When in the course of time, Frances Mary’s door was opened to Wilfred,
he experienced a disagreeable let-down. She was quite unchanged; just as
good-looking; just as comradely. It was an offense in his eyes now. It
might as well have been Stanny or Jasper; there was no thrill in it.
What a fool he had been to let himself imagine things! . . . Why was he
unable to fall in love with Frances Mary? It was because there was no
trace of sex-consciousness in her to arouse a like feeling in him. In
other words it was her finest quality which put him off. Same old
vicious circle!
He was a little discomposed to find Jessie Dartrey sitting demurely in
the warm-colored living-room. But her manner had undergone a
metamorphosis. This afternoon the downright creature was almost
anxiously friendly. Wilfred grinned at her mockingly; but even so, could
not rouse her to battle. He interpreted her changed attitude as a plea
to allow the little scene between them to be forgotten and buried—and
especially not to let Frances Mary know about it. He was quite willing.
He liked Jessie fine. Very soon she went.
Frances Mary brought out the tea-things; moving about the room in her
large, graceful fashion. She was telling Wilfred about her summer in the
Vermont hills. She had found a tiny shack, where she had lived alone,
doing her own housekeeping. There were three delightful children who
brought her supplies from the farmer’s nearby. Jean Ambrose and Aurora
Page had had a house in the neighborhood. Frances Mary had made a new
friend in a painter who had come to board at the farmer’s; a diffident
girl, who had come out wonderfully in the end. Other girls had visited
Jean and Aurora, who possessed a spare room.
An Adamless Eden thought Wilfred, with a tinge of scorn.
Frances Mary told Wilfred briefly, of the completed novel she had
brought back with her. It was the story of a woman who had married too
late. She did not suggest on this occasion that Wilfred might help her
with criticism. He felt a little jealous and sore. Will I ever have the
constancy to write a whole book? he asked himself with a sinking heart.
In return he told her about the genteel boarding-house; and about his
long walks over the Ramapo Mountains, which had reduced his mind to a
state of comfortable vacuity.
“How is your work?” she asked. “Hasn’t it been coming well?”
“It’s been going well,” he answered with a laugh. “I sold four stories
in the Spring. That is how I was able to go to the country. I’ve got rid
of three more since. I’ve been reeling them off.”
Frances Mary glanced at him, to see how this was to be taken.
“Oh, I know they’re putrid,” said Wilfred. “I’ve discovered the
combination. You take a thoroughly nice fellow, and a thoroughly nice
girl, and you invent difficulties to separate them; then you remove the
difficulties. There are three old fables that you can work ad lib; the
Cinderella motive; the Ugly Duckling Motive; and the Prince in Disguise.
Work in a bit of novelty into the setting, and your story is hailed as
Original; a sure go! That’s the sort of thing they fill the backs of the
magazines with; they’ve got to have a lot of it.”
Frances Mary said nothing.
“Well, I had to be writing something,” he said; “or I’d have gone clean
off my chump. That was the best I could fish up out of myself. The old
keenness has gone.”
“How about the mountains?”
“The mountains did things to _me_,” he said flippantly; “but I couldn’t
throw _them_!”
“Isn’t there good material in your social experiences last winter?”
“No,” said Wilfred quickly. Fearful of betraying his inward shiver, he
added: “It’s been done too often. . . . There’s no lack of material. The
lack is in me.”
She said no more on the subject.
Wilfred was sitting beside a little table covered with a scarf of
coffee-colored Italian silk in alternate stripes, shiny and dull. On the
table were some of Frances Mary’s precious gim-cracks. She loved little
objects of all sorts, if they had beauty. On this table, a row of books
still in their paper wrappers; a white Chinese bowl, decorated with red
fish, and filled with apples; a small censer of pierced silver; an
enamelled snuffbox; some miniature ivory grotesques; a bit of cloisonné.
Wilfred knew every object in the room.
Opposite him, sat Frances Mary by the tea-table, watching the kettle,
which at this season did its work suspended over an alcohol flame. With
her bright hair banded round her head in a style of her own; and wearing
a soft draped dress the same color as her hair, what a grateful sight to
the eye! Purely feminine; ladylike—horrible word for a lovely quality.
What was the color of her hair? Wilfred had always termed it sorrel, but
was dissatisfied with the word. Now the right word leaped into his mind;
fallow! Of course! the color of the fallow deer! Fallow! a delicious
word!—But Frances Mary’s veiled level glance and reticent lips rejected
passion. She seemed less sympathetic to him than usual.
In the silence Wilfred saw the abyss yawning at his feet, and shutting
his eyes, leaped. His limbs were palsied; his tongue clave to the roof
of his mouth. He said stammeringly:
“Frances Mary, how about you and I getting married?”
She looked at him quickly, her face dimpling with laughter. “Why,
Wilfred! Just like that! . . . You’re not in love with me!”
“I’m fed up with love!” cried Wilfred, bitterly, before he thought of
the implications of his speech. Panic seized him. “With the idea of
love,” he hastily added, becoming aware at the same moment, that he was
only making matters worse.
Frances Mary’s lashes were lowered. Her face showed no other change.
There was a silence. Having taken the leap, and not having met with
annihilation, Wilfred began to discover resources in himself. After all,
the whole truth had to come out; and it didn’t so much matter if it came
wrong end first.
“I don’t expect you to give me an answer out of hand,” he went on. “We
must talk it out. I know that this must appear to you like just another
of my artificial, self-conscious flights, but if you will only have a
little patience with me, I will convince you.”
“Could one marry from conviction?” she asked lightly.
“Yes!” he cried. “That’s the very point! The notion that passion must
decide is fatal. I know it! I know it!”
“You may be right,” she said with a half smile that he could not
interpret. “By all means let us talk it out!” Her serene glance was
raised again; but it did not rest on Wilfred. She was looking at the
kettle, meditatively. “If you do not love me, why do you want to marry
me?”
“I _do_ love you,” said Wilfred. “But not. . . .”
“Not passionately,” she quickly interposed, smiling and looking at him
full; an extraordinary look of remote kindness.
Wilfred was silent. He was being put in the wrong, though he knew he was
right.
“Well, your reasons?” she asked.
“You are the finest woman I know,” he said quickly. This was one of the
questions he had imagined her asking. “I respect and admire you. My
instinct tells me you will grow in my respect and admiration as long as
I live. That’s the only thing that could hold me.”
She smiled again. He felt resentfully, that she was reading him through
and through. It wasn’t fair, because he was all at sea respecting her.
Still, everything had to come out!
“You feel that it is essential you should be held,” said Frances Mary,
dryly.
“Oh Fanny, you make me feel so young!”
Again that smile from a distance. The kettle boiled; but instead of
making tea, she put out the light. She looked about her. Fetching a
little raffia basket, she commenced to sew a lace edging to a scrap of
white stuff.
“To live with somebody you trusted!” said Wilfred, moved by his own
words. “Somebody you could be yourself with; to whom you could reveal
your innermost thoughts! To share the same tastes and pleasures!
Somebody who could help you, and whom you might help a little—you have
said it of me. Wouldn’t that be happiness?”
“You have pictured it all out!” she said smiling.
“Yes, I have!” he returned, goaded. “I have thought about it, and
dreamed about it! I know you laugh at my mixed mental processes, at the
way I deceive myself; well, I laugh too! Just the same you can build on
dreams as well as thoughts. The soft stuff fades; but something collects
little by little, just from one’s having been deceived so often.”
She disregarded this. “You do not know me,” she said quietly. “Nobody
knows me. I have made a business of concealing myself. Even in my
stories. Everything I write is just . . . bravura! . . . You only
imagine those fine things about me. Nobody is any better than anybody
else—in some ways. If you thought you were getting a paragon you’d be
frightfully sold . . . so would I!”
“Not a paragon,” said Wilfred, smiling in his turn. “I know your
faults.”
“What are they?” she challenged.
“You are afraid of life. You hate your own emotions. You dissect them
while they are alive. You are much too refined. Occasionally you ought
to be beaten. You have lived too long in your mind; you ought to give
your blood a chance!”
“What makes you say that?” she demanded, startled and affronted.
Wilfred shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “It just came out.”
She quickly regained her equanimity. “Not bad as far as it goes,” she
said. “But you haven’t touched on the worst things.”
Her quiet bitterness struck a little fear into Wilfred’s breast. _Was_
there an unsuspected worst in Frances Mary? Oh, well, he was committed
now; no choice but to struggle on. “You have one quality that I hold to
through all,” he said; “your disinterestedness. The finest quality of
all!”
Her smile became still more remote. “Oh, it’s easy to be disinterested
about things that don’t touch you too closely,” she said.
This was a facer for Wilfred. He strove not to show it. “I’ll take my
chance of your soundness,” he said.
She shook her head. “Passion, preposterous as it is, is the only
justification.”
“I could love you—if you gave me a chance,” he said sullenly.
Frances Mary laughed suddenly and merrily.
“I know I’m ridiculous,” he said blushing crimson; “but I mean to see it
through. It’s all got to come out, absurdities and all.”
“Why marry at all?” she asked.
“I want you.”
She looked at him.
“Well . . . need you.”
“As a sort of antidote to passion, I take it,” said Frances Mary softly.
All the kindness had suddenly gone out, leaving her soft face pinched
and awry.
Wilfred was stung beyond endurance. “Yes!” he cried, jumping up. “An
antidote to passion! I’ve seen it and what it ends in. Am I criminal or
foolish to dream of something better? I looked on you as a woman above
prejudice. It’s easy enough to make a joke of me because I’m not playing
the old false game with you. You’ve got everything on your side, the
whole weight of the ages! But I won’t be so easily shut up now; my
foolishness has taught me something. There’s something to be said for my
way, though I’m alone in it. It’s my real self I’m offering you; though
I sound like a fool.”
She had risen too, and walked away to a table between the windows where
she stood with her back turned. “I’m sorry, Wilfred,” she said in a
muffled voice. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
When she apologized, it took all the fire out of him. “It doesn’t
matter,” he said flatly.
Presently, she turned around; but, the light being behind her, he could
not see her face clearly. “Your position is sound,” she said, “and you
have stated it better than you think. . . . Still, what you ask is
impossible. For two reasons; first, I am not the woman you think I am;
second, I must think of myself a little.”
The cold voice completed Wilfred’s demoralization. “I only admit the
second reason,” he said gloomily. “Of course you must think of yourself.
I am seeking _my_ good.”
“Why should I marry you?”
“If you put it to me, the Lord knows!”
“I do not think you are the finest man I ever knew. In fact I have no
illusions about you.”
“So much the better,” he mumbled.
“Then why? why?”
“Well, I thought. . . .”
“You thought I loved you?” she asked quickly.
“Not so far as that. I thought perhaps you might come to. There was
sympathy. . . .”
She came away from the front table. Her hands were pressed against her
breast; her face tormented. To Wilfred, who was wrought up too, that
seemed natural. “Wilfred, tell me plainly what you have been doing these
last months,” she said breathlessly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said quickly, “I . . .”
A cry escaped her. “No! Don’t tell me. . . . !”
But he was already under way. “I fell in love, as they put it, with a
woman who preferred Joe Kaplan to me,” he said bitterly. “You know all
about Joe Kaplan. She married him. Well, that cured that. Afterwards I
slid into an affair with a woman whom I despised. That soon ran its
course. Then I went to the country and tried to haul myself up by my own
boot-straps without succeeding. That’s all.”
Frances Mary had returned to her chair. She was sitting forward in an
attitude unnatural to her, her head lowered. “You experienced passion
. . . for a woman you despised?” she murmured.
“Yes,” said Wilfred. “That’s the point I was trying to make. That’s how
easy it is. . . .”
There was a silence. Then Frances Mary said in an uncertain voice: “You
had better go.”
Wilfred stared. “I won’t go for any such reason as that!” he said hotly.
“Are you raising the banner of conventional morality! _You_ . . . !”
She said: “Suppose I told you that _I_ . . . !”
“Rubbish!” cried Wilfred. “It would be better for you if you had!”
“Your ideas are loathsome!” cried Frances Mary with unexpected loudness.
“This is what I get for trying to be honest!”
“_Honest!_”
Simultaneously it struck them what exhibitions they were making of
themselves. They laughed in bitter vexation, and fell silent. They
avoided each other’s eyes.
“I apologize for shouting at you,” mumbled Wilfred.
Frances Mary did not apologize, though she had shouted too.
Presently something changed in her. She looked at Wilfred queerly.
Settling back in her chair, she raised her head. “Wilfred, kiss me,” she
said in a colorless voice.
He looked at her sharply. Her face was drawn and ugly. His instinct bade
him refuse; but she had told him to do it. He was absurdly under her
influence. He went to her with a hangdog air, and printed a cold kiss on
her lips.
A little groan of rage was forced from Frances Mary. She sprang up so
suddenly that her chair was knocked over backwards. All in the one
movement, she fetched Wilfred such a smack on the cheek that his sight
was blotted out for a moment. He fell back, covering the place, staring
at her open-mouthed, clownishly. Frances Mary burst into tears; a
catastrophic breakdown; her face working as absurdly and uglily as a
small child’s; the tears fairly spurting from her eyes. Wilfred quickly
recovered himself. He had to repress a desire to laugh. A load was
lifted from his breast. She could feel! Frances Mary put her hands over
her face, and turned away from him.
“Go! Go!” she murmured.
Wilfred walked to the other end of the room, and sat down on the couch.
“I won’t go till I get to the bottom of this,” he said.
“You see . . . you see . . .” she gasped out in her torn voice.
She loves me! thought Wilfred in a maze. She feels passion for _me_!
What a fatuous brute I have been! . . . Still, the bars had to be
smashed down one way or another!
“Now you see what kind of a woman I am! . . . You’d better go!”
“I don’t think any of the worse of you,” said Wilfred, smiling to
himself.
Careless of her ugly, tear-stained face, she flung around, and stamped
her foot. “Don’t sit there and sneer!” she cried. “It’s intolerable!”
“Sneer . . . !” he echoed indignantly.
“Disinterested!” cried Frances Mary. “Oh, Heavens! . . . I don’t think
much of it! Your so-called disinterestedness is revolting to me! You
talk by rote! Prating of love and passion! What do you know about
either? You’re light! What is passion to you? An interesting experience!
You have suffered, you say. You’re quite healed, aren’t you, and ready
for fresh experiments? You know nothing of the agony of repression. For
years! For years! Everything comes out of you like a child’s babbling.
You know nothing of the wolves that tear. . . . Oh, why don’t you go?”
Wilfred recognized the element of truth in her portrait of him, but was
not dismayed. He could no longer repress the delighted grin. “I’m not
afraid of your wolves,” he said. “. . . I hail them!”
“Be quiet!” cried Frances Mary. But the new quality in his grin arrested
her. She stared; her angry face all at a pause.
Wilfred stood up.
“Don’t come near me!” she cried sharply.
He laughed outright. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go. But this is not the
end, of course.”
She drew the old veil over her face. But it was somewhat torn now.
Picking up the fallen chair, she set it on its feet. “I’ll never marry
you now!” she said with extreme bitterness. “However it might be for
your good! Women can’t forget things as conveniently as men seem to do.
This scene would always be present with me. Even when you began to love
me—as no doubt you would! no doubt you would! having resolved upon it.
I should always be remembering how you decided beforehand that it would
be a fine thing for you if you could bring yourself to it!”
She doesn’t mean a word of it! he thought with infinite relief and
delight. She’s no better than me! He said: “You’re talking pure romantic
nonsense! You might have got it out of one of my stories! . . . You’ve
got something to learn too!”
“From your experience?” she asked with bitter nostrils.
* * * * *
Wilfred walked along Fifty-Ninth street, bemused with wonder. How
extraordinary! How extraordinary! . . . Well, after all I didn’t do so
badly, considering . . . !