It was not often that Wilmer remained long awake after retiring to
her room. Her days came to a calm and untroubled close with the first
approach of drowsiness. The problems which claimed her attention were
either of that minor daylight character familiar to all housekeepers or
else of so purely an academic nature--being largely those offered by
the younger British novelists--that they were as easily laid aside at
night as her walking boots.
But this evening, instead of hurrying into bed after blowing out her
light, she slipped on a dainty negligee and sat by the open window.
She enjoyed the feel of the fresh night breeze on her white forehead
and warm face. The moon had already lost one section of its brilliant
circumference, but enough was left to bathe in a translucent glow the
encircling hills which shut in the sleeping valley covered now with a
silver veil. A cluster of chestnut-oaks stood below her window slightly
to the left of the porch. Fleeting bits of light sifted through the
luxuriant foliage like drops of silver rain. The scene before her
eyes was both clear and vague; many bits easily recognizable, but the
rest complicated with full-bodied shadows. She knew every inch of it,
and yet it was veiled in mystery. Knowing there was nothing to fear,
still she would have been afraid to walk abroad alone. She would not
trust her intelligence to keep in leash her imagination. And yet if her
intellect could not do that for her, it was serving her ill.
It was--in other ways. Reason should have told her she was making too
much of the incident of the afternoon. To treat that seriously was to
make too much of Allston himself. And this was dangerous. It destroyed
perspective and cloaked the man in mystery--as the night light did the
familiar acres and trees before her. This left her the prey to all
sorts of illusions--to all sorts of unwarranted timidities. It took
her back to childhood and virginal ignorance. This, after her reading
had turned the searchlight upon one shadow after another revealing the
stark truth.
The stark truth was sometimes unpleasant; sometimes tediously
innocuous. Never was it romantic. Most men, it seems, were the slaves
of fleeting passions; most women, their victims. This ended sometimes
in tragedy; sometimes in comedy; sometimes in nothing at all. The
greatest tragedy to her was when it ended in nothing at all. She had
an orderly mind and liked to reach definite conclusions. She found
vagueness depressing.
Yet that appeared to be the spirit of the day. No one knew anything
with certainty whether of politics or religion or human nature. She
herself had clung persistently to most of the doctrines of her father
in politics and religion, and found them adequate. But she could not
accept his trusting confidence in the inherent honesty of men, except
those of his generation. The world was simpler in his day.
She had liked Allston from the start and been willing to accept him, up
to a certain point, at his face value. She never expected to go beyond
that point. As long as she viewed him merely objectively, she found him
distinctly entertaining and a decided addition to her list of friends.
Considering the circumstances of his introduction to the household, she
was warranted in believing that here their relations would end. It was
on this theory she had allowed herself so much freedom with him.
Now this was all changed. He had thrust himself upon her attention
in another fashion. When he seized her hand, the act, in itself, was
trivial enough, as he had argued. But what it connoted was not trivial.
And the effect it produced on her was not trivial. The blood which
rushed to her face was not in protest at his boldness, even though
for self-protection she had been obliged to make him think so. In
reality it was a startling confession of weakness in herself. Had she
been coldly indifferent or even righteously indignant, she could have
forgotten the incident. But she could not forget the surge of a far
different emotion that had swept through her.
She had handled herself well considering the strength and
unexpectedness of this attack. The carefully erected barriers of years
had been swept away. She had found herself standing, self-dependent,
facing this man in the grip of a passion so primitive it shocked her.
She had been thrilled by the clasp of his strong fingers. For a few
dizzy seconds she was merely some captured thing glad of her capture.
Had she obeyed her desires, she would not have struggled at all--would
neither have withdrawn her hand nor chided him.
Wilmer faced the truth mercilessly. She made no attempt to equivocate
or to excuse herself, though even here in the privacy of her room her
cheeks flamed scarlet once again. She had been governed by instincts
as primitive as anything she might expect of Roxie and she knew it. To
be sure, she had conquered them. In the space of half a dozen frantic
heartbeats she had mastered herself. But this did not blot out those
other few seconds.
And now to explain it--and she must explain it to maintain her
self-respect--she was driven to the use of the word love; the word she
prided herself on being able to regard with almost cynical scorn. It
was not like this that she had expected love to come, if ever it did
come into her life. If she was not yet twenty-five, she was no longer
seventeen. She was supposed to be sufficiently well disciplined to
analyze even this passion intelligently. If not, all her reading and
thought were to little purpose. The first appeal of a lover to her
should be through intellect and character, not through the emotions.
It was some consolation to be able to admit that she could offer no
criticism of Allston’s character as far as it had been revealed to her.
As for his intellect, if it was not as acutely active as her ideal
called for, it was by no means negative. She might have been satisfied
with it--if only it mattered. But it did not.
She had not this afternoon, and she did not now, care a picayune about
his intellect. It was the beat of his pulse against her hand which had
swayed her. It was the feel of being in his possession that had taken
away her breath. It was the magic of his eyes seeking her eyes with an
insistence almost brutal which had swept her off her feet.
It was all those things which at this moment brought into her eyes
something of the mystery which the moon brought to the familiar picture
at which in awe she now gazed from her window. Her lips parted and she
pronounced his name--using quite unconsciously, because it expressed a
tenderness her mood demanded, a nickname she associated with a brother
who had died very young.
“Ned,” she repeated to herself.
The sound of the whispered name brought the man into such vivid being
that it was as though he stood beside her. She shrank away from the
window. She stared about the room in fear lest her boldness had
actually materialized him. Hurriedly she threw off her negligee and
running to the bed hid herself beneath the sheets.