"What's the matter?" he asked, coming around in front of her. "Perhaps
I can help you even if it's only to give some good advice."
She looked up at him with a sudden flash. "I suppose that, since you
are so much engaged, you think you would make a good father-confessor!"
"I don't see that that has anything to do with it," he said, sitting
down beside her, "but you can bank on me for doing anything I can."
"You don't see that that has anything to do with it," she broke in
sharply, with the evident intention of wounding him, "because you are
very unworldly, what is usually called very unsophisticated."
If she had thought to pique him with this adjective, she was disarmed
by the heartiness of his admission, "As green as grass! But I'd like to
help you all the same, if I can."
"You don't care if you are?" she asked curiously.
"Lord no! What does it matter?"
"You may care then to know," she went on, still probing at him, "that
your not caring is the principal reason for my--finding you
interesting--for my liking you--as I do."
"Well, I'm interested to know that," he said reasonably, "but blessed
if I can see why. What difference does it make to _you_?"
"It's a great surprise to me," she said clearly. "I never met anybody
before who didn't care more about being sophisticated than about
anything else. To have you not even think of that--to have you think of
nothing but your work and how to 'mean well' as you say----" she
stopped, flushing deeply.
"Yes, it must be quite a change," he admitted sobered by her tone, but
evidently vague as to her meaning. "Well, I'm very glad you don't mind
my being as green as grass and as dense as a hitching-block. It's very
lucky for me."
A quick bitterness sprang into her voice. "I don't see," she echoed his
phrase, "what difference it makes to _you_!"
"Don't you?" he said, lighting a cigarette and not troubling himself to
discuss the question with her. She was evidently all on edge with
nerves, he thought, and needed to be calmed down. He pitied women for
their nerves, and was always kindly tolerant of the resultant
petulances.
She frowned and said with a tremulous resentment, as if gathering
herself together for a long-premediated attempt at self-defense.
"You're not only as green as grass, but you perceive nothing,--any
European, even the stupidest, would perceive what you--but you are as
primitive as a Sioux Indian, you have the silly morals of a
non-conformist preacher,--you're as brutal as----"
He opposed to this outburst the impregnable wall of a calm and
meditative silence. She looked angrily into his quiet eyes, which met
hers with unflinching kindness. The contrast between their faces was
striking--was painful.
She said furiously, "There is nothing to you except that you are
stronger than I, and you know it--and that _is_ brutal!" She paused a
long moment, quivering, and then relapsed into spent, defeated
lassitude,--"and I like it," she added under her breath, looking down
at her hands miserably.
"I don't mean to be brutal," he said peaceably. "I'm sorry if I am."
"Oh, it's no matter!" she said impatiently.
"All right, have it your own way," he agreed, good-naturedly, shifting
into a more comfortable position, and resuming his patient silence. He
might have been a slightly pre-occupied but indulgent parent, waiting
for a naughty child to emerge from a tantrum.
After a while, "Well, then," she began as though nothing had passed
between them since his offer to give her advice, "well then, if you
want to be father-confessor, tell me what you'd do in my place, if your
family expected you as a matter of course to--to----"
"What do they want you to do?" he asked as she hesitated.
"Oh, nothing that they consider at all formidable! Only what every girl
should do--make a good and suitable marriage, and bring up children to
go on doing what she had found no joy in."
"Don't you do it!" he said quietly. "Nobody believes more than I do in
marrying the right person. But just marrying so's to _be_ married--that's
Tophet! Red-hot Tophet!"[133-1]
"But what else is there for me to do?" she said, turning her eyes to
him with a desperate hope in his answer. "Tell me! My parents have
brought me up so that there is nothing I can fill my life with, if--I
think, on the whole, I will be more miserable if I don't than if I----"
"Why, look-y-here!" he said earnestly. "You're not a child, you're a
grown woman. You have your music. You could earn your living by that.
Great Scott! Earn your living scrubbing floors before you----"
She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Ah, but I am so alone against
all my world! Now, here, with you, it seems easy but--without any one
to sustain me, to----"
Harrison went on: "Now let me give you a rule I believe in as I do in
the sun's rising. Never marry a man just because you think you could
manage to live with him. Don't do it unless you are dead sure you
couldn't live without him!"
She took down her handkerchief, showing a white face, whose expression
matched the quaver in her voice, as she said breathlessly: "But how if
I meet a man and feel I cannot live without him, and he is already--"
she brought it out squarely in the sunny peace,--"if he is already as
good as married!"
He took it with the most single-hearted simplicity. "Now it's you who
are unsophisticated and getting your ideas from fool novels. Things
don't happen that way in real life. Either the man keeps his marriage a
secret, in which case he is a sneak and not worth a second thought from
any decent woman, or else, if she had known all along that he was
married, she doesn't get to liking him that way. Don't you see?"
She looked away, down the stream for a moment with inscrutable eyes,
and then broke into an unexpected laugh, rising at the same time and
putting on her hat. "I see, yes, I see," she said. "It is as you say,
quite simple. And now let us go to visit the rest of the park."