"Dashed sight more comfortable than up your two flights here!"
"The Wings' apartment is for rent?"
"Didn't you know that, old stick-in-the-mud? What's the matter with you?
Mary's been hunting a tenant for two weeks."
Charles, finding it unnecessary to state that he had not seen Mary for
exactly that length of time,--barring one very transient meeting on the
street,--merely indicated, without any polish, that, not being a
gadabout ass like some, he made no pretense of keeping up with all the
latest tittle-tattle.
He then asked, in a voice indicating no interest in the subject: "What's
Mrs. Wing going to do?"
"Going to North Carolina to live with Fanny."
"With Fanny!... I suppose she didn't consider going with Miss Mary?"
"Couldn't stand the pressure. Why, New York would kill her off like a
fly! And besides, she doesn't want to get too far away from the Warders,
you know. Of course, Fanny can't make her very comfortable just now--but
we talked it all over and that seemed the best arrangement, all round."
"I see."
"Mary can't turn back now, of course. Well, Charlie," said Donald,
earnestly, "I don't hold with her fool notions, and all that but hang it
all!--she's no ordinary woman, and this is no ordinary job. Those people
are giving her two assistants and $5000 a year. What d'you know about
that for a poor little girl?"
He was struggling to get into his overcoat without "breaking" his
shirt-front--going at once, evidently. But Charles had lost sight of his
strategic intentions.
"Well, how about you two old chaps for the furnished apartment--February
fifteenth, if you want it?"
Charles observed that he couldn't look at it. Donald, as if only
stimulated by his host's taciturnity, became sentimental.
"First Mary, then Mrs. Wing, then me--this is going to be a break-up,
Charlie, do you realize it? I'm beginning to feel it, too, let me tell
you! Jove," said Donald, putting on his shining head-piece and bringing
the conversation back to himself simultaneously--"now that I come right
down to it, _I_ don't want to leave this good old town!"
He departed, to his unconscious match-making. Charles, left alone,
merely sat on at his table. And all that he thought of Angela Flower now
was of an insignificant remark she had let fall, the first time they had
walked together: "Mr. Garrott do you know who _Marna_ reminded me of?
Somebody you admire a great deal...."
And then for half an hour, his writer's mind insisted on working over
and over that detestable conversation between _Marna_ and her father,
and changing it a little, just a little touch here and there, to make it
fit smoothly upon Mrs. Wing and Mary....
"I tell you," said the lonely authority, suddenly, bringing his fist
down on the table with a thump,--"this whole Movement's a failure if it
lessens _woman's lovableness_! I tell you the whole object of this
Movement is to make women _more lovable_!"
For he, of course, had never thought--like the author of "Marna" for
example--that passionate love was the only sort of love worth
mentioning. In that narrow sense, in her sufficiently cheap faculty for
stirring the senses of men, it was clear that woman, whatever she did or
left undone, would always remain "lovable." But as to love in broad and
human terms--well (to keep the subject wholly impersonal); could any one
in his senses call _Marna_ a lovable being? No, her creator, in his
determination to show how strong and "free" she was, had quite
unconsciously made her a harsh and vain self-worshiper, revolting to
decent persons. Had he, as we might say, thus inadvertently given the
whole thing away? Was it finally true that a woman could not claim and
lead her Own Life, except at a heavy price--paid down in her best
treasure? Was the ruthless Career-Maker but the logical other-form of
the waiting, the too pursuing, Maker of Homes?
From his drawer, Charles presently pulled out the former exercise-book
which had enjoyed the great rise in the world. In this book, he had
written no sentence since his remembered Notes on Flora Trevenna. Now he
set down with a firm hand:--
What is called the Woman's Movement is seen, in the last
analysis, to be only every woman's struggle between two
irreconcilable impulses in her own nature.
Having written that sentence, the young man stared at it long. To him it
was like a bright beam of light, turned upon the roots of his peculiar
problem. For if these two impulses were in truth irreconcilable, why
need he go on struggling to reconcile them in a heroine he could
unreservedly admire?