From anger against Victor Dorn, Jane passed to anger against herself.
This was soon followed by a mood of self-denunciation, by astonishment
at the follies of which she had been guilty, by shame for them. She
could not scoff or scorn herself out of the infatuation. But at least
she could control herself against yielding to it. Recalling and
reviewing all he had said, she--that is, her vanity--decided that the
most important remark, the only really important remark, was his
declaration of disbelief in her sincerity. "The reason he has repulsed
me--and a very good reason it is--is that he thinks I am simply amusing
myself. If he thought I was in earnest, he would act very differently.
Very shrewd of him!"
Did she believe this? Certainly not. But she convinced herself that
she believed it, and so saved her pride. From this point she proceeded
by easy stages to doubting whether, if Victor had taken her at her
word, she would have married him. And soon she had convinced herself
that she had gone so far only through her passion for conquest, that at
the first sign of his yielding her good sense would have asserted
itself and she could have retreated.
"He knew me better than I knew myself," said she--not so thoroughly
convinced as her pride would have liked, but far better content with
herself than in those unhappy hours of humiliation after her last talk
with him.
From the beginning of her infatuation there had been only a few days,
hardly more than a few hours, when the voice of prudence and good sense
had been silenced. Yes, he was right; they were not suited to each
other, and a marriage between them would have been absurd. He did
belong to a different, to a lower class, and he could never have
understood her. Refinement, taste, the things of the life of luxury
and leisure were incomprehensible to him. It might be unjust that the
many had to toil in squalor and sordidness while the few were
privileged to cultivate and to enjoy the graces and the beauties; but,
unjust or in some mysterious way just, there was the fact. Her life
was marked out for her; she was of the elect. She would do well to
accept her good fortune and live as the gods had ordained for her.
If Victor had been different in that one respect! ... The
infatuation, too, was a fact. The wise course was flight--and she fled.
That winter, in Chicago and in New York, Jane amused herself--in the
ways devised by latter day impatience with the folly of wasting a
precious part of the one brief life in useless grief or pretense of
grief. In Remsen City she would have had to be very quiet indeed,
under penalty of horrifying public sentiment. But Chicago and New York
knew nothing of her grief, cared nothing about grief of any kind.
People in deep mourning were found in the theaters, in the gay
restaurants, wherever any enjoyment was to be had; and very sensible it
was of them, and proof of the sincerity of their sorrow--for sincere
sorrow seeks consolation lest it go mad and commit suicide--does it not?
Jane, young, beautiful, rich, clever, had a very good time indeed--so
good that in the spring, instead of going back to Remsen City to rest,
she went abroad. More enjoyment--or, at least, more of the things that
fill in the time and spare one the necessity of thinking.
In August she suddenly left her friends at St. Moritz and journeyed
back to Remsen City as fast as train and boat and train could take her.
And on the front veranda of the old house she sat herself down and
looked out over the familiar landscape and listened to the katydids
lulling the woods and the fields, and was bored and wondered why she
had come.
In a reckless mood she went down to see Victor Dorn. "I am cured," she
said to herself. "I must be cured. I simply can't be small and silly
enough to care for a country town labor agitator after all I've been
through--after the attentions I've had and the men of the world I've
met. I'm cured, and I must prove it to myself ."
In the side yard Alice Sherrill and her children and several neighbor
girls were putting up pears and peaches, blackberries and plums. The
air was heavy with delicious odors of ripe and perfect fruit, and the
laughter, the bright healthy faces, the strong graceful bodies in all
manner of poses at the work required made a scene that brought tears to
Jane's eyes. Why tears she could not have explained, but there they
were. At far end of the arbor, looking exactly as he had in the same
place the year before, sat Victor Dorn, writing. He glanced up, saw
her! Into his face came a look of welcome that warmed her chilled heart.
"Hel-LO!" he cried, starting up. "I AM glad to see you."
"I'm mighty glad to be back," said she, lapsing with keen pleasure into
her native dialect.
He took both her hands and shook them cordially, then looked at her
from head to foot admiringly. "The latest from the Rue de la Paix, I
suppose?" said he.
They seated themselves with the table between them. She, under cover
of commonplaces about her travels, examined him with the utmost
calmness. She saw every point wherein he fell short of the men of her
class--the sort of men she ought to like and admire. But, oh, how dull
and stale and narrow and petty they were, beside this man. She knew
now why she had fled. She didn't want to love Victor Dorn, or to marry
him--or his sort of man. But he, his intense aliveness, his keen,
supple mind, had spoiled her for those others. One of them she could
not marry. "I should go mad with boredom. One can no more live
intimately with fashion than one can eat gold and drink diamonds. And,
oh, but I am hungry and thirsty!"
"So you've had a good time?" he was saying.
"Superb," replied she. "Such scenery--such variety of people. I love
Europe. But--I'm glad to be home again."
"I don't see how you can stand it," said Victor.
"Why?" inquired she in surprise.
"Unless I had an intense personal interest in the most active kind of
life in a place like this, I should either fly or take to drink,"
replied he. "In this world you've either got to invent occupation for
yourself or else keep where amusements and distractions are thrust at
you from rising till bed-time. And no amusements are thrust at you in
Remsen City."
"But I've been trying the life of being amused," said Jane, "and I've
got enough."
"For the moment," said Victor, laughing. "You'll go back. You've got
to. What else is there for you?"
Her eyes abruptly became serious. "That's what I've come home to find
out," said she. Hesitatingly, "That's why I've come here to-day."
He became curiously quiet--stared at the writing before him on the
table. After a while he said:
"Jane, I was entirely too glad to see you to-day. I had----"
"Don't say that," she pleaded. "Victor, it isn't a weakness----"
His hand resting upon the table clenched into a fist and his brows drew
down. "There can be no question but that it is a weakness and a
folly," he pushed on. "I will not spoil your life and mine. You are
not for me, and I am not for you. The reason we hang on to this is
because each of us has a streak of tenacity. We don't want each other,
but we are so made that we can't let go of an idea once it has gotten
into our heads."
"There is another reason," she said gently. "We are, both of us,
alone--and lonesome, Victor."
"But I'm not alone. I'm not lonesome----" And there he abruptly
halted, to gaze at her with the expression of awakening and
astonishment. "I believe I'm wrong. I believe you're right," he
exclaimed. "I had never thought of that before."
"You've been imagining your work, your cause was enough," she went on
in a quiet rational way that was a revelation--and a
self-revelation--of the real Jane Hastings. "But it isn't. There's a
whole other side of your nature--the--the--the private side--that's the
expression--the private side. And you've been denying to it its
rights."
He reflected, nodded slowly. "I believe that's the truth," he said.
"It explains a curious feeling I've had--a sort of shriveling
sensation." He gazed thoughtfully at her, his face gradually relaxing
into a merry smile.
"What is it?" asked she, smiling in turn.
"We've both got to fall in love and marry," said he. "Not with each
other, of course--for we're not in any way mated. But love and
marriage and the rest of it--that's the solution. I don't need it
quite as much as you do, for I've got my work. But I need it. Now
that I see things in the right light I wonder that I've been so
stupidly blind. Why do we human beings always overlook the obvious?"
"It isn't easy to marry," said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy
to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life.
I've had several chances--one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I
think. But not one that I could bring myself to accept."
"Vanity--vanity," said Victor. "Almost any human being is interesting
and attractive if one will stop thinking about oneself and concentrate
on him or her."