|TWO days later, on Thursday, the Worm crossed the Square and Sixth
Avenue and entered Greenwich Village proper.
He was dressed, at the top, in a soft gray hat from England. Next
beneath was a collar that had cost him forty cents. The four-in-hand
scarf was an imported foulard, of a flowering pattern in blues and
greens; with a jade pin stuck in it. The new, perfectly fitting suit
was of Donegal homespun and would cost, when the bill was paid, slightly
more than sixty dollars. The shoes, if not custom made, were new. And he
carried a slender stick with a curving silver head.
He felt uncomfortably conspicuous. His nerves tingled with an emotional
disturbance that ignored his attempts to dismiss it as something beneath
him. For the first time in nearly a decade he was about to propose
marriage to a young woman. As he neared the street on which the young
woman lived, his steps slackened and his mouth became uncomfortably
dry.... All this was absurd, of course. He and Sue were good friends.
“There needn't be all this excitement,” he told himself with a desperate
clutching at the remnants of his sense of humor, “over suggesting to her
that we change from a rational to an irrational relationship.”
At the corner, however, he stopped dead. Then with a self-consciousness
worthy of Peter himself, he covered his confusion by buying an afternoon
paper and walking slowly back toward Sixth Avenue.
Suddenly, savagely, he crumpled the paper into a ball, threw it into the
street, strode resolutely to Sue's apartment-house and rang her bell.
Sue promptly lighted the alcohol lamp under her kettle and they had tea.
Over the cups, feeling coldly desperate, the Worm said:
“Been thinking you all over, Sue.” It was a relief to find that his
voice sounded fairly natural.
She took the remark rather lightly. “I'm not worth it, Henry.... I've
thought some myself--your idea of the boundary...”
His thoughts were moving on with disconcerting rapidity. He must take
the plunge. It was his fate. He knew it.
“We talked marriage,” he said.
She nodded.
“Since then I've tried to figure but what I do think, and crystallize
it. Sue, I'm not so sure that Betty was wrong.”
“That's a new slant,” said she thoughtfully.
“Or very old. Just try to look through my eyes for a moment. Betty had
tried freedom--had something of a fling at it. Now, it is evident that
in her case it didn't work very well. Isn't it?”
“In her case, yes,” Sue observed quietly.
“Precisely, in her case. She had reached the boundary. You'll admit
that?”
Sue smiled faintly at his argumentative tone. “Yes, I'll admit it.”
“Betty isn't a great soul. A stronger nature would have taken longer to
reach the boundary. But doesn't it indicate that the boundary is there?”
“Well”--Sue hesitated. “All right. For the sake of the argument I'll
admit that, too.”.
“Well, now, just what has Betty done? She doesn't love this manufacturer
she has married.”
“Not a bit.”
“And the marriage may fail. The majority of them, from an idealistic
point of view, undoubtedly do fail. Admitting all that, you have let me
see that you yourself in a weak moment have considered the same course.”
Sue's brow clouded. But she nodded slowly.
“Well, then”--he hitched forward in his chair, and to cover his
burning eagerness talked, if possible, a shade more stiffly
and impersonally--“doesn't this, Betty's act and your momentary
consideration of the same act, suggest that a sound instinct may be at
work there?”
“If cowardice is an instinct, Henry.”
“How do you know it is cowardice? From what data do you get that
conclusion? Betty, after all her philandering, has undertaken a definite
contract. It binds her. It is a job. There is discipline in it, a chance
for service. It creates new conditions of life which will certainly
change her unless she quits. Haven't you noticed, all your life, what a
relief it is to get out of indecision into a definite course, even if it
costs you something?”
Again that faint smile of hers. “Turning conservative, Henry?”
He ignored this. “Life moves on in epochs, Sue. If you don't start
getting educated when you're a youngster, you go most awfully wrong. If
you don't accept the discipline of work as soon as you've got a little
education and grown up, you're a slacker and before long you're very
properly rated as a slacker. So with a woman--given this wonderful
function of motherhood and the big emotional capacity that goes with
it--if she waits too long after her body and Spirit have ripened she
goes wrong, emotionally and spiritually. There's a time with a normal
woman when love and maternity are--well, the next thing. Not with every
woman of course. But pretty certainly with the woman who reaches that
time, refuses marriage, and then is forced to admit that her life isn't
working out. Peter has coined the word for what that woman becomes--a
better word than he himself knows... she's a truffler.”
She was gazing at him. “Henry,” she cried, “what has struck you? Where's
that humorous balance of yours?”
“I'm in earnest, Sue.”
“Yes, I see. But why on earth--”
“Because I want you to marry--”
It was at this moment that the Worm's small courage fled utterly out of
his inexperienced heart. And his tongue, as if to play a saturnine trick
on that heart, repeated the phrase, unexpectedly to what was left of his
brain, with an emphatic downward emphasis that closed the discussion.
“I want you to marry,” he said.
A sudden moisture came to Sue's eyes, and much of the old frankness as
she surveyed him.
“Henry,” she said then, “you are wonderful, coming at me like this, as
if you cared--”
“I do care--”
“I know. I feel it. Just when I thought friends were--well...” She did
not finish this, but sat erect, pushed her teacup aside and gazed at him
with something of the old alertness in the green-brown eyes. There
was sudden color in her cheeks. “Henry, you've roused me--just when I
thought no one could. I've got to think.... You go away. You don't mind,
do you? Just let me be alone. I've felt lately as if I was losing--my
mind, my will, my perceptions--something. And, Henry--wait!” For he had
risen, with a blank face, and was looking for his hat.
“Wait--did Peter leave you his itinerary?”
The Worm felt in his pockets and produced it.
“He sent me one, but I tore it up.” She laughed a little, then colored
with a nervous suddenness; and walked after him to the door. “You've
always had the faculty of rousing me, Henry, and steadying me. To-day
you've stirred me more than you could possibly know. I don't know what
will come of it--I'm dreadfully; confused--but I can at least try to
think it out.”
That was all--all but a few commonplace phrases at the doer.
“Oh,” said he, with a touch of awkwardness, “I meant to tell you that
I've made a change myself.”
“You?” Again her eyes, recalled to him, ran over his new clothes.
“I start work to-morrow, on _The Evening Courier_.”
“Oh, Henry, I'm glad. Good luck! It ought to be interesting.”
“At least,” said he heavily, “it will be a slight contact with reality,”
and hurried away.