Chapter 6

“What you said made me want to drink it,” she said to Howard. “I was glad to hear your lecture on the weather. I had never thought of it before, but New York really has a fine climate. And only this afternoon I let that stupid Englishman--Plymouth--you’ve met him? No?--Well, at any rate, he was denouncing our climate and for the moment I forgot about London.”

“Frightful there, isn’t it, after October and until May?”

“Yes, and the air is usually stale even in the late spring. When it’s warm, it’s sticky. And when it’s cold, it’s raw.”

“You are a New Yorker?”

“Yes,” said Miss Trevor faintly, and for an instant showing surprise at his ignorance. “That is, I spend part of the winter here--like all New Yorkers.”

“All?”

“Oh, all except those who don’t count, or rather, who merely count.”

“How do you mean?” Howard was taking advantage of her looking into her plate to smile with a suggestion of irony. She happened to glance up and so caught him.

“Oh,” she said, smiling with frank irony at him, “I mean all those people--the masses, I think they’re called--the people who have to be fussed over and reformed and who keep shops and--and all that.”

“The people who work, you mean?”

“No, I mean the people you never meet about anywhere, the people who read the newspapers and come to the basement door.”

“Oh, yes, I understand.” Howard was laughing. “Well, that’s one way of looking at life. Of course it’s not my way.”

“What is your way?”

“Why, being one of those who count only in the census, I naturally take a view rather different from yours. Now I should say that _your_ people don’t count. You see, I am most deeply interested in people who read newspapers.”

“Oh, you write for the papers, like Jim Segur? What do you write?”

“What they call editorials.”

“You are an editor?”

“Yes and no. I am one of the editors who does not edit but is edited.”

“It must be interesting,” said Miss Trevor, vaguely.

“More interesting than you imagine. But then all work is that. In fact work is the only permanently interesting thing in life. The rest produces dissatisfaction and regret.”

“Oh, I’m not so very dissatisfied. Yet I don’t work.”

“Are you quite sure? Think how hard you work at being fitted for gowns, at going about to dinners and balls and the like, at chasing foxes and anise seed bags and golf balls.”

“But that is not work. It is amusing myself.”

“Yes, you think so. But you forget that you are doing it in order that all these people who don’t count may read about it in the papers and so get a little harmless relaxation.”

“But we don’t do it to get into the papers.”

“Probably not. Neither did this--what is it here in my plate, a lamb chop?--this lamb gambol about and keep itself in condition to form a course at Segur’s dinner. But after all, wasn’t that what it was really for? Then think how many people you support by your work.”

“You make me feel like a day-labourer.”

“Oh, you’re a much harder worker than any day labourer. And the saddest part of it to me is that you work altogether for others. You give, give and get in return nothing but a few flattering glances, a few careless pats on the back of your vanity. I should hate to work so hard for so little.”

“But what would you do?” Miss Trevor was looking at him, interested and amused.

“Well, I’d work for myself. I’d insist on a return, on getting back something equivalent or near it. I’d insist on having my mind improved, or having my power or my reputation advanced.”

“I was only jesting when I said that about people not counting.”

“Altogether?”

“No, not altogether. I don’t care much about the masses. They seem to me to be underbred, of a different sort. I hate doing things that are useful and I hate people that do useful things--in a general way, I mean.”

“That is doubtless due to defective education,” said Howard, with a smile that carried off the thrust as a jest.

“Is that the way you’d describe a horror of contact with--well, with unpleasant things?” Miss Trevor was serious.

“But is it that? Isn’t it just an unconscious affectation, taken up simply because all the people about you think that way--if one can call the process thinking? You don’t think, do you, that it is a sign of superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the great masses of one’s fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try to get something substantial out of it, try to possess himself of its ideas and emotions? Why should one play the fool simply because those about one are incapable of playing any other part?”

“I’m surprised that you are here to-night. Still, I suppose you’ll give yourself absolution on the plea that one must dine somewhere.”

“But I’m not wasting my time. I’m learning. I’m observing a phase of life. And I’m seeing the latest styles in women’s gowns and--”

“Is that important--styles, I mean?”

“Do you suppose that my kind of people, the working classes, would spend so much time and thought in making anything that was not important? There is nothing more important.”

“Then you don’t think we women are wasting time when we talk about dress so much?”

“On the contrary, it is an evidence of your superior sagacity. Women talk trade, ‘shop,’ as soon as they get away from the men. They talk men and dress--fish and nets.”

Berersford heard the word fish and interrupted.

“Do you go South next month, Marian?”

“Yes--about the fifteenth.” Miss Trevor explained to Howard: “Bobby--Mr. Berersford here--always fishes in Florida in January.”

The conversation again became general and personal. Howard knew none of the people of whom they were talking and all that they said was of the nature of gossip. But they talked in a sparkling way, using good English, speaking in agreeable voices with a correct accent, and indulging in a great deal of malicious humour.

As they separated Mrs. Sidney, to whom Howard had not spoken during the evening, said to Segur: “You must bring Mr. Howard on Sunday afternoon.”

“Will you drop Marian at the house for me?” Mrs. Carnarvon asked her. “I want to go on to Edith’s.”

Segur went with Mrs. Sidney and Marian to their carriage. “Who is Mr. Howard?” Mrs. Sidney said, and Miss Trevor drew nearer to hear the answer.

“One of the editorial writers down on the paper and a very clever one--none better. He works hard and is desperately serious and a regular hermit.”

“I think he’s very handsome--don’t you, Marian?”

“I found him interesting,” said Miss Trevor.

Howard thought a great deal about Miss Trevor that night, and she was still in his head the next day. “This comes of never seeing women,” he said to himself. “The first girl I meet seems the most beautiful I ever saw, and the most intellectual. And, when I think it over, what did she say that was startling?”

Nevertheless he went with Segur the next Sunday to Mrs. Sidney’s great house in the upper Avenue overlooking the Park.

“Why do I come here?” he asked himself. “It is a sheer waste of time. Mrs. Sidney can do me no good, or I her. It must be the hope of seeing Miss Trevor.”

When the gaudy and be-powdered flunkey held back the heavy curtains of the salon to announce him and Segur, he saw Miss Trevor on a low chair absently staring into the fire. Yet when he had spoken to Mrs. Sidney and turned toward her she at once stretched out her hand with a slight smile. Some others came in and Howard was free to talk to her. He sat looking at her steadily, admiring her almost perfect profile, delicate yet strong.

“And what have you been doing since I saw you?” Miss Trevor asked.

“Writing little pieces about politics for the paper,” replied Howard.

“Politics? I detest it. It is all stealing and calling names, isn’t it? And something dreadful is always going to happen if somebody or other isn’t elected, or is elected, to something or other. And then, whether he is or not, nothing happens. I should think the men who have been so excited and angry and alarmed would feel very cheap. But they don’t. And the next time they carry on in just the same ridiculous way.”

“Politics is like everything else--interesting if you understand what it is all about. But like everything else, you can’t understand it without a little study at first. It’s a pity women don’t take an interest. If they did the men might become more reasonable and sane about it than they are now. But you--what have you been doing?”

“I--oh, industriously superintending the making of my new nets.” Marian laughed and Howard was flattered. “And also, well, riding in the Park every morning. But I never do anything interesting. I simply drift.”

“That’s so much simpler and more satisfactory than threshing and splashing about as I do. It seems so fussy and foolish and futile. I wish--that is, sometimes I wish--that I had learned to amuse myself in some less violent and exhausting way.”

“Marian--I say, Marian,” called Mrs. Sidney. “Has Teddy come down?”

Miss Trevor coloured slightly as she answered: “No, he comes a week Wednesday. He’s still hunting.”

“Hunting,” Howard repeated when Mrs. Sidney was again busy with the others. “Now there is a kind of work that never bothers a man’s brains or sets him to worrying. I wish I knew how to amuse myself in some such way.”

“You should go about more.”

“Go--where?”

“To see people.”

“But I do see a great many people. I’m always seeing them--all day long.”

“Yes--but that is in a serious way. I mean go where you will be amused--to dinners for instance.”

“I don’t dare. I can’t work at work and also work at play. I must work at one or the other all the time. I can do nothing without a definite object. I can’t be just a little interested in anything or anybody. With me it is no interest at all or else absorption until interest is exhausted.”

“Then if you were interested in a woman, let us say, you’d be absorbed until you found out all there was, and then you’d--take to your heels.”

“But she might always be new. She might interest me more and more. Anyhow I fancy that she would weary of me long before I wearied of her. I think women usually weary first. Men are very monotonous. We are as vain as women, if not vainer, without their capacity for concealing it. And vanity makes one think he does not need to exert himself to please.”

“But why do people usually say that it is the men that are difficult to hold?”

“Because the men hold the women, not through the kind of interest we are talking about, but through another kind--quite different. Women are so lazy and so dependent--dependent upon men for homes, for money, for escort even.”

Miss Trevor was flushing, as if the fire were too hot--at least she moved a little farther away from it. “Your ideal woman would be a shop-girl, I should say from what you’ve told me.”

“Perhaps--in the abstract. I really do think that if I were going to marry, I should look about for a working-girl, a girl that supported herself. How can a man be certain of the love of a woman who is dependent upon him? I should be afraid she was only tolerating me as a labour-saving device.”

Miss Trevor laughed. “There certainly is no vanity in that remark,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine most of the men I know thinking that.”

“It’s only theory with me. In practice doubtless I should be as self-complacent as any other man.”

They left Mrs. Sidney’s together and Howard walked down the Avenue with her. It seemed a wonderful afternoon--the air dazzling, intoxicating. He was filled with the joy of living and was glad this particular tall, slender, distinguished-looking girl was there to make his enjoyment perfect. They were gay with the delight of being young and in health and attractive physically and mentally each to the other. They looked each at the other a great deal, and more and more frankly.

“Am I never to see you again?” he asked as he rang the bell for her.

“I believe Mrs. Carnarvon is going to invite you to dine here Thursday night.”

“Thank you,” said Howard.

Miss Trevor coloured. But she met his glance boldly and laughed. Howard wondered why her laugh was defiant, almost reckless.

* * * * *

He saw Segur at the club after dinner that same night. “And how do you like Miss Trevor?” Segur began as the whiskey and carbonic were set before them.

“A very attractive girl,” said Howard.

“Yes--so a good many men have thought in the last five years. She’s marrying Teddy Danvers in the spring, I believe. At any rate it’s generally looked on as settled. Teddy’s a good deal of a ‘chump.’ But he’s a decent fellow--good-looking, good-natured, domestic in his tastes, and nothing but money.”

Howard was smiling to himself. He understood Miss Trevor’s sudden consciousness of the nearness of the fire, her flush when Mrs. Sidney asked about “Teddy,” and the recklessness in her parting laugh.

“Well, Teddy’s in luck,” he said aloud.

“Not so sure of that. She’s quite capable of leading him a dance if he bores her. And bore her he will. But that is nothing new. This town is full of it.”

“Full of what?”

“Of weary women--weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull--stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women--stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So--well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”

“It’s like Paris--like France?”

“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule.”

“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood coming out--the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well.”

“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée--the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close--that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air--of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind--like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him--a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s engaged--her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll let me.” And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it--and far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.

XI.

TRESPASSING.

For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from the aigrette in her hat to her heels--a long, narrow, graceful figure, dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most intelligent class of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon found that he was “just out for the air” she left them, to go home--in Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

“Come back to tea with her,” she said as she nodded to Howard.

“We have at least an hour.” Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his happiness dancing in his eyes. “Why shouldn’t we go to the Park?”

“I believe it’s not customary,” objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made the walk in the Park a certainty.

“I’m glad to hear that. I don’t care to do customary things as a rule.”

“I see that you don’t.”

“Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you can’t help seeing it--and don’t in the least mind?”

“Why shouldn’t you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine winter day?”

“Why indeed!” Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her eyes.

“We are not in the Park yet.” Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a laugh and added: “I feel reckless to-day.”

“You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. _I_ have shut out to-morrow ever since I saw you.”

“And yesterday?” She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to look at her, his eyes sad. “But there is a to-morrow,” she went on.

“Yes--my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is----”

“Well?”

“Your engagement, of course.”

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist the contagion.

“My to-morrow,” he continued, “is far more menacing than yours. Yours is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can waive yours for the moment?”

“But why are you so certain that I wish to?”

“Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not content to have me here.”

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

“I never met any one like you,” she said. “I have always felt so sure of myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was going and--didn’t much care. And that’s the worst of it.”

“No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path--everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don’t know where, going you don’t know whither. We pass very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a little variation in your movement--a very little, and soon over. They probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to you--close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair cruelly singed--and then hurried sadly away. And----”

“And--what? Isn’t there any more to the story?” Marian’s eyes were shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there before.

“And--and----” Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the colour fly from her face and then leap back again. “And--I love you.”

“Oh”--Marian said, hiding her face in her white muff. “Oh.”

“I don’t wish to touch you,” he went on, “I just wish to look at you--so tall, so straight, so--so alive, and to love you and be happy.” Then he laughed and turned. “But you’ll catch cold. Let us walk on.”

“So you are trying to make a career?” she asked after a few minutes’ silence.

“Yes--trying--or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your way and I mine.”

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she was assisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in wonder and delighted terror.

“Why do you look at me in that way?” he said, turning his head suddenly.

“Because you are stronger than I--and I am afraid--yet I--well--I like it.”

“It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention the gentleman’s name?”

“It is not necessary. But I’d like to hear you pronounce it. At least I did a moment ago.”

“I’ll not risk repetition. I’ve been thinking of what might have been.”

“What?” Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. “A commonplace engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning--or worse?”

“Not unlikely. But since we’re only dreaming why not dream more to our taste? Now as I look at your strong, clear, ambitious profile, I can dream of a career made by two working as one, working cheerfully day in and day out, fair and foul weather, working with the certainty of success as the crown.”

“But failure might come.”

“It couldn’t. We wouldn’t work for fame or for riches or for any outside thing. We would work to make ourselves wiser and better and more worthy each of the other and both of our great love.”

Again they were walking in silence.

“I am so sad,” Marian said at last. “But I am so happy too. What has come over me? But--you will work on, won’t you? And you will accomplish everything. Yes, I am sure you will.”

“Oh, I’ll work--in my own way. And I’ll get a good deal of what I want. But not everything. You say you can’t understand yourself. No more can I understand myself. I thought my purpose fixed. I knew that I had nothing to do with marrying and giving in marriage, so I kept away from danger. And here, as miraculously as if a thunderbolt had dropped from this open winter sky, here is--you.”

They were in the Avenue again--“the awakening,” Howard said as the flood of carriages rolled about them.

“You will win,” she repeated, when they were almost at Forty-seventh Street. “You will be famous.”

“Probably not. The price for fame may be too big.”