"Yes," said Margaret gravely, "of the three I prefer Jesse. He at
least was not a psychologist, nor did he write in English past finding
out! By the way, I remember Uncle Osmond used to say," she added, a
reminiscent dreaminess in her eyes which held Daniel's breathless gaze,
"that only in a very primitive or provincial society was a regard for
respectability paramount, and that in an individual of an upper class
it bespoke either assinine stupidity or damned hypocrisy."
Daniel started and stared until his eyes popped, to hear that soft,
drawling voice say "damned," even though quoting. Why, one would think
a nice girl would be embarrassed to own a relative who used profane
language, instead of _flaunting_ it!
"Wasn't your uncle a Christian?" he asked dubiously.
"Oh, no!" she laughed.
Now what was there to laugh at in so serious a question? Daniel was
finding Miss Berkeley's conversation extremely upsetting.
"He died unsaved?" he asked gravely.
"I suppose a mediæval theologian would have said he did."
"I trust he didn't influence _you_, Miss Berkeley!"
"But of course, I got lots of ideas from him, for which I'm very
thankful. If it had not been for his interesting mind, I could never
have lived so long with his devilish disposition, or, as he used to
call it, his 'hell of a temper.'" ("If he's going to fall in love with
me," Margaret was saying to herself, as she saw his shocked
countenance, "he's got to know the worst--I won't deceive him.")
"I'm addicted to only two vices, Mr. Leitzel: profanity and beer."
Daniel smiled faintly, she looked so childishly innocent. "You are
different from any girl I ever met. As a conversationalist especially.
New Munich girls never talk the way you do."
"You mean they are not profane?"
"You're only joking, aren't you?" asked Daniel anxiously. "I didn't
refer merely to your using oaths, but the ideas you occasionally
express; that, for instance, about 'respectability,' I'm sure I never
heard our New Munich young ladies say things like that. However," he
added, his face softening and beaming, "nothing you could do or say
could ever counteract for me the impression you made upon me as you sat
there to-night holding that baby!"
"You are very fond of children, aren't you, Mr. Leitzel?" she asked
graciously.
"Well, I should say! I'd like to have a large family, even if it is
expensive!"
"So should I," said Margaret frankly; and Daniel had a moment's doubt
as to the maidenly modesty of this reply, much as he approved of the
sentiment.
After that evening, during the next three weeks, the course of Daniel's
love ran swiftly, if not always smoothly; for his usually unreceptive
soul was so deeply penetrated by the personality of this maiden whom he
desired that he actually felt, intuitively, her aversion to certain
phases of his mind the worthiness of which he had never before had a
doubt, and he therefore curbed, somewhat, the expression of his real
self, adapting his discourse, though vaguely, to the evident tastes of
the woman whose favour he sought. Also, his genuine interest in her
made him less obnoxiously egotistical. Indeed, all his most offensive
traits were, at this time, and unfortunately for poor Margaret's fate,
kept so much in abeyance, and so strongly did she, quite unconsciously,
bring out the little best that was in him, that her earlier impression
of him was speedily coloured over by the more gracious effect he
produced as a self-effacing and worshipful lover--a lover to one who,
for many years, had not been treated with even common consideration.
Had Daniel had the least idea how little Margaret was touched by the
_material_ value of the gifts he daily laid at her feet, he would
certainly have saved himself some of the heavy expenditure he
considered necessary for the accomplishment of his courting. If he had
known that it was only the attention, the thoughtfulness, the devotion
showered upon her constantly that meant so much to her whose life had
hitherto been one long siege of self-sacrifice, he would surely have
limited the quality, if not the quantity, of his offerings.
As Margaret came to realize that she was drifting surely, fatally, into
the arms of Daniel Leitzel, her conscience forced her to try to justify
her selling herself for a home.
"To marry without love? But I might have married 'Reverend Hoops' for
love! And he was so much worse--less possible," she amended her
reflections, "than Daniel is. It was really _love_ that I felt for
that poor, bow-legged Hoops! Yes, the sort of love that would make
marriage a madness of ecstasy! Too great, indeed, for a human soul to
bear! And even if one did not presently discover one's mate to be a
delusion with an Adam's apple, who said 'Yes, sir,' to a negro, even if
he continued to seem to you a worthy object of love, such an
intoxication of happiness as I felt over my imaginary Hoops could not
possibly continue, one's strength couldn't sustain it--one would end
with nervous prostration!
"Hattie and Walter, when they married, were romantically in love, and
now, what could be more prosaic than their jog-trot relation? So much
for love." She missed that phase of the question.
But there was another aspect of a loveless marriage that had to be
reckoned with.
"How would I be better than a woman of the streets? Yes I would be
better, for I would bear children. But children born outside of love?
Well, Reverend Hoops might have been the father of my children even
after I, recovered from 'loving' him, and every one of my children
might have had an Adam's apple. Better, it seems to me, to marry with
eyes open and not blinded by love.' Then, at least, one would not have
to suffer a dreadful flop afterward. The higher one's ideal in
marriage, the more certainly does one seem doomed to bitter
disillusionment. Probably the jog-trot, commonplace relation between a
man and woman, recognized and accepted as such, is the only one likely
to endure. Insist upon romance, and the end, I verily believe, is
divorce. Daniel couldn't make me unhappy any more than he could make
me happy--there's that comfort at least.
"As for a great passion of the soul, the man capable of it is certainly
a _rara avis_ and isn't likely to come _my_ way. If I thought," said
Margaret to herself, her heart beating thickly at the vision she called
up from the depths in her, "that life held anywhere for me such a great
spiritual passion, given and returned----" Her face turned white, she
closed her eyes for an instant upon the too dazzling light of the
vision. "But then," she resumed her self-justification, "if the
highest ideal of marriage is unrealizable, should one compromise with a
lower ideal, or avoid marriage altogether? I remember Uncle Osmond
once said it was a psychological fact that a woman was happier even in
a loveless marriage than in a single life. And, dear me, the race
can't stop because poets have dreamed of a paradise which earth does
not know!"
It seemed to be another trick of the irony of fate that while
everything in Margaret's environment and in her education conduced to
make her walk blindly into such a marriage as this with Daniel Leitzel,
nothing in her whole life had in the least fitted her for meeting and
coping with that which was before her as the wife of such a man as
Daniel really was.
She was glad that the form which her lover's proposal of marriage
assumed obviated any necessity on her part for salving over her own
lack of sentiment.
"Of course, you have surmised ere this, Miss Berkeley--Margaret--that I
intended to make you an offer of marriage, to ask you to become--_my
beloved wife_!" he said impressively, and Margaret checked her
inclination to beg him not to make it sound too much like a tombstone
inscription. "My proposal may seem to you precipitate; I am aware it
is unusual to propose on so short a courtship; you perhaps think I
ought to keep on paying attentions to you for at least several months
longer. But I can spare so little time away from my business. And to
court you by correspondence--well, I am certainly too much of a
gentleman to send typewritten letters, dictated to my stenographer, to
a lady, especially one so refined as you are and one whom I want to
make my wife. And to write out letters myself, that's something I have
neither time nor inclination for. And something I'm not used to
either. So, I thought that while I'm down here on the spot, I might as
well stay and conclude the matter. That is why I have been so pressing
in my attentions to you--not to lose time, you see, which is money to
me and should be to every man. So with as much haste as was consistent
with propriety and tact, Miss Berkeley, I've been leading up to this
present hour in which I offer you my hand and heart and," he added, his
tone becoming sentimental, "my life's devotion."
It sounded for the most part like a lawyer's brief, Margaret thought,
as, sitting white and quiet, she listened to him.
"You have given me every reason to think, Miss Berkeley, by your
reception of my assiduous attentions, that my suit was agreeable to you
and that you would accept me when I asked you to, in spite of the
evident opposition of your sister and her husband."
"But they are not opposed to you. Why, what could have made you think
so? They have been very kind to you, Mr. Leitzel."
"To me personally, yes; kind and hospitable. But as your suitor? No.
Have they not persistently put themselves in the way of my seeing you
alone, and thus tried to interfere with my taking from them you and
your--taking you from them?" he hastily concluded.
Daniel had been, all through this courtship, strangely, and to himself
incomprehensibly, shy about making any inquiries as to Margaret's
dowry, though he fairly suffered in the repression of his desire to
know what she was "worth." He wondered what it really was that made
him tongue-tied whenever he thought of "sounding" her? Perhaps it was
that she, on her side, was so persistently reticent not only as to her
own property but with regard to _his_ possessions. Never had she even
hinted any curiosity as to his income, though he had several times led
up to the subject in order to give her the necessary opportunity. The
matter would, of course, have to be talked out between them _some_
time. Daniel was all prepared with his own story; he knew just exactly
what statements he was going to "hand out" to his future wife and what
he was _not_ going to tell. But the strange thing was she didn't seem
to feel the least interest in the matter.
When Margaret tried just now to assure him that her relatives' supposed
interference with his attentions to her was wholly imaginary, she
received her first glimpse of the notorious obstinacy of the little
lawyer, and she recognized, with some consternation, that when once an
idea had found lodgment in his brain, it was there to stay; no
reasoning or proof could dislodge it.
"Since your relatives are opposed to your marrying," he reiterated his
conviction at the end of her proofs to the contrary, "I think it would
be well if we got married before I returned to New Munich. This would
not only save me the expense of another trip South, but would avert any
further plotting on the part of your family. I'm afraid to leave the
spot," he affirmed, "without taking you with me. Anyway, I _can't_."
His face flushed and he fairly caught his breath as he gazed at her.
"I'm thinking of you day and night, every hour, every minute! If I
went back without you I couldn't work. I'm just crazy about you!"
It was this outburst of feeling that just saved the day for Daniel, his
cold-blooded dissection of his penurious motives in his swift
lovemaking having almost turned the tide against him.
"If we marry at all," said Margaret in a matter-of-fact tone, "I agree
with you that it might as well be at once."
"'If at all?' Ah!" said Daniel almost coquettishly, "that's to remind
me that you haven't accepted me yet? I'm going ahead too fast, am I?
My feelings ran away with me, Margaret, for the moment because it's
simply unthinkable to me that you should refuse me--I mean, I could not
think of life without you now that I know and love you."
"Very well, I'll marry you, Mr. Leitzel. I might as well. But if it
is to be done, we shall have to have a quiet wedding, you know."
Calmly as she spoke, the colour dyed her cheeks as she realized the
fatal finality of the words she uttered. Deep down in her soul, not
clearly recognized by herself, was a vague sense of guilt in the thing
she was doing, all her logic to the contrary notwithstanding. For
every normal woman feels instinctively that the human relation which
may make her a mother, if it is not a sacred and ennobling relation,
must be a degrading one, and no experiences of life, however
embittering, can ever wholly obliterate this profound intuition.
Cynical as were Margaret's theories of love and marriage, she could
never have given herself to Daniel Leitzel had she not felt goaded to
it by her unfitness to earn her living, and by her sister's desire to
have her away. And even these two driving circumstances could not
wholly exonerate her to herself from the charge before her conscience
of unworthy weakness in taking an easy way out instead of grappling
with her difficulty and conquering it, as great souls, she very well
knew, have ever done.