THE VERDICT OF A SAGE
When Graham reached his room he was in no mood for sleep. At first he
lapsed into a long revery over the events of the evening, trivial in
themselves, and yet for some reason holding a controlling influence
over his thoughts. Miss St. John was a new revelation of womanhood to
him, and for the first time in his life his heart had been stirred by a
woman's tones and glances. A deep chord in his nature vibrated when she
spoke and smiled. What did it mean? He had followed his impulse to
permit this stranger to make any impression within her power, and he
found that she had decidedly interested him. As he tried to analyze her
power he concluded that it lay chiefly in the mirthfulness, the
joyousness of her spirit. She quickened his cool, deliberate pulse. Her
smile was not an affair of facial muscles, but had a vivifying warmth.
It made him suspect that his life was becoming cold and self-centred,
that he was missing the deepest and best experiences of an existence
that was brief indeed at best, and, as he believed, soon ceased
forever. The love of study and ambition had sufficed thus far, but
actuated by his own materialistic creed he was bound to make the most
of life while it lasted. According to Emerson he was as yet but in the
earlier stages of evolution, and his highest manhood wholly
undeveloped. Had not "music, poetry, and art" dawned in his mind? Was
nature but a mechanism after whose laws he had been groping like an
anatomist who finds in the godlike form bone and tissue merely? As he
had sat watching the sunset a few hours previous, the element of beauty
had been present to him as never before. Could this sense of beauty
become so enlarged that the world would be transfigured, "radiant with
purple light"? Morning had often brought to him weariness from
sleepless hours during which he had racked his brain over problems too
deep for him, and evening had found him still baffled, disappointed,
and disposed to ask in view of his toil, _Cui bono_? What ground had
Emerson for saying that these same mornings and evenings might be
filled with "varied enchantments"? The reason, the cause of these
unknown conditions of life, was given unmistakably. The Concord sage
had virtually asserted that he, Alford Graham, would never truly exist
until his one-sided masculine nature had been supplemented by the
feminine soul which alone could give to his being completeness and the
power to attain his full development.
"Well," he soliloquized, laughing, "I have not been aware that hitherto
I have been only a mollusk, a polyp of a man. I am inclined to think
that Emerson's 'Pegasus' took the bit--got the better of him on one
occasion; but if there is any truth in what he writes it might not be a
bad idea to try a little of the kind of evolution that he suggests and
see what comes of it. I am already confident that I could see
infinitely more than I do if I could look at the world through Miss St.
John's eyes as well as my own, but I run no slight risk in obtaining
that vision. Her eyes are stars that must have drawn worshippers, not
only from the east, but from every point of the compass. I should be in
a sorry plight if I should become 'all memory,' and from my fair
divinity receive as sole response, 'Please forget.' If the philosopher
could guarantee that she also would be 'all eye and all memory,' one
might indeed covet Miss St. John as the teacher of the higher
mysteries. Life is not very exhilarating at best, but for a man to set
his heart on such a woman as this girl promises to be, and then be
denied--why, he had better remain a polyp. Come, come, Alford Graham,
you have had your hour of sentiment--out of deference to Mr. Emerson I
won't call it weakness--and it's time you remembered that you are a
comparatively poor man, that Miss St. John has already been the choice
of a score at least, and probably has made her own choice. I shall
therefore permit no delusions and the growth of no false hopes."
Having reached this prudent conclusion, Graham yawned, smiled at the
unwonted mood in which he had indulged, and with the philosophic
purpose of finding an opiate in the pages that had contained one
paragraph rather too exciting, he took up the copy of Emerson that he
had borrowed. The book fell open, indicating that some one had often
turned to the pages before him. One passage was strongly marked on
either side and underscored. With a laugh he saw that it was the one he
had been dwelling upon--"No man ever forgot," etc.
"Now I know why she blushed slightly and hesitated to lend me this
volume," he thought. "I suppose I may read in this instance, 'No woman
ever forgot.' Of course, it would be strange if she had not learned to
understand these words. What else has she marked?"
Here and there were many delicate marginal lines indicating approval
and interest, but they were so delicate as to suggest that the strong
scoring of the significant passage was not the work of Miss St. John,
but rather of some heavy masculine hand. This seemed to restore the
original reading, "No _man_ ever forgot," and some man had apparently
tried to inform her by his emphatic lines that he did not intend to
forget.
"Well, suppose he does not and cannot," Graham mused. "That fact places
her under no obligations to be 'all eye and memory' for him. And yet
her blush and hesitancy and the way the book falls open at this passage
look favorable for him. I can win her gratitude by amusing the old
major, and with that, no doubt, I shall have to be content."
This limitation of his chances caused Graham so little solicitude that
he was soon sleeping soundly.