It cannot be pretended that Alice was quite pleased with the way her friends took her engagement, or rather the way in which they spoke of Dan. It seemed to her that she alone, or she chiefly, ought to feel that sweetness and loveliness of which every one told her, as if she could not have known it. If he was sweet and lovely to every one, how was he different to her except in degree? Ought he not to be different in kind? She put the case to Miss Cotton, whom it puzzled, while she assured Alice that he was different in kind to her, though he might not seem so; the very fact that he was different in degree proved that he was different in kind. This logic sufficed for the moment of its expression, but it did not prevent Alice from putting the case to Dan himself. At one of those little times when she sat beside him alone and rearranged his necktie, or played with his watch chain, or passed a critical hand over his cowlick, she asked him if he did not think they ought to have an ideal in their engagement. “What ideal?” he asked. He thought it was all solid ideal through and through. “Oh,” she said, “be more and more to each other.” He said he did not see how that could be; if there was anything more of him, she was welcome to it, but he rather thought she had it all. She explained that she meant being less to others; and he asked her to explain that.
“Well, when we're anywhere together, don't you think we ought to show how different we are to each other from what we are to any one else.”
Dan laughed. “I'm afraid we do, Alice; I always supposed one ought to hide that little preference as much as possible. You don't want me to be dangling after you every moment?”
“No-o-o. But not—dangle after others.”
Dan sighed a little—a little impatiently. “Do I dangle after others?”
“Of course not. But show that we're thoroughly united in all our tastes and feelings, and—like and dislike the same persons.”
“I don't think that will be difficult,” said Dan.
She was silent a moment, and then she said; “You don't like to have me bring up such things?”
“Oh yes, I do. I wish to be and do just what you wish.”
“But I can see, I can understand, that you would sooner pass the time without talking of them. You like to be perfectly happy, and not to have any cares when—when you're with me this way?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I do,” said Dan, laughing again. “I suppose I rather do like to keep pleasure and duty apart. But there's nothing you can wish, Alice, that isn't a pleasure to me.”
“I'm very different,” said the girl. “I can't be at peace unless I know that I have a right to be so. But now, after this, I'm going to do your way. If it's your way, it'll be the right way—for me.” She looked sublimely resolved, with a grand lift of the eyes, and Dan caught her to him in a rapture, breaking into laughter.
“Oh, don't! Mine's a bad way—the worst kind of a way,” he cried.
“It makes everybody like you, and mine makes nobody like me.”
“It makes me like you, and that's quite enough. I don't want other people to like you!”
“Yes, that's what I mean!” cried Alice; and now she flung herself on his neck, and the tears came. “Do you suppose it can be very pleasant to have everybody talking of you as if everybody loved you as much—as much as I do?” She clutched him tighter and sobbed.
“O Alice! Alice! Alice! Nobody could ever be what you are to me!” He soothed and comforted her with endearing words and touches; but before he could have believed her half consoled she pulled away from him, and asked, with shining eyes, “Do you think Mr. Boardman is a good influence in your life?”
“Boardman!” cried Mavering, in astonishment. “Why, I thought you liked Boardman?”
“I do; and I respect him very much. But that isn't the question. Don't you think we ought to ask ourselves how others influence us?”
“Well, I don't see much of Boardy nowadays; but I like to drop down and touch earth in Boardy once in a while—I'm in the air so much. Board has more common-sense, more solid chunk-wisdom, than anybody I know. He's kept me from making a fool of myself more times—”
“Wasn't he with you that day with—with those women in Portland?”
Dan winced a little, and then laughed. “No, he wasn't. That was the trouble. Boardman was off on the press boat. I thought I told you. But if you object to Boardman—”
“I don't. You mustn't think I object to people when I ask you about them. All that I wished was that you should think yourself what sort of influence he was. I think he's a very good influence.”
“He's a splendid fellow, Boardman is, Alice!” cried Dan. “You ought to have seen how he fought his way through college on such a little money, and never skulked or felt mean. He wasn't appreciated for it; the men don't notice these things much; but he didn't want to have it noticed; always acted as if it was neither here nor there; and now I guess he sends out home whatever he has left after keeping soul and body together every week.”
He spoke, perhaps, with too great an effect of relief. Alice listened, as it seemed, to his tone rather than his words, and said absently—
“Yes, that's grand. But I don't want you to act as if you were afraid of me in such things.”
“Afraid?” Dan echoed.
“I don't mean actually afraid, but as if you thought I couldn't be reasonable; as if you supposed I didn't expect you to make mistakes or to be imperfect.”
“Yes, I know you're very reasonable, and you're more patient with me than I deserve; I know all that, and it's only my wish to come up to your standard, I suppose, that gives me that apprehensive appearance.”
“That was what vexed me with you there at Campobello, when you—asked me—”
“Yes, I know.”
“You ought to have understood me better. You ought to know now that I don't wish you to do anything on my account, but because it's something we owe to others.”
“Oh, excuse me! I'd much rather do it for you,” cried Dan; but Alice looked so grave, so hurt, that he hastened on: “How in the world does it concern others whether we are devoted or not, whether we're harmonious and two-souls-with-but-a-single-thought, and all that?” He could not help being light about it.
“How?” Alice repeated. “Won't it give them an idea of what—what—of how much—how truly—if we care for each other—how people ought to care? We don't do it for ourselves. That would be selfish and disgusting. We do it because it's something that we owe to the idea of being engaged—of having devoted our lives to each other, and would show—would teach—”
“Oh yes! I know what you mean,” said Dan, and he gave way in a sputtering laugh. “But they wouldn't understand. They'd only think we were spoons on each other; and if they noticed that I cooled off toward people I'd liked, and warmed up toward those you liked, they'd say you made me.”
“Should you care?” asked Alice sublimely, withdrawing a little from his arm.
“Oh no! only on your account,” he answered, checking his laugh.
“You needn't on my account,” she returned. “If we sacrifice some little preferences to each other, isn't that right? I shall be glad to sacrifice all of mine to you. Isn't our—marriage to be full of such sacrifices? I expect to give up everything to you.” She looked at him with a sad severity.
He began to laugh again. “Oh no, Alice! Don't do that! I couldn't stand it. I want some little chance at the renunciations myself.”
She withdrew still further from his side, and said, with a cold anger, “It's that detestable Mrs. Brinkley.”
“Mrs. Brinkley!” shouted Dan.
“Yes; with her pessimism. I have heard her talk. She influences you. Nothing is sacred to her. It was she who took up with those army women that night.”
“Well, Alice, I must say you can give things as ugly names as the next one. I haven't seen Mrs. Brinkley the whole winter, except in your company. But she has more sense than all the other women I know.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“You know I don't mean you,” he pushed on. “And she isn't a pessimist. She's very kindhearted, and that night she was very polite and good to those army women, as you call them, when you had refused to say a word or do anything for them.”
“I knew it had been rankling in your mind all along,” said the girl “I expected it to coma out sooner or later. And you talk about renunciation! You never forget nor forgive the slightest thing. But I don't ask your forgiveness.”
“Alice!”
“No. You are as hard as iron. You have that pleasant outside manner that makes people think you're very gentle and yielding, but all the time you're like adamant. I would rather die than ask your forgiveness for anything, and you'd rather let me than give it.”
“Well, then, I ask your forgiveness, Alice, and I'm sure you won't let me die without it.”
They regarded each other a moment. Then the tenderness gushed up in their hearts, a passionate tide, and swept them into each other's arms.
“O Dan,” she cried, “how sweet you are! how good! how lovely! Oh, how wonderful it is! I wanted to hate you, but I couldn't. I couldn't do anything but love you. Yes, now I understand what love is, and how it can do everything, and last for ever.”
Mavering came to lunch the next day, and had a word with Mrs. Pasmer before Alice came in. Mr. Pasmer usually lunched at the club.
“We don't see much of Mrs. Saintsbury nowadays,” he suggested.
“No; it's a great way to Cambridge,” said Mrs. Pasmer, stifling, in a little sigh of apparent regret for the separation, the curiosity she felt as to Dan's motive in mentioning Mrs. Saintsbury. She was very patient with him when he went on.
“Yes, it is a great way. And a strange thing about it is that when you're living here it's a good deal further from Boston to Cambridge than it is from Cambridge to Boston.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “every one notices that.”
Dan sat absently silent for a time before he said, “Yes, I guess I must go out and see Mrs. Saintsbury.”
“Yes, you ought. She's very fond of you. You and Alice ought both to go.”
“Does Mrs. Saintsbury like me?” asked Dan. “Well, she's awfully nice. Don't you think she's awfully fond of formulating people?”
“Oh, everybody in Cambridge does that. They don't gossip; they merely accumulate materials for the formulation of character.”
“And they get there just the same!” cried Dan. “Mrs. Saintsbury used to think she had got me down pretty fine,” he suggested.
“Yes!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an indifference which they both knew she did not feel.
“Yes. She used to accuse me of preferring to tack, even in a fair wind.”
He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Pasmer; and she said, “How ridiculous!”
“Yes, it was. Well, I suppose I am rather circuitous about some things.”
“Oh, not at all!”
“And I suppose I'm rather a trial to Alice in that way.”
He looked at Mrs. Pasmer again, and she said: “I don't believe you are, in the least. You can't tell what is trying to a girl.”
“No,” said Dan pensively, “I can't.” Mrs. Pasmer tried to render the interest in her face less vivid. “I can't tell where she's going to bring up. Talk about tacking!”
“Do you mean the abstract girl; or Alice?”
“Oh, the abstract girl,” said Dan, and they laughed together. “You think Alice is very straightforward, don't you?”
“Very,” said Mrs. Pasmer, looking down with a smile—“for a girl.”
“Yes, that's what I mean. And don't you think the most circuitous kind of fellow would be pretty direct compared with the straight-forwardest kind of girl?”
There was a rueful defeat and bewilderment in Dan's face that made Mrs. Pasmer laugh. “What has she been doing now?” she asked.
“Mrs. Pasmer,” said Dan, “you and I are the only frank and open people I know. Well, she began to talk last night about influence—the influence of other people on us; and she killed off nearly all the people I like before I knew what she was up to, and she finished with Mrs. Brinkley. I'm glad she didn't happen to think of you, Mrs. Pasmer, or I shouldn't be associating with you at the present moment.” This idea seemed to give Mrs. Pasmer inexpressible pleasure. Dan went on: “Do you quite see the connection between our being entirely devoted to each other and my dropping Mrs. Brinkley?”
“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Alice doesn't like satirical people.”
“Well, of course not. But Mrs. Brinkley is such an admirer of hers.”
“I dare say she tells you so.”
“Oh, but she is!”
“I don't deny it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “But if Alice feels something inimical—antipatico—in her atmosphere, it's no use talking.”
“Oh no, it's no use talking, and I don't know that I want to talk.” After a pause, Mavering asked, “Mrs. Pasmer, don't you think that where two people are going to be entirely devoted to each other, and self-sacrificing to each other, they ought to divide, and one do all the devotion, and the other all the self-sacrifice?”
Mrs. Pasmer was amused by the droll look in Dan's eyes. “I think they ought to be willing to share evenly,” she said.
“Yes; that's what I say—share and share alike. I'm not selfish about those little things.” He blew off a long sighing breath. “Mrs. Pasmer, don't you think we ought to have an ideal of conduct?”
Mrs. Pasmer abandoned herself to laughter. “O Dan! Dan! You will be the death of me.”
“We will die together, then, Mrs. Pasmer. Alice will kill me.” He regarded her with a sad sympathy in his eye as she laughed and laughed with delicious intelligence of the case. The intelligence was perfect, from their point of view; but whether it fathomed the girl's whole intention or aspiration is another matter. Perhaps this was not very clear to herself. At any rate, Mavering did not go any more to see Mrs. Brinkley, whose house he had liked to drop into. Alice went several times, to show, she said, that she had no feeling in the matter; and Mrs. Brinkley, when she met Dan, forbore to embarrass him with questions or reproaches; she only praised Alice to him.
There were not many other influences that Alice cut him off from; she even exposed him to some influences that might have been thought deleterious. She made him go and call alone upon certain young ladies whom she specified, and she praised several others to him, though she did not praise them for the same things that he did. One of them was a girl to whom Alice had taken a great fancy, such as often buds into a romantic passion between women; she was very gentle and mild, and she had none of that strength of will which she admired in Alice. One night there was a sleighing party to a hotel in the suburbs, where they had dancing and then supper. After the supper they danced “Little Sally Waters” for a finale, instead of the Virginia Reel, and Alice would not go on the floor with Dan; she said she disliked that dance; but she told him to dance with Miss Langham. It became a gale of fun, and in the height of it Dan slipped and fell with his partner. They laughed it off, with the rest, but after a while the girl began to cry; she had received a painful bruise. All the way home, while the others laughed and sang and chattered, Dan was troubled about this poor girl; his anxiety became a joke with the whole sleighful of people.
When he parted with Alice at her door, he said, “I'm afraid I hurt Miss Langham; I feel awfully about it.”
“Yes; there's no doubt of that. Good night!”
She left him to go off to his lodging, hot and tingling with indignation at her injustice. But kindlier thoughts came to him before he slept, and he fell asleep with a smile of tenderness for her on his lips. He could see how he was wrong to go out with any one else when Alice said she disliked the dance; he ought not to have taken advantage of her generosity in appointing him a partner; it was trying for her to see him make that ludicrous tumble, of course; and perhaps he had overdone the attentive sympathy on the way home. It flattered him that she could not help showing her jealousy—that is flattering, at first; and Dan was able to go and confess all but this to Alice. She received his submission magnanimously, and said that she was glad it had happened, because his saying this showed that now they understood each other perfectly. Then she fixed her eyes on his, and said, “I've just been round to see Lilly, and she's as well as ever; it was only a nervous shock.”
Whether Mavering was really indifferent to Miss Langham's condition, or whether the education of his perceptions had gone so far that he consciously ignored her, he answered, “That was splendid of you, Alice.”
“No,” she said; “it's you that are splendid; and you always are. Oh, I wonder if I can ever be worthy of you!”
Their mutual forgiveness was very sweet to them, and they went on praising each other. Alice suddenly broke away from this weakening exchange of worship, and said, with that air of coming to business which he lad learned to recognise and dread a little, “Dan, don't you think I ought to write to your mother?”
“Write to my mother?”
“Why, you have written to her. You wrote as soon as you got back, and she answered you.”
“Yes; but write regularly?—Show that I think of her all the time? When I really think I'm going to take you from her, I seem so cruel and heartless!”
“Oh, I don't look at it in that light, Alice.”
“Don't joke! And when I think that we're going away to leave her, for several years, perhaps, as soon as we're married, I can't make it seem right. I know how she depends upon your being near her, and seeing her every now and then; and to go off to Europe for years, perhaps—Of course you can be of use to your father there; but do you think it's right toward your mother? I want you to think.”
Dan thought, but his thinking was mainly to the effect that he did not know what she was driving at. Had she got any inkling of that plan of his mother's for them to come and stay a year or two at the Falls after their marriage? He always expected to be able to reconcile that plan with the Pasmer plan of going at once; to his optimism the two were not really incompatible; but he did not wish them prematurely confronted in Alice's mind. Was this her way of letting him know that she knew what his mother wished, and that she was willing to make the sacrifice? Or was it just some vague longing to please him by a show of affection toward his family, an unmeditated impulse of reparation? He had an impulse himself to be frank with Alice, to take her at her word, and to allow that he did not like the notion of going abroad. This was Dan's notion of being frank; he could still reserve the fact that he had given his mother a tacit promise to bring Alice home to live, but he postponed even this. He said: “Oh, I guess that'll be all right, Alice. At any rate, there's no need to think about it yet awhile. That can be arranged.”
“Yes,” said Alice; “but don't you think I'd better get into the habit of writing regularly to your mother now, so that there needn't be any break when we go abroad?” He could see now that she had no idea of giving that plan up, and he was glad that he had not said anything. “I think,” she continued, “that I shall write to her once a week, and give her a full account of our life from day to day; it'll be more like a diary; and then, when we get over there, I can keep it up without any effort, and she won't feel so much that you've gone.”
She seemed to refer the plan to him, and he said it was capital. In fact, he did like the notion of a diary; that sort of historical view would involve less danger of precipitating a discussion of the two schemes of life for the future. “It's awfully kind of you, Alice, to propose such a thing, and you mustn't make it a burden. Any sort of little sketchy record will do; mother can read between the lines, you know.”
“It won't be a burden,” said the girl tenderly. “I shall seem to be doing it for your mother, but I know I shall be doing it for you. I do everything for you. Do you think it's right?”
“Oh; it must be,” said Dan, laughing. “It's so pleasant.”
“Oh,” said the girl gloomily; “that's what makes me doubt it.”
Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice's first letter. She said that her mother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the good account she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of their daily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully she appreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she was going to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice must not be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sent messages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for her father and mother.
Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable in it. “She says your mother will write later,” Alice suggested.
“Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother's autographs are pretty uncommon,” he said, smiling.
“Why, doesn't she write? Can't she? Does it tire her?” asked Alice.
“Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie to write usually.”
“Dan,” cried Alice intensely, “why didn't you tell me?”
“Why, I thought you knew it,” he explained easily. “She likes to read, and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don't suppose I get more than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She makes the girls write. But you needn't mind her not writing. You may be sure she's glad of your letters.”
“It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there's no chance of her answering,” Alice grieved. “It's as if I had passed over your sisters' heads. I ought to have written to them.”
“Oh, well, you can do that now,” said Dan soothingly.
“No. No, I can't do it now. It would be ridiculous.” She was silent, and presently she asked, “Is there anything else about your mother that I ought to know?” She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline in her eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course of things, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him, that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.
His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that was in it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seem the moment. “I can't say that there is,” he answered coldly.
In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went a great deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almost of defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed with it. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemed to do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made him laugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, and then left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow her in them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with her they seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over very hypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy they resumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisation which the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts and purposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps, have attached to them. They discussed them and analysed them with a satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without an effect of caricature. They measured Alice's romance together, and evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion, which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice's waist. When he had accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think, to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.
She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so, that it was all wrong.
“But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them so,” suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice's misgivings over with her, “aren't they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn't it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such perfect counterparts—”
“Yes,” the girl assented, “that's what we're taught to believe.” She meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.
She kept on writing to Dan's mother, though more and more perfunctorily; and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. She knew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan's connivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.
At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from his mother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidently tasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice's kindness in writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifying glance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tender triumph, and the fond prevision of the greater pleasure of reading it again with Dan.
But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him before reading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershot with flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When she could misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter, and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk, where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, this note to Mavering—
“I wish to see you immediately.
“ALICE PASMER.”
Dan had learned, with a lover's keenness, to read Alice's moods in the most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just passed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat and cold, so fine that no one else would have felt the difference, but sensible to him in their subtlest intention.
Perhaps a mere witness of the fact would have been alarmed by a note which began without an address, except that on the envelope, and ended its peremptory brevity with the writer's name signed in full. Dan read calamity in it, and he had all the more trouble to pull himself together to meet it because he had parted with unusual tenderness from Alice the night before, after an evening in which it seemed to him that their ideals had been completely reconciled.
The note came, as her notes were apt to come, while Dan was at breakfast, which he was rather luxurious about for so young a man, and he felt formlessly glad afterward that he had drunk his first cup of coffee before he opened it, for it chilled the second cup, and seemed to take all character out of the omelet.
He obeyed it, wondering what the doom menaced in it might be, but knowing that it was doom, and leaving his breakfast half-finished, with a dull sense of the tragedy of doing so.
He would have liked to ask for Mrs. Pasmer first, and interpose a moment of her cheerful unreality between himself and his interview with Alice, but he decided that he had better not do this, and they met at once, with the width of the room between them. Her look was one that made it impassable to the simple impulse he usually had to take her in his arms and kiss her. But as she stood holding out a letter to him, with the apparent intention that he should come and take it, he traversed the intervening space and took it.
“Why, it's from mother!” he said joyously, with a glance at the handwriting.
“Will you please explain it?” said Alice, and Dan began to read it.
It began with a good many excuses for not having written before, and went on with a pretty expression of interest in Alice's letters and gratitude for them; Mrs. Mavering assured the girl that she could not imagine what a pleasure they had been to her. She promised herself that they should be great friends, and she said that she looked forward eagerly to the time, now drawing near, when Dan should bring her home to them. She said she knew Alice would find it dull at the Falls except for him, but they would all do their best, and she would find the place very different from what she had seen it in the winter. Alice could make believe that she was there just for the summer, and Mrs. Mavering hoped that before the summer was gone she would be so sorry for a sick old woman that she would not even wish to go with it. This part of the letter, which gave Dan away so hopelessly, as he felt, was phrased so touchingly, that he looked up from it with moist eyes to the hard cold judgment in the eyes of Alice.
“Will you please explain it?” she repeated.
He tried to temporise. “Explain what?”
Alice was prompt to say, “Had you promised your mother to take me home to live?”
Dan did not answer.
“You promised my mother to go abroad. What else have you promised?” He continued silent, and she added, “You are a faithless man.” They were the words of Romola, in the romance, to Tito; she had often admired them; and they seemed to her equally the measure of Dan's offence.
“Alice—”
“Here are your letters and remembrances, Mr. Mavering.” Dan mechanically received the packet she had been holding behind her; with a perverse freak of intelligence he observed that, though much larger now, it was tied up with the same ribbon which had fastened it when Alice returned his letters and gifts before. “Good-bye. I wish you every happiness consistent with your nature.”
She bowed coldly, and was about to leave him, as she had planned; but she had not arranged that he should be standing in front of the door, and he was there, with no apparent intention of moving.
“Will you allow me to pass?” she was forced to ask, however, haughtily.
“No!” he retorted, with a violence that surprised him. “I will not let you pass till you have listened to me—till you tell me why you treat me so. I won't stand it—I've had enough of this kind of thing.”
It surprised Alice too a little, and after a moment's hesitation she said, “I will listen to you,” so much more gently than she had spoken before that Dan relaxed his imperative tone, and began to laugh. “But,” she added, and her face clouded again, “it will be of no use. My mind is made up this time. Why should we talk?”
“Why, because mine isn't,” said Dan. “What is the matter, Alice? Do you think I would force you, or even ask you, to go home with me to live unless you were entirely willing? It could only be a temporary arrangement anyway.”
“That isn't the question,” she retorted. “The question is whether you've promised your mother one thing and me another.”
“Well, I don't know about promising,” said Dan, laughing a little more uneasily, but still laughing. “As nearly as I can remember, I wasn't consulted about the matter. Your mother proposed one thing, and my mother proposed another.”
“And you agreed to both. That is quite enough—quite characteristic!”
Dan flushed, and stopped laughing. “I don't know what you mean by characteristic. The thing didn't have to be decided at once, and I didn't suppose it would be difficult for either side to give way, if it was judged best. I was sure my mother wouldn't insist.”
“It seems very easy for your family to make sacrifices that are not likely to be required of them.”
“You mustn't criticise my mother!” cried Dan.
“I have not criticised her. You insinuate that we would be too selfish to give up, if it were for the best.”
“I do nothing of the kind, and unless you are determined to quarrel with me you wouldn't say so.”
“I don't wish a quarrel; none is necessary,” said Alice coldly.
“You accuse me of being treacherous—”
“I didn't say treacherous!”
“Faithless, then. It's a mere quibble about words. I want you to take that back.”
“I can't take it back; it's the truth. Aren't you faithless, if you let us go on thinking that you're going to Europe, and let your mother think that we're coming home to live after we're married?”
“No! I'm simply leaving the question open!”
“Yes,” said the girl—sadly, “you like to leave questions open. That's your way.”
“Well, I suppose I do till it's necessary to decide them. It saves the needless effusion of talk,” said Dan, with a laugh; and then, as people do in a quarrel, he went back to his angry mood, and said “Besides, I supposed you would be glad of the chance to make some sacrifice for me. You're always asking for it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mavering,” said Alice, “for reminding me of it; nothing is sacred to you, it seems. I can't say that you have ever sought any opportunities of self-sacrifice.”
“I wasn't allowed time to do so; they were always presented.”
“Thank you again, Mr. Mavering. All this is quite a revelation. I'm glad to know how you really felt about things that you seemed so eager for.”
“Alice, you know that I would do anything for you!” cried Dan, rueing his precipitate words.
“Yes; that's what you've repeatedly told me. I used to believe it.”
“And I always believed what you said. You said at the picnic that day that you thought I would like to live at Ponkwasset Falls if my business was there—”
“That is not the point!”
“And now you quarrel with me because my mother wishes me to do so.”
Alice merely said: “I don't know why I stand here allowing you to intimidate me in my father's house. I demand that you shall stand aside and let me pass.”
“I'll not oblige you to leave the room,” said Dan. “I will go. But if I go, you will understand that I don't come back.”
“I hope that,” said the girl.
“Very well. Good morning, Miss Pasmer.”
She inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment of his bow, and he whirled out of the room and down the dim narrow passageway into the arms of Mrs. Pasmer, who had resisted as long as she could her curiosity to know what the angry voices of himself and Alice meant.
“O Mr. Mavering, is it you?” she buzzed; and she flung aside one pretence for another in adding, “Couldn't Alice make you stay to breakfast?”
Dan felt a rush of tenderness in his heart at the sound of the kind, humbugging little voice. “No, thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, I couldn't stay, thank you. I—I thank you very much. I—good-bye, Mrs. Pasmer.” He wrung her hand, and found his way out of the apartment door, leaving her to clear up the mystery of his flight and his broken words as she could.
“Alice,” she said, as she entered the room, where the girl had remained, “what have you been doing now?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, with a remnant of her scorn for Dan qualifying her tone and manner to her mother. “I've dismissed Mr. Mavering.”
“Then you want him to come to lunch?” asked her mother. “I should advise him to refuse.”
“I don't think he'd accept,” said Alice. Then, as Mrs. Pasmer stood in the door, preventing her egress, as Dan had done before, she asked meekly “Will you let me pass, mamma? My head aches.”
Mrs. Pasmer, whose easy triumphs in so many difficult circumstances kept her nearly always in good temper, let herself go, at these words, in vexation very uncommon with her. “Indeed I shall not!” she retorted. “And you will please sit down here and tell me what you mean by dismissing Mr. Mavering. I'm tired of your whims and caprices.”
“I can't talk,” began the girl stubbornly.
“Yes, I think you can,” said her mother. “At any rate, I can. Now what is it all?”
“Perhaps this letter, will explain,” said Alice, continuing to dignify her enforced submission with a tone of unabated hauteur; and she gave her mother Mrs. Mavering's letter, which Dan had mechanically restored to her.
Mrs. Pasmer read it, not only without indignation, but apparently without displeasure. But, she understood perfectly what the trouble was, when she looked up and asked, cheerfully, “Well?”
“Well!” repeated Alice, with a frown of astonishment. “Don't you see that he's promised us one thing and her another, and that he's false to both?”
“I don't know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, recovering her good-humour in view of a situation that she felt herself able to cope with. “Of course he has to temporise, to manage a little. She's an invalid, and of course she's very exacting. He has to humour her. How do you know he has promised her? He hasn't promised us.”
“Hasn't promised us?” Alice gasped.
“No. He's simply fallen in with what we've said. It's because he's so sweet and yielding, and can't bear to refuse. I can understand it perfectly.”
“Then if he hasn't promised us, he's deceived us all the more shamefully, for he's made us think he had.”
“He hasn't me,” said Mrs. Pasmer, smiling at the stormy virtue in her daughter's face. “And what if you should go home awhile with him—for the summer, say? It couldn't last longer, much; and it wouldn't hurt us to wait. I suppose he hoped for something of that kind.”
“Oh, it isn't that,” groaned the girl, in a kind of bewilderment. “I could have gone there with him joyfully, and lived all my days, if he'd only been frank with me.”
“Oh no, you couldn't,” said her mother, with cosy security. “When it comes to it, you don't like giving up any more than other people. It's very hard for you to give up; he sees that—he knows it, and he doesn't really like to ask any sort of sacrifice from you. He's afraid of you.”
“Don't I know that?” demanded Alice desolately: “I've known it from the first, and I've felt it all the time. It's all a mistake, and has been. We never could understand each other. We're too different.”
“That needn't prevent you understanding him. It needn't prevent you from seeing how really kind and good he is—how faithful and constant he is.”
“Oh, you say that—you praise him—because you like him.”
“Of course I do. And can't you?”
“No. The least grain of deceit—of temporising, you call it—spoils everything. It's over,” said the girl, rising, with a sigh, from the chair she had dropped into. “We're best apart; we could only have been wretched and wicked together.”
“What did you say to him, Alice?” asked her mother, unshaken by her rhetoric.
“I told him he was a faithless person.”
“Then you were a cruel girl,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden indignation; “and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had escaped you. I don't know where you got all those silly, romantic notions of yours about these things. You certainly didn't get them from me,” she continued, with undeniable truth, “and I don't believe you get them from your Church, It's just as Miss Anderson said: your Church makes allowance for human nature, but you make none.”
“I shouldn't go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters,” said the girl, with cold resentment.
“I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense—or somebody,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you know what talk this will make?”
“I don't care for the talk. It would be worse than talk to marry a man whom I couldn't trust—who wanted to please me so much that he had to deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth.”
“You headstrong girl!” said her mother impartially, admiring at the same time the girl's haughty beauty.
There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer's mind which perhaps none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from every worldly point of view. She could only ask, “If you break this engagement, what do you expect to do?”
“The engagement is broken. I shall go into a sisterhood.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I will have no such nonsense. Don't flatter yourself that I will. Even if I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it. You're always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I've never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as temporising and circuitous”—the word came to her from her talk with him—“would be twice too good for you. I'm going to breakfast.”