IT had been increasingly easy for him to forget her. When he had first
broken with Joanna, when he had written her that virtuous letter,
Maggie’s rooms, Maggie’s arms were a haven. She was always ready to
listen, always sympathetic. She met his advances half way; if he asked
for a kiss he got it at once. There was none of Joanna’s half-real,
half-coquettish withdrawal. No one could accuse Maggie of a lack of
modesty. Peter would have been the first to fight such an accuser, but
he found himself half-wishing that she were not quite so easy to
approach.
Somehow life grew less stimulating. Presently they were settling down
into the cosy, prosy existence of the long married couple. In the
afternoons Peter came in—he was usually playing with Tom at night—they
exchanged a word of greeting. Maggie gave him a dutiful kiss; there
would be a word or two about the weather, his playing engagements, then
silence. Presently Peter would say: “Mind if I look over the paper a
moment, Maggie? I got up late this morning.”
And Maggie’s bright answer: “Oh, of course not, I’ve got my accounts to
run over.”
Somehow all the easy, “understanding” conversation had vanished. Joanna,
Maggie had soon learned, was not a welcome topic. And Peter no longer
went to his classes, so there was no possible theme there. Peter to his
disgust found himself drawing unwilling contrasts between these seances
and similar moments spent with Joanna. Had there ever been any silences?
If there were they were filled with all sorts of tingling thoughts and
meanings. There was the night when Joanna leaned against him in
Morningside Park. They had said nothing. But the very air about them was
pulsing. How long ago all that seemed! Had it ever been true? Why had he
never felt like that when Maggie, as she frequently did, rested her head
on his shoulder?
He would shake himself angrily out of his reverie. “Silly ass,” his lips
formed.
Maggie seeing his lips move would ask him interestedly: “What’s the
matter, Peter?”
“Nothing at all,” he’d tell her contritely. What should be the matter
with his dear Maggie so near? Sometimes he put an arm around her
shoulder. “Look here, I’ve got an hour yet. Like to go out?”
That never failed to please her. She loved to be seen with him. She had
a very charming, flattering air of deference, of dependence when she was
out. It was singularly pleasing and yet puzzling to Peter. Joanna now
was just as likely to cross the street as not, without waiting for a
guiding hand, a protecting arm. If she had once visited a locality she
knew quite as much about getting away from it as her escort. But Maggie
was helpless, dependent. Strange when they were all growing up together
he would have said she was quite as independent in her way as Joanna,
and she was decidedly capable in her hair-dressing work. Madame
Harkness’ business had increased considerably in Philadelphia and
Baltimore.
Peter had often mused over this.
He had known for some time that he did not love Maggie. But he could not
tell whether or not she loved him. Certainly she had appeared to at
first, and certainly even now she clung to him. Her very submissiveness
would seem to indicate some depth of feeling. He remembered Maggie as
being anything but yielding in their earlier days, and she had never
apparently changed one iota in her resentment toward her husband. She
was making a remarkably good living from her connection with Madame
Harkness, had bought the house in New York and was contributing to her
mother. She could not be marrying him to be taken care of.
Of course he knew nothing of her _flair_, her passion for being
connected with “real” people—for “class” as he would have called it. And
if he had known this, it would have explained nothing to him, for he
never thought of himself in this sense. His most frequent source of
worry consisted in wondering if Maggie realized how lukewarm his feeling
was for her. Apparently she never suspected it.
Maggie may not have let Peter realize it, but she was completely aware
that he did not love her. She understood, had always understood, that
Joanna was the one woman in the world for him. Having loved Joanna once
there was no possibility of his caring about any one else. She had
recognized in Peter’s turning to her a manifestation of the state of
mind which had led her at the time of her marriage to turn to Henderson
Neal.
Her acceptance of Peter had been almost spontaneous, yet it was governed
subconsciously by two or three motives. First of all, while she thought
it extremely probable that Joanna liked, even loved Peter, she did not
believe that Joanna would ever consider marriage with him as important
as her art. Therefore she might just as well take him. Then she enjoyed
the artistic fitness of showing Joanna that a girl whom the latter did
not consider worthy to marry her brother was deemed worthy to marry her
lover. And last and most important, Maggie saw through Peter a second
means of entrance into the society of “real” people. She had glimpsed
this once through the possibility of marriage with Philip. Instead
Henderson Neal had closed this entrance to her, she had once believed,
forever. She must not fail to take advantage of this new avenue.
Already she was beginning to reap its value. Miss Alice Talbert, it is
true, became colder than ever when Maggie’s engagement to Peter was
known. She told Arabelle Morton that she considered “Peter done for,
ruined, if he married that gambler’s wife. Cousin Joanna did well to get
rid of him.” But Arabelle herself had laughed, had said she wanted to
meet the girl who had captured “that good-looking Bye boy.” She had come
to see Maggie, had invited her to the Morton house. Her good-natured
shallowness, her frank determination not to be a “high-brow” and her
complete social assurance captivated Maggie. Arabelle was of as
unimpeachable standing as Miss Talbert, though her choice of friends was
not so exclusive. Maggie was “taken up” by the young women of Arabelle’s
set and henceforth her lines were comparatively easy. Still she met with
an occasional snub from the older women. Mrs. Viny, who turned out to be
the terrible old lady who had asked her about Mr. Neal in Atlantic City,
refused grimly to recognize her and gave it as her opinion that “Peter’s
doings would make Isaiah Bye turn over in his grave—yet. You mark my
word.”
Her hearers got a vision of the dust and nothingness which, for many
years, had been Isaiah Bye, slowly shifting its position in the narrow
quarters of his tomb.
Maggie had her own plans. She did not mean to have Peter following
forever in Tom Mason’s train. But after they had married she would bring
about a change. She was sure she could coax him. It would never do to
let Joanna think, she would tell him, that he could not achieve
distinction without _her_. And when Peter Bye became Dr. Bye, the famous
surgeon, Philadelphia would find that Mrs. Peter Bye had a long memory.
Only Peter, who at first had agreed to marry in June, now some months
later seemed in no haste to marry at all—that was the rub.
When she telephoned him on the day on which he had had his interview
with Mrs. Lea, she made up her mind to hasten the marriage.
He came to see her the next afternoon full of his scheme of returning to
his classes. Maggie noticed a difference.
“You look as though you’d inherited a fortune or found a million
dollars.”
“I have. My senses have come back to me. What do you think, Maggie? I’ve
chucked all this foolishness with Tom Mason. My, I bet he’s cursing mad.
I’m getting down to brass tacks; went back to my classes this morning.”
Surprise and something else altered her face.
“What’s the matter, you don’t like it?”
“Yes—of course—only, but Peter, can’t you see how hard all this is for
me?”
He got up, fiddled with the things on the mantel, turned about and faced
her, the knuckles straining a little in the hand with which he grasped
the back of a chair.
“Just what do you mean, Maggie? What’s hard?”
She told him then that his going back to school naturally meant a
postponement of their marriage. “Oh, Peter, can’t you see I want to be
safe like other women, with a home and protection? I met Henderson,
Henderson Neal, uptown Saturday—I didn’t mean to tell you—but he glared
at me. He made me shiver, I wished you were with me. I’m afraid of him,
Peter, I’ll never be safe till we’re married.”
His level voice answered her: “I can see to your safety, Maggie; if Neal
really frightens you, I can have him bound over to keep the peace. But
we can’t marry now, dear. I want to be able to take care of my—my wife.
And if I go back to my classes, I’ll need all the money I can lay hands
on. I’ve lost so much time that I can’t afford to do any outside work.
I’ll just live on what I’ve made with Mason. But that will leave me
pretty poor. You see, I’ve got to have five hundred dollars cold for my
instruments.”
She looked at him speechless, her gray eyes going black in the pale gold
of her face, her hands submissively folded.
He took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “If you don’t
mind, Maggie, I think we’d better discuss this later. Suppose we think
it over for two or three days, and then we’ll settle upon something.”
His voice, infinitely gentle, infinitely sorry for her, trailed off into
silence.
She said listlessly: “I think I’ll go to New York for a while. I think
I’d like to be with my mother.”
He ignored the pathos of this. “That would be fine. How soon do you want
to go?”
“To-morrow,” she told him. “You needn’t come to the station with me,
Peter, you’d hardly have time to make it. I won’t take much, so I can
manage.”
He felt himself a cad for agreeing with her. “It’s too bad I have to go
now, but I’ve got to read over some notes with Morgan. So this is
good-by for the present. Aren’t you going to kiss me, Maggie?”
She held up her face for her dutiful kiss.
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