Part 16

"I'm making a fool of myself. I'm letting her make a fool of me," he thought angrily, as he stood in the entrance. "I'll not come again." But he had made this same decision each time he was met with "Not at home," and had nevertheless reappeared at her door after a few weeks of self-denial. So, he mocked himself even as he was bravely resolving. He gazed up and down the street. His face brightened. Far down the long block, toward Fifth Avenue, he saw a slim, singularly narrow figure, thin yet nowhere angular; beautiful shoulders and bust, narrow hips; a fascinating simple dress of brown, a sable stole and muff, a graceful brown hat with three plumes. "Distinguished" was the word that seemed to him to describe what he could see, thus far. As she drew near, he noted how her clear skin, her eyes, her hair all had the sheen that proclaims health and vivid life. "But she would never have looked like this, or have been what she is, if she had not got rid of me," he said to himself by way of consolation.

"Won't you take a walk?" he asked, when they met half way between the two avenues. The friendliness of her greeting dispelled his ill humor; sometimes that same mere friendliness was the cause of a stinging irritation.

"Come back with me," she replied. "I'm always in at this time. Besides, to-day I have an engagement--no, not just yet--not until Boris comes. Then, he and I are going out."

"Oh--Raphael! Always Raphael."

"Almost always," said she. "Almost every day--often twice a day, sometimes three times a day."

His dealings with women had been in disregard and disdain of their "feminine" methods; but he did know the men who use that same indirection to which women are compelled because nature and the human societies modeled upon its savage laws decree that woman shall deal with men in the main through their passions. He, therefore, suspected that Neva's frank declaration was not without intent to incite. But, to suspect woman's motive rarely helps man; in his relations with her he is dominated by a force more powerful than reason, a force which compels him to acts of which his reason, though conscious and watchful, is a helpless spectator. Armstrong's feeling that Neva was not unwilling to give herself the pleasure of seeing him jealous of Raphael did not help him toward the self-control necessary to disappoint her. Silent before his rising storm, he accompanied her to the studio. Alone with her there, he said abruptly:

"Do you think any human being could fall in love with me?"

She examined him as if impartially balancing merits and demerits. "Why not?" she finally said.

"I've sometimes thought there was a hardness in me that repels."

"Perhaps you're right," she admitted. "You'll probably never know until you yourself fall in love."

"What is your objection to me?"

"Mine?" She seemed to reflect before answering. "The principal one, I think, is your tyranny. You crush out every individuality in your neighborhood. You seem to want a monopoly of the light and air."

"Was that what used to make you so silent and shut up in yourself?"

She nodded. "I simply couldn't begin to grow. You wouldn't have it."

"But now?" he said.

She smiled absently. "It often amuses me to see how it irritates you that you can't--crowd me. You do so firmly believe that a woman has no right to individuality."

He was not really listening. He was absorbed in watching her slowly take off her long gloves; as her white forearms, her small wrists, her hands, emerged little by little, his blood burned with an exhilaration like the sting of a sharp wind upon a healthy skin----

"Neva, will you marry me?"

So far as he could see, she had not heard. She kept on at the gloves until they were off, were lying in her lap. She began to remove her hat pins; her arms, bare to the elbows, were at their best in that position.

"A year ago, two years ago," he went on, "I thought we had never been married. I know now that we have never been unmarried."

"And when did you make that interesting discovery?" inquired she, still apparently giving her hat her attention.

"When I saw how I felt toward Raphael. You think I am jealous of him. But it is not jealousy. I know you couldn't fall in love with a fellow that rigs himself out like a peacock."

The delicate line of Neva's eyebrows lifted. "Boris dresses to suit himself," said she. "I never think of it--nor, I fancy, does he."

"Besides," continued Armstrong, "you could no more fall in love with him than you could at any other place step over the line between a nice woman and the other kind."

"Really!"

"Yes--really!" he retorted, showing as much anger as he dared. "My feeling about Raphael is that he has no right to hang about another man's wife as he does. And you feel the same way."

With graceful, sure fingers she was arranging her hair where it had been pressed down by her hat. "That is amusing," she said tranquilly. "You must either change your idea of what 'nice woman' means or change your idea of me. I haven't the slightest sense of having been married to you."

"Impossible!" he maintained.

"I know why you say that--why men think that. But I assure you, my friend, I have no more the feeling that I am married than that I am still sick because I had a severe illness once."

His mind had been much occupied by memories of their married days; their dead child so long, so completely forgotten by him and never thought of as a tie between him and his wife, had suddenly become a thing of vividness, the solemn and eternal sealing of its mother to him. Her calm repudiation of him and his rights now seemed to him as unwomanly as would have seemed any attempt on her part to claim him, had he not begun to care for her.

"Don't say those things," he protested angrily. "You don't mean them, and they sound horrible."

She looked at him satirically. "You men!" she mocked. "You men, with your coarse, narrow ideas of us women that encourage all that is least self-respecting in us! I do not attach the same importance to the physical side of myself that you do. I try to flatter myself there is more to me than merely my sex. I admit, nature intended only that. But we are trying to improve on nature."

"I suppose you think you have made me ashamed because I am still in a state of nature," he rejoined. "But you haven't. No matter what any man may pretend, he will care for you in the natural way as long as you look as you do." And his glance swept her in bold admiration. "As I said a while ago, I'm not jealous of Raphael. I'm jealous of all men. Sometimes I get to thinking about you--that you are somewhere--with some man, several men--their heads full of the ideas that steam in my head whenever I look at you--and I walk the floor and grind my teeth in fury."

The color was in her cheeks, though her eyes were mocking. "Go on," she said. "This is interesting."

"Yes--it must be interesting, and amusing, in view of the way I used to act. But that was your fault. You hid yourself from me then. You cheated me. You let me make a fool of myself, and throw away the best there was in my life."

"You forget your career," said she. "You aren't a human being. You are a career."

"I suppose you--a woman--would prefer an obscurity, a nobody, provided he were a sentimental, Harry-hug-the-hearth."

"I think so," she said. "A nobody with a heart rather than the greatest somebody on earth without one. Heart is so much the most important thing in the world. You'll find that out some day, when you're not so strong and self-reliant and successful."

"I have found it out," replied he. "And that is why I ask you to marry me."

"Ask me to become an incident in your career."

"No. To become joint, equal partner in our career."

She shook her head. "You couldn't, wouldn't have a partner, male or female--not yet. Besides it would be impossible for me to interest myself in getting rich or taking care of riches or distributing them among a crowd of sycophants."

"I'm not getting rich," replied he. "I'm making a good salary, and spending it almost all. But I'm not making much, outside."

"I had heard otherwise. They tell me your sort of business is about the best 'graft'--isn't that the word?--downtown, and that you are where you can get as much as you care to carry away."

"Yes. I _could_."

"But you don't? I knew it!"

Her belief in his honesty made him uncomfortable. "I didn't say I was different from the others--really different," he said hesitatingly. That very morning he had been forced to listen to a long series of reports on complaints of O.A.D. policy holders--how some had been swindled by false promises of agents whom he must shield; how others had been cheated on lapsed or surrendered policies; how, in a score of sly ways, the "gang" in control were stealing from their wards, their trusting and helpless victims. "I can't, and don't purpose to, deny," he went on to her, "that I'm part of the system of inducing some other fellow to sow, and then reaping his harvest, or most of it. I don't put it in my own barn, but I do help at the reaping. Oh, everything's perfectly proper and respectable--at least, on the surface. But--well, sometimes I get desperately sick of it all. Just now, I'm in that mood; it brought me here to-day. There's a row on down there, and it's plot and counterplot, move and check, all very exciting, but I--hate it! Nobody's to blame. It's simply a system that's grown up. And if one plays the game, why, he's got to conform to the rules."

"_If_ one plays the game."

"What's a man to do? Go back to the farm and become a slave to a railroad company or a mortgage? We can't all be painters."

She glanced at him quickly with a sudden narrowing of the eyelids that seemed to concentrate her gaze like a burning glass. "I hadn't thought of that," said she.

"If you had to be either a sheep or a shearer, which would you choose?"

"Is that how it is?"

"Pretty nearly," was his gloomy reply.

A long silence, he staring at the floor, she watching him. At last she said, "Haven't they--got--something on you--something they can use against you?"

He startled. "Where did you hear that? What did you hear?" he demanded, with an astonished look at her.

"I was lunching to-day with some people who know we used to be married, but they don't know we're good friends. They supposed I'd be glad to hear of any misfortune to you. And they said a mine was going to blow up under you, and that you'd disappear and never be heard of again."

"You can't tell me who told you?"

"No--unless it's absolutely necessary. It has something to do with an investigating committee. You're to be called quite suddenly and something is to come out--something you did that will look bad--" She came to a full stop.

His face cleared. "Oh--I know about that. I've arranged for it." His mind was free to consider her manner. "And you assumed I was guilty?"

"I didn't know," she replied. "I was sure you were no worse than the rest of them. If you hadn't come to-day, I'd have sent you warning."

His eyes lighted; he smiled triumphantly. "I told you!" he cried. "You see, you still feel that we're married, that our interests are the same."

She colored, but he could not be sure whether her irritation was against herself or against him. "You are very confident of yourself--and of me," said she ironically, and her eyes were laughing at him. "And this is the man," she mocked, "who less than three brief years ago was so eager to be rid of me!"

"Yes," he admitted, with a brave and not unsuccessful effort at brazening out what could not be denied or explained away. "But you were not the same person then that you are now."

"And whose fault was that?" retorted she. "You married me when I was a mere child. You could have made of me what you pleased. Instead, you----"

"I admit it all," he interrupted. "I married you--from a base motive, though I can plead that I glamoured it over to myself. Still, I owed it to myself and to you to have done my level best with and for you. And I shirked and skulked."

She did not show the appreciation of this abjectness which he had, perhaps unconsciously, expected. Instead, she laughed satirically, but with entire good humor. "How clever you think yourself, Horace," said she, "and how stupid you think me. That's a very old trick, to try to make a crime into a virtue by confessing it."

He hung his head, convicted. "At least," he said humbly, "I love you now. If you will give me another chance----"

"You had as good a chance as a man could ask," she reminded him, without the anger that would have made him feel sure of her. "How you used to exasperate me! You assumed I had neither intelligence nor feeling. You were so selfish, so self-centered. I don't see how you can hope to be trusted, even as a friend. You shake me off; you see me again; find I have been somewhat improved by a stay in New York; find I am not wholly unattractive to others. Your jealousy is roused. No, please don't protest. You see, I understand you perfectly."

"I deserve it," he said.

"Do you think a woman would be showing even the small good sense you concede women, if she were to trust a man whose interest in her was based upon jealousy of another man?"

"I'm not jealous of that damned, scented foreigner, with his rings and his jeweled canes and his hand-kissing. I know it must make your honest American flesh creep to have him touch his lips to the back of your hand."

Neva blazed at him. "How dare you!" she cried, rising in her wrath. "How dare _you_ stand in my house, in my presence, and insult thus the best friend I ever had--the only friend!"

"Friend!" sneered Armstrong. "I know all about the sort of friendship that rake is capable of."

Neva was facing him with a look that blanched his face. "You will withdraw those insults to Boris," she said, in that low, even voice which is wrath's deadliest form of expression, "and you will apologize to me, or you will leave here, never to return."

"I beg your pardon," he responded instantly. "I am ashamed of having said those things. I--I ... It was jealousy. I love you, and I can't bear to think of the possibility of rivalry."

"You are swift with apologies. In the future, be less swift with impertinence and insult," she answered, showing in manner, as well, that she was far from mollified. "As between Boris's friendship and professions of love from a man who only a little while ago neglected and abandoned and forgot me----"

"For God's sake, Neva," he pleaded. "I've been paying for that. And now that you have shown me how little hope there is for me, I shall continue to suffer. Be a little merciful!"

His agitation, where usually there was absolute self-control, convinced and silenced her. Presently he said, "Will you be friends again--if I'll behave myself?"

She nodded with her humorous smile and flash of the eyes. "_If_ you behave yourself," replied she. "We were talking of--of Fosdick, was it not?"

"Fosdick!" He made a gesture of disgust. "That name! I never hear it or think of it except in connection with something repulsive. It's always like a whiff from a sewer."

"And you were about to marry his daughter!" said she, with a glance of raillery.

He reddened; anything that was past for him was so completely shut out and forgotten that, until she reminded him, the sentimental episode with Amy was as if it had not been. "Where did you hear that?" he asked, his guilty eyes lowering; for he felt she must have suspected why he had thought of marrying Amy.

"Everybody was talking about it when I came to New York."

He was silent for a moment. "Well," he finally continued, "she and I are not even friends." Into his eyes came the steely, ruthless look. "Within a week I'm going to destroy Josiah Fosdick." Then, in comment on her swiftly changing expression, "I see you don't like that."

"No," she replied bluntly.

"I'm going to do a public service," said he, absolutely unconscious of the real reason why his threat so jarred upon her. "I ought to have a vote of thanks."

She could not tell him that it was not his condemnation of Josiah but his merciless casting out of his friendship with Amy that revolted and angered and saddened her. If she did tell him, he, so self-absorbed and so bent upon his own inflexible purposes that he was quite blind to his own brutality, would merely think her jealous. Besides, she began to feel that her real ground for anger against him ought to be Josiah's fate, even if her femininity made the personal reason the stronger. She accordingly said, "You just got through telling me it was a system, and not any one man's fault."

Armstrong dismissed that with a shrug. "I'm in his way, he's in mine. One or the other has to go down. I'm seeing to it that it's not I." Then, angered by her expression, and by the sense of accusing himself in making what sounded like excuse, he cried, "Say it! You despise me!"

"It isn't a judgment," she answered; "it's a feeling."

"But you don't know what the man has done."

"One should not ask himself, What has the other man done? but, What will my self-respect let me do?"

He ignored this. "Let me tell you," he said, with a return of the imperious manner that was second nature to him nowadays. "This man brought me to New York because he found I knew how to manage the agents so that they would lure in the most suckers--that's the only word for it. When I came, I believed the O.A.D. was a big philanthropic institution--yes, I did, really! Of course I knew men made money out of it. I was making money out of it, myself. But I thought that, in the main, the object was to give people a chance to provide against old age and death."

"Yes, I remember," she said. "You used to talk about what a grand thing it was."

He laughed. "Well, we do give 'em _some_ return for their money--if they aren't careless and don't give us a chance to cheat them out of part or all of it, under the laws we've been fixing up against them. But we never give anything like what's their due. I found I was little more than a puller-in for a den of respectable thieves--that life insurance is simply another of the devices of these oily rascals here in New York--like all their big stock companies and bonding schemes and the rest of it--a trick to get hold of money and use it for their own benefit. Ours is the vilest trick of all, though--it seems to me. For we play on people's heart strings, while the other swindles appeal chiefly to cupidity." He took a magazine from the table. "Look here!" He pointed to an illustrated advertisement. "It's the 'ad' of one of our rivals--same business as ours. See the widow with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the three little children clinging to her; see the heap of furniture on the sidewalk--that means they've ejected her for not paying the rent. And the type says, 'This wouldn't have happened if the father had been insured in the Universal.' Clever, isn't it? Well, the men back of that company and those back of ours and, worst of all, Trafford's infamous gang, all get rich by stealing from poor old people, from widows and orphans. That is Fosdick's business--robbing dead bodies, picking the pockets of calico mourning dresses."

It gave him relief and a sense of doing penance, to utter these truths about himself and his associates that had been rankling in him. As he believed she knew nothing of business and as he thought her sex did not reason but only felt, he assumed she would accept his own lenient view of his personal part in the infamy, of his own deviations from the "ideal" standards. Her expression disquieted him. "The most respectable people in the country are in it, in some branch of it," he hastened to explain, without admitting to himself that he was explaining. "You must read the list of our directors."

Her silence alarmed him. He wished he had not been so frank. Recalling his words he was appalled by their brutality; he could not deny to himself that they stated the truth, and he wondered that he had not seen that truth in its full repulsiveness until now. "Of course, they don't look at it that way," he went on. "A man can get his conscience to applaud almost anything he's making money out of--the more money, the easier."

"Then they do these things quite openly?" said Neva, in amazement.

"Openly? Certainly not," replied Armstrong, with a slight smile at her innocence.

"If they don't do them openly, they know just what they're about."

"No," he said, imperious and impatient. "You don't understand human nature. You don't appreciate how men delude themselves."

His tone, its reminder of his intolerance of any independence of thought in a woman, or in anyone around him for that matter, brought the color to her cheeks. "A man who does wrong, but thinks he is doing right, is not ashamed," she answered. "If he shuffles and conceals, you may be sure he does not deceive himself, no matter how completely his pretense deceives you."

There seemed to be no answer to this. It made ridiculous nonsense of the familiar excuse for reputable rascality, the excuse he had heard a thousand times, and had accepted without question. But it also somehow seemed a home thrust through his own armor. With anger that was what he would have called feminine in its unreasonableness, he demanded, "Then you don't think I have the right to tear Fosdick down?"

"If you are going to tear them all down, and yourself, too," was her answer, slowly spoken, but firm.

He laughed ironically. "That's practical!"

"Does a thing have to be dishonorable and dishonest, to be practical?"

"From your standpoint, yes," he replied. "At this very moment Fosdick is chuckling over the scheme he thinks will surely disgrace me forever! And you are urging me to let him disgrace me. Is that what you call friendship? Is that your idea of 'heart'?"

She flushed, but rejoined undaunted, "You can juggle with your conscience all you please, Horace--just like the other men downtown. But you know the truth, in the bottom of your heart, just as they do. And if you rise by the way you've planned, you know that, when you've risen, you'll do just as he was doing."

"Then," said he, "your test of me is whether I'll let you beg off this old buzzard, Fosdick."

She made a gesture of denial and appeal. "On the contrary, I'd despise a man who did for a woman what he wouldn't do for his own self-respect." She was pale, but all the will in her character was showing itself in her face. "What is Fosdick to me? Now that you've told me about him, I think it's frightful to send men to jail for stealing bread, and leave such a creature at large. But--as to you--" Her bosom was rising and falling swiftly--"as to you, I'm not indifferent. You have stood for strength and courage, for pride--for manliness. I thought you hard and cold--but brave--really brave--too brave to steal, at least from the helpless, or to assassinate even an assassin. Now, I see that you've changed. Your ambition is dragging you down, as ambition always does. And what an ambition! To be the best, the most successful, at cheating the helpless, at robbing the dead!"

As she spoke, his expression of anger faded. When she ended, with unsteady voice and fighting back the tears, he did not attempt to reply. He had made of his face an impassive mask. They were still silent, he standing at the window, she sitting and gazing into the fire, when Molly entered to announce Raphael. He threw his coat over his arm, took up his hat. She searched his face for some indication of his thoughts, but could find none. He simply said, "I'll think it over."

*XIX*

*TWO TELEPHONE TALKS*