn. There are times when men may be won with wine. There are

  times when men may be won with the wine of song, so queer they

  are. La la, so many ways, so many ways. There are your pretties,

  my dear, your dainties. They are magic nets. No fisherman upon

  the sea ever tangled fish more successfully than we women with

  our flimsies. You are on the right path. I have seen men enmeshed

  by a corset cover no prettier, no daintier, than these of yours I

  have seen on the line.

  "I have called the washing of fine linen an art. But it is not

  for itself alone. The greatest of the arts is the conquering of

  men. Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for

  their existence. Listen. In all times and ages have been women,

  great wise women. They did not need to be beautiful. Greater then

  all woman's beauty was their wisdom. Princes end potentates bowed

  down before them. Nations battled over them. Empires crashed

  because of them. Religions were founded on them. Aphrodite,

  Astarte, the worships of the night--listen, infant-woman, of the

  great women who conquered worlds of men."

  And thereafter Saxon listened, in a maze, to what almost seemed a

  wild farrago, save that the strange meaningless phrases were

  fraught with dim, mysterious significance. She caught glimmerings

  of profounds inexpressible and unthinkable that hinted

  connotations lawless and terrible. The woman's speech was a lava

  rush, scorching and searing; and Saxon's cheeks, and forehead,

  and neck burned with a blush that continuously increased. She

  trembled with fear, suffered qualms of nausea, thought sometimes

  that she would faint, so madly reeled her brain; yet she could

  not tear herself away, sad sat on and on, her sewing forgotten on

  her lap, staring with inward sight upon a nightmare vision beyond

  all imagining. At last, when it seemed she could endure no more,

  and while she was wetting her dry lips to cry out in protest,

  Mercedes ceased.

  "And here endeth the first lesson," she said quite calmly, then

  laughed with a laughter that was tantalizing and tormenting.

  "What is the matter? You are not shocked?"

  "I am frightened," Saxon quavered huskily, with a half-sob of

  nervousness. "You frighten me. I am very foolish, and I know so

  little, that I had never dreamed . . . THAT."

  Mercedes nodded her head comprehendingly.

  "It is indeed to be frightened at," she said. "It is solemn; it

  is terrible; it is magnificent!"

  CHAPTER IV

  Saxon had been clear-eyed all her da
ys, though her field of

  vision had been restricted. Clear-eyed, from her childhood days

  with the saloonkeeper Cady and Cady's good-natured but unmoral

  spouse, she had observed, and, later, generalized much upon sex.

  She knew the post-nuptial problem of retaining a husband's love,

  as few wives of any class knew it, just as she knew the

  pre-nuptial problem of selecting a husband, as few girls of the

  working class knew it.

  She had of herself developed an eminently rational philosophy of

  love. Instinctively, and consciously, too, she had made toward

  delicacy, and shunned the perils of the habitual and commonplace.

  Thoroughly aware she was that as she cheapened herself so did she

  cheapen love. Never, in the weeks of their married life, had

  Billy found her dowdy, or harshly irritable, or lethargic. And

  she had deliberately permeated her house with her personal

  atmosphere of coolness, and freshness, and equableness. Nor had

  she been ignorant of such assets as surprise and charm. Her

  imagination had not been asleep, and she had been born with

  wisdom. In Billy she had won a prize, and she knew it. She

  appreciated his lover's ardor and was proud. His open-handed

  liberality, his desire for everything of the best, his own

  personal cleanliness and care of himself she recognized as far

  beyond the average. He was never coarse. He met delicacy with

  delicacy, though it was obvious to her that the initiative in all

  such matters lay with her and must lie with her always. He was

  largely unconscious of what he did and why. But she knew in all

  full clarity of judgment. And he was such a prize among men.

  Despite her clear sight of her problem of keeping Billy a lover,

  and despite the considerable knowledge and experience arrayed

  before her mental vision, Mercedes Higgins had spread before her

  a vastly wider panorama. The old woman had verified her own

  conclusions, given her new ideas, clinched old ones, and even

  savagely emphasized the tragic importance of the whole problem.

  Much Saxon remembered of that mad preachment, much she guessed

  and felt, and much had been beyond her experience and

  understanding. But the metaphors of the veils and the flowers,

  and the rules of giving to abandonment with always more to

  abandon, she grasped thoroughly, and she was enabled to formulate

  a bigger and stronger love-philosophy. In the light of the

  revelation she re-examined the married lives of all she had ever

  known, and, with sharp definiteness as never before, she saw

  where and why so many of them had failed.

  With renewed ardor Saxon devoted herself to her household, to her

  pretties, and to her charms. She marketed with a keener desire

  for the best, though never ignoring the need for economy. From

  the women's pages of the Sunday supplements, and from the women's

  magazines in the free reading room two blocks away, she gleaned

  many ideas for the preservation of her looks. In a systematic way

  she exercised the various parts of her body, and a certain period

  of time each day she employed in facial exercises and massage for

  the purpose of retaining the roundness and freshness, and

  firmness and color. Billy did not know. These intimacies of the

  toilette were not for him. The results, only, were his. She drew

  books from the Carnegie Library and studied physiology and

  hygiene, and learned a myriad of things about herself and the

  ways of woman's health that she had never been taught by Sarah,

  the women of the orphan asylum, nor by Mrs. Cady.

  After long debate she subscribed to a woman's magazine, the

  patterns and lessons of which she decided were the best suited to

  her taste and purse. The other woman's magazines she had access

  to in the free reading room, and more than one pattern of lace

  and embroidery she copied by means of tracing paper. Before the

  lingerie windows of the uptown shops she often stood and studied;

  nor was she above taking advantage, when small purchases were

  made, of looking over the goods at the hand-embroidered underwear