"Last night," said he, uncertain whether she was trifling with him or
was really the innocent she pretended to be. "If I were you, I'd not
speak as friendlily as you did this morning--not before people."
"Why?" inquired she, her sweet young face still more perplexed.
"This isn't a small town out West," explained he. "It's New York. People
misunderstand--or rather--" He gave her a laughing, mischievous
glance--"or rather--they don't."
"I can't see anything to make a mystery about," declared the girl. "Why,
you act as if there were something to be ashamed of in coming to see
me."
He was observing her sharply. How could a girl live in the New York
atmosphere several years without getting a sensible point of view? Yet,
so far as he could judge, this girl was perfectly honest in her
ignorance. "Don't be foolish," said he. "Please accept the fact as I
give it to you. You mustn't let people see everything."
She made no attempt to conceal her dislike for this. "I won't be mixed
up in anything like that," said she, quite gently and without a
suggestion of pique or anger. "It makes me feel low--and it's horribly
common. Either we are going to be friends or we aren't. And if we are,
why, we're friends whenever we meet. I'm not ashamed of you. And if you
are ashamed of me, you can cut me out altogether."
His color deepened until his face was crimson. His eyes avoided hers. "I
was thinking chiefly of you," he said--and he honestly thought he was
speaking the whole truth.
"Then please don't do so any more," said she, turning to go. "I
understand about New York snobbishness. I want nothing to do with it."
He disregarded the danger of the door being opened at any moment. He
rushed to her and took her reluctant hand. "You mustn't blame me for the
ways of the world. I can't change them. Do be sensible, dearest. You're
only going to be here a few days longer. I've got that plan for you and
your father all thought out. I'll put it through at once. I don't want
the office talking scandal about us--do you?"
She looked at him pityingly. His eyes fell before hers. "I know it's a
weakness," he said, giving up trying to deceive her and himself. "But I
can't help it. I was brought up that way."
"Well--I wasn't. I see we can never be friends."
What a mess he had made of this affair! This girl must be playing upon
him. In his folly he had let her see how completely he was in her power,
and she was using that power to establish relations between them that
were the very opposite of what he desired--and must have. He must
control himself. "As you please," he said coldly, dropping her hand.
"I'm sorry, but unless you are reasonable I can do nothing for you." And
he went to his desk.
She hesitated a moment; as her back was toward him, he could not see her
expression. Without looking round she went out of his office. It took
all his strength to let her go. "She's bluffing," he muttered. "And
yet--perhaps she isn't. There may be people like that left in New York."
Whatever the truth, he simply must make a stand. He knew women; no woman
had the least respect for a man who let her rule--and this woman,
relying upon his weakness for her, was bent upon ruling. If he did not
make a stand, she was lost to him. If he did make a stand, he could no
more than lose her. Lose her! That thought made him sick at heart. "What
a fool I am about her!" he cried. "I must hurry things up. I must get
enough of her--must get through it and back to my sober senses."
That was a time of heavy pressure of important affairs. He furiously
attacked one task after another, only to abandon each in turn. His mind,
which had always been his obedient, very humble servant, absolutely
refused to obey. He turned everything over to his associates or to
subordinates, fighting all morning against the longing to send for her.
At half past twelve he strode out of the office, putting on the air of
the big man absorbed in big affairs. He descended to the street. But
instead of going up town to keep an appointment at a business lunch he
hung round the entrance to the opposite building.
She did not appear until one o'clock. Then out she came--with the head
office boy!--the good-looking, young head office boy.
Norman's contempt for himself there reached its lowest ebb. For his
blood boiled with jealousy--jealousy of his head office boy!--and about
an obscure little typewriter! He followed the two, keeping to the other
side of the street. Doubtless those who saw and recognized him fancied
him deep in thought about some mighty problem of corporate law or
policy, as he moved from and to some meeting with the great men who
dictated to a nation of ninety millions what they should buy and how
much they should pay for it. He saw the two enter a quick-lunch
restaurant--struggled with a crack-brained impulse to join them--dragged
himself away to his appointment.
He was never too amiable in dealing with his clients, because he had
found that, in self-protection, to avoid being misunderstood and largely
increasing the difficulties of amicable intercourse, he must keep the
feel of iron very near the surface. That day he was for the first time
irascible. If the business his clients were engaged in had been less
perilous and his acute intelligence not indispensable, he would have
cost the firm dear. But in business circles, where every consideration
yields to that of material gain, the man with the brain may conduct
himself as he pleases--and usually does so, when he has strength of
character.
All afternoon he wrestled with himself to keep away from the office. He
won, but it was the sort of victory that gives the winner the chagrin
and despondency of defeat. At home, late in the afternoon, he found
Josephine in the doorway, just leaving. "You'll walk home with me--won't
you?" she said. And, taken unawares and intimidated by guilt, he could
think of no excuse.
Some one--probably a Frenchman--has said that there are always in a
man's life three women--the one on the way out, the one that is, and the
one that is to be. Norman--ever the industrious trafficker with the
feminine that the man of the intense vitality necessary to a great
career of action is apt to be--was by no means new to the situation in
which he now found himself. But never before had the circumstances been
so difficult. Josephine in no way resembled any woman with whom he had
been involved; she was the first he had taken seriously. Nor did the
other woman resemble the central figure in any of his affairs. He did
not know what she was like, how to classify her; but he did know that
she was unlike any woman he had ever known and that his feeling for her
was different--appallingly different--from any emotion any other woman
had inspired in him. So--a walk alone with Josephine--a first talk with
her after his secret treachery--was no light matter. "Deeper and
deeper," he said to himself. "Where is this going to end?"
She began by sympathizing with him for having so much to do--"and father
says you can get through more work than any man he ever knew, not
excluding himself." She was full of tenderness and compliment, of a kind
of love that made him feel as the dirt beneath his feet. She respected
him so highly; she believed in him so entirely. The thought of her
discovering the truth, or any part of it, gave him a sensation of
nausea. He was watching her out of the corner of his eye. Never had he
seen her more statelily beautiful. If he should lose her! "I'm
mad--_mad_!" he said to himself.
"Josephine is as high above her as heaven above earth. What is there to
her, anyhow? Not brains--nor taste--nor such miraculous beauty. Why do
I make an ass of myself about her? I ought to go to my doctor."
"I don't believe you're listening to what I'm saying," laughed
Josephine.
"My head's in a terrible state," replied he. "I can't think of
anything."
"Don't try to talk or to listen, dearest," said she in the sweet and
soothing tone that is neither sweet nor soothing to a man in a certain
species of unresponsive mood. "This air will do you good. It doesn't
annoy you for me to talk to you, does it?"
The question was one of those which confidently expects, even demands, a
sincere and strenuous negative for answer. It fretted him, this
matter-of-course assumption of hers that she could not but be altogether
pleasing, not to say enchanting to him. Her position, her wealth, the
attentions she had received, the flatteries--In her circumstances could
it be in human nature not to think extremely well of oneself? And he
admitted that she had the right so to think. Still--For the first time
she scraped upon his nerves. His reply, "Annoy me? The contrary," was
distinctly crisp. To an experienced ear there would have sounded the
faint warning under-note of sullenness.
But she, believing in his love and in herself, saw nothing, suspected
nothing. "We know each other so thoroughly," she went on, "that we don't
need to make any effort. How congenial we are! I always understand you.
I feel such a sense of the perfect freedom and perfect frankness between
us. Don't you?"
"You have wonderful intuitions," said he.
It was the time to alarm him by coldness, by capriciousness. But how
could she know it? And she was in love--really in love--not with
herself, not with love, but with him. Thus, she made the mistake of all
true lovers in those difficult moments. She let him see how absolutely
she was his. Nor did the spectacle of her sincerity, of her belief in
his sincerity put him in any better humor with himself.
The walk was a mere matter of a dozen blocks. He thought it would never
end. "You are sure you aren't ill?" she said, when they were at her
door--a superb bronze door it was, opening into a house of the splendor
that for the acclimated New Yorker quite conceals and more than
compensates absence of individual taste. "You don't look ill. But you
act queerly."
"I'm often this way when they drive me too hard down town."
She looked at him with fond admiration; he might have been better
pleased had there not been in the look a suggestion of the possessive.
"How they do need you! Father says--But I mustn't make you any vainer
than you are."
He usually loved compliment, could take it in its rawest form with fine
human gusto. Now, he did not care enough about that "father says" to
rise to her obvious bait. "I'm horribly tired," he said. "Shall I see
you to-morrow? No, I guess not--not for several days. You understand?"
"Perfectly," replied she. "I'll miss you dreadfully, but my father has
trained me well. I know I mustn't be selfish--and tempt you to neglect
things."
"Thank you," said he. "I must be off."
"You'll come in--just a moment?" Her eyes sparkled. "The butler will
have sense enough to go straight away--and the small reception room will
be quite empty as usual."
He could not escape. A few seconds and he was alone with her in the
little room--how often had he--they--been glad of its quiet and
seclusion on such occasions! She laid her hand upon his shoulders, gazed
at him proudly. "It was here," said she, "that you first kissed me. Do
you remember?"
To take her gaze from his face and to avoid seeing her look of loving
trust, he put his arms round her. "I don't deserve you," he said--one of
those empty pretenses of confession that yet give the human soul a sense
of truthfulness.
"You'd not say that if you knew how happy you make me," murmured she.
The welcome sound of a step in the hall give him his release. When he
was in the street, he wiped his hot face with his handkerchief. "And I
thought I had no moral sense left!" he reflected--not the first man, in
this climax day of the triumph of selfish philosophies, to be astonished
by the discovery that the dead hands of heredity and tradition have a
power that can successfully defy reason.
He started to walk back home, on impulse took a passing taxi and went to
his club. It was the Federal. They said of it that no man who amounted
to anything in New York could be elected a member, because any man on
his way up could not but offend one or more of the important persons in
control. Most of its members were nominated at birth or in childhood and
elected as soon as they were twenty-one. Norman was elected after he
became a man of consequence. He regarded it as one of the signal
triumphs of his career; and beyond question it was proof of his power,
of the eagerness of important men, despite their jealousy, to please him
and to be in a position to get the benefit of his brains should need
arise. Norman's whole career, like every career great and small, in the
arena of action, was a derision of the ancient moralities, a
demonstration of the value of fear as an aid to success. Even his
friends--and he had as many as he cared to have--had been drawn to him
by the desire to placate him, to stand well where there was danger in
standing ill.
Until dinner time he stood at the club bar, drinking one cocktail after
another with that supreme indifference to consequences to health which
made his fellow men gape and wonder--and cost an occasional imitator
health, and perhaps life. Nor did the powerful liquor have the least
effect upon him, apparently. Possibly he was in a better humor, but not
noticeably so. He dined at the club and spent the evening at bridge,
winning several hundred dollars. He enjoyed the consideration he
received at that club, for his fellow members being men of both social
and financial consequence, their conspicuous respect for him was a
concentrated essence of general adulation. He lingered on, eating a
great supper with real appetite. He went home in high good humor with
himself. He felt that he was a conqueror born, that such things of his
desire as did not come could be forced to come. He no longer regarded
his passion for the nebulous girl of many personalities as a descent
from dignity. Was he not king? Did not his favor give her whatever rank
he pleased? Might not a king pick and choose, according to his fancy?
Let the smaller fry grow nervous about these matters of caste. They did
well to take care lest they should fall. But not he! He had won thus far
by haughtiness, never by cringing. His mortal day would be that in which
he should abandon his natural tactics for the modes of lesser men. True,
only a strong head could remain steady in these giddy altitudes of
self-confidence. But was not his head strong?
And without hesitation he called up the vision that made him
delirious-and detained it and reveled in it until sleep came.