simply because all the people about you think that way--if one can call
the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of
superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the
great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or
a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can
fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing
silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try
to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its
ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those
about one are incapable of playing any other part?”
“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give
yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”
“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of
life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and--”
“Is that important--styles, I mean?”
“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend
so much time and thought in making anything that was not important?
There is nothing more important.”
“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress
so much?”
“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women
talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men
and dress--fish and nets.”
Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.
“Do you go South next month, Marian?”
“Yes--about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby--Mr.
Berersford here--always fishes in Florida in January.”
The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of
the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of
the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good
English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and
indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.
As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the
evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”
“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I
want to go on to Edith’s.”
Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr.
Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the
answer.
“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever
one--none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular
hermit.”
“I think he’s very handsome--don’t you, Marian?”
“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.
Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was
still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he
said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever
saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she
say that was startling?”
Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great
house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.
“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time.
Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing
Miss Trevor.”
When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of
the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair
absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney
and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight
smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat
looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate
yet strong.
“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.
“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.
“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it?
And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other
isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether
he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so
excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And
the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”
“Politics is like everything else--interesting if you understand what it
is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without
a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If
they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than
they are now. But you--what have you been doing?”
“I--oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian
laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park
every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”
“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and
splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I
wish--that is, sometimes I wish--that I had learned to amuse myself in
some less violent and exhausting way.”
“Marian--I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”
Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week
Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”
“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the
others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains
or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such
way.”
“You should go about more.”
“Go--where?”
“To see people.”
“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them--all day
long.”
“Yes--but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be
amused--to dinners for instance.”
“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work
at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite
object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody.
With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is
exhausted.”
“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed
until you found out all there was, and then you’d--take to your heels.”
“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more.
Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her.
I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as
vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it.
And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”
“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to
hold?”
“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are
talking about, but through another kind--quite different. Women are
so lazy and so dependent--dependent upon men for homes, for money, for
escort even.”
Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot--at least she
moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a
shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”
“Perhaps--in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to
marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported
herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is
dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a
labour-saving device.”
Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she
said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”
“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as
self-complacent as any other man.”
They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with
her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon--the air dazzling, intoxicating.
He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall,
slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment
perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and
attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each
at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.
“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.
“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday
night.”
“Thank you,” said Howard.
Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard
wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.
* * * * *
He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you
like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set
before them.
“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.
“Yes--so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s
marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s
generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’
But he’s a decent fellow--good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his
tastes, and nothing but money.”
Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden
consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney
asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.
“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.
“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he
bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is
full of it.”
“Full of what?”
“Of weary women--weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just
one interest and that usually small and dull--stocks or iron or real
estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English
women--stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be
interested. Their husbands bore them. So--well, what is the natural
temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”
“It’s like Paris--like France?”
“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not
fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule.”
“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood
coming out--the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they
can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it
well.”
“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman
loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”
Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed
thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée--the first temptation that had
entered his loneliness since Alice died.
In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following
her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she
was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of
the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true
relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for
the gap between him and Alice to close--that gap of which she was more
acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really
was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him.
Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but
neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon
a pedestal if the opportunity presses.
In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal
masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit
of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most
alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once
appreciative and worthy of appreciation.
Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of
the open air--of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a
cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the
sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred
window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and
freedom. And Marian was of his own kind--like the women among whom he
had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be,
but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him--a woman to
love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire
him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring
into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be
cold and cheerless.
He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love
to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to
resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for
the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why
not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s
engaged--her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll
let me.” And he resumed his idealising.
At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long
process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it--and
far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the
draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own
concocting, and drank it off.
He was in love.
XI.
TRESPASSING.
For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to
the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and
went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving
nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better
success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead
of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from
the aigrette in her hat to her heels--a long, narrow, graceful figure,
dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most
intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as
if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight
hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives
and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded
crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon
found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home--in
Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.
“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.
“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his
happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”
“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made
the walk in the Park a certainty.
“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”
“I see that you don’t.”
“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you
can’t help seeing it--and don’t in the least mind?”
“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine
winter day?”
“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her
eyes.
“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a
laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”
“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. _I_ have shut out
to-morrow ever since I saw you.”
“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to
look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.
“Yes--my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is----”
“Well?”
“Your engagement, of course.”
Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist
the contagion.
“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours
is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full
of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and
disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can
waive yours for the moment?”
“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”
“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not
content to have me here.”
They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they
turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss
Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.
“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of
myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was
going and--didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”
“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your
universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your
brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never
wobble in your path--everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a
wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer
coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass
very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note
a little variation in your movement--a very little, and soon over. They
probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to
you--close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair
cruelly singed--and then hurried sadly away. And----”
“And--what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were
shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there
before.
“And--and----” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep
in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the
colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And--I love you.”
“Oh”--Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”
“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you--so
tall, so straight, so--so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he
laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”
“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’
silence.
“Yes--trying--or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your
way and I mine.”
Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her
life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she
was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to
restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in
wonder and delighted terror.
“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.
“Because you are stronger than I--and I am afraid--yet I--well--I like
it.”
“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than
I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention
the gentleman’s name?”
“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I
did a moment ago.”
“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”
“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace
engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading
into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning--or worse?”
“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our
taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can
dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day
in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of
success as the crown.”
“But failure might come.”
“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside
thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy
each of the other and both of our great love.”
Again they were walking in silence.
“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has
come over me? But--you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish
everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”
“Oh, I’ll work--in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want.
But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I
understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing
to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger.
And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open
winter sky, here is--you.”
They were in the Avenue again--“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood
of carriages rolled about them.
“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh
Street. “You will be famous.”
“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”
“The price? But you are willing to work?”
“Work--yes. But not to lie, not to cheat, not to exchange self-respect
for self-contempt--at least, I think, I hope not.”
“But why should that be necessary?”
“It may not be if I am free--free to meet every situation as it arises,
with no responsibility for others resting upon me in the decision. If I
had a wife, how could I be free? I might be forced to sell myself--not
for fame but for a bare living. Suppose choice between freedom with
poverty and comfort with self-contempt were put squarely at me, and I a
married man. She would decide, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, and if she were the right sort of a woman, decide instantly for
self-respect.”
“Of course--if I asked her. But do you imagine that when a man loves a
woman he lets her know?”
“It would be a crime not to let her know.”
“It would be a greater crime to put her to the test--if she were a woman
brought up, say, as you have been.”
“How can you say that? How can you so overestimate the value of mere
incidentals?”
“How can I? Because I have known poverty--have known what it was to
look want in the face. Because I have seen women, brought up as you have
been, crawling miserably about in the sloughs of poverty. Because I have
seen the weaknesses of human nature and know that they exist in me--yes,
and in you, for all your standing there so strong and arrogant and
self-reliant. It is easy to talk of misery when one does not understand
it. It is easy to be the martyr of an hour or a day. But to drag into a
sordid and squalid martyrdom the woman one loves--well, the man does not
live who would do it, if he knew what I know, had seen what I have seen.
No, love is a luxury of the rich and the poor and the steady-going. It
is not for my kind, not for me.”
They were pausing at Mrs. Carnarvon’s door.
“I shall not come in this afternoon,” he said. “But to-morrow--if I
don’t come in to-day, don’t you think it will be all right for me to
come then?”
“I shall expect you,” she said.
The talk of those who had come in for tea seemed artificial and flat.
She soon went up-stairs, eager to be alone. Mechanically she went to her
desk to write her customary daily letter to Danvers. She looked vacantly
at the pen and paper, and then she remembered why she was sitting there.
“You are a traitor,” she said to her reflection in the mirror over the
desk. “But you will pay for your treason. Has not one a right to that
for which she is willing to pay?”
XII.
MAKING THE MOST OF A MONTH.
To be sure of a woman a man must be confident either of his own powers
or of her absolute frankness and honesty. It was self-assurance that
made Edward Danvers blindly confident of Marian.
His father, a man with none but selfish uses for his fellow men, had
given him a pains-taking training as a vigilant guard for a great
fortune. His favourite maxim was, “Always look for motives.” And he once
summed up his own character and idea of life by saying: “I often wake at
night and laugh as I think how many men are lying awake in their beds,
scheming to get something out of me for nothing.”
There could be but one result of such an education by such an educator.
Danvers was acutely suspicious, saved from cynicism and misanthropy
by his vanity only. He was the familiar combination of credulity and
incredulity, now trusting not at all and again trusting with an utter
incapacity to judge. Had he been far more attractive personally, he
might still have failed to find genuine affection. To be liked for one’s
self alone or even chiefly is rarely the lot of any human being who has
a possession that is all but universally coveted--wealth or position or
power or beauty.
Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she
perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else
of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness,
his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his
narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities--his kindness of heart,
his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense
of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had
much in common--the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and
the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting.
He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England
and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She
undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and
bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.