Infatuation

together--as compact and jealous a little aristocracy as any in Hungary or Silesia. Of course there was another Carthage--several other Carthages--one a teeming riverside quarter where English was an unknown tongue, a place black with factory chimneys, full of noise and refuse, dirt and ugliness, where forty thousand nondescript foreigners pigged together, and contributed forty thousand pairs of very grimy and unwilling hands to the material advancement of the city and state. There was a business Carthage, with banks and sky-scrapers, and vast webs of wires that darkened the sky. There was a pleasure Carthage that awoke only at night, blazing out with a myriad lights, and a myriad enticements. There was a middle-class residence Carthage; a second-class residence Carthage; an immense, poor, semi-disreputable, altogether dreary Carthage that was popularly alluded to as "South of the slot," the name dating from the time of the first cable-car line, now long since discarded. But to return to Phyllis Ladd. In losing her mother, it might be said she had discovered her father. At first perhaps it was pity, loneliness, almost terror that caused Mr. Ladd to take this little creature in his arms, and hold her as he might a shield. He had idolized his wife; he hardly knew how to go on living without her; one day, in his office, as his old friend Latham was leaving him, he had pulled open a drawer, and taken a loaded revolver from it. "Latham," he said, with a very slight tremor in his voice, "would you mind putting this damned thing in your pocket--I--I--find it tempts me." Yes, his little daughter was a shield; he held her slim body between himself and despair; he told her this again and again, as he sat with bowed head and suffusing eyes in the shadow of an irrevocable happiness. And she in whom there stirred, mysteriously, dimly, the tenderness of the sublime love that had called her into being--she, even while she mingled her tears with his, felt within herself the welling of an exquisite joy. To love, to solace, to protect, here again instincts were prematurely awakened; here again her little feet departed from the commonplace to carry her far afield. In time, as weeks and months rolled on, the blow, so unendurable at first, so crushing and terrible, softened, as such things will, and a busy world again engrossed a busy man. But…