An Exploiter of Souls
"AND the worst of it is, they are all such nice people!"
"Why, that's the best of it, it seems to me. Of course, they all mean well."
"In a certain way they all do well, too," Mrs. Strong said, sighing; "really, it is very perplexing. Adèle is the truest friend to him! Why, where would he have been now, without Adèle?"
"In the barn-yard, probably," Henry Austin told her, putting his teacup down on the mantelpiece behind him; "and making, no doubt, an excellent farmer."
"Farmer? Yes! Plodding about in rusty boots (I declare, I smell the barnyard now whenever he comes in in his pumps!)—plodding about in his potato-fields all day, and falling asleep over his Shakespeare at eight o'clock in the evening! Exciting life."
"Not exciting," her old friend admitted, smiling, "but contented."
"Well, but, my dear Henry!—he's contented now. He's a successful actor; indeed, I think he is a great actor,—and you know I don't say that lightly. He has an angel of a wife; Dora is the best girl I know. And he has a mother-in-law who is the most charming woman in the world! Now, isn't Adèle a charmer?"
"Oh, bless my soul, yes! At least, I suppose she is. She always was. You know I haven't seen her for a dozen years. But she certainly was a charmer then. I bear the scars still," he ended, drolly.
"You don't look like a blighted being," she told him. "Well, she's more charming now than when she broke your heart, if such a thing is possible. Augustine's success has been wine to her; sometimes I think she adores it as much as she does him. Of course he is contented."
"She had just discovered him when I went away," Henry Austin said, thoughtfully; he was standing with his back to the fire, looking down at the plump, anxious little old lady on the yellow damask sofa at the other side of the hearth. "I remember," he went on, frowning reflectively, "that she spoke to me about him. I told her she had a flair for genius. She was always discovering people who could do things. She once cherished the belief that I could write."
"Well, she has a flair for genius," Mrs. Strong said, emphatically; "she has found lots of them. You remember that it was she who discovered Elise Davis's voice? And she scraped up money from all of us to send that Ernst man to Paris—and did you see what the last Revue des Beaux-Arts said about him? And she picked up Rose Harris, a little seamstress at $1 25 a day, and started her in business; and let me tell you, sir, if you had a wife (as you ought to have), and had to pay Harris's bills, you would understand her genius! I can't afford a Harris dress oftener than once in two years. Then came Augustine. I suppose you know how she discovered him?"
Henry Austin shook his head, whimsically. "Hazel rod?"
"My dear, she went to spend the summer on a farm, for economy. Took Dora; Dora was fifteen then. (Mr. Wharton had just died, and we were all thanking Heaven for her release.) And there was this genius, twenty-eight years old; self-educated; refined, too, in a way, though his boots were barn-yardy;—and as beautiful as a god. And good. Yes, he certainly is a good man; I am worried enough over the affair, but I know Augustine Ware is a good man. That's what makes it so puzzling. He is good, and Adèle is good, and Dora is an angel!"
"My dear Jane! Do you want them to be bad?"
"Now, Henry, don't be frivolous. But I tell you one thing: there's a good, honest, human badness, my friend, that isn't nearly so bad as a certain kind of good-
