"The trouble with you is, you haven't thought about these things, but
have accepted the judgment of others about them. And what others? Why,
sheep, cattle, parrots--the doddering dolts who make public opinion in
any given place or at any given time."
She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
"Another point. You are trying to have a career. Now, that's something
new in the world--for women to have careers. You face at best a hard
enough struggle. You must do very superior work indeed, to convince
anyone you are entitled to equal consideration with men as a worker.
Why handicap yourself by creating an impression that you are eccentric,
bizarre?"
Neva looked astonished. "I don't understand," said she.
"What is the normal mode for a woman? To be feminine--careful of her
looks, fond of dress, as pleasing to the eye as possible. Do you strive
to be normal in every way but the one way of making a career, and so
force people to see you're a real woman, a well-balanced human being?"
Neva had the expression of one in the dark, toward whom light is
beginning to glimmer.
"A woman," proceeded he, the impersonal instructor, "a woman going in
for a career and so, laying herself open to suspicion of being
'strong-minded' and 'masculine' and all sorts of hard, unsympathetic,
unfeminine things that are to the mutton-headed a sign of want of
balance--a woman should be careful to remove that impression. How? By
being ultra-feminine, most fashionable in dress, most alluring in
appearance-- Do you follow me?"
"Perfectly," said Neva. "You've given me a great deal to think
about.... Why, how blind we are to the obvious! Now that I see it, I
feel like a fool."
"Use the same good taste in your own appearance that you use in bringing
out beauty in your surroundings. Note that----"
Boris paused abruptly; his passion was betraying itself both in his eyes
and in his voice. But he saw that Neva had, as usual, forgotten the
teacher in the lesson. He felt relieved, yet irritated, too. Never
before had he found a woman who could maintain, outwardly at least, the
fiction of friendship unalloyed with passion. "She acts exactly as if
she were another man," said he discontentedly to himself, "except when
she treats me as if I were another woman."
He did not return to the subject of her appearance. And his judgment
that he had said enough--and his confidence in her good taste--were
confirmed a few days later. She came in a new hat, a new blouse, and
with her hair done as he had suggested. The changes were in themselves
slight; but now that her complexion had been cleared and taken on its
proper color--a healthy pallor that made her eyes sparkle and glow,
every little change for the better wrought marvels. A good complexion
alone has redeemed many a woman from downright ugliness; Neva's
complexion now gave her regular features and blue-white teeth and
changeful, mysterious eyes their opportunity. The new blouse, one of
the prettiest he had ever seen, took away the pinched-in look across the
shoulders to which he had objected. As for her hair, it was no longer a
_melange_ of light brown and dark brown, but a halo of harmonizing tints
from deepest red to brightest gold, a merry playground for sunbeams. He
was astounded, startled. "Why, she has really marvelous hair!" he
muttered. Then he laughed aloud; she, watching him for signs of his
opinion, wore an expression like a child's before its sphinxlike
teacher. She echoed his laugh.
"My advice about the mirror was not so bad, eh?" said he.
"No, indeed," replied she, with the first gleam of coquetry he had ever
seen.
Puzzling over her seeming unconsciousness of the, to him, all-important
fact that she was a woman and he a man, he decided that it must be a
deliberately chosen policy, the result of things she had heard about
him. He had always avoided talking of his conquests, though he
appreciated that it was the quick and easy road to a fresh conquest; but
it pleased him to feel that his reputation as a rake, a man before whom
women struck the flag at the first sign from him, was as great as his
fame for painting. And it seemed to him that, if Neva had heard, as she
must, she could not but be in a receptive state of mind. "That's why
she's on her guard," he concluded. "She's secretly at war with the
old-fashioned notions in which she was bred."
He could not long keep silent. "Has somebody been slandering me to my
friend?" asked he abruptly, one day, after they had both been silently
at work for nearly an hour.
She paused, glanced at him, shook her head--a very charming head it was
now, with the hair free about her temples and ears and in a loose coil
low upon her neck. "No," said she, apparently with candor. "Why?"
"It seemed to me you were peculiar of late--distant with me."
"Really, it isn't so. You know I'd not permit anyone to speak against
you to me."
"But--well, a man of my sort always has a lot of stories going round
about him--things not usually regarded as discreditable--but you might
not take so lenient a view."
Her face turned toward her easel again, her expression unreadably
reserved.
"Not that I've been a saint," he went on. "We who have the artistic
temperament-- What does that temperament mean but abnormal sensibility
of nerves, all the nerves?"
"That is true," assented she.
Then she was not so cold as she seemed! She understood what it was to
feel. "Of course," he proceeded, "I appreciate your ideas on those
subjects. At least I assume you have the ideas of the people among whom
you were brought up."
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, as if she were carefully
choosing her words, "I've learned that standards of morals, like
standards of taste, are individual. There are many things about human
nature as I see it in--in my friends--that I do not understand. But I
realize I deserve no credit for being what I am when I have not the
slightest temptation to be otherwise."
Silence again, as he wondered whether her remark was a chance shot or a
subtle way of informing him that, if he were thinking of her as a woman
and a possibility, he was wasting energy. "What I wished to say," he
finally ventured, "was that I had the right to expect you to accept me
for what I am to you. You cannot judge of what I may or may not have
been to anyone else, of what others may or may not have been to me."
"What you are to me," replied she earnestly, "I've no right, or wish, to
go beyond that."
"And," pursued he with some raillery, "don't forget we should be
grateful for all varieties of human nature--the valleys that make the
peaks, the peaks that make the abysses. What a world for suicide it
would be, if human nature were one vast prairie and life one long Sunday
in Battle Field.... What did you hear about me?"
"Nothing that interested me."
"Really?" He could not help showing pique.
"Nothing that would have changed me, if I had believed."
"I warned you it might be true," he interrupted.
"True or false, it was not part of the Boris Raphael I admire and
respect."
He shifted his eyes, colored, was silenced. He did not like her frank
friendliness; he did not want her respect, or the sort of admiration
that goes with respect. But he somehow felt cheap and mean and ashamed
before her, had a highly uncomfortable sense of being an inferior before
a superior. He was glad to drop the subject. "At least," reflected he,
"the longer the delay, the richer the prize. She was meant for some
man. And what other has my chance?"
And, meanwhile, following his instinct and his custom, he showed her of
his all-sided nature only what he thought she would like to see; time
enough to be what he wished, when he should have got her where he
wished--a re-creation for the gratification of as many sides of him as
she had, or developed, capacity to delight.
*VII*
*A WOMAN'S POINT OF VIEW*
Narcisse, summoned by a telephone message, went to Fosdick's house. As
she entered the imposing arched entrance, Amy appeared, on the way to
take her dog for a drive. "It's father wants to see you," said she.
"I'll take you to him, and go. I'd send Zut alone, but the coachman and
footman object to driving the carriage with no one but him in it.
Fancy! Aren't some people too silly in their snobbishness--and the upper
class isn't in it with the lower classes, is it?"
"You don't begin to know how amusing you are sometimes," said Narcisse.
"Oh, I'm always forgetting. You've got ideas like Armstrong. You know
him?"
"I've met him," said Narcisse indifferently. "You say your father wants
to see me?"
Amy looked disappointed. Her mind was full of Armstrong, and she wished
to talk about him with Narcisse, to tell her all she thought and felt,
or thought she thought and felt. "There's been a good deal of talk that
he and I are engaged," she persisted. "You had heard it?"
"I never hear things of that sort," said Narcisse coldly. "I'm too
busy."
"Well--there's nothing in it. We're simply friends."
"I'm sorry," said Narcisse.