Better Dead | Page 2

Scribner have given it. Weighted with "An Edinburgh Eleven" it would rest very comfortably in the mill dam, but the publishers have reasons for its inclusion; among them, I suspect, is a well-grounded fear that if I once began to hack and hew, I should not stop until I had reduced the edition to two volumes. This juvenile effort is a field of prickles into which none may be advised to penetrate--I made the attempt lately in cold blood and came back shuddering, but I had read enough to have the profoundest reason for declining to tell what the book is about. And yet I have a sentimental interest in "Better Dead," for it was my first--published when I had small hope of getting any one to accept the Scotch--and there was a week when I loved to carry it in my pocket and did not think it dead weight. Once I almost saw it find a purchaser. She was a pretty girl and it lay on a bookstall, and she read some pages and smiled, and then retired, and came back and began another chapter. Several times she did this, and I stood in the background trembling with hope and fear. At last she went away without the book, but I am still of opinion that, had it been just a little bit better, she would have bought it.

CONTENTS
I. ENGAGED? II. THE S. D. W. S. P.? III. THE GREAT SOCIAL QUESTION? IV. WOMAN'S RIGHTS? V. DYNAMITERS? VI. A CELEBRITY AT HOME? VII. EXPERIMENTING? VIII. A LOST OPPORTUNITY? IX. THE ROOT OF THE MATTER? X. THE OLD OLD STORY?

BETTER DEAD
CHAPTER I
When Andrew Riach went to London, his intention was to become private secretary to a member of the Cabinet. If time permitted, he proposed writing for the Press.
"It might be better if you and Clarrie understood each other," the minister said.
It was their last night together. They faced each other in the manse-parlour at Wheens, whose low, peeled ceiling had threatened Mr. Eassie at his desk every time he looked up with his pen in his mouth until his wife died, when he ceased to notice things. The one picture on the walls, an engraving of a boy in velveteen, astride a tree, entitled "Boyhood of Bunyan," had started life with him. The horsehair chairs were not torn, and you did not require to know the sofa before you sat down on it, that day thirty years before, when a chubby minister and his lady walked to the manse between two cart-loads of furniture, trying not to look elated.
Clarrie rose to go, when she heard her name. The love-light was in her eyes, but Andrew did not open the door for her, for he was a Scotch graduate. Besides, she might one day be his wife.
The minister's toddy-ladle clinked against his tumbler, but Andrew did not speak. Clarrie was the girl he generally adored.
"As for Clarrie," he said at last, "she puts me in an awkward position. How do I know that I love her?"
"You have known each other a long time," said the minister.
His guest was cleaning his pipe with a hair-pin, that his quick eye had detected on the carpet.
"And she is devoted to you," continued Mr. Eassie.
The young man nodded.
"What I fear," he said, "is that we have known each other too long. Perhaps my feeling for Clarrie is only brotherly--"
"Hers for you, Andrew, is more than sisterly."
"Admitted. But consider, Mr. Eassie, she has only seen the world in soirées. Every girl has her day-dreams, and Clarrie has perhaps made a dream of me. She is impulsive, given to idealisation, and hopelessly illogical."
The minister moved uneasily in his chair.
"I have reasoned out her present relation to me," the young man went on, "and, the more you reduce it to the usual formulae, the more illogical it becomes. Clarrie could possibly describe me, but define me--never. What is our prospect of happiness in these circumstances?"
"But love--" began Mr. Eassie.
"Love!" exclaimed Andrew. "Is there such a thing? Reduce it to syllogistic form, and how does it look in Barbara?"
For the moment there was almost some expression in his face, and he suffered from a determination of words to the mouth.
"Love and logic," Mr. Eassie interposed, "are hardly kindred studies."
"Is love a study at all?" asked Andrew, bitterly. "It is but the trail of idleness. But all idleness is folly; therefore, love is folly."
Mr. Eassie was not so keen a logician as his guest, but he had age for a major premiss. He was easy-going rather than a coward; a preacher who, in the pulpit, looked difficulties genially in the face, and passed them by.
Riach had a very long neck. He was twenty-five years of age, fair, and somewhat heavily built, with a face as inexpressive as book-covers.
A native