"And then," she continued, "and then one day when your luncheon has
disagreed with you--you walk into a gallery and see a portrait of--of an
old friend for whom in youth, when you were a dreamer, you professed a
sentimental attachment, and you exclaim that the artist is a discerning
man who has discovered the secret that she has guarded so closely. She's
sorry that she ever tried to console herself with baubles it's what
you've suspected all along. But you'll just run around to see for
yourself--to be sure of it." And she handed me my tea. "Come now,
confess. Where are your wits--I hear you don't lack them in court."
"Well," I said, "if that amuses you--"
"It does amuse me," said Nancy, twining her fingers across her knee and
regarding me smilingly, with parted lips, "it amuses me a lot--it's so
characteristic."
"But it's not true, it's unjust," I protested vigorously, smiling, too,
because the attack was so characteristic of her.
"What then?" she demanded.
"Well, in the first place, my luncheon didn't disagree with me. It never
does."
She laughed. "But the sentiment--come now--the sentiment? Do you perceive
any hint of emptiness--despair?"
Our chairs were very close, and she leaned forward a little.
"Emptiness or no emptiness," I said a little tremulously, "I know that I
haven't been so contented, so happy for a long time."
She sat very still, but turned her gaze on the fire.
"You really wouldn't want to find that, Hugh," she said in another voice,
at which I exclaimed. "No, I'm not being sentimental. But, to be serious,
I really shouldn't care to think that of you. I'd like to think of you as
a friend--a good friend--although we don't see very much of one another."
"But that's why I came, Nancy," I explained. "It wasn't just an
impulse--that is, I've been thinking of you a great deal, all along. I
miss you, I miss the way you look at things--your point of view. I can't
see any reason why we shouldn't see something of each other--now--"
She continued to stare into the fire.
"No," she said at length, "I suppose there isn't any reason." Her mood
seemed suddenly to change as she bent over and extinguished the flame
under the kettle. "After all," she added gaily, "we live in a tolerant
age, we've reached the years of discretion, and we're both too
conventional to do anything silly--even if we wanted to--which we don't.
We're neither of us likely to quarrel with the world as it is, I think,
and we might as well make fun of it together. We'll begin with our
friends. What do you think of Mr. Scherer's palace?"
"I hear you're building it for him."
"I told him to get Eyre," said Nancy, laughingly, "I was afraid he'd
repeat the Gallatin Park monstrosity on a larger scale, and Eyre's the
only man in this country who understands the French. It's been rather
amusing," she went on, "I've had to fight Hilda, and she's no mean
antagonist. How she hates me! She wanted a monstrosity, of course, a
modernized German rock-grotto sort of an affair, I can imagine. She's
been so funny when I've met her at dinner. 'I understand you take a great
interest in the house, Mrs. Durrett.' Can't you hear her?"
"Well, you did get ahead of her," I said.
"I had to. I couldn't let our first citizen build a modern Rhine castle,
could I? I have some public spirit left. And besides, I expect to build
on Grant Avenue myself."
"And leave here?"
"Oh, it's too grubby, it's in the slums," said Nancy. "But I really owe
you a debt of gratitude, Hugh, for the Scherers."
"I'm told Adolf's lost his head over you."
"It's not only over me, but over everything. He's so ridiculously proud
of being on the board of the Children's Hospital.... You ought to hear
him talking to old Mrs. Ogilvy, who of course can't get used to him at
all,--she always has the air of inquiring what he's doing in that galley.
She still thinks of him as Mr. Durrett's foreman."
The time flew. Her presence was like a bracing, tingling atmosphere in
which I felt revived and exhilarated, self-restored. For Nancy did not
question--she took me as I was. We looked out on the world, as it were,
from the same window, and I could not help thinking that ours, after all,
was a large view. The topics didn't matter--our conversation was fragrant
with intimacy; and we were so close to each other it seemed incredible
that we ever should be parted again. At last the little clock on the
mantel chimed an hour, she started and looked up.
"Why, it's seven, Hugh!" she exclaimed, rising. "I'd no idea it was so
late, and I'm dining with the Dickinsons. I've only just time to dress."
"It's been like a reunion, hasn't it?--a reunion after many years," I
said. I held her hand unconsciously--she seemed to be drawing me to her,
I thought she swayed, and a sudden dizziness seized me. Then she drew
away abruptly, with a little cry. I couldn't be sure about the cry,
whether I heard it or not, a note was struck in the very depths of me.
"Come in again," she said, "whenever you're not too busy." And a minute
later I found myself on the street.
This was the beginning of a new intimacy with Nancy, resembling the old
intimacy yet differing from it. The emotional note of our parting on the
occasion I have just related was not again struck, and when I went
eagerly to see her again a few days later I was conscious of
limitations,--not too conscious: the freedom she offered and which I
gladly accepted was a large freedom, nor am I quite sure that even I
would have wished it larger, though there were naturally moments when I
thought so: when I asked myself what I did wish, I found no answer.
Though I sometimes chafed, it would have been absurd of me to object to a
certain timidity or caution I began to perceive in her that had been
absent in the old Nancy; but the old Nancy had ceased to exist, and here
instead was a highly developed, highly specialized creature in whom I
delighted; and after taking thought I would not have robbed her of fine
acquired attribute. As she had truly observed, we were both conventional;
conventionality was part of the price we had willingly paid for
membership in that rarer world we had both achieved. It was a world, to
be sure, in which we were rapidly learning to take the law into our own
hands without seeming to defy it, in order that the fear of it might
remain in those less fortunately placed and endowed: we had begun with
the appropriation of the material property of our fellow-citizens, which
we took legally; from this point it was, of course, merely a logical step
to take--legally, too other gentlemen's human property--their wives, in
short: the more progressive East had set us our example, but as yet we
had been chary to follow it.
About this time rebellious voices were beginning to make themselves heard
in the literary wilderness proclaiming liberty--liberty of the sexes.
There were Russian novels and French novels, and pioneer English novels
preaching liberty with Nietzschean stridency, or taking it for granted. I
picked these up on Nancy's table.
"Reading them?" she said, in answer to my query. "Of course I'm reading
them. I want to know what these clever people are thinking, even if I
don't always agree with them, and you ought to read them too. It's quite
true what foreigners say about our men,--that they live in a groove, that
they haven't any range of conversation."
"I'm quite willing to be educated," I replied. "I haven't a doubt that I
need it."
She was leaning back in her chair, her hands behind her head, a posture
she often assumed. She looked up at me amusedly.
"I'll acknowledge that you're more teachable than most of them," she
said. "Do you know, Hugh, sometimes you puzzle me greatly. When you are
here and we're talking together I can never think of you as you are out
in the world, fighting for power--and getting it. I suppose it's part of
your charm, that there is that side of you, but I never consciously
realize it. You're what they call a dual personality."
"That's a pretty hard name!" I exclaimed.
She laughed.
"I can't help it--you are. Oh, not disagreeably so, quite
normally--that's the odd thing about you. Sometimes I believe that you
were made for something different, that in spite of your success you have
missed your 'metier.'"
"What ought I to have been?"
"How can I tell? A Goethe, perhaps--a Goethe smothered by a
twentieth-century environment. Your love of adventure isn't dead, it's
been merely misdirected, real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying
into unknown paths. Perhaps you haven't yet found yourself."
"How uncanny!" I said, stirred and startled.
"You have a taste for literature, you know, though you've buried it. Give
me Turgeniev. We'll begin with him...."
Her reading and the talks that followed it were exciting, amazingly
stimulating.... Once Nancy gave me an amusing account of a debate which
had taken place in the newly organized woman's discussion club to which
she belonged over a rather daring book by an English novelist. Mrs.
Dickinson had revolted.
"No, she wasn't really shocked, not in the way she thought she was," said
Nancy, in answer to a query of mine.
"How was she shocked, then?"
"As you and I are shocked."
"But I'm not shocked," I protested.
"Oh, yes, you are, and so am I--not on the moral side, nor is it the
moral aspect that troubles Lula Dickinson. She thinks it's the moral
aspect, but it's really the revolutionary aspect, the menace to those
precious institutions from which we derive our privileges and comforts."