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The city of Grand Republic, Radisson County, Minnesota, eighty miles north of Minneapolis, seventy-odd miles from Duluth, has 85,000 population.

It is large enough to have a Renoir, a school system scandal, several millionaires, and a slum. It lies in the confluent valleys where the Big Eagle River empties into the Sorshay River, which flows west to the Mississippi.

Grand Republic grew rich two generations ago through the uncouth robbery of forests, iron mines, and soil for wheat. With these almost exhausted, it rests in leafy quiet, wondering whether to become a ghost town or a living city. The Chamber of Commerce says that it has already become a city, but, in secret places where the two bankers on the school board cannot hear them, the better schoolteachers deny this.

At least there is in Grand Republic a remarkable number of private motor cars. It was a principal cause of his reputation for eccentricity that Cass Timberlane, on amiable spring days, walked the entire mile and a quarter from the court house to his home.

He climbed up Joseph Renshaw Brown Way to Ottawa Heights, on which were the Renoir and the millionaires and most of the houses provided with Architecture.

He looked down on the Radisson County Court House, in which was his own court room, and he did not shudder. He was fondly accustomed to its romanticism and blurry inconvenience.

It had been built in 1885 from the designs of an architect who was drunk upon Howard Pyle’s illustrations to fairy tales. It was of a rich red raspberry brick trimmed with limestone, and it displayed a round tower, an octagonal tower, a minaret, a massive entrance with a portcullis, two lofty flying balconies of iron, colored-glass windows with tablets or stone petals in the niches above them, a green and yellow mosaic roof with scarlet edging, and the breathless ornamental stairway from the street up to the main entrance without which no American public building would be altogether legal.

Cass knew that it was as archaic as armor and even less comfortable, yet he loved it as a symbol of the ancient and imperial law. It was his Westminster, his Sorbonne; it was the one place in which he was not merely a male in vulgar trousers, but a spiritual force such as might, with a great deal of luck and several hundreds of years, help to make of Grand Republic another Edinburgh.

He had, too, an ancestral proprietary right in this legal palace, for his father had started off his furniture business (wholesale as well as retail, and therefore noble) by providing most of the chairs and desks for the court house.

When he had reached Varennes Boulevard, circling along the cliffs on top of Ottawa Heights, Cass could see the whole city, the whole valley, with the level oat and barley fields on the uplands beyond. The Big Eagle River came in from the south, bearing the hot murmurous air from the great cornfields, from the country of the vanquished Sioux; the Sorshay River, which had been called the Sorcier by the coureurs de bois, two hundred years ago, wound from a northern darkness of swamp and lakes and impenetrable jackpine thickets, the country of the tawny Chippewas.

At the junction of the rivers was the modern city, steel and cement and gasoline and electricity, as contemporary as Chicago if but one-fortieth the size and devoid of the rich raucousness of the Loop. The limestone magnificence of the Wargate Memorial Auditorium and the titanic Blue Ox National Bank Building (no less than twelve stories), the carved and educated granite of the Alexander Hamilton High School, the Pantheon of the Duluth & Twin Cities Railroad Station, the furnaces and prodigious brick sheds of the Wargate Wood Products Corporation plant and a setting of smaller factories, were all proofs of the Chamber of Commerce’s assertion that in a short time, perhaps twenty years or twenty centuries, Grand Republic would have a million inhabitants.

But beyond the tracks, along the once navigable Sorshay River, the wooden warehouses and shaky tenements were so like the frontier village of seventy-five years ago that you imagined the wooden sidewalks of the 1860’s and the streets a churning of mud, with Chippewa squaws and Nova Scotia lumbermen in crimson jackets and weekly murder with axe handles. Very untidy.

Indeed Mrs. Kenny Wargate, Manhattan-born and cynical daughter-in-law of the Ruling Family, asserted that Grand Republic had leaped from clumsy youth to senility without ever having a dignified manhood. She jeered, “Your Grand Republic slogan is: tar-paper shanty to vacant parking lot in three generations.”

But Judge Timberlane and his friends, loving the place as home, believed that just now, after woes and failures and haste and waste and experiment, Grand Republic was beginning to build up a kind of city new to the world, a city for all the people, a city for decency and neighborliness, not for ecclesiastical display and monarchial power and the chatter of tamed journalists and professors drinking coffee and eating newspapers in cafés. And if so many of the pioneers had been exploiters and slashers of the forest, the Wargates had been and now were builders of industries that meant homes and food for hundreds of immigrant families from the fiords, from New England hills.

Cass often pondered thus as he walked along Varennes Boulevard. As he rounded a curve of the bluff-top, he could look northward, and there, at the city’s edge, was the true Northland, in the stretches of pine and birch and poplar that framed the grim eye of Dead Squaw Lake. And he loved it as he could never love the lax and steamy and foolishly laughing isles he had once seen in the Caribbean.

Through all of his meditation ran his startled remembrance of Jinny Marshland on the witness stand. He was still indignant that in a city so small as Grand Republic he had never seen her.

But he knew that, for all his talk at public dinners about Midwestern Democracy, the division between the proprietors and the serfs was as violent in Grand Republic as in London. The truckdriver might call Boone Havock, the contractor, “Boone,” when they met in the Eitelfritz Brauhaus (as with remarkable frequency they did meet), but he would never enter Boone’s house or his church, and as for Boone’s asylum, the Federal Club, neither the truckdriver nor any Scandinavian or Finn with less than $10,000 income nor any recognizable Jew whatever would be allowed even to gawk through the leaded-glass windows (imported).

Even Lucius Fliegend, Jinny’s Jewish employer, that fine and sensitive old man, could not belong to the Federal Club, but had to play his noontime chess in the Athletic Club. And as a professing member of Democracy, Cass was ashamed that not since he had been elected judge had he once been in the Athletic Club.

He would remedy that right away. Tomorrow.

He was abnormally conscious of the universal and multiple revolution just then, in the early 1940’s, from sulfa drugs and surrealism and semantics to Hitler, but he was irritated by all the Voices, by the radio prophets and the newspaper-column philosophers. He had had two competent years in Washington as a Member of Congress. Sick of the arguments, he had refused to be re-elected, yet now that he was back in his native town, sometimes he missed the massacres in the Coliseum, and felt a little bored and futile.

And ever since his divorce from the costly and clattering Blanche, he had been lonely. Could a Jinny Marshland cure his loneliness, his confusions in the skyrocketing world?

Then he rebuked himself.

Why should a charming girl, probably a dancer to phonographs, have any desire to cure the lonelinesses of forty-year-old single gentlemen? There was tenderness and loyalty in Jinny, he felt, but what would she want with a judge whom she would find out not to be a judge at all but another gaunt and early-middle-aged man who played the flute? Thus he raged and longed as he neared his house. It is understood that the newer psychiatrists, like the older poets, believe that patients do fall in love at first sight.

Cass’s house was sometimes known as “Bergheim” and sometimes as “the old Eisenherz place.” It had been built as a summer residence—in those days it had seemed to be quite out in the country—by Simon Eisenherz, greatest of the Radisson County pioneers, in 1888, and purchased by Cass’s father, Owen Timberlane, in 1929. Owen had died there, less than a year later, leaving it jointly to his wife, Marah, and to Cass, along with a local fortune of forty or fifty thousand dollars.

The house was somber and somehow tragic, and when Cass’s mother died there, also, and he took Blanche, his wife, to it, she had hated it as much as he himself loved it. As a boy he had considered it the wonderful castle, the haunt of power and beauty, which no ordinary mortal like a Timberlane could ever hope to own complete. He still felt so.

George Hame, his court reporter, said that Bergheim was a wooden model of the court house, and it did have a circular tower and an octagonal conservatory, now called the “sun room.” It was painted a dark green, merely because it had always been painted dark green. Over the porches there were whole gardens of jig-saw blossoms, and two of the windows were circular, and one triangular, with ruby glass. Cass admitted everything derisive that was said about this monstrosity, and went on loving it, and explaining that if you opened all of the windows all of the time, it wasn’t airless inside—not very—not on a breezy day.

As he came up the black-and-white marble walk to the bulbous carriage-porch, a black kitten, an entire stranger, was sitting on a step. It said “meow,” not whiningly but in a friendly mood, as between equals, and it looked at Cass in a way that dared him to invite it in for a drink.

He was a lover of cats, and he had had none since the ancient and misanthropic Stephen had died, six months before. He had a lively desire to own this little black clown, all black, midnight black, except for its sooty yellow eyes. It would play on the faded carpets when he came home from the court room to the still loneliness that, in the old house, was getting on his nerves.

“Well, how are you, my friend?” he said.

The kitten said she was all right. And about some cream now——?

“Kitten, I can’t steal you from some child who’s out looking for you. It wouldn’t be right to invite you in.”

The kitten did not answer anything so naive and prudish. It merely said, with its liquid and trusting glance, that Cass was its god, beyond all gods. It frisked, and dabbled at a fly with its tiny black paw, and looked up at him to ask, “How’s that?”

“You are a natural suborner of perjury and extremely sweet,” admitted Cass, as he scooped it up and took it through the huge oak door, down the dim hallway to the spacious kitchen and to Mrs. Higbee, his cook-general.

Mrs. Higbee was sixty years old, and what is known as “colored,” which meant that she was not quite so dark of visage as Webb Wargate after his annual Florida tanning. She was graceful and sensible and full of love and loyalty. She was in no way a comic servant; she was like any other wholesome Middle-Class American, with an accent like that of any other emigree from Ohio. It must be said that Mrs. Higbee was not singularly intelligent; only slightly more intelligent than Mrs. Boone Havock or Mrs. Webb Wargate; not more than twice as intelligent as Mrs. Vincent Osprey. She was an Episcopalian, and continued to be one, for historic reasons, though she was not greatly welcomed in the more fashionable temples of that faith. Judge Timberlane depended on her good sense rather more than he did on that of George Hame or his friend Christabel Grau.

Mrs. Higbee took the black kitten, tickled it under the chin, and remarked. “Our cat?”

“I’m afraid so. I’ve stolen it.”

“Well, I understand a black cat is either very good luck or very bad luck, I forget which, so we can take a chance on it. What’s its name?”

“What is it? A her?”

“Let’s see. Um, I think so.”

“How about ‘Cleo’? You know—from Cleopatra. The Egyptians worshiped cats, and Cleopatra was supposed to be thin and dark and uncanny, like our kitten.”

But he was not thinking of Queen Cleopatra. He was thinking of Jinny Marshland, and the thought was uneasy with him.

“All right, Judge. You, Cleo, I’m going to get those fleas off you right away tomorrow, and no use your kicking.”

Cass marveled, “Has she got fleas?”

“Has—she—got—fleas! Judge, don’t you ever take a real good look at females?”

“Not often. Oh, Mrs. Higbee, you know I’m dining out tonight—at Dr. Drover’s.”

“Yes. You’ll get guinea hen. And that caramel ice cream. And Miss Grau. You won’t be home early.”

“Anything else I ought to know about the party?”

“Not a thing.... Will you look at that Cleo! She knows where the refrigerator is, already!”

In Cass’s set, which was largely above the $7000 line, it was as obligatory to dress for party dinners as in London, and anyway, he rather liked his solid tallness in black and white. He dawdled in his bedroom, not too moonily thinking of Jinny yet conscious of her. A bright girl like that would do things with this room which, he admitted, habit and indifference and too much inheritance of furniture had turned into a funeral vault. It was a long room with meager windows and a fireplace bricked-up years ago.

The wide bed was of ponderous black walnut, carved with cherubs that looked like grapes and grapes that looked like cherubs, and on it was a spread of yellowed linen. The dresser was of black walnut also, with a mortuary marble slab; the wardrobe was like three mummy-cases on end, though not so gay; and littered over everything were books on law and economics and Minnesota history.

“It is a gloomy room. No wonder Blanche insisted on sleeping in the pink room.”

He heard a friendly, entirely conversational “Meow?” and saw that the gallant Cleo had come upstairs to explore. All cats have to know about every corner of any house they choose to honor, but sometimes they are timid about caves under furniture. There have, indeed, been complaining and tiresome cats. But Cleo talked to him approvingly about her new home.

For so young and feminine a feline, she was a complete Henry M. Stanley. She looked at the old bedspread and patted its fringe. She circulated around under the old Chinese teakwood chair, in which no one had ever sat and which no one even partly sane would ever have bought. She glanced into the wardrobe, and cuffed a shoelace which tried to trip her.

She said, “All right—fine” to Cass, and went on to the other rooms.

In that stilly house he continued to hear her jaunty cat-slang till she had gone into the gray room, the last and largest of the six master’s-bedrooms. Then he jumped, at a long and terrified moan. He hurried across the hall. Cleo was crouched, staring at the bed upon which had died his mother, that silent and bitter woman christened Marah Nord.

The tiny animal shivered and whimpered till he compassionately snatched it up and cuddled it at his neck. It shivered once more and, as he took it back to his own den, it began timidly to purr, in a language older than the Egyptian.

“Too many ghosts in this house, Cleo. You must drive them out—you and she. I have lived too long among shadows.”