CHAPTER I

It was an uninspiring bit of street:  narrow, paved with cobble; hot and noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling and snow-slimed months of winter.  It looked anything this May after noon except a starting-place for drama.  But, then, the great dramas of life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls.  Life is a composite of contradictions—­a puzzle to the wisest of us:  the lily lifting its graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill.  Samson’s dead lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a storehouse of wild honey.  We are too accustomed to the ordinary and the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.

Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop from them or what their stories were to be.

The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a uniform, dingy, scaling redness.  The house of the Duchess, on the left side as you came down the street toward the little Square which squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges emanated a weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also in that the personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a character of its own.

The street did business with her when pressed for funds, but it knew little definite about the Duchess except that she was shriveled and bent and almost wordless and was seemingly without emotions.  But of course there were rumors.  She was so old, and had been so long in the drab little street, that she was as much a legend as a real person.  No one knew exactly how she had come by the name of “Duchess.”  There were misty, unsupported stories that long, long ago she had been a shapely and royal figure in colored fleshings, and that her title had been given her in those her ruling days.  Also there was a vague story that she had come by the name through an old liking for the romances of that writer who put forth her, or his, or their, prolific extravagances under the exalted pseudonym of “The Duchess.”  Also there was a rumor that the title came from a former alleged habit of the Duchess of carrying beneath her shapeless dress a hoard of jewels worthy to be a duchy’s heirlooms.  But all these were just stories—­no more.  Down in this quarter of New York nicknames come easily, and once applied they adhere to the end.

Some believed that she was now the mere ashes of a woman, in whom lived only the last flickering spark.  And some believed that beneath that drab and spent appearance there smouldered a great fire, which might blaze forth upon some occasion.  But no one knew.  As she was now, so she had always been even in the memory of people considered old in the neighborhood.