The Penalty | Page 3

was, that in the first place she was not really in love with
anybody and never had been, and that it was not she herself who
enjoyed being kissed by a man to whom she was indifferent, neither
liking nor loathing, but nature, which for reasons, or perhaps only
whims, of its own, tempts the cell to divide and the flower to go to
seed.
Through the tangle of her love affairs Wilmot Allen threaded a path of
hope, despair, and cynicism. There were times when she seemed to
have a return of her childhood infatuation for him; there were times
when he feared that in one of her moments of impressionable
enthusiasm she would marry some other man in haste, and repent at
leisure. And there were the cynical intervals, when it seemed to him
that he could do without her, and that nothing was worth while but
enjoyment, both base and innocent, and pleasure.
During Wilmot's junior year at New Haven, his father's sensational,
dissipated, and stock-gambling career came to a sudden end. There was
even a shadow on the name. He had done something really
discreditable, something of course to do with money; since a man who
is merely a gambler, a drunkard, and a Don Juan may with ease keep
upon good terms with society.

Wilmot Allen failed, at least without honor, filled himself full of
brandy, cocked a forty-five-calibre revolver, put the muzzle in his
mouth, pulled the trigger, blew off the back of his head, and was
"accidentally shot while cleaning the weapon."
The real tragedy was that so good a career as the son's should have
come to so untimely an end in so good a collegiate world as Yale. He
stood well in his class, he had played right tackle for two seasons and
was heir apparent to the captaincy; he was well beloved and would
have received an election to a senior society in the spring. But the solid
ground being withdrawn from under his feet--in other words, his
allowance from his father--he left amid universal regret, and found
himself a very small person in a very great city; worse, a youth who
had always had everything, loved pleasure, lights, games, and color,
and who now had no visible means of support.
[Illustration: She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that
she had never been born.]
Friends found him a position in Wall Street. Being young, attractive, a
good "mixer," not in the least shy, he was given a handsome
"entertaining" allowance and told to bring in business. So he
foregathered with out-of-town magnates, made the city a pleasant,
familiar place to them, and brought much of their money into the firm's
office. When Barbara was kind he despised his anomalous position and
strove to free himself from it; but even the best man has to live.
And during those intervals when he thought he could do without her,
Wilmot sank deeper and deeper into methods of self-advancement
which, if not actually base and culpable, at least smirched the finer
qualities of his nature, and hardened his heart.
If the father's heritage, drink and women, were spared him, or at least
that part of him which was really noble, a love of cleanness,
clear-mindedness, and purity, died hard. But gambling was second
nature to him. He could not enjoy a game unless he had something on it;
and all book-makers and proprietors of gambling-houses were friends
of his and called him by his first name. Sometimes through a series of

lucky turns he rose to heights of picturesque affluence; more often he
was stone-broke; but so much money passed through his hands in the
course of a year that it was always possible for him to borrow and live
well enough on credit. Money became his passion, not for its own sake,
not for the sake of what it could buy, but because it was a game upon
which the best wits of the world have been engaged for ages and
ages--and because you have to have it, or be able to owe so much that it
amounts to the same thing.
At first when he got in a hole, owed money which he saw no way of
raising, Wilmot suffered all the anguish and remorse of the trustee who
has speculated with orphans' funds (for the first time) and lost them.
Gradually he became hardened. And those who knew him best could
never tell whether he was worth fifty thousand or had just lost that
much. He drew upon a stock of courage and cheerfulness worthy of
even the noblest cause, until the term "self-respect" dropped
automatically from his inner vocabulary and his moral sense became a
rotten, rusty buckler through which the spear of temptation or necessity
passed like