Part 34

"I want to talk to you--if you'll listen." She stopped the soft wandering of her fingers over the keys. "No, go on playing, please."

She resumed. Now her eyes were on the keyboard, and she was having no easy task of it finding the right keys and striking the right chords, all the time conscious of his steady penetrating gaze. "It's nearing the time you fixed for going East," he began.

She nodded slowly in time to the music. He was so seated that the piano prevented his seeing any of her but her bare shoulders and graceful head with its masses of auburn hair, against a background of palms and ferns. "I'm glad the spring is so backward this year," she said; for, she had learned not to fear his misunderstanding, if she spoke out her thoughts. "If it were really spring with the grounds all in bloom and the windows wide-- It makes me sad to think of that."

She had thought she might perhaps soften his contempt by reminding him that there was another and a less repellant side to her character. But as soon as the words were out, she wished she had not spoken; it was useless to try to make him think well of her. He was probably regretting that he had let her have Winchie. She looked appealingly toward him, hoping he would speak--say anything--no matter what, so long as it broke that silence of painful suspense. When she could endure it no longer, she suddenly burst out: "You've come to ask me to leave at once. You are right, I'll go as soon as I can pack."

"On the contrary," said he, eyes still intent upon the tall shafts of flame leaping toward the cavernous blackness of the chimney. "I've come to ask you not to go at all."

His tone was calm and self-controlled. It contained no suggestion of ominous meaning; nor did his face.

"I--I don't understand," she ventured, nervously.

"I want to propose," explained he, in the same deliberate way, "that we give each other another trial."

There was no mistaking his meaning. In the sudden reversal from all she had been expecting and fearing, her thoughts became mere chaos. Hands resting upon the keys, she sat silent, rigid--waiting.

He turned his chair, leaned toward her, his elbows on his knees. "Is the idea--is it--distasteful to you?" he asked.

Carefully, with her tapering fingers she measured chords without striking them. "Not _distasteful_," said she.

"You do not dislike me--now?"

"I never have, except for a few minutes now and then--when you said or did tyrannical things." Painfully embarrassed, she was trying to regain control of herself under cover of arranging the chiffon round the edge of the bosom of her dress.

"Courtney, I'm a different man from what I was."

"Yes," she assented, without reserve. "Very different. But----"

"Don't, please," he said, before she could begin to explain. "When you've heard my reasons for asking you to stay, you may think well of them. If not, why you at least can refuse more intelligently. This afternoon, when Gallatin was down at the laboratory making an ass of himself, you whirled upon me with some very vivid reminders of what you had been to him."

"I was insane with rage--not that it wasn't all true--only--I--it was--" She hung her head--"Oh, I'm so ashamed!--so ashamed!" she cried.

"I'm glad you did," interrupted he, heartily. "You thought to infuriate me. And you did, for a moment. Then--I was astonished to find myself quite calm. Do you know why?"

"Yes. Because you care nothing about me."

"Because I care nothing about him. Because I know you've ceased to think you care about him--care, you never did. Since I've come to my senses, I've been getting acquainted with you. And I know you do not and never did and never could love Basil Gallatin. That is, the woman you are now--the only one that interests either of us--never did and never could."

The deep green eyes glanced gratefully toward him. "That's true."

"It was simply what you and I went through with when we first met--and became engaged--and got married."

"Yes," said she. "Much the same. But--" Her eyes met his fully. "It wouldn't be honest if I didn't say too that I do not regret--about him. I suppose there's something wrong with me, but somehow I don't seem able to regret anything I do--even the things I'm ashamed of--like what I said this afternoon. It all seems part of experience. It seems necessary. That experience with him--it helped me toward learning to live."

She expected that he would be offended by her frankness. But he was not. "It helped you toward learning to live," he assented, like one stating an indisputable truth. "And it helped me. No, more than that. It _taught_ me.... I wish the lesson could have been got in some--some other way. Perhaps you do, too." She nodded, gazing thoughtfully across the piano into the fire. "But," he went on, "fate doesn't let us choose our way--or, perhaps, there's no nice, refined way of getting one's full growth, any more than there is for a tree. It's simply got to stand outdoors in all weathers, and learn to survive and grow strong, no matter what comes."

"And the things that seem to hinder, often help most--and those that look like helps are enemies."

She saw his understanding, appreciative look, though her eyes were gazing past him; and she liked it. "We've both learned," said he. "And we've both been put in the way of learning more. Now why shouldn't you and I use our experience to the best advantage?"

"I intend to try," said she.

"Then it's simply a question of what is the best advantage. Isn't it for us both to stay on here?"

"I don't think so," was her slow reply. "Not for either of us."

"But you'll listen to my reasons? Really listen, I mean. You know, you caught my bad habit of not listening."

"Yes," she said with a forced, uneasy smile. "I'll listen."

"Well--first, there's this place. You like it, don't you? You must, since you made it. I've found that out, too."

"I love it," she answered. "But--" She shook her head.

"Now, do try to be patient with me. You must consider all three of my reasons together. That was only number one. Number two is Winchie."

She searched his face with swift terrified eyes. He smiled a frank and winning reassurance that instantly convinced her. "Please put that kind of thoughts about me out of your mind forever," he urged. "I've learned my lesson--that the beginning of fear is the end of trust. The boy's yours. You've got the right to him; he's got the right to you. Even if I could do for him, it'd be my duty-- But I didn't come here this evening to talk about duty. That's a rotten hypocrisy."

"Is this Richard Vaughan?" she cried laughingly.

"The same--minus his grandfather," replied he, eyes and voice echoing her laugh. "No more duty for me. When anybody talks about doing his duty, he'd better be watched. If he boasts of having done his duty he'd better be locked up while they find out what mischief he's been at. No, I'm out for honest, selfish inclination only. That brings me to my third reason. I want you to stay. But--for very selfish sensible reasons I want you to want to stay. I've gotten acquainted with you. I need you. There's nobody who could take your place."

She smiled at what seemed to her the extravagant kindness of this.

"I mean just that," he went on. It wasn't the words he was saying; it never is a matter of words. It was the way he said it--the force behind the words, like the force behind the projectile. "I need you. Don't you think you could learn to need me? A man needs a woman. A woman needs a man. We've never given each other a fair trial. Why shouldn't we? Now that you've taught me, I don't want you to abandon me. And why should you begin all over again with another man?"

She sat motionless, hardly breathing, it seemed, from the stillness of her bosom. He waited long but no answer came. He went to the big old-fashioned chimneypiece, stood with his back to the logs; a look of somberness came into his face. "Well," he said, "I've said my say." There was silence in the room. He drew a long breath. "What do you think?"

She lifted her head. With flushed face and reproachful, almost resentful eyes she cried: "You've no right to come at me that way. You make it hard for me to do as I wish."

"You wish to go? Then it's settled." He turned his face to the fire, and she could not see it. "We'll not speak of this again." His voice seemed natural; but there must have been some subtle quality in it that set her nerves to vibrating.

"And you," she cried, "are thinking 'How mean and ungrateful she is--after my generosity to refuse to----'"

"Not so!" he protested sharply, wheeling round. "I've not been generous. When I told you the fault was chiefly mine, I meant it."

"When a man treats a woman as if she were a human being, it's generosity, as the world goes," insisted she. And then the words began to pour from her as if they had suddenly found an outlet. "You make me feel small and mean in refusing. Oh, I'm grateful for the way you've treated me--but I hate myself for being grateful--and I'm ashamed that it is hateful. But I can't be different. Your generosity--your forgiveness hurt my pride. They make me feel I'm your inferior--and I am. But I mustn't stay where I'd feel humble. You make me ashamed to go, but I know I've the right to go--and that I ought to go. I must!"

"Then--you are going," was his unhesitating reply. "I don't want you to stay. I see you don't believe me--don't understand me--and no wonder. It'd be useless to try again, unless we were both determined with all our hearts to make a success if success was at all possible."

"And it couldn't be a success," said she, a touching melancholy in her voice, in her deep, mysterious eyes. "For, a man doesn't want an equal woman but a dependent--wants his woman to be like his dog. Oh, what a world it is!--where everybody cants about self-respect, and everybody prefers cringers to friends, fear to love!"

"Not I," said Vaughan, in the quiet forceful manner that fitted so well his air of reserve power, of strength without strenuosity. "And that's why I want you. Courtney, don't you see that you're free and independent here, now? Don't you see it'd be a waste of time, a waste of energy, for you to go away? You may not need me, but I need you--in every way. You can get along without me. But how can I get along without you? Where would I find a woman who could take your place?"

Her bosom was rising and falling stormily. Her eyes wandered, as if she were desperately seeking a way of escape and had scant hope of finding it.

"Can't you give 'us' another trial?" he asked, with proud humility.

"I cannot," she cried, starting up in her agitation. "I cannot! I must go. There's everything here but the one thing I must have--what you never could give me, after all that's happened--and then, there's what I said to you this afternoon. We never could look at each other without my feeling that you-- Oh, let's not talk about it. I must go--I must! I cannot live without love--equal love. I must seek until I find it--find some one who needs me--all of me--all I have to give--and must give."

He left the hearth and faced her with the length of the piano between them. "Could you love me?" he asked.

His voice set to vibrating nerves she had thought would never again respond to him. She trembled, and her eyes sank. "Even if I could--you couldn't love me. You could forgive--could be generous and kind. But you couldn't love."

"But I do love you," he said. And she, looking at him in wonder, thought there had never shone eyes so near to being the very soul itself. "I began to love you when you sent Gallatin away and faced me alone and did not lie. I came back because-- You were like the air to me, Courtney. One isn't conscious of the air unless he hasn't it, and can't breathe. I've loved you more and more, day by day, ever since. And I shall love you more and more--need you more and more--every day until I die. Courtney--can't you forgive me? I am sorry for what I did--and--I love you."

She sank upon the piano seat, flung her slim white arms along the keyboard, buried her face in them. "I've found it!" she sobbed. "I've found it!"

Several discoveries in chemistry give Richard Vaughan fame, and Courtney shares it. But they value it all at nothing beside the discovery which gives them happiness: That the wise make of their mistakes a ladder, the foolish a grave.

THE END

* * * * * * * *

*OTHER BOOKS BY*

*DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS*

Mr. Phillips does not follow the usual fashion in novels. He has a fashion of his own. His readers are now numbered by the scores of thousands. In at least one of our cities, at the public library where they take ten copies of each of Mr. Phillips's new books, there is usually a waiting-list _five to seven months_ long for a chance at it, which shows one of two things, or perhaps both: to how much trouble some people will go to save the trifling expenditure of the price of a book, or how extremely popular Mr. Phillips is--so popular that he has a multitude of eager readers among those who cannot afford to buy books.

It is no small triumph to win all kinds of readers, as Mr. Phillips has. The reason he has achieved it is because he writes about life as we live it ourselves, in our hearts and in our homes and in our dealings with each other--the familiar yet startling and always fascinating truth about life.

Mr. Phillips is an Indiana man in the early forties. He graduated from De Pauw University and then from Princeton. He has had a career giving him unusual opportunities to observe the life of all kinds of people, high and low, rich and poor, town and country, here and abroad. As he watched the struggle of humanity to live--the concealment and subterfuge, the extraordinary mixture of good and bad in everyone--all the conflict in the jungle which we call life impressed itself on him, and he gradually found that fiction--the novel--was presenting to him the best medium for him to express to everyone what he had found in his work so far. The result has been that in the last few years Mr. Phillips has gathered together an audience of thousands, who watch each book as it appears. It is interesting to see what he has produced.

Mr. Phillips's novel just preceding the present work is

*The Fashionable Adventures of*

*JOSHUA CRAIG*

Concerning this story, the London _Times_ said: "Until the modern Balzac actually arrives, perhaps Mr. David Graham Phillips may be permitted to fill the gap"; and of the hero it said: "Joshua Craig, a Lincoln adapted for the use of latter-day Americans."

It is the story of a strong, virile personality set among the frothy superficialities of society life in Washington. Joshua Craig, a young Western lawyer, is striving to make a name for himself in national politics, and carries everything before him by his cyclonic forcefulness. In spite of his bourgeois birth, he tears down the barriers of society, and his utter disregard of conventionalities makes him the sensation of the season. And yet, for all his frank contempt of the methods of Aristocracy, their plots and littleness, he finds among them one "woman," Margaret Severance. He lays siege to her with all his impulsiveness and the assurance of success, and makes her own honest self do battle with the scheming smallnesses of her aristocratic bringing up. He carries her away with a masterfulness that is characteristic of him, and marries her before she can get her breath. Big and rough and crude, repelling and yet compelling, he fights for the supremacy of his fundamental ideas, and step by step the "lady" in her gives way to the "woman," always struggling, always battling. She finally yields to his will--to become the quiescent wife of a candidate for governor.

Just preceding this book, Mr. Phillips published

*OLD WIVES FOR NEW*

Many, many critics have called this novel immoral and gross. It is not so. It tells the naked truth--not brutally, but frankly. It is not romance. It is real life. It deals with a wife who cannot keep pace with her husband, and who becomes slothful and unclean and low-minded because she does not realize that to live and move forward she must keep herself physically and mentally clean and fresh. It is the truth. It hits many a woman to-day hard. Women do not like this truth. It bites too deep and so they called it disgusting and immoral. And yet more than 200,000 people have read it. Of this novel it is said: "If the husband reads it he gives it to his wife. If the wife reads it first, she is very likely to hide it from her husband." A woman said of it: "While I was reading it, I stopped one night just after the train wreck. It was so vivid that as I took up my morning paper, the next day, I glanced at the head-lines for news of Murdock's condition, and to find whether the scandal had come out." "Old Wives for New" is a picture of married life--when the blinds are drawn and the servants out of the way, and the husband and wife become their real selves. The _St. Paul Pioneer Press_ says: "It contains things about women that have never seen the light of day before." It might have added: and things about men also. The book teems with good characters, each with a haunting resemblance to ourselves. There are women of respectability and women of the other world, wise men and fools, people that are more good than bad, people that are more bad than good, but nobody that is unhuman enough to be either all good or all bad. The keynote is that of a good story which searches for the truth.

Another of the remarkable novels is

*THE SECOND GENERATION*

It has been called a problem novel. But it is so only in the sense that every story that lives and breathes and is clothed in flesh and blood presents a problem. You will read this book without laying it down, if you can. And afterward you will think about it for many a day. You will laugh; you will come very near to crying, if you don't quite cry. You will love old Hiram Ranger and Ellen, his wife. You will envy Dory Hargrave his fascinating Adelaide. You will laugh over the soulful Janet, and will sympathize with Arthur Ranger. And as for Madelene--well, you will certainly find her thrilling! And the adventures of all these people will keep you intensely interested. Doctor Schulze must not go without a mention. He is as amusing here as when he appears again in "Old Wives for New," and his advice on medicine and other things may save you some bad health and a deal of money. As its title suggests, the story is a picture of our American life that may be found in any city or any town the country over--the story of the strong, hard-working father, who carved his way through life; and then the story of the next generation--the son and daughter who had apparently no fight to make.

The fourth novel is

*LIGHT-FINGERED GENTRY*

Here is another novel of present-day life, and at present as true, as interesting, from the romantic point of view, as either of the other two. When it was appearing serially, one of the foremost men in America became so excitedly interested that he asked, and as a special favor got, an advance set of the proofs of the whole story. He couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen about Neva Carlin and her divorced husband, Horace Armstrong; about the handsome, rakish great artist, Boris; about sensible Narcisse, the architect, and her nice weak brother; and the pert, pretty heiress, Amy Fosdick. As in Mr. Phillips's other novels, here we have again those startling, intimate views of men and women. Much more interesting, much more amusing is this sort of thing than the slush you so often take into your system with a box of chocolates, to the detriment of your brain as well as of your stomach. It may be said right here that if you are weak or without ambition, or if you have no desire to be a clean, clean-cut, up-to-date, attractive human being, "in the know," you had better not read Mr. Phillips's novels. His pictures of people are too true to make people of the running-to-seed sort comfortable. The story gives again a true, unvarnished picture of the situation as it has and does exist among the great and unprincipled financiers of this country. It tells in straightforward, direct language of the sacrifice of friendships and family ties for the advancement of moneyed interest and the pursuit of power, while all through the story runs the influence of a woman toward human and sane living and thinking.

A year ago Mr. Phillips published a play called

*THE WORTH OF A WOMAN*

This little volume illustrates the possibility of making an actual acting play that is also interesting to read. It is a remarkable love story--very "daring," as the critics say when they are afraid to say "literally true." If you read this play, you will go about posing its central idea--the dilemma of Diana and her lover--to all your friends, and arguing over whether Diana or Julian was right--or both, or neither.

THE WORKS OF DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

The Hungry Heart The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Old Wives for New Light-fingered Gentry The Second Generation The Worth of a Woman The Deluge The Social Secretary The Plum Tree The Cost The Master Rogue Golden Fleece A Woman Ventures The Great God Success