THE LOVERS
ELLEN’S determination to take a day off from her work to enjoy the
novelty of the new sensation of love at first sight proved a dangerous
precedent.
The morning after Manning’s visit her mind refused to budge. She
resolutely sat down at her desk, laid out her notes, sharpened three
pencils and wrote the title to her article. Nothing followed. That is
to say nothing that had any value for the columns of _The New Era
Magazine_. What actually followed was the endless scribbling of
Manning’s name. She wrote it in a smooth, flowing girlish hand as if
addressing imaginary envelopes. She printed it out in pencilled type
in secret correspondence. She wrote it with all sorts of prefixes--Mr.
Ralph Manning, the Hon. Ralph Manning. She lingered over this one for
quite a while and wondered if she would like him to enter politics.
His Southern training gave him a leaning to political life. He was an
orator. She had caught this from his modest account of the winning of
the little gold oratory medal that dangled from his watch chain. He was
a Democrat, too,--all Southern boys who came to New York were--except
a few from the mountains. This would be an enormous advantage. New
York City was overwhelmingly Democratic. His culture and genius for
leadership would land him at the top. He might become the Governor.
She laughed at her silly enthusiasm, and the laugh died slowly into a
frown.
“No! That wouldn’t do at all!” she muttered.
“A politician is a slave to convention. He dare not call his soul his
own--no, decidedly not!”
She sprang to her feet with a gesture of disgust, threw down her pencil
and sought a book to stimulate her mind to creative work again. Every
book that stared at her from the shelves of her well-chosen library
provoked an argument with Manning. They were all radical pleas for
the new world in which she moved. The old-fashioned protests she had
thrown away as fast as she read them. Her faith in woman had become a
religion. In the fervor of her devotion she refused to harbor heresies.
Any man or woman who opposed the emancipation of woman was a heretic,
and their ravings in print or from the public platform were not only
insults to the truth--they were crimes. She had made it a rule never to
poison her soul with their venomous attacks.
Every title she read was an indictment of Manning’s old-fashioned
creed. Somehow this morning she resented her own radical
narrow-mindedness. There were two sides to every question, of course.
She must give him credit for sincerity in his views.
“Heavens, what are his views?” she breathed suddenly.
For the life of her she couldn’t recall a single sentence of antagonism
to her feminist philosophy. Why had she taken it for granted that he
would oppose her?
The question startled.
She repeated it with fearless searching. There could be no doubt to
the answer if she were honest enough to confess it. She was honest.
She would confess it. The revelation had come from the depths of her
woman’s intuitions--her instinctive perception of the mind and purpose
of her mate.
The thought infuriated her. Why, in Heaven’s name, should she
instinctively long for and deliberately plan to win a man who was the
contradiction in creed, training, and character of everything she stood
for in life?
Was it merely the old trick of nature bringing into union two people
who were opposites? Or was her heart-surrender at sight to this
mere man a proof of the futility of her philosophy of the economic,
spiritual and physical independence of woman?
She rejected with scorn the idea of such proof. She determined to put
the powers of her own personality to the test. She wanted this man.
She would win him. She would beat down all opposition--no matter what
the source. She would overwhelm his masculine mind with the obsession
of her love. She would bring him a suppliant to her feet. She would
hesitate at nothing to accomplish this complete triumph.
With him the old-fashioned way was the way to win. Of course, he would
be shocked and hopelessly frightened at any other way.
She determined to drop serious literary work for a month. Fortunately,
she had more than a month’s work ready for the press. Her tremendous
energies had far outrun the requirements of the magazine for the past
year. Much of her surplus writing had been seized by the popular
magazines. They had paid the top prices and she was particularly proud
of this achievement; made, not because she had curried favor with the
mob, but precisely because she had defied their opinions and trampled
their most sacred traditions.
She would merely drop this extra work and fill her columns in _The
New Era_. This would give her a month of absolute freedom--freedom
to live to her finger tips--freedom to explore the soul of a man and
find its inmost secrets.
She devoted the day to the careful planning of the long weeks of
voluptuous idleness she would spend basking in the presence of her
chosen victim. That he would fall before the assault she would make
was not to be doubted. He had given too many signs of human weakness
the night before. There was the barest hesitation when confronted
by her creed of independence. The deliberate plan to devote a month
of precious time to the old-fashioned task of ensnaring a man was
undignified in a new woman, to say the least.
But the end justified the means. The test--the final moral and
spiritual test of her action--lay in its purpose. If she planned to
force the burden of her keep on the unsuspecting victim it was immoral
by all the standards of the new ethics. If her purpose was purely one
of self-development, with no intention of either selling herself into
slavery or forcing him into slavery, her conscience would be clear.
Her conscience was clear. She was following a beautiful and natural
impulse--the impulse of a hungry heart in search of its mate. She would
live this glorious hour to its last moment of joy.
She threw every scruple to the winds and gave herself to the task
of winning the man she had chosen. No art of the dressmaker, the
shoemaker, the milliner, the hairdresser was neglected.
At her suggestion he formed the habit of consulting her daily about
his work. Her experience of five years in writing for the metropolitan
journals made her advice invaluable. He was quick to recognize this and
grateful for the honor of her assistance. These regular daily visits
were made in the early morning and usually lasted but an hour--an hour
of real work for two artistic minds.
His first article had been printed in full and featured with
illustrations for the Sunday edition. It had made a sensation both
among the radical leaders of the feminist movement and among the big
newspaper men as well. It had been written with the true genius of the
born reporter of events. A philosophy of life ran through its witty
sentences, but the play of humor took the sting from his personal
opinions and made both sides to the controversy laugh.
His ambition now was to win a permanent place on the staff of the
paper, with a good annual salary attached, to a chance to move up as he
should prove his worth.
Their morning conference over, he devoted the day to the hardest kind
of work and gave each evening to Ellen West. He was not an observant
man about a woman’s dress. He knew nothing of materials or the art of
their making. He was very sensitive to their effects.
A joyous week had passed before he noticed the extraordinary care with
which Ellen was dressing. It never occurred to him that he had caused
it. To his mind it was merely the proof of her perfection as a woman.
He was particularly pleased because it was proof positive that beneath
all her talk of woman’s declaration of independence was the soul of a
beautiful and sensitive girl hungry for love. However deep might be
her convictions of women’s right to everything man might have fenced
off and claimed as his own, he thanked God that she was not one of the
feminine fools bent on making a man of herself.
Now that he had noticed the perfection of her dress and the exquisite
charm with which her whole being seemed doubly charged because of it,
he began to take courage. Drawn to her irresistibly from the moment
of introduction, he had at first regarded her as a sort of goddess
destined to dwell in the clouds above his head. For the first days
of their intimacy he had not dared to think of her as a possible
sweetheart. He had drifted in the resistless current which her interest
in him had created, content if she smiled.
The new light of purpose began to grow in his gaze. She was quick to
note it and quick to respond to its challenge.
She looked into his honest eyes with daring frankness. At first he
had lowered his own as if afraid he had gone too far in some word or
gesture. He began to return her deep penetrating gaze with a daring
that made her lower her eyes in spite of her philosophy of independence.
At the end of four magic weeks he rapped the brass knocker on her door
one morning with unusual violence. The maid was slow answering the
call. He rapped again with greater violence.
He heard Ellen’s voice in sleepy tones:
“Don’t break it down, please, dear boy; Dora’s on a vacation!”
He heard her hand fumbling at the chain bolt and spoke as if for
himself.
“I just can’t wait, Ellen!”
He put his hand over his mouth. He wondered if she had heard his daring
familiarity.
The door suddenly opened and she stepped back to allow him to enter. To
his amazement she was dressed in a pale pink negligee, her expressive
eyes drooping still with the languor of sleep.
Never had her tall figure seemed so lissom, the lines of her body so
clear and strong and the touch of her footstep so light.
“I beg your pardon,” he stammered, “for coming at this unearthly hour.”
“Come in,” she said softly.
“But I just had to see you and tell you first,” he rushed on, unmindful
of her invitation.
“Come in!” she commanded.
He blushed, and went on excitedly.
“I can’t--I’ve just a minute to tell you that the big thing’s happened.”
“You’ve won your position?”
“Landed on both feet--the boss just called me in and told me my salary
was fifty dollars a week and the job mine as long as I liked it.”
“They’ll give you more than that,” she smiled.
“You can bet they will; but the thing is that I’ve landed! I’m part now
of the machine whose throb stirs the world.”
She caught the contagion of his enthusiasm and flushed with responsive
joy as she extended her bare arm from the folds of the disturbing pink
robe.
“I congratulate you.”
“I owe so much of it to you,” he cried.
“Nonsense; you deserve much more and it will come.”
He pressed her hand with unusual firmness.
“I must hurry to the office now; may I come a little earlier than usual
to-night?”
“Certainly. I’m dying to know all about it.”
He pressed her hand again and bounded down the stairs.
Ellen closed the door, slowly walked back into her bedroom and looked
into the mirror, her arms high above her shoulders in a lazy effort to
readjust the mass of waving brown hair about to fall. She had hastily
thrown it into an immense coil and fixed it with two pins before
opening the door.
She smiled at the charming reflection in the mirror.
“I’m afraid I frightened the poor boy!” she murmured.
She lifted her figure with a slow graceful movement, conscious to her
finger-tips of her power to charm the eye of man and lure his senses
into submission to her will.
Her white teeth glowed in the dim light and her mirror flashed back the
triumphant smile. The crisis had come. She knew it instinctively from
the moment he had made his announcement. He had an income of $2,500 a
year and the certainty of an increase in due season. He could marry on
that. She read him as an open book. He rushed to tell her first because
he had told her of his hopes and dreams. But the thing that gave spring
to his step and brought him to her door at the unearthly hour of his
call, the thing that pounded the knocker on her door until it rang like
an alarm of fire, was the possibility of telling her of his love in
the good old-fashioned way.
If there had been any doubt of this in the tone of his voice, the haste
of his call or the process of her analysis of his mind, there could be
no doubt about it after the last look he gave her before hurrying away.
There was no mistaking that look.
Now that the crisis in their lives had come it was a pretty serious
affair. Sure as she felt of her powers over his physical senses, there
was the steel fiber in his character to be reckoned with.
He would ask her to marry him. He would do this to-night. She felt it
with increasing dread and yet she wished it with increasing intensity.
“What a fool a woman is after all!” she exclaimed. “We _haven’t_
evolved a soul of our own--God knows it’s true!”
Not for a moment had she weakened on the fundamental test of her creed.
She couldn’t figure out how he would take it when she refused to marry
him.
He would beg and plead and cajole and repeat himself, of course. Men
always had done this--they always would. But would he take refusal as
final and quit?
The thought was sickening. For the first time she began to dimly
realize the tragic possibilities of the situation into which she had
allowed herself to drift.
The one thing that was now clear beyond the shadow of all doubt was
that she was hopelessly in love. The passion that held her was the
first great emotion she had ever experienced. It was sweeping all life
before it.
She set her mouth firmly.
“In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood
there’s no such word as fail!”
She took the pile of waving brown hair until it fell a mantle of
tenderness about her finely rounded shoulders.
“Well, Mr. Armand Richelieu, I’m going to show your spirit that in the
lexicon of youth which fate reserved for a bright womanhood there’s no
such word as fail!”
She spent the day in lazy, joyous brooding over the coming evening. She
amused herself picturing his possible attitudes when he came to the
crucial moment of his declaration and the proposal which she knew would
follow in the same breath.
He wouldn’t fall on his knees--that was certain. There was a deep vein
of the romantic in his nature--and, confound it all--she admired him
for it in spite of her ridicule of chivalry! But he was also endowed
with a reasonable amount of common sense. She relied on this to save
him in the end.
The day was warm, but not sultry--a typical, bright July day in
New York, with cooling breezes sweeping the city from the sea. She
planned the evening carefully and selected the exact spot for the big
love-scene. It should be on the roof, with the stars looking down, and
the soft splash of the tiny fountain for a musical accompaniment.
Again she wondered just what he would say--and again the foolish fear
gripped her that she might lose him in the maze of her new theories of
life.