Chapter 10

“Why? Because I should bully you into it. I'm an obstinate kind of creature, and get things by hanging on. Women give in if you worry them long enough. But tell me more about Tom,” he went on. “Did he dance and shoot his way into your heart? I wish I'd been there to see! You take a very bad tintype, by the way. Tom sent me that.” He got up, and taking a picture from the mantelpiece, tossed it into her lap, and leaning over the back of her chair, looked down on it. “Have you a sentiment about it?” he added, smiling. “It does look like Tom.”

She held it and gravely studied it. She colored, and, still looking at the picture, felt her way suddenly open. “Yes, it does look like him,” she said, and putting it down, leant forward and looked into the fire. “Do you want to know why I accepted Tom?” she added, slowly. She was fully launched on a career of deception now, and felt a desperate exultation.

Amory stared at her and nodded.

She kept her eyes on the fire. “I wanted--a home.”

Amory sat motionless, then spoke. “Why--why, weren't you happy with your aunt and uncle?”

She shook her head. “No; and Tom was good and kind and very--”

Amory got up and shook himself. “Oh, but that's an awful mistake,” he said.

“I know,” said the girl, and turning, looked at him a moment. “Well, I've come to tell you that I have--” She hesitated.

Amory slid down into the chair beside her. “Changed your mind?”

“Yes.”

“That note of your aunt's?”

“Yes”

He sat back and folded his arms. “I see,” he said, and there followed a long silence.

The girl began buttoning and unbuttoning her glove. She must go; she was frightened, elated, amused. She did not want to go, but go she must. Would he ever forgive her?

“Don't--don't hate me!” she said.

Amory awoke from his stunned meditation. “My dear young lady, of course not,” he began; “only, Tom will be terribly broken up. It's the only thing to do now, I suppose, but why did you do the other?”

She looked at him. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, she thought. “I was unhappy and foolish.” She hesitated. “But you needn't be troubled about Tom. He--” Again she hesitated.

“Not troubled about old Tom!” expostulated Amory.

“Wait.” She put up her hand. “He made a mistake, too; he doesn't care so very much, and he has already flirted--”

Amory laid his hand on her chair. “Tom!”

“Yes,” she repeated; “he really is rather a flirt, and--”

“Tom!”

She nodded. “Yes; really, it did hurt me a little, only--”

“Tom!”

She faced him. “Yes, Tom. What do you think Tom is--blind and deaf and dumb? Any man worth his salt can flirt.”

Amory stared at her. “Oh, he can, can he?”

She nodded. “He was very good and kind, but I saw that he was changing; and then he met a little fair-haired, blue-eyed--”

Amory interposed. “I told you.”

She gave him a curious smile. “Yes, a silly little blond thing, just that.”

But his satisfaction in his perspicacity was short-lived; he walked up and down the room in his perplexity. “I can't get over it,” he murmured. “I thought it a mad love-match, all done in a few weeks; and to have it turn out like this! You--”

“Mercenary,” she interjected, with a sad little smile.

He looked at her. “Yes; and Tom--”

“Fickle,” she ended again.

“Yes, and Tom fickle. Why, it shakes the foundations!”

The girl felt a sudden wave of shame and weariness. She must go. She hadn't been fair, but it had been so sudden, so difficult. She looked at him, and getting up, wondered if she would ever see him again.

“I must go,” she said. “I came--” She hesitated, and a sudden desire to have him know her as herself swept over her. It needed only another lie or two in the beginning, and then some truth would come through to sustain her. She went on: “I came because I wanted to know what you were like; Tom had talked so much of you, and I wanted some one to understand and perhaps explain; and now I must go and leave your warm, delightful room for the comfortless place I live in. Don't think too hardly of me.”

Amory shook his head. “You don't leave me until you have had your tea.” He rang the bell. “But what do you mean by a comfortless home? Does Mrs. White neglect you?”

She looked at the fire. “I don't live with her--now; I live alone; I work for my living.”

Amory got up as the maid brought in the tea-tray, and setting it beside them, he poured out her tea; as he handed her the cup, he brought his brows together sternly, as though making out her very mysterious words.

“You work for your living?” he repeated. “I thought you lived with Mrs. White, and that they were well off.”

“I did, but now I've come back to my real life, which I would have left had I married Tom.”

He nodded. “I see. I had heard awfully little about it all; I was away, and then it was so quickly done.”

“I know,” she went on, hurriedly; “but let me tell you, and you will understand me better later--that is, if you want to understand me.”

“Most certainly I do.” Amory sustained the strange sad gaze of her charming, heavy-lidded eyes in a sort of maze. Her mat skin looked white, now that her blushes were gone, and her delicate, irregular features a little pinched. He drank his tea and watched her while she talked.

“I teach music,” she began; “to do it I left my relations in the country and came to this horrible great city. I have one dreary, cold room, as unlike this as two rooms can be. I have tried to make it seem like a home, but when I saw this I knew how I had failed.”

“Poor little girl!” said Amory.

“I have the ordinary feelings of a girl,” she went on, “and yet I see before me the long stretch of a dreary life. I love music; I hear none but the strumming of children. I like pictures, books, people; I see none. I like to laugh, to talk; there is no one to laugh with, to talk to. I am very--unhappy.” The last words were spoken very low, but the misery in them touched Amory deeply.

“Poor little girl!” he said again, and gently laid his hand on the arm of her chair. “But how can Tom know this and let you go? You are mistaken in Tom, I am sure, and--”

The girl straightened her slender figure and rose. “Oh no! it is all right. He doesn't love me, your Tom; and so the world goes--I must go, too. I--”

“Don't go,” said Amory. “Let me--” She shook her head. “You have no more to do; you have comforted and warmed and fed a hungry wanderer, and she must make haste home. Thank you for everything; thank you.”

Amory felt a pang as she stood up. Not to see her again--why, that was absurd! Why should he not see her? She had quarrelled with Tom, yes, and perhaps the family might be hard on her; but he--he understood, and why should he shake off her acquaintance? She was not for Tom. Well, it was just as well. How could any one think this girl would suit Tom--big-bearded, clumsy, excellent fellow that he was?

He put out his hand. “Mary,” he said. The girl stared at him with eyes suddenly wide open; he smiled into them.

“I have a right to call you that,” he proceeded, “haven't I? I might have been your brother.” He took her hand, and then laughed a little. “I am almost glad I am not. You wouldn't have suited Tom, and as a sister, somehow, you wouldn't have suited me!” He laughed again. “But”--he hesitated; she still stared straight up at him with her soft, dark eyes, and he thought them very beautiful--“but why shouldn't I see you--not as a brother, but an acquaintance--friend? You say you need them. Tell me where you have this room of yours?”

The vivid beauty of her blush startled him, and she drew her hand quickly from his.

“Oh no!” she said, hurriedly. “Let things drop between us; here--forever.”

Amory stood before her with an expression which reminded her of his description of himself--obstinate; yes, he looked it.

“Why?” he urged. “Just because you are not to marry Tom, is there any reason why we should not like each other--is there? That is--if we do! I do,” he laughed. “Do you?”

Her lids had dropped; she looked very slim, and young, and shy. “Yes,” she said.

It gave Amory a good deal of pleasure for a monosyllable.

“Well, then, your number?” he said.

She shook her head.

“I'll ask Tom,” he retorted. “He will tell me.”

He was baffled and curiously charmed by the smile that touched her sharply curved young mouth.

“Tom may,” she said.

“I was ready to accept you as a sister,” he persisted, “and you won't even admit me as a casual visitor!”

She took a step toward the door. “Wait till you hear Tom's story,” she said.

Amory stared curiously at her. “Do you think he will be vindictive, after all?” he said. “Why should he be, if what you say is just?”

She paused. “Wait till you see Tom and Mrs. White; then if you want to know me, why--” She was blushing again.

“Well,” Amory demanded, “what shall I do?”

She looked up with a sort of childish charm, curling her lip, lighting her eyes with something of laughter and mischief. “Why, look for me and you'll find me.”

“Find you?” repeated Amory, bewildered.

She nodded. “Yes, if you look. To-morrow will be Sunday; every one will be going to church, and I with them. Stand on the steps of this house at 10.30 precisely, and look as far as you can, and you will see--me. Goodnight.”

“Good night.” Amory took her hand. “Let me see you home; it's dark.”

She laughed. “You don't lack persistency, do you?” she said, with a sweetness which gave the words a pleasant twist. “But don't come, please. I'm used to taking care of myself; but--before I go let me write my note also.” She went to the desk and scratched a line, and folding it, handed it to him. “There,” she said; “read Mrs. White's note and then that, but wait till you hear the house door bang. Promise not before.”

“Please--” began Amory.

“Promise,” she repeated.

“I promise,” he said, and again they shook hands for good-by.

“That's three times,” thought the girl as she went to the door, and turning an instant, she smiled at him. “Good-by.” The door closed softly behind her, and Amory waited a moment, then went to it, and opening it, listened; the house door shut lightly, and seizing his notes, he stood by the window in the twilight and read them. The first was as follows:

“DEAR MR. AMORY,--Mary and I had to return unexpectedly to Cleveland. Forgive our missing this chance of meeting you, but Mr. White's note is urgent, as his sister is very ill. Mary regrets greatly not seeing you before the wedding.

“Yours sincerely,

“BARBARA WHITE.”

Amory threw the paper down. “Do I see visions?” he cried, and hastily unfolded the second; it ran as follows:

“Forgive me; I got into the wrong house, the wrong room. I was very tired, and my latch-key fitted, and I didn't know until I saw your fire, and then you came. Don't think me a very bold and horrid girl, and forgive me. Your fire was so warm and bright, and--you were kind.

“M.”

Amory stared at the paper a moment; then, catching his hat and flying down the stairs, opened the outer door.

The night was bitter cold, with a white frost everywhere; but in the twilight no solitary figure was in view; the long street was empty. He ran the length of it, then back to his room, and throwing down his hat, he lit his pipe. It needed thought.

BRAYBRIDGE'S OFFER

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. With its mixture of Oriental appointments in curtains, cushions, and little tables of teak-wood the Turkish room expressed rather an adventurous conception of the Ottoman taste; but it was always a cozy place whether you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.

Our rather limited little down-town dining club was almost a celibate community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away the intervening time; some read the evening papers, or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now seeing the three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher range of thinking.

“I shouldn't have supposed, somehow,” he said with a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”

“Perhaps he hadn't,” Minver suggested.

Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she--”

“I don't see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.

“I didn't say it,” Minver contradicted.

“You implied it; and I don't think it's fair. It's easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”

“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn't think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”

“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.

Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.

“Yes,” Minver said, facing about toward me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you're always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”

“No, I can't,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”

“No, you couldn't, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It's part of your swindler to assume that you _do_ know why. You ought to find out.”

Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”

“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don't you do it, Acton?”

I returned, as seriously as could have been expected: “Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don't like to talk of such things.”

“They're ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don't either of them, in a given ease, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man.”

Minver's point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other's pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.

“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don't think they're so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say?”

“Very much what you said. It's astonishing how people forget the vital things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generation knows nothing of it.”

“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do _you_ know what you were saying, Wanhope?”

“I've ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn't inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”

“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood--” Rulledge began, but Minver's laugh arrested him.

“Nothing so concrete, I'm afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. There's something pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at.”

“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they're not in earnest about it.”

“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don't mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her.”

“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.

“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn't know it, _he_ never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:

“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”

“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.

“Yes,” Wanhope admitted after a thoughtful reluctance.

“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”

“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won't mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can't be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”

“Oh, I'm not sure about that, professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you.”

“It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don't believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to be.”

“Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?” I invited him.

“I'm not sure of that. No man's part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”

“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn't.”

“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”

“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man--the fascination of his being grizzled, and slovenly, and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don't vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess's end of the party, and was watching for a chance to--”

Wanhope cast about for the word, and Winver supplied it: “Pull out.”

“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”

“I don't understand,” Rulledge said.

“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late, the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it's rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”

We others looked at each other. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl--I've understood it was she--looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”

“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling name.”

“Don't reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”

“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don't see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”

“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.

“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.

“No; the response must be in kind, to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn't be afraid.”

“Oh! _That's_ the way you get out of it!”

“Well?” Rulledge urged.