"I suppose so," replied he sourly.
"Are you worried about the expense? Is it costing you too much, this
helping father? Are you sorry you went into it?"
He was silent.
"You are sorry?" she exclaimed. "You feel that you are wasting your
money?"
His generosity forbade him to keep up the pretense that might aid him in
his project. "No," he said hastily. "No, indeed. This expense--it's
nothing." He flushed, hung his head in shame before his own weakness, as
he added, in complete surrender, "I'm very glad to be helping your
father."
"I knew you would be!" she cried triumphantly. "I knew it!" And she
flung her arms round his neck and kissed him.
"That's better!" he said with a foolishly delighted laugh. "I believe we
are beginning to get acquainted."
"Yes, indeed. I feel quite different already."
"I hoped so. You are coming to your senses?"
"Perhaps. Only--" She laid a beautiful white pleading hand upon his
shoulder and gazed earnestly into his eyes--"please don't frighten me
with that talk--and those other kisses."
He looked at her uncertainly. "Come round in your own way," he said at
last. "I don't want to hurry you. I suppose every bird has its own way
of dropping from a perch."
"You don't like my way?" she inquired.
It was said archly but also in the way that always made him vaguely
uneasy, made him feel like one facing a mystery which should be explored
cautiously. "It is graceful," he admitted, with a smile since he could
not venture to frown. "Graceful--but slow."
She laughed--and he could not but feel that the greater laughter in her
too innocent eyes was directed at him. She talked of other things--and
he let her--charmed, yet cursing his folly, his slavery, the while.
X
Many a time he had pitied a woman for letting him get away from her,
when she obviously wished to hold him and failed solely because she did
not understand her business. Like every other man, he no sooner began to
be attracted by a woman than he began to invest her with a mystery and
awe which she either could dissipate by forcing him to see the truth of
her commonplaceness or could increase into a power that would enslave
him by keeping him agitated and interested and ever satisfied yet ever
baffled. But no woman had shown this supreme skill in the art of
love--until Dorothy Hallowell. She exasperated him. She fascinated him.
She kept him so restless that his professional work was all but
neglected. Was it her skill? Was it her folly? Was she simply leading
him on and on, guided blindly by woman's instinct to get as much as she
could and to give as little as she dared? Or was she protected by a real
indifference to him--the strongest, indeed the only invulnerable armor a
woman can wear? Was she protecting herself? Or was it merely that he,
weakened by his infatuation, was doing the protecting for her?
Beside these distracting questions, the once all-important matter of
professional and worldly ambition seemed not worth troubling about. They
even so vexed him that he had become profoundly indifferent as to
Josephine. He saw her rarely. When they were alone he either talked
neutral subjects or sat almost mute, hardly conscious of her presence.
He received her efforts at the customary caressings with such stolidity
that she soon ceased to annoy him. They reduced their outward show of
affection to a kiss when they met, another when they separated. He was
tired--always tired--worn out--half sick--harassed by business
concerns. He did not trouble himself about whether his listless excuses
would be accepted or not. He did not care what she thought--or might
think--or might do.
Josephine was typical of the women of the comfortable class. For them
the fundamentally vital matters of life--the profoundly harassing
questions of food, clothing, and shelter--are arranged and settled. What
is there left to occupy their minds? Little but the idle emotions they
manufacture and spread foglike over their true natures to hide the
barrenness, the monotony. They fool with phrases about art or love or
religion or charity--for none of those things can be vivid realities to
those who are swathed and stupefied in a luxury they have not to take
the least thought to provide for themselves. Like all those women,
Josephine fancied herself complex--fancied she was a person of variety
and of depth because she repeated with a slight change of wording the
things she read in clever books or heard from clever men. There seemed
to Norman to be small enough originality, personality, to the ordinary
man of the comfortable class; but there was some, because his necessity
of struggling with and against his fellow men in the several arenas of
active life compelled him to be at least a little of a person. In the
women there seemed nothing at all--not even in Josephine. When he
listened to her, when he thought of her, now--he was calmly critical. He
judged her as a human specimen--judged much as would have old Newton
Hallowell to whom the whole world was mere laboratory.
She bored him now--and he made no effort beyond bare politeness to
conceal the fact from her. The situation was saved from becoming
intolerable by that universal saver of intolerable situations, vanity.
She had the ordinary human vanity. In addition, she had the peculiar
vanity of woman, the creation of man's flatteries lavished upon the sex
he alternately serves and spurns. In further addition, she had the
vanity of her class--the comfortable class that feels superior to the
mass of mankind in fortune, in intellect, in taste, in everything
desirable. Heaped upon all these vanities was her vanity of high social
rank--and atop the whole her vanity of great wealth. None but the
sweetest and simplest of human beings can stand up and remain human
under such a weight as this. If we are at all fair in our judgments of
our fellow men, we marvel that the triumphant class--especially the
women, whose point of view is never corrected by the experiences of
practical life--are not more arrogant, more absurdly forgetful of the
oneness and the feebleness of humanity.
Josephine was by nature one of the sweet and simple souls. And her love
for Norman, after the habit of genuine love, had destroyed all the
instinct of coquetry. The woman--or, the man--has to be indeed
interesting, indeed an individuality, to remain interesting when
sincerely in love, and so elevated above the petty but potent sex
trickeries. Josephine, deeply in love, was showing herself to Norman in
her undisguised natural sweet simplicity--and monotony. But, while men
admire and reverence a sweet and simple feminine soul--and love her in
plays and between the covers of a book and when she is talking
highfaluting abstractions of morality--and wax wroth with any other man
who ignores or neglects her--they do not in their own persons become
infatuated with her. Passion is too much given to moods for that; it has
a morbid craving for variety, for the mysterious and the baffling.
The only thing that saves the race from ruin through passion is the
rarity of those by nature or by art expert in using it. Norman felt that
he was paying the penalty for his persistent search for this rarity; one
of the basest tricks of destiny upon man is to give him what he
wants--wealth, or fame, or power, or the woman who enslaves. Norman
felt that destiny had suddenly revealed its resolve to destroy him by
giving him not one of the things he wanted, but all.
The marriage was not quite two weeks away. About the time that the
ordinary plausible excuses for Norman's neglect, his abstraction, his
seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine's vanity came forward to
explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour
approached--so vanity assured her--the man who loved her as her complex
soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with
that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A
large income, fashionable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a
maid--these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and
soul. How? Why? No one knew. But everyone admitted, indeed saw, the
truth. Further, these beings--these great ladies--according to all the
accredited poets, novelists, and other final authorities upon
life--always inspired the most awed and worshipful and diffident
feelings in their lovers. Therefore, she--the great lady--was getting
but her due. She would have liked something else--something common and
human--much better. But, having always led her life as the conventions
dictated, never as the common human heart yearned, she had no keen sense
of dissatisfaction to rouse her to revolt and to question. Also, she was
breathlessly busy with trousseau and the other arrangements for the
grand wedding.
One afternoon she telephoned Norman asking him to come on his way home
that evening. "I particularly wish to see you," she said. He thought her
voice sounded rather queer, but he did not take sufficient interest to
speculate about it. When he was with her in the small drawing room on
the second floor, he noted that her eyes were regarding him strangely.
He thought he understood why when she said:
"Aren't you going to kiss me, Fred?"
He put on his good-natured, slightly mocking smile. "I thought you were
too busy for that sort of thing nowadays." And he bent and kissed her
waiting lips. Then he lit a cigarette and seated himself on the sofa
beside her--the sofa at right angles to the open fire. "Well?" he said.
She gazed into the fire for full a minute before she said in a voice of
constraint, "What became of that--that girl--the Miss Hallowell----"
She broke off abruptly. There was a pause choked with those dizzy
pulsations that fill moments of silence and strain. Then with a sob she
flung herself against his breast and buried her face in his shoulder.
"Don't answer!" she cried. "I'm ashamed of myself. I'm ashamed--ashamed!"
He put his arm about her shoulders. "But why shouldn't I answer?" said
he in the kindly gentle tone we can all assume when a matter that
agitates some one else is wholly indifferent to us.
"Because--it was a--a trap," she answered hysterically. "Fred--there was
a man here this afternoon--a man named Tetlow. He got in only because
he said he came from you."
Norman laughed quietly. "Poor Tetlow!" he said. "He used to be your head
clerk--didn't he?"
"And one of my few friends."
"He's not your friend, Fred!" she cried, sitting upright and speaking
with energy that quivered in her voice and flashed in her fine brown
eyes. "He's your enemy--a snake in the grass--a malicious,
poisonous----"
Norman's quiet, even laugh interrupted. "Oh, no," said he. "Tetlow's a
good fellow. Anything he said would be what he honestly
believed--anything he said about me."
"He pleaded that he was doing it for your good," she went on with scorn.
"They always do--like the people that write father wicked anonymous
letters. He--this man Tetlow--he said he wanted me for the sake of my
love for you to save you from yourself."
Norman glanced at her with amused eyes. "Well, why don't you? But then
you _are_ doing it. You're marrying me, aren't you?"
Again she put her head upon his shoulder. "Indeed I am!" she cried. "And
I'd be a poor sort if I let a sneak shake my confidence in you."
He patted her shoulder, and there was laughter in his voice as he said,
"But I never professed to be trustworthy."
"Oh, I know you _used_ to--" She laughed and kissed his cheek. "Never
mind. I've heard. But while you were engaged to me--about to marry
me--why, you simply couldn't!"
"Couldn't what?" inquired he.
"Do you want me to tell you what he said?"
"I think I know. But do as you like."
"Maybe I'd better tell you. I seem to want to get rid of it."
"Then do."
"It was about that girl." She sat upright and looked at him for
encouragement. He nodded. She went on: "He said that if I asked you, you
would not dare deny you were--were--giving her money."
"Her and her father."
She shrank, startled. Then her lips smiled bravely, and she said, "He
didn't say anything about her father."
"No. That was my own correction of his story."
She looked at him with wonder and doubt. "You aren't--_doing_ it, Fred!"
she exclaimed.