So Hartley rewrote his article on Cordelia Vaughan. If there was any little rift in the throbbing lute of his enthusiasm he solaced himself with the thought that he was moving with the times, that he was growing more politic, that being down on his luck had knocked some of the sensitiveness out of him. He felt, too, that life of late had been making him more humble. "You're so damned hopelessly honest!" his editor had once disgustedly said of him. But now, as he wrote late into the night, page after page, The Silver Poppy, though still unread by him, paragraph by paragraph grew into a wonderful and still more wonderful work, and Cordelia Vaughan, if not the openly accredited George Eliot of America, was at least the apostle of that newer upward movement which was to carry the American novel from the valley of mental mediocrity to the clearest heights of the intellectual. CHAPTER VII THE APRIL OF LOVE From the book to the battle we go, And it comes that we travel afar Unto marts that we do not know, Where a Philistine people are. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Market-Place." "I'm not very big," she said wistfully; "I'm only one of those little harbor-tugs that wear the liners of life into their berths--for the port has its perils as well as the open sea."--"The Silver Poppy." Mrs. Spaulding usually breakfasted at half-past eleven, just four hours later than her husband. That gentleman, indeed, had passed through half a day of delirious Wall Street business before the plump and loosely gowned figure of his belated spouse rustled languidly down to the breakfast room. Mrs. Spaulding--and at the breakfast hour above all other times--liked to believe that she was a very ill-used and lonely woman. If a touch of forlorn desolation did cling about her even days, it was a desolation quite different to her husband's. Through her loneliness she still groped for something tangible and material; he found little toward which he cared to reach. He had first made his money in wheat, at Indianapolis. Later he had doubled a substantial fortune by prompt and shrewd investments in the then half-prospected iron-mines of the Lake Superior district. He was an honest and simple-minded man, with a straight-forward and workaday bent of mind, who still fretted at idleness, and was still wordlessly oppressed by the gaieties of life when they chanced to fall before the hour of the dinner gong and the Tuxedo coat. It was not until his fortune had crept up to the million mark that he ventured to ask for the hand of the youthful and overpretty Lillian Bunting, a belle in her time, and a young lady, it was said, with marked social aspirations for the Middle West.