She colored guiltily, though she also was smiling. Her nervous fingers
were pulling the ice from a branch of a bush.
He noted that Winchie, rolling up a huge snowball, had got safely out of
hearing. "Just a vanity," he went on. "Well--pitch it overboard. I
make you a business proposition. I need you. You need the experience.
I hope you'll accept. I can well afford to pay you what I'll pay
Carter. He's tied up until January--perhaps a little later. If you'll
accept, I can accomplish a lot this winter. If not, I'll be nearly
helpless."
Thus it naturally and easily and sensibly came about that, a few months
later, at the very moment when Judge Vanosdol was signing the decree of
divorce, Dick and Courtney were in the laboratory, their heads touching
as they bent over a big retort, heedless of the strong fumes rising from
its boiling and hissing contents. The heat subsided. The compound
slowly cleared--a beautiful shade of green instead of the black they
hoped for--and confidently expected. They looked dejectedly at each
other; she felt like weeping for his chagrin.
"What the devil is the matter?" demanded he, glowering at her. "Sure
you didn't make a mistake?"
Her nerves were on edge, as were his. "That's right!" she said, tears
in her eyes. "Suspect me."
"I'm not suspecting you," he retorted angrily. "Don't drag your sex
into work. You're not a woman here. We've no time for poodle-dog
politeness."
"I don't want politeness," cried she. "What did I say that could
possibly make you think I did?"
"It was what you didn't say," replied he. "Why didn't you answer back?
Or throw the ladle at me?"
"I will next time."
And there they both laughed.
Now, she was free--absolutely free--and with money enough of her own
earning to get her and Winchie to New York and to keep them for quite a
while. And Narcisse Siersdorf had written most encouraging comments on
the account of her efforts at landscape gardening and on the
accompanying photographs, and had offered her a clerkship at twenty-five
dollars a week "as a starter." Also, Richard, as an earnest of his
belief and his interest, had got her an offer of a trial position at
twenty dollars a week in the laboratories of the American Coal Products
Company at Chicago. She was not only free; she was independent.
The morning after Narcisse's letter came she saw Richard eying her
curiously several times, as if he were puzzling over something but
hesitated to question her. The fourth or fifth time she caught him at
it, she said: "What do you want to ask me? Have I made a mistake?"
"No--no, indeed," protested he. "You don't make mistakes."
He had been extremely polite, no matter how severely his temper was
tried, ever since the day of the little flare-up over the failed
experiment. And every day it pleased her through and through, pleased
and thrilled her, that his reason was fear lest she, perfectly free to
go, should resign and quit, if he did not behave.
"Then," she went on to him, "why do you look at me inquiringly?"
"It's your manner," replied he. "You're acting very differently to-day
from what you ever did before."
While he was saying it she divined the reason--the letter from Narcisse.
The offer from the Coal Products Company had come several weeks before;
but that had been got for her. This position in New York was of her own
getting. And for the first time in her life she felt like a full-grown
personality capable of taking care of herself. Unconsciously her whole
outlook upon life changed; the change disclosed itself in her
expression, in her voice, in her manner. She handed Richard her patent
of nobility, the letter from Narcisse; she watched his face as he read.
But she got no clue to his thoughts. As he gave back the letter without
comment she said: "I'm in the way to get rid of the reason for a woman's
so often wishing she'd been born a man."
"I understand," said he, and turned away to gaze reflectively out of the
window.
She went into the rear room to work there. Half an hour later she
returned, to find him still staring out over the lake. "I've given him
something more to think about," said she to herself, with a sly smile at
his back. "And it'll do him good, if ever he starts out to marry
again." Yet somehow she was not fully satisfied that her guess covered
the whole of what he was thinking. He was extremely puzzling, this
polite, appreciative, carefully businesslike Richard.
She was impatient to be gone. She wished to try in longer flight the
new wings of freedom and independence she had grown. She felt confident
they would sustain her; but she could not be sure until she tried. She
had decided for the Siersdorf offer. She liked the chemistry chiefly
because, working with Richard at the explorations of hydrogen and
nitrogen, she was moving toward a definite high accomplishment--the
discovery of a source of happiness to millions--a cheap substitute for
coal and wood that would banish that horror of horrors, cold, from the
lives of the poor. But it would be quite another thing to work at
fabricating new shades of color in dyes, new commercial uses for the
by-products of coal; she would be descending from scientist's helper to
plodder for a living, from lieutenant of a Columbus to mate on a tramp
steamer. Not so, if she went into the Siersdorf office.
There she would remain artist, worker with the fine tools of the
imagination. Also Basil's tastes lay in that direction. Fancy is not
the air plant that idealists pretend. Its flowers may be spiritual but
its roots strike deep into the physical. It may need the sun and the
air of heaven, but it needs the soil even more. In the soil it is born;
by the soil it chiefly lives. Courtney's fancy was the fancy of a
normal human being in whom all the emotions are healthy, ardent, fully
developed. It had no long or difficult task in blurring into vagueness
whatever marred her memory of her and Basil's romance--or at least in
making the blemishes for the time seem unimportant in presence of the
rosy, horizon-filling peak moments of their happiness. Once more, from
the quiet of her long lonely evenings--hardly the less solitary for
Helen's rather monotonous company--arose the longings, the visions, the
thrills. She felt that, in her young inexperience, she had been too
arrogant in her demands upon life; she had asked more than she could
possibly expect from a human love, more than she had any right to
expect. But now she was chastened; her point of view was less wildly
romantic. What would they not be to each other!--once they were
together--and free from all constraint of moral doubts and conventional
dreads. It was only natural that in their life of stress passion should
have been uppermost, should have become dominant. It was human for
Basil to feel that he was contending for even physical possession of
her--and until there is physical possession, love has no substantial
ground to build upon.
She was eager to be off for New York, to establish her independence, and
then to begin her real life on the enduring foundation of equality and
comradeship brightened by passion as a tree is brightened by its
blossoms and their perfume. But, eager though she was, she could not
deny her obligation to remain until Dick's assistant came. She knew now
that he had spoken the literal truth when he said he needed her badly.
It would be a return for his broad-minded humanity quite beneath her, to
leave him in the lurch--especially when carrying on his particular line
of experiments meant danger if he had to do all the work alone. She
must stay until Carter came. And she was glad of this opportunity to
show him that she did appreciate what he had done for her, even though
he had done it not for her sake but for his own--in obedience to his
sense of the decent and the self-respecting.
So, she worked steadily and interestedly on, just as if the divorce had
not yet been entered upon the records of the court as valid and final.
She found an unexpected additional source of interest in studying her
former husband as an individuality. It is always a novel sensation for
a woman with any claim to physical charm to find herself regarded
impersonally--sexlessly. That is usually anything but an agreeable
sensation; every woman feels the chagrin of failure when she sees that
her charms do not charm--this, though she might be disdainful of and
resentful of overt tribute to her physical self. Courtney, however, did
not in those peculiar circumstances feel sufficiently piqued to try to
assert woman's ancient right of dominion over the senses of man. She
could enjoy the novelty of being treated like a man, and could study
calmly the man who was thus unmindful of what is habitually uppermost in
any strongly masculine nature.
At work with Richard alone, she was at last getting acquainted with him.
From the beginning of each day at the laboratory to the end, she was
receiving a series of vivid impressions of a really superior
man--competent, intelligent, resourceful. He thought about himself
never; he could not be daunted or baffled. His broad-mindedness was no
longer marred by the sex narrowness that had made appreciation of it
impossible to her, to any woman of her sort. He knew so much; he
carried knowledge so lightly. It seemed to her, after much experience of
"learned" men, that knowledge was chiefly power to bore. His knowledge
was like a rapier of finest steel skilfully used in his duel with his
mysterious masked combatant, the alchemist on guard at nature's
secretest laboratory. She felt that he was a man out of a million; yet
she had no sense of embarrassed inferiority. This general in the army
of exact science, which is the true army of progress, was a democrat,
marched with the soldiers afoot, was their equal. "If any woman ever
does fall in love with him," thought she, "she will worship him.
But--he's too impersonal. We women want something smaller--not a sun
star, but a fire on a hearth."
Now that he was nothing but fellow worker to her, she could look at him
with the friendly impartiality of human being for fellow being. Piecing
together what she knew of his masculine side and what she could how see
latent in those strong features, those intense nervous energies, she
felt that somewhere there might be a woman equal to concentrating upon
herself what went altogether into the duel for nature's secrets. "And
unless she were a great woman, he would burn her up like a match tossed
into a furnace."
This latent capacity of his for love fascinated her. There were even
moments when it tempted her--was like a challenge taunting her womanhood
as confessedly ineffectual. But at the laboratory she was too busy to
linger over such thoughts; and in her other hours, there was household
routine to compel her attention--and the plans for the great attempt.
At last Carter wrote that he would positively come in two weeks.
"You've been splendidly patient with me," Dick said as he showed her the
latter. "I've seen that you were eager to be gone." As she murmured a
polite denial, he repeated, "Yes, eager--but not in the way to make me
uncomfortable over my selfishness."
"I've rarely thought of it while I was down here," said she. "It was
only in the evenings--and when I happened not to sleep very well."
"It was natural you should be upset," sympathized Dick. "Who wouldn't
be, standing on the edge of the icy plunge so long? But you'll like
it--and everything'll come out all right. I've discovered that you have
a lot of common sense--and that's more than I can say for most
men--including myself."
Another month, at the farthest, and she would be in New York, would have
made the great beginning! ... Should she send Basil word as soon as she
arrived? Should she wait until she got her bearings? She saw it would
be wiser to wait. Everything depended on beginnings--right
beginnings--and it would be the right beginning for Basil to find her as
obviously master of her own destiny, as free to withhold or to give, as
was he himself. Also-- Coming from a small town in the West, she could
not but feel strange in New York, and look provincial. "Yes, I'll
wait," she decided, the instant this last reason dropped into the
balance. For, she had not the vanity that underestimates the matter of
looks and neglects the fact that everyone is at a distinct disadvantage
in a strange environment.
One morning, about a week later, there came a ring at the telephone
which was in Dick's part of the laboratory. As these calls were always
for her, she rose from her case in the back room and went to answer. It
was Mazie--"The hotel over to Fenton wants to speak to you, ma'am."
"Connect them, please," said Courtney, hoping her voice had betrayed and
would betray nothing to the man behind her.