"Don't take off your things," I heard him say. "I came to get you. We'll have a blow-out somewhere. Olive, Olive!" His quick sympathy came out, and the excusing charm. "Oh, my dear, you're crying!"
"Griff, you're leaving me." It was as if I had accused him. I sank down in a chair; I was dabbling at my eyes and trying to get my veil off with cold fingers.
"Not if you feel that way about it." He came and put his arms about me and constrained me until I leaned against his body. I knew what he was, what a man of that stamp must be feeling and thinking, and, knowing, I permitted it. I was crying still, I think ... his hands came fumbling under my veil ... presently he kissed me.
"Olivia?"
"Well, Griff!"
"You know—it is for you to say if I shall leave you."
"You mean that you will give up ... but how can you, Griff; it is the only thing that's been offered." We were sitting still on the low cot in my room and there was no light but the dull glow of the stove and the last trace of the day that came in at the window. We had not been out to dinner yet, and Griffin's arm was around me. I could feel it slack a little now as if he definitely forebore to constrain me.
"I mean, Lowe could get you a place in the chorus."
"But, Griff, I can't sing."
"You can sing enough for that, and Lowe would get you the place if—if you belonged to me." I knew exactly what this implied, but no start responded to it. The nerve of propriety was ached out.
"Of course I know I'm not in your class," Griff was going on. "I wouldn't do such a thing as ask you to marry me. But I'm awfully fond of you ... and you're up against it."
"Yes, Griff, I'm up against it."
"Your fine friends ... what would they do for you?"
"Nothing whatever."
"Well, then ... you needn't go under your own name, and this is a chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?"
"No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was neither angry nor insulted.
"And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself ... honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't you?"
I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the situation. It was too desperate for that.
"I guess I ought to tell you ... I'm a bad sort ... bad with women. After I knew that my—that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what became of me. There was a woman in the company ... she liked me, and I thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her. But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to like a person to live with them ... and, anyway, I'm not asking you to marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a superior abnegation.
"You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me.
"I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity.
I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I couldn't stand forFlim-Flam. I think just at first, though, I made myself believe I was considering it.
I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a chance.
"I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her.
"Oh, but my dear—surely not with that!"
"I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses."
"Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!" Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"
"I'll get my board and clothes out of it," I told her bluntly. "And whether I like it or not, it is the only thing offered."
"And you are just taking it on trust? I suppose that is the right way; you can never tell how things will be brought about." I don't know how much of this was honest, and how much derived from the capacity for self-deception which grows on women whose sole business in life is getting on with a man. At any rate, having shaken my situation around to the shape of a moral attitude, as a robin does a worm, nothing would have prevented her from swallowing it whole.
Faint as I was I refused her invitation to dinner. With what I had in mind to do I didn't care to meet Henry Mills again. I was fiercer in my detestation of him and Cecelia than I had been before I had thought of being in the same case myself. I resented them as a ribald commentary on my necessity.
As I rode home on the car, all my outer self was in a tumult, dazed and buzzing like a hive. I was dimly aware of moving, sitting upright, of paying my fare, and of great staring red posters that flashed upon me from the billboards. I remember that it occurred to me several times that if I could only understand what I read on them, it might be greatly to my profit. Somewhere deep under my confusion I was aware of being plucked by the fringes of my consciousness. Something was trying to get through to me.
I refused to see Griffin at all that evening, and got into bed early, staring into the dark and seeing nothing but fragments of red letters that seemed about to shape themselves into the saving word, and then dissolved and left me blank. I tried to pray and realized that I had no connecting wires over which help might come.
Belief in the God I had been brought up to, had been beaten out of me at Higgleston, very largely by the conviction of those who professed to know Him best, that He couldn't in any case be the God of my Gift. And I hadn't been thinking since then of the Something Without Us to which I acted, as Deity. Now it occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that if the God of the Church had cast me off, there must still be something which artists everywhere prayed to, a Distributer of Gifts who might be concerned about the conduct of His worshippers.
I reached out for Him—and I did not know His name. I must pray though, I must pray to something which stood for Help. Slowly, as I cast back in my mind to find the name for it, I remembered Eversley. Eversley was everything which any player might wish to be, and Eversley had been kind. I would pray to Eversley. All at once there flashed across the blank of my mind, his name in letters of red. That was it! That was the name on the billboards! Eversley was in town. I recalled that Griff had spoken of it. I hadn't been able to spare a penny for a paper for a long time, or I should have known it. I would see Eversley. I got up and groped around in the cupboard for a piece of dry bread and ate it. Then I went back to bed and dropped asleep suddenly with the release of tension. To-morrow I would see Eversley.
Griffin failed to understand my change of mood in the morning.
"You aren't afraid that I shall try to hold you?"
"No I'm not afraid."
"Or that anybody will find it out?"
"I shouldn't care if they did," I told him. "I'm going to see Eversley. I suppose it's fair to tell you, you'll be the last resort, Griff."
"I'll be the foundation of your fortune, if Eversley will let me, but he won't." I think there was regret in his voice, but it was never in anything he said to me.
"I know you're not mean, Griff; that's why I told you."
"Oh, I'll tell you, too. I was mean once; I didn't mean to be, but it turned out that way." He was on the point of admitting something to me that I felt if I was to depend upon him I shouldn't hear.
I got out as early as possible and walked until I found a billboard. Eversley was at the Playhouse; he had been playing here for three days. I walked past it several times considering the possibility of getting his address from the stage doorman, though I knew I couldn't.
It was clear and bright, few people moved in the street. I walked between the alleyways and a row of ash-cans waiting for the belated carts of the cleaners. "Eversley, Eversley!" I called over and over as if it had been a charm. Suddenly in the still cold brightness, a torn fragment of newspaper flapped in the ash-can, it lifted and made a clumsy flight like a half-fledged bird and dropped beside me. Its one torn wing flapped gently as I passed it, and showed me part of a pictured face. I said to myself that I was in a pretty state when even a torn face in a paper looked like Eversley. I had gone on three steps, and suddenly I stopped. It was Eversley, of course; his picture would be in the papers. I went back and lifted the printed scrap. It was part of an interview with the great tragedian, three days old, and it told me the address of his hotel.
It was nearly eleven when I arrived there. The foyer was crowded with people among whom I fancied I recognized several of my profession. They had the same desperate air that I knew must stand out on me. I thought the clerk recognized it.
"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too, not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious. Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too late of course to catch them.
"Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy.
"First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by my evident wish to speak to her.
"Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband; I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her.
"My husband never sees visitors in the morning."
"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.
He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.
"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."
"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.
"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "Youwouldn't wish that. What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"
"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something—something pressing to be done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."
"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"
"I shall believe you," I said.
He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate carving in his face of nobility and gentleness. There were men like that then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a shibboleth of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me, groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay face downward on the table.
"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage. Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter in Chicago rose up in the part ofMagdato protest against the judgment of Taylorville.
I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.
"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley could do for me.
"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"
"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not let myself down like that.... Was that why you asked me to do the part?" I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without taking any note of my standing.
"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"
I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.
"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."
Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to see him the next day, and if he liked me—by the tone in which Mark Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone—he would take me on to New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.
So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast, I turned into the first attractive café and paid out almost my last cent for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the assurance of Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled withMagda, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.
As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my mind as one seen from the farther shore. I considered a little and then I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the dusk didn't conceal from me that embarrassment was on him. He looked checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable assumption. Whatever Dean had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had. He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.
It was about eleven of the next day that I had a note from Eversley to come to his rooms to meet Mr. Polatkin. I went in a kind of haze of excitement, numb as to my feet and finger-tips, moving about by reflexes merely and with a vague doubt as each new point of the way presented itself, the car I took, the hotel stair, the length of the corridor, if I should be equal to any one of them, so far was my consciousness removed from the means of communication.
Eversley shook hands with me out of a cloud, moving in an orbit miles outside of my own, and when he left me, saying that Polatkin would come up the next moment, it was as if he had withdrawn into the vastness of outer space. In the interval before I heard Mr. Polatkin's knock I rehearsed a great many ways of meeting him, none of which were from the right cue.
I do not know why I hadn't been prepared by the name for his being a Jew, nor for the sudden shifting of the ground of our meeting which that fact made for me. So far as I had thought of him at all, it was in a kind of nebulosity of the high disinterestedness that was responsible for Mark Eversley's interest in me. It had been, his generous succour, all of a piece of that traditional protectiveness, the expectation of which is so drilled into women that it rose promptly in advance of any occasion for it. The mere supposition that he was to provide for me, had tinged my mind, unaware, with the natural response of a docility made ridiculous by the figure of Polatkin edging himself in through a door that an arrangement of furniture made impossible completely to open. His height did not bring him above the level of my eyes, and as much of him as was visible above his theatrical-looking, furred coat, was chiefly nose and pallid forehead disdained by tight, black, curly hair, and extraordinarily black eyes which seemed to have retreated under the brows for the purpose of taking council with the intelligence that informed them.
I had put on my best to meet him, and though my husband had been dead more than two years, my best was still tinged with widowhood, for the chief reason that once having got into black I had not been able to afford to put it off for anything more suitable. I had put a good deal of white about the neck trying for an effect which I knew, as Polatkin's eyes travelled over me, had been feminine rather than professional. Now as I realized how I had unconsciously responded to the suggestion of preciousness in the fact of his coming to take care of me, I felt myself grow from head to foot one deep suffusing red. It comes out for me in retrospect how near I was to the situation which had intrigued Cecelia Brune and her kind, put at disadvantage, not by a monetary obligation so much as by the inevitable feminine reaction toward the source of care and protection. At the time, however, I was concerned to keep the stodgy little Jew, who stood hat in hand taking stock of me, from discovering that I had come to this meeting with a degree of personal expectation which I should have resented in him. I hoped indeed that my blush might pass with him for a denial of the very thing it confessed, or at least for mere shyness and gaucherie. I was helped from my confusion by the realization that Mr. Polatkin was not so much looking at me or speaking to me, as projecting me into the future and gauging me against a background of his own creation.
I was standing still, after we had got through some perfunctory civilities, for I thought he would want me to act for him—but I found afterward that he had trusted Mr. Eversley for my capacity—and I had a feeling of being able to meet the situation better on my feet. I caught him looking at me with an irritating impersonality.
"Jalowaski shall make your corsets," he affirmed; "he makes 'em for Eames and Gadski—a little more off there, a little longer here ... so...." He did not touch me, he was not even within touching distance, but he followed the outline of my figure with his thumb, flourishing out the alterations which made it more to his mind. "Jalowaski would fix you so you wouldn't believe it was you," he concluded.
He appeared so well satisfied with his inspection that he expanded graciously. "And there is one thing you have which there is lots of actresses would give half they got for it. You have got imagination in the way you dress your hair. It is a wonder how some of them can act and yet ain't got no imagination at all about the way they look, only so it is stylish. For an actress it is all right for her to look stylish on the street, but there are times when she has to look otherways on the stage; y'understand me."
I slid somehow into a chair; I don't know exactly what I expected, but it certainly hadn't been this appraisement, which I had the sense to see was favourable and yet resented.
"The first thing we will see to yet, is some clothes; for you will excuse me, Miss Lattimore, but what you are wearing don't show you off at all. You don't need to wear black. Of course I know you are a widow, Mr. Eversley was telling me, but there are some actresses what make out like they was, because they think it becomes them, y' understand, but there is no need for you to wear it, for Mr. Eversley is telling me that your husband is dead more than two years already." He had loosened his coat to display an appropriate amount of gold fob dependent over a small balloon in the process of being inflated; now from somewhere in his inner recess he produced a folded paper.
"It is better we have a contract from the start. Though of course it is all right if Mr. Eversley recommends you, but it is better we don't have misunderstandings." He spread the paper out and weighted it with one of his pudgy hands.
"So you are going to take me ... you haven't seen me act yet."
"Eversley has."
"Well ... if you want to take his judgment ... but he hasn't told me anything aboutyouyet. What do you want of me; what are you going to do for me?"
If Eversley had told him how desperate my situation was, it wasn't a good move to try to hold out against him now, it might have given him the idea that I was ungrateful, but I couldn't stand for being handed about this way like a female chattel. That Eversley had told him, I saw by the expression of astonishment on his face which slowly changed to one of amusement.
"I'm going to save you from starving to death," he began, and then as the sense of my courage in the face of such an alternative grew upon him, "I'm going to make you one of the leading tragic actresses of America."
"And what am I to do?"
"Whatever I tell you. Eversley thinks you could study a while with Mrs. Delamater. She is wonderful, wonderful!" He described with his arms a circle scarcely larger than the arc of his cherubic contour, to show how wonderful she was.
"I should like some dancing lessons, too," I submitted.
"Do you dance? Ah, no, it is too much to expect; but if I could find me a dancer, Miss Lattimore, a born dancer!" He brought his arms into play again to describe a felicity which transcended expression. "But they are not so easy to find," he sighed audibly. "We must do what we can already."
Eversley told me afterward that Polatkin had the soul of an actor, but the only part which he had ever been able to play without being ridiculous, was Fagin, and now he was too fat even for that, so that he took it out vicariously in the success of those whose opportunity he made. It was the dream of his life to find a real genius, a dancer or a prima donna; I believe I was the nearest he ever came to it; and I owe it to him to say that I couldn't have arrived at more than the faintest approach to it without him.
It was that contract I signed with him there in Eversley's room which brought him in the end about three hundred per cent. on the money he advanced me, but I never begrudged it. He gave me a check then and there, and an address of a hotel in New York where I was to meet him within five days. He looked me well over as he shook hands with me.
"You would be better if you would weigh about ten pounds more," he assured me, and I was mixed between resentment at his personality and thankfulness to have even that sort of interest taken in me. I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Eversley afterward; there was not time for half the things I wished to hear from him, but this sticks in my memory. I had put it to him that the meagreness of my personal experiences had, so far, tended to the skimping of my art.
"There's no question as to that," he told me, "but it is nothing compared to the effect that your art will have on your experience. It's a mistake to let it set up in you an appetite for particular kinds of it. There's the experience of having done without experience, you can put that into your acting as well as the other, and you'll find it is often the most valuable." I was later to find the worth of that, but like most advice, it only proved itself in the event of my not taking it.
There was not much to be done about my leaving Chicago; I had rooted there shallowly. I went out that afternoon to tell Pauline good-bye, for I wished to avoid Henry. It seemed a great step, my going away. There was a kind of finality about it. The casual character of my relation to the stage had disappeared; I was about to be married to it. Pauline cried a little; in spite of there being so much in my life that I couldn't tell her, I remembered how long we had been friends and that we were very fond of one another. She couldn't, of course, quite abandon her favourite moral attitude.
"You have a great work, Olivia, a great responsibility. You must remember that you are the trustee of a rare gift."
"I'll take as good care of it," I assured her, "as those who sent it take of me." At the time I believe I felt that the Powershadtaken notice of me at last.
I got away as soon as possible; it seemed kinder to Griffin. We had been divided as by a sword; he knew now there was nothing between us and he was abashed at the memory of having touched me. All that time we had lurked behind the pressure of packing and settling my affairs; we never came out squarely and faced one another. I think some latent manhood that had risen to my need of him, slunk back with the certainty that I could do very well without him.
"You'll be sure and hunt me up if you come to New York?" I urged; I wasn't going to be accused of disloyalty because of the rise in my fortunes. He shook his head.
"You'll be up among the nobs then." He looked at me for a moment wistfully, "You'll remember that I said I wouldn't try to hold you?" I let him get what comfort he could out of the generosity he imagined in himself at that. Seen against the shining background which Polatkin's money had made for me, he looked almost weazened. "Good-bye," I said, with another handshake, and I set my face steadily toward New York.
The third season in New York found me in a very gratifying situation. I had made a public for myself, and friends, not only new friends but old ones drawn there by good fortune of their own. I had worked out my obligation to Polatkin, though I was still on such terms with him as allowed him to give me a good deal of advice, and for me to call him Poly in his more human moments. I used even to go out to his house at One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street to spend an hour with Mrs. Polatkin and the several little replicas of himself, of whom, in spite of their tendency to run mostly to nose and forehead, he was exceedingly proud. The help he had afforded me had uncovered new layers of capacity, to fill out satisfyingly the opportunities he created. I was a successful actress, there was no doubt whatever that I was a success; I would have been able to prove it by the figure of my salary. And often when the house rocked with applause, and I was called time after time before the curtain, I would question the high, half-lighted void. I would look and ache and cry out inwardly. For what? Well, I suppose I knew pretty well what I was looking for by the end of that year, though it wasn't a thing I could say much about, even to Sarah.
Sarah and I had a flat together on Thirty-first Street. The second winter we had played together, in a comedy Jerry had written for us, with so much success that it was impossible that we should remain together long. To have kept together two players of such distinguished and equal quality would have been to miss the lustre of achievement which they might each shed on a lesser group, wholly without any other excuse for coherence. Our managers, too, contrived to get us not a little advertisement out of the circumstance of our being friends and undivided by success. There was, however, one fact known to us both, though without any conscious communication, which we would not for worlds have made known to an unsuspecting public; and that was that while I was still on the hither side of my full power, Sarah had come to the level of hers.
Sarah was always wonderful in what I call static parts, parts all of one mood and consistency. She was notable as Portia; as Hermione, absolute. Perhaps the greatest favourite with her public was Galatea, which, besides being well within the average taste, allowed the greatest display of her bodily perfection. Yet with all this, Sarah knew that she was nearing the end of her contribution; knew it perhaps with that prescience of the Gift itself, folding up its wings for withdrawal. I have never been able to make up my mind whether she abandoned her talent because she had no more use for it, or if it left her because its time was served.
I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night, that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but I—I came hungry—always! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the course; when I would continue acting in my room, going over my part, recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled and aching with incompletion.
I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing something; not less in sheer bodily well-being, leisure, beautiful clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours and adjustments were in tune with my temperament, as nothing I had had before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality called charm.
And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded. I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I wanted.
"It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute."
That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world, wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her limbered up."
"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to me the probable outcome of such a relation.
"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.
It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane and open passion as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife, noble, extenuating, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able to conceive such a relation and to discriminate it so readily from the ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny. Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.
The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs. Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children, though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling infrequently.
No one could be on a footing of any intimacy with Mrs. Jerry without being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy which gnawed upon the bosom that nursed them. Connubial misery was a kind of drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.
It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children, who were nice children except for the way in which they continually reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.
I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.
Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement, especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.
"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can feel news of it coming up through the stems."
"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me. "There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."
"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"
"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to bring on a crisis."
"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't, however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the——not heart——let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes—of Mineola Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the mentor of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I ventured on a word of caution.
"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."
"You think I'd do that?"
"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live with her."
"I could live with you," he affirmed.
"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any one ... like Miss Doran, I mean ... do you mean that you wouldn't write plays at all?"
"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell? This thingis. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back from it."
"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"
"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better clear out before it.
I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah, who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast, but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me. It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve and apprise him that I was there. What deterred me was the reflection that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled head to make a case of his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of sundry vagrant impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain above the din of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter. The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance at Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.
He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.
"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."
"For where?"
"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment. "Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."
"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers, and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.
Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.
"I don't blame you for going."
"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of consternation passed in his face between his divided interest and a suspicion of the reason for my desertion.
"Look here, Olivia—oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.
I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre closed for the season I sailed for London.
For a week, perhaps, I was content merely with being there, simply happy and human. I had brought letters and addresses which I neglected. In spite of the excuse I had made to Jerry about it, I did not even go to the theatres. I turned aside from the traditional goals, to ride on the top of omnibuses and walk miles down the Strand and Piccadilly, touching shoulders with the crowd. The thing that I had striven for in my art, what men paint and write and act for, was upon me. Answers to all the questions about it that I had not the skill to put to myself, lurked for me behind the next one of the Greek marbles and the next. The pictures were luminous with it. In the soft spring nights it took the streets and turned the voices happy. It danced with the maids in the alleyways to the tune of the barrel organs. Then all at once I had a scare. That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me seemed about to take flight. I would be smiling at it secretly. I would catch myself in the motion of saluting it, and suddenly it would be gone. Mornings I would wake up in Chicago to the old struggle and depression; I would have to go out in the streets and court back my joy; it fled from me and concealed itself in the crowd. I followed it by the trail of the first name I lighted on in my address-book. It happened to be Mrs. Franklin Shane; I wrote her a note and then walked out in Hyde Park to see the last of the rhododendrons, and regretted it. Mrs. Franklin Shane was Pauline Mills raised to thenth power, which I did not fail to perceive was due to Franklin Shane being Henry multiplied by a million. The acute sense of values, which had established Pauline at the centre of Evanston, had landed Mrs. Shane at the outer rim of English exclusiveness. What she would do with her time and energy when she had penetrated to its royal core, interested me immensely.
I had been entertained at her house the previous winter when I had been studying a play that made me perfectly willing to be exploited by Mrs. Franklin Shane, for the sake of what I got out of it to fatten my part. There in London she called for me in her car the afternoon of the day that brought her my note. I don't remember that anything was expressly said about it, but it was in the air that Mrs. Franklin Shane had arrived, in her study of Exclusiveness, at knowing that the younger members of it were addicted to the society of ladies of my profession, and meant to make the most of me. I thought it might be amusing to see what, supposing with me as a tolerable bait, she could catch a younger son, she would do with him. She was clever enough not to put the use she was to make of me, too obviously. I was invited to an informal reception the next afternoon in which she found herself involved by her husband's business exigencies; I gathered from her way of speaking of it that the guests were chiefly Americans and that she had made the best of the situation, extracting from it for herself a kernel of credit by not turning down her compatriots, now that she was assured of having the English aristocracy to play with.
The house in front of which a hansom deposited me the next day, was notable; one could guess that the Franklin Shanes had been made to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of occupying it. It was stuffed full of the treasures of four hundred years of the selective instinct.
"You must really see the Velasquez," my hostess had confided to me as soon as I had shaken hands with her, and I judged from the fact of her not mentioning my name to any other of her guests, that she was saving me for a special introduction.
The Velasquez was very wonderful; there was also an early Holbein and a Titian so black with time that there was only one point in the room from which you could make out what it was about. I was slowly making my way to that point. I had been in the house half an hour and had met but one or two people whom I slightly knew, when I was aware of my hostess piloting toward me through the press, a black-coated male in whom I suspected one of the pegs upon which her social venture hung. It occurred to me that she had sent me to look at the pictures so that she might know where to find me. The room was packed with Americans, satisfying in the only way open to them, a natural curiosity as to the shell in which the only kind of society which wasn't open to them, lived, and the man blocking out a passage through it with his shoulders, was so tall that it brought my eyes on a level with his necktie. There was an odd freedom about it that set me at once to correct my impression of him by his face, and the moment I raised my eyes to him I knew him.
I could hear Mrs. Franklin Shane mumbling the phrases of introduction, rendered unimportant by the radiant recognition that for the moment enveloped us, that burst around us as a flame in which our hostess seemed to shrivel and go out in a thin haze of silk and chiffon. I remember looking around for her presently, and wondering how she had got away from us. We began again at the point where we had left off.
"So you did go on the stage then, in spite of Taylorville?"
"And you," I pressed my foot into the velvet pile of the carpet to make sure that I stood. "You are an engineer, I suppose?"
"In spite of my uncle!"
Somewhere in the next room some one began to sing. I did not hear the song nor see the Titian. I was back in Willesden pasture and the soft rain of dying leaves was on my face. I was conscious of nothing but his hand which he had laid upon my arm to steady me against the pressure of the crowd which swayed and turned upon itself to let Mrs. Shane through, to drag me to be presented to the singer who was even more of a notability than I was.
There was an interval then in which I appeared to be going through the forms of society, and going through them under an intolerable sense of injustice in the fact that having found Helmeth Garrett at last, now I had lost him. It was one of those occasions when the inward monitor is so bent on its own affairs that the habit of living goes on automatically, or does not go on at all. It went on so with me for half an hour. By degrees, what seemed an immense unbearable throbbing of the universe, resolved itself at the renewal of that electrifying touch on my arm, to the thrum of an orchestra in the refreshment room. I felt myself carried along by the pressure of the crowd in that direction, but just at the turn of the stair that went down to it I was drawn peremptorily aside.
"Come," Mr. Garrett insisted, "come out of this. I want to talk to you." There was the old imperiousness in his manner, exclusive of all other considerations. He seemed to know the house. We took a turn through the hall came out presently at theporte cochèrewhere a line of carriages waited, supported by a line of skirt-coated figures like little wooden Noahs before an ark. I let him put me into a closed carriage without a word of protest. I had not taken leave of my hostess; I had not so much as thought of her. I suppose he had been arranging this in the interval in which I had not seen him. The moment the door of the carriage was shut, we clasped hands and laughed shamelessly.
"You had three little freckles high up on your cheek, what became of them?" he demanded. All at once his mood changed again. "All the years I've been without you!... I saw a picture of you in a magazine three years ago in Alaska. I came near writing."
"You should have. What were you doing there?"
"Promoting Engineer, Alaska, Russia, Mexico." He began a gesture to include the whole round of the mining world, but left off to take my hand again. "The worldisround," he declared, as though he had somewhat doubted it. "It brings us back again to the old starting points."
"They're always the same, I suppose, the places we set out from; but we ... we are never the same."
"Is that a warning?" He looked at me, checked for a moment.
"Only a platitude." I had thrown it out instinctively against his engulfing manner, against everything that rose up in me to assure me that nothing whatever had changed, that it would never change. The life of the London streets streamed around us; crossing Piccadilly Circus we were held up with the traffic; the roar of the city islanded us like a sea.
"I suppose you know where we are going?" I suggested in one of the checked intervals.
"To your hotel; Mrs. Shane gave me the address. I told her we were old friends. You mustn't be surprised if you find she expects us to have gone to school together. I wanted to get away where we could talk." I gave him an assenting smile. Still neither of us showed any disposition to begin. He took off his hat in the carriage and ran his fingers through his hair. About the temples it had gone gray a little. Now and then he gave a short contented laugh as a man will, put suddenly at ease.
"I'm glad you kept the old name, Olivia Lattimore ... Olivia. I shouldn't have found you without."
"You knew I had lost my husband."
"I read that in the magazine. There's where I have the advantage of you." He dropped his light banter for a soberer tone. "My wife died two years ago." We were silent after that until the fact had been put behind us by a space of time.
I don't know why London seems a more homey place than New York. It has been going on so long, perhaps, is so steeped in the essential essence of human living, and the buildings there are smaller, more personal, the mind is able to grasp them to the uttermost. I remember as we stopped at my hotel, being taken suddenly with a tremendous awareness of it all, the noble river flowing by, the human stream, miles on miles of homes, and the green countryside. I was aware of a city set in an island and an island in the sea, the wide immortal sea going around and around it, the coursing waves—I checked myself in an upward gesture of the arms, as though I had pulsed and surged with it. I caught in my companion's smile a delighted recognition.
"Sh—" he said, "what'll Flora Haines think of you!"
"Flora! Oh, Flora wouldn't eventhinkabout a play-actor. What would your uncle——"
"He's dead now." He stopped me.
"They are all dead," I told him, "all those that mattered to us."
We had another mood when we came to my rooms. I perceived suddenly what there was in him more than I had known. It was in his manner that he had commanded men. I was pierced through with a sense of his virility, the quality that goes to make a male. I was glad of an excuse to put away my hat and wrap, to escape for a moment from the effect he produced on me ... from inordinate pride in him that he could so produce it. The room was full of the tumult we created for one another.
"Will you sit here?" I said at last. I believe I pushed a chair toward him.
"No, you." He must have turned it back toward me, otherwise I do not know how I came to be so near him.
"You know," I said, ... "I never got your letter."
"I guessed as much when it came back to me. I should have come to you the next day, but I quarrelled with my uncle. I walked all the way to the railway station before I remembered. But what had I to offer you?"
"It was so long ago ..."
"No, no, yesterday." His arms were around me. "Olivia ... yesterday and to-day!"
I think I moved a little to be the more completely engulfed by him, to lay against his the ache of my empty breast; all these years I had not known how empty. We kissed at last and Joy came upon us. We loved; we kissed again between laughter. I remember little snatches of explanation in the intervals of kissing.
"All this time, Helmeth, I have wanted you so."
"I was on my way to you. All last winter in Alaska ... in the long night, Olivia. I should have come soon."
"Oh," I cried, "I have been drawn across the sea to you. All the way I felt you calling!"
"We had to meet again; had to!"
After a time I insisted that he should sit down. "You haven't had any tea." I tried to get control of myself. I was crossing the room to ring when he swept me up again.
"Look here, Olivia, I don't want any tea. I want you. God!" he said, "do you know how I want you?" All at once I was crying on his breast.
"Oh, Helmeth, Helmeth, do you know you have only seen me twice in your life."
"And both times," he insisted, "I've wanted to marry you."
It was two or three days before we spoke of marriage again. I believe I scarcely thought of it; we had all the past to account for, and the present. We had moments of strangeness, and then we would kiss, and all the years would seem to each of us as full of the other as the very hour.
"Where were you, Helmeth, the second summer after we met?" I had told him of my visit to Chicago and the dream of him I had had there.
"Out in Arizona, carrying a surveyor's chain, dreaming ofyou! Often when the moonlight was all over that country like a lake, I would walk and walk. I had long talks with you; they were the only improving conversation I had."
"For years," I said, "that dream of you was the only thing that kept my Gift awake. Times I would lose it, and then I would dream again and it would come back. I know now when I lost it completely, it was about a year before I saw you that time in Chicago." I had told him of that, too.
"That year I married." I could see that there was something in the recollection always that weighed upon him.
"I didn't," he said, "until after my aunt had told me about you. I went back there when she died; she was always good to me. You know, don't you, Olive, that in spite of everything ... everything ... there is only you."
"Let us not talk of it." I do not know how it is proper to feel on such occasions, but I supposed that he must have had as I had, stinging tears to think of the dead and how their love was overmatched by this present wonder. I would have had, somehow, Tommy and my boy to share in it.
I went rather tardily to make my apologies to Mrs. Franklin Shane. I hope they sounded natural.
"Mydear! you needn't expect me to be surprised atanythingHelmeth Garrett does." She talked habitually in italics. "My husband says that it is only because he so generally does right, that it is at all possible to get along with him." I snapped up crumbs like this with avidity.
"His wife, too, you must have known her." I hinted. This was at the end of a rather complete account of Helmeth's business relations with Mr. Shane.
"Oh, well," I could see Christian charity struggling with Mrs. Shane's profound conviction of the rectitude of her own way of life. "She was agoodwoman, but no—imagination." She was so pleased to have hit upon a word which carried no intrinsic condemnation that she repeated it. "No imagination whatever. One feels," she modified the edge of her judgment still further, "that so much might have been made out of Mr. Garrett. These self-made men are so difficult."
"Are you difficult?" I demanded when I had retailed the conversation to him that evening.
"I suppose so; anyway I am self-made. She is right so far; I dare say it is badly done. You'll have to take a few tucks in me."
"Not a tuck. I like you the way you are. Oh, I like you ... I like youso!" There was an interval after this before we could go on again.
"Tell me how you made yourself, Helmeth. Don't leave anything out, not a single thing."
"By mistakes mostly. Every time I had made one I knew it was a mistake and I didn't do it again. I don't know that I'm much of a success anyway, but I've got a large assortment of things not to do."
"That was the way I learned how to act; filling in behind!"
"I thought that came by instinct. What counts with a man, is not so much getting to know how to do it, but getting a chance to prove to other people that he knows how."
"I've been through that too," I told him, but he was bent on making himself clear.
"I suppose I ought to tell you, Olivia, I'm only a sort of scab engineer. I haven't any papers."
"But if you can do the work? Mrs. Shane said——"
"Oh, Shane will trust me; he's learned. What hurts is to have worked up a scheme to the point where it is necessary to have outside capital, and then have one of the outsiders stick out for a certificated engineer. That's what comes of my uncle's notion that a man should 'pick up' his professional training." There was the core of that old bitterness rankling in him still; he could not yield himself quite to consolation.
"But you have got on, Helmeth, you gothere." What "here" meant to me exactly, was more than my lover, more than the pleasant room behind us, the obsequious servitors, more even than the sleek, silvered river and the towered banks that took on shapes of romance under the London gray. There was something in the word to me of fulfilment, the knowledge of things done, the certainty of an unassailed capacity for doing. We were sitting with the broad window flung open, the top of a lime tree tapping the sill of it with soft shouldering touches, as of some wild creature against its mate, creaking a little in somnolent content. I put out my hand to touch his knee—oh, as I might have done it if the "here" had been the point toward which we had travelled together all these years. He laughed then as he often did when I touched him, a man's short full laugh of repletion. He thrust out his knee quite frankly till it touched mine, and closed his hand over my fingers; he returned to what had been in the air the previous moment with an effort. The suspicion that it was an effort, was all I had to prepare me for what was about to leap upon me.
"Oh, I've pulled through, I've pulled through. But I'm not where I might have been. And I'm not rich, Olivia. Not what is called rich."
"Is being called rich one of the things that goes with—what was it you called yourself—a promoting engineer?"
"It goes with it if you are any good at it. Not that I care about money except for what it stands for ... and then there are the girls."
"You have—girls." It struck me as absurd that I hadn't thought of it until that moment.
"I thought Mrs. Shane would have told you. I have two. It isn't going to make any difference with you, Olivia?"
"Ah, what difference should it make!" I was apprised within me by the haste I made to cover my consternation, that there was more difference in it than my words allowed. "Children of yours?" I said. "So much more of you for me to love." The apprehension was whelmed in the possessing movement with which he drew me to his breast.