THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE
The instinct to conceal certain moods of depression and distress together
with the histrionic power to make the concealment possible may be a
serious peril to a woman of Mary Wollaston's temperament. She had managed
at the telephone that morning to deceive Wallace pretty completely. Even
her laugh had failed to give her away.
She was altogether too near for safety to the point of exhaustion. She
had endured her second night without sleep. She had not really eaten an
adequate meal since her lunch in town the day Paula had engineered her
out of the way for that talk with Maxfield Ware.
There was nothing morbid in her resolution to find, at the earliest
possible moment, some way of making herself independent of her father's
support. Having pointed out Paula's duty as a bread winner she could not
neglect her own, however dreary the method might be, or humble the
results. In any mood, of course, the setting out in search of employment
would have been painful and little short of terrifying to one brought up
the way Mary had been.
A night's sleep though and a proper breakfast would have kept the thing
from being a nightmare. As it was, she felt, setting out with her
clipping from the help-wanted columns of a morning paper, a good deal
like the sole survivor of some shipwreck, washed up upon an unknown
coast, venturing inland to discover whether the inhabitants were
cannibals. Even the constellations in her sky were strange.
Where, then, was Anthony March? Nowhere above her horizon, to-day at all
events. The memory of him had been with her much of the two last
sleepless nights. She had told over the tale of her moments with him
again and again. (Did any one, she might have wondered, ever love as
deeply with so small a treasury of golden hours for memory to draw upon?)
But she could not, somehow, relate him at all to her present or her
future. Her love for him was an out-going rather than an in-coming thing.
At least, her thoughts had put the emphasis upon that side of it; upon
the longing to comfort and protect him, to be the satisfaction to all his
wants. Not--passionately not--to cling heavily about his neck, drag at
his feet, steal his wayfarer's liberty,--no, not the smallest moment of
it! This present helplessness of hers then, which heightened her need for
him, served also to bolt the doors of her thoughts against him.
Her recollection of the next few hours, though it contained some
vignettes so sharp and deeply bitten in as to be, she fancied,
ineffaceable, was in the main confused. She must have called upon ten or
a dozen advertisers in various suburban districts of the city (she
avoided addresses that were too near home and names where she suspected
hers might be known). Her composite impression was of flat thin voices
which she could imagine in excitement becoming shrill; of curious
appraising stares; of a vast amount of garrulous irrelevancy; of a note
of injury that one who could profess so little equipment beyond good will
should so disappoint the expectation her first appearance had aroused.
The background was a room--it seemed to have been in every case the
same--expensively overfurnished, inexpressive, ill-fitting its uses, like
a badly chosen ready-made coat. The day was not without its humors, or
what would have been humors if her spirit could have rebounded to them.
Chiefly, the violent antagonism she found aroused in two or three cases
by the color of her hair.
The residuum of her pilgrimages was three addresses where she might call
about the middle of next week, in person or by telephone, to learn the
advertiser's decision. Well it would convince Wallace Hood that she was
in earnest. That was something.
Wallace's coming to tea became, as the day wore on, more and more
something to look forward to. All the things about him which in more
resilient hours she had found irritating or absurd, his neutrality, his
appropriateness, his steady unimaginative way of going always one step
at a time, seemed now precisely his greatest merits. The thought of tea
in his company even aroused a faint appetite for food in her and lent
zest to her preparations for it. When she stopped at the neighborhood
caterer's shop for supplies she bought some tea cakes in addition to the
sandwiches she had ordered in the morning. She had managed to get home
in good enough season to restore the drawing-room somewhat to its
inhabited appearance, to set out her tea table, put on her kettle, and
then go up-stairs and change her dress for something that was not wilted
by the day's unusual heat. She was ready then to present before Wallace
an _ensemble_ which should match pretty well her tone at the telephone
this morning.
But when she answered the ring she supposed was his and flinging open the
door saw Graham Stannard there instead, she got a jarring shock which her
overstrung nerves were in no condition to endure.
"I persuaded Mr. Hood to let me come to tea in his place," he said.
"It was rather cheeky of me to ask him, I'm afraid. I hope you will
forgive me."
The arrest of all her processes of thought at sight of him lasted only
the barest instant. Then her mind flashed backward through a surmise
which embraced the whole series of events. An alarm at Hickory Hill over
her failure to arrive (which somehow they had been led to expect), a
dash by Graham (Rush not available, perhaps), into town for news. To
Wallace Hood, of course. And Wallace had betrayed her. In the interest of
romantic sentiment. The happy ending given its chance. A rich young
adoring husband instead of a job as nursery governess in Omaha!
It took no longer for all that to go through her mind than Graham needed
for his little explanatory speech on the door-step. There he stood
waiting for her answer. The only choice she had was between shutting the
door in his face without a word, or graciously inviting him to come in
and propose to her--for the last time, at all events. It was not, of
course, a choice at all.
"I'm afraid it's a terribly hot day for tea," she said, moving back from
the doorway to make room for him to come in. "Wallace likes it, though. I
might make you something cold if only I had ice, but of course there
isn't any in the house. It's nice and cool, though, isn't it; from having
been shut up so long?"
Anything,--any frantic thing that could be spun into words to cover the
fact that she had no welcome for him at all, not even the most wan little
beam of friendly tenderness. She had seen the hurt look come into his
eyes, incipient panic at the flash of anger which had not been meant for
him. She must float him inside, somehow, and anchor him to the tea table.
There she could get herself together and deal with him--decently.
He came along, tractably enough, sat in the chair that was to have
been Wallace's, and talked for a while of the tea, and how hot it was
this afternoon, and how beautifully cool in here. It was hot, too, out
at Hickory Hill but one thought little of it. The air was drier for
one thing. He and Rush had commented on the difference as they drove
in to-day.
"Oh, Rush came in with you, did he?" she observed.
He flushed and stammered over the admission and it was easy to guess why.
The fact that her brother, as well as Wallace, was lurking in the
background somewhere waiting for results gave an official cast to his
call that was rather--asinine. She came to the rescue.
"I suppose he and Wallace had something they wanted to talk about," she
commented easily, and he made haste to assent.
She steadied herself with a breath. "Did Wallace tell you," she asked,
"about our explosion at Ravinia over Paula's new contract? And how
furious both father and Paula are with me about it? And how I'm out
looking for a job? He didn't say anything about his sister, did he;
whether he'd written to her to-day or not?"
"Not whether he'd written. But he told us the rest. How you wanted to go
to work. As a nursery governess."
He paused there but she did not break in upon it. She had given him all
the lead he needed. With the deliberate care that a suddenly tremulous
hand made necessary he put down his teacup and spoke as if addressing it.
"I think you're the bravest--most wonderful person in the world. Of
course, I've known that always. Not just since I came back last spring.
But this, that Mr. Hood told us this afternoon, somehow--caps the climax.
I can't tell you how it--got me, to think of your being ready to do--a
thing like that."
The last thing she would have done voluntarily was to put any obstacles
in his way. Her program, on the contrary was to help him along all she
could to his declaration, make a refusal that should be as gentle as was
consistent with complete finality, and then get rid of him before
anything regrettably--messy ensued. But to have her courage rhapsodized
over like this was a thing she could not endure.
"It's nothing," she said rather dryly, "beyond what most girls do
nowadays as a matter of course. I'm being rather cowardly about it, I
think--on account of some silly ideas I've been more or less brought up
with perhaps, but..."
"What if they do?" he broke in; "thousands of them at the stores and in
the offices. It's bad enough for them--for any sort of woman. But it's
different with you. It's horrible. You aren't like them."
She tried to check herself but couldn't. "What's the difference? I'm
healthy and half-educated and fairly young. I have the same sort, pretty
much, of thoughts and feelings. I don't believe I like being clean and
warm and well-fed and amused and admired any better than the average girl
does. I ought to have found a job months ago, instead of letting Rush
bring me home from New York. Or else gone to work when I came home. But
every one was so horrified..."
"They were right to be," he interrupted. "It is a horrible idea. Because
you aren't like the others. You _haven't_ the same sort of thoughts and
feelings. A person doesn't have to be in love with you to see that. Your
father and Rush and Mr. Hood all see it. And as for me--well, I couldn't
endure it, that's all. Oh, I know, you can act like anybody else; laugh
and dance and talk nonsense and make a person forget sometimes. But the
other thing is there all the while--shining through--oh, it can't be
talked about!--like a light. Of--of something a decent man _wants_ to be
guided by, whatever he does. And for you to go out into the world with
that, where there can't be any protection at all ... I can't stand it,
Mary. That's why I came to-day instead of Mr. Hood."
She went very white during that speech and tears came up into her eyes.
Tears of helpless exasperation. It was such a cruelly inhuman thing to
impose an ideal like that upon a woman. It was so smug, so utterly
satisfactory to all romantic sentimentalists. Wallace would approve every
word of it. Wallace had sent him to say just this;--was waiting now to be
told the good news of his success.
The fact is worth recalling, perhaps, that away back in her childhood
Wallace had sometimes reduced her to much this sort of frantic
exasperation by his impregnable assumption that she was the white-souled
little angel she looked. Sitting here in this very room he had goaded her
into committing freakish misdemeanors.
She was resisting now an impulse of much the same sort, though the
parallel did not, of course, occur to her. It was just a sort of
inexplicable panic which she was reining in with all her might by telling
herself how fond she really was of Graham and how terrible a thing it
would be if she hurt him unnecessarily. She dared not attempt to speak so
she merely waited. She was sitting relaxed, her head lowered, her chin
supported by one hand. This stillness and relaxation she always resorted
to in making any supreme demand upon her self-control.
He looked at her rather helplessly once or twice during the silence. Then
arose and moved about restlessly.
"I know you don't love me. I've gone on hoping you could after I suppose
I might have seen it wasn't possible. You've tried to and you can't. I
don't know if one as white as you could love any man--that way. Well, I'm
not going to ask any more for that. I want to ask, instead, that we be
friends. I haven't spoiled the possibility of that, have I?"
She was taken utterly by surprise. It didn't seem possible that she had
even heard aright and the face he turned to, as he asked that last
question, was of one pitiably bewildered, yet lighted too by a gleam of
gratitude.
"You really mean that, Graham?" she asked in a very ragged voice. "Is
that what you came to-day to tell me?"
"I mean it altogether," he said earnestly. "I mean it without
any--reservations at all. You must believe that because it's the--basis
for everything else."
She repeated "everything else?" in clear interrogation; then dropped back
rather suddenly into her former attitude. Everything else! What else was
there to friendship but itself?
He turned back to the window. "I've come to ask you to, marry me, Mary,
just the same. I couldn't be any good as a friend, couldn't take care of
you and try to make you happy, unless in the eyes of the world I was your
husband. But I wouldn't ask,--I promise you I wouldn't ask
anything,--anything at all. You do understand, don't you? You'd be just
as--sacred to me ..."
Then he cried out in consternation at the sight of her, "Mary!
What is it?"
The tension had become too great, that was all. Her self-control,
slackened by the momentarily held belief that it was not needed,
had snapped.
"I understand well enough," she said. "You would say good night at my
bedroom door and good morning at the breakfast table. I've read of
arrangements like that in rather nasty-minded novels, but I didn't
suppose they existed anywhere else. I can't think of an existence more
degradingly sensual than that;--to go on for days and months and years
being 'sacred' to a man; never satisfying the desires your nearness
tortured him with--to say nothing of what you did with your own!
"But that such a thing should be offered to me because I'm too good to
love a man honestly.... You see, I'm none of the things you think I am,
Graham. Nor that you want me to be. Not white, not innocent. Not a 'good'
woman even, let alone an angel. That's what makes it so--preposterous."
He had been staring at her, speechless, horrified. But at this it was as
if he understood. "I ought not to have worried you to-day," he said,
suddenly gentle. "I know how terribly overwrought you are. I meant--I
only meant to make things easier. I'm going away now. I'll send Rush to
you. He'll come at once. Do you mind being alone till then?"
She answered slowly and with an appearance of patient
reasonableness, "It's not that. It's not what Rush calls
shell-shock. There is many a shabby little experimental flirt who
has managed to keep intact an-innocence which I don't possess. That
is the simple-physiological truth."
Then, after a silence, with a gasp, "I'm not mad. But I think I shall be
if you go on looking at me like that. Won't you please go?"