“How shall we be married?” Howard asked her in the late Autumn.
“I know it will not be in a church with ushers and bridesmaids and a crowd gaping at us. I suppose there is a public side to marriage since the state makes one enter into a formal contract. But that can be done privately. I should as soon think of driving down the Avenue with my arms about your neck as of a public wedding.”
“Thank you,” he laughed. “I was afraid—well, women are usually so fond of—but you’re not usual. Let us see. The minister is absolutely necessary, I suppose. Would one feel married if there were not a minister?”
“I don’t know—I feel—”
She hesitated and blushed but looked straight at him with that expression in her eyes which always made him think of their love as their religion.
“Feel—go on. I want to hear that very, very much.”
“I feel as if I were just as much married to you now as I ever could be.”
“And that is how I have felt ever since the day, when I hardly knew you, when you suddenly came into my life—my real, inner life where no one had been before—and sat down and at once made it look as if it were your home. And the place that had been lonely was lonely no more, and has not been since.”
She put her hand in his and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Only that—that I am so happy. It—it frightens me. It seems so like a dream.”
“It’s going to be a long, long dream, isn’t it?” He lifted her hand and kissed it, then put it down in her lap again gently as if he feared a sudden movement might awaken them. “Perhaps it had better be at Mrs. Carnarvon’s house—some morning just before luncheon and we could go quietly away afterward.”
“Yes—and—tell me,” she said, “wouldn’t it be better for us not to go far away—and not to stay long? It seems to me that I most want to begin—begin our life together just as it will be.”
“Are you afraid you wouldn’t know what to do with me if I were idling about all day long?”
“Not exactly that. But I’d rather not take a vacation until we had earned it together.”
“What a beautiful idea! I’ll see what I can do.”
They postponed the wedding until Howard had the “art-department” of theNews-Recordwell established. It was on a bright winter day in the second week of January that they stood up together and were married by the Mayor whom Howard had helped to elect. Only Mr. and Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian’s brother were there. Then the six sat down to luncheon, and at three o’clock Howard and his wife started for Lakewood.
When they arrived a victoria was waiting. As soon as they were seated, Howard said “Home.” The coachman touched his hat and the horses set out at a swift trot. The sun was setting and the dry, still air was saturated with the perfume of the snow-draped pines. Within five minutes the carriage was at a pretty little cottage with wide, glass-enclosed porches. They entered the hall. In the rooms on either side open fires were blazing an ecstatic welcome.
“How do you like ‘home’?” asked Howard.
“I don’t quite understand.”
“You remember your plan of beginning at once. Well—this is the compromise. Stokely has let me have his house here for a month—we may keep it two if we like it. There is a telephone. The office isn’t two hours away by rail. The newspapers are here early. We can combine work and play.”
The manservant had left the room, a sort of library-reception room. Marian was seated in a big chair drawn near the fire. She had thrown back her wraps and was slowly drawing off her gloves. Howard stood at the side of the fire, leaning against the mantel and looking down at her.
“Before you definitely decide to stay—” he paused.
“Yes,” she said, her colour heightening as she slowly lifted her eyes to his, “yes—why this solemn tone?”
“If ever—in the days that come—one never knows what may happen—if ever you should find that you had changed toward me——”
“Yes?”
“I ask you—don’t promise—I never want you to promise me anything—I want you always—at every moment—to be perfectly free. So I just ask that you will let me see it. Then we can talk about it frankly, and we can decide what is best to do.”
“But—suppose—you see I might still not wish to wound you—” she suggested, half teasing, half in earnest.
“It seems to me now that it is impossible that we can ever change. It seems to me—” he sat on the wide arm of her chair, and leaned over until his head touched hers, “that if you were to change it would break my heart. But if you were to change and were to hide it from me, I should find it out some day and——”
“And what——”
“It would be worse—a broken heart, a horror of myself, a—a contempt for you.”
“Whatever comes, I’ll be myself or try to be. Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly.”
“And if you change?”
“But I shall not!”
“Why do you say that so positively?”
“Because—well, there are some things that we wish to believe and half believe, and some things that we believe that we believe, and somethings that weknow. Iknowabout you—about my love for you.”
“It is strange in a way, isn’t it?” Marian was gently drawing her fingers through his. “This is all so different from what I used to think love would be. I used to picture to myself a man, something like you in appearance, only taller and fair, who would be my master, who would make me do what he wished. I think a woman always dreams of a lover who will be strong enough to be her ruler. And here——”
“So I am not the strong man that you look up to and tremble before? We shall see.”
“Don’t laugh at me. I mean that instead I have a man who makes me rule myself. You make me feel strong, not weak, and proud, not humble. You make me respect myself so.”
“The democracy of love—freedom, equality, fraternity. Don’t you like it?”
“Madame is served.” It was the servant holding back one of the portières, his face expressionless, his eyes down.
Happiness evades description or analysis. We can only say that it reaches its highest point when a man and a woman, intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, endowed with youth, health and freedom, are devoting their energies solely and determinedly to verifying each a preconceived idea of the other.
“And what do you think of it by this time?”
Marian asked the question in the pause after a twenty minutes’ canter over a straightaway stretch through the pines.
“Of what?” Howard inquired. “I mean of what phase of it. Of you?”
“Well,—yes, of me—after a week.”
“As I expected, only more so—more than I could have imagined. And you, what do you think?”
“It’s very different from what I expected. It seemed to me beforehand that you, even you, would ‘get on my nerves’ just a little at times. I didn’t expect you to appreciate—to feel my moods and to avoid doing—or is it that you simply cannot do—anything jarring. You have amazing instincts or else—” Marian looked at him and smiled mischievously, “or else you have been well educated. Oh, I don’t mind—not in the least. No matter what the cause, I’m glad—glad—glad that you have been taught how to treat a woman.”
“I see you are determined to destroy me,” Howard was in jest, yet in earnest. “I am not used to being flattered. I have never had but one critic, and I have trained him to be severe and uncharitable. Now if you set me up on a high altar and wave the censers and cry ‘glory, glory, glory,’ I’ll lose my head. You have a terrible responsibility. I trust you and I believe everything you say.”
“I’ll begin my duties as critic as soon as we go back to—to earth. But at present I’m going to be selfish. You see it makes me happier to blind myself to your faults.”
They rode in silence for a few moments and then she said:
“I wish I had your feeling about—about democracy. I see your point of view but I can’t take it. I know that you are right but I’m afraid my education is too strong for me. I don’t believe in the people as you do. It’s beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not wish you to feel as I do. I’d hate it if you did. It would be stooping, grovelling for you to make distinctions among people. But——”
“Oh, but I do make distinctions among people—so much so that I have never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with me. Oh, yes, I’m one of the most exclusive persons in the world.”
“That sounds like autocracy, doesn’t it?” laughed Marian. “But you know I don’t mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are, only in different ways, whereas I feel that they’re not. You don’t mind vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to people so long as they don’t try to jump the fence about your own little private enclosure.”
“Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social distinctions. The fact is, isn’t it, that social distinctions are mere trifles—”
“You oughtn’t to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can’t change an instinct. To me some people are better than others and are entitled to more, and ought to be looked up to and respected.”
Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career.
“She is too intelligent, too high-minded,” he often reassured himself, “to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people, with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as they are.”
So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: “Poor fallen queen—to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner.”
“Plebeian—you?” Marian looked at him proudly. “Why, one has only to see you to know.”
“Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain, ordinary, common, untitled Americans.”
“Why, so were mine,” she laughed.
“Don’t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known that.”
“Iamabsurd, am I not?” Marian said gaily. “But let me have my craze for well-mannered people and I’ll leave you your craze for the—the masses.”
They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation; for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this matter—his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a sociological unit.
He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening, Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct suggested nothing to her, bored her.
“Just read that,” he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it and wonder what he meant.
“It seems to me,” she would think, “that it wouldn’t in the least matter if that had not been printed.” Then she would ask evasively but with an assumption of interest, “What are you going to do about it?”
And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her unconquerable indifference to news.
She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as a writer. “I’ll start right when we get to town,” she was constantly promising herself. “It must, must, must beourwork.”
Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly content to have her as the companion of his leisure.
Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.
When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything to settle.
Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue—just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the stamp of Marian’s individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last week of February.
“You—everywhere you,” he said, as they inspected room after room. “I don’t see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful—the things you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets, pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but—”
He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed her. “It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you beauty but you make it wonderful becauseyoushine through it, give it the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses, eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such effects with the materials. I don’t express it very well but—you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.” She was leaning against him, her head resting upon his shoulder. “And you like your home?”
“We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the three great gods—Freedom, Love and Happiness. And—we’ll keep the fires on the altars blazing, won’t we?”
His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As he most often breakfasted about ten o’clock, she arranged to breakfast regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those “everlasting newspapers,” praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests, domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.
If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so super-sensitive to his passion for complete freedom, she would have resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to “our” career. Thus there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in her regret that they were together so little.
“Good morning, stranger!” she said, as he came into the dining room one day in early June.
He kissed her hand and then the “topknot” as he called the point into which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. “It has been four days since I saw you,” he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first days of their acquaintance.
“I have missed you—you know,” she was trying to look cheerful, “but I understand—”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “You understand what I intend, understand that I mean my life to be forus. But sometimes—this morning—I think I am mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this—” he threw his hand contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, “this trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life, my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these.” And he pushed the bundle of papers off the table.
“Something has depressed you.” She was leaning her elbow upon the table and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. “I wouldn’t have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should I,” she laughed, “or I try to think I shouldn’t.”
“Let us go abroad for two months,” he said. “I am tired, so tired. I am so weary of all these others, men and things.”
“Can you spare the time?”
“I”—he corrected himself—“we have earned a vacation. It will be for me the first real vacation since I left Yale—thirteen years ago. I am growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?”
“The sooner the better—if this is not a passing mood. What has depressed you?” she persisted.
“What seems to be a piece of very good luck.” He laughed almost sneeringly. “They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in stock—which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as the paper pays what it does now—twenty-five per cent. And they offer me twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a fair way to be rich.”
“They don’t want to lose you, evidently,” she said. “But why does this make you sad? We are independent now—absolutely independent, both of us.”
“Yes—we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open? Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our environment, speak for me?”
“I can’t imagine you a slave to mere dollars.”
“Can’t you? Well, I am afraid—I’m really afraid. I have always said that if I wished to—enslave a people I would make them prosperous, would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them endure any oppression. Freedom’s battles were never fought by men with full stomachs and full purses.”
“But rich men have given up everything for freedom—Washington was a rich man.”
“Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and—I dread it.”
She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck and her check against his.
“You are brave. You are strong,” she whispered. “You will meet that crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how the battle will go.”
He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. “We will go abroad next Wednesday week,” he whispered, “and we’ll be happy in France—in Switzerland—in Holland—I want to see the park at the Hague again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about.”
With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were always laughing and talking—an endless flow of high spirits, absorption each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.
“I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation,” he said.
“What is that—perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn’t have believed you could be so idle.”
“Perfect idleness—yes. But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind that bloweth where it listeth.”
And again, she said: “Let me see, what day is this?”
“I think it is Thursday or Friday,” he replied. “But it may be Sunday. I can assure you that it is afternoon, late afternoon, and I think we ought to dress for dinner soon. After dinner, if you still care to know, and will remind me, I’ll try to find out the day. But I’m sure we shall have forgotten before to-morrow.”
Howard got an extension of his leave of absence and they roamed about England in August, reaching New York on the first day of September. Marian went on to Mrs. Carnarvon at Newport and Howard took rooms at the Waldorf. She stayed away a full week, then came to town, opened their apartment, and surprised him with a formal invitation to dinner.
He came like a guest and they went through all the formalities of meeting for the first time, of increasing intimacy—condensing a complete courtship into one evening.
“I thought you had had enough of me for the time,” he said, as they sat in the wide window-seat, he tracing with his forefinger the line of the straps over her bare shoulders.
“And I thought that I would give you a chance to forget how nice I am and so give you the pleasure of learning all over again. But it was so lonely and miserable up there. ‘Who can come after the king?’”
“Sometimes I think I ought to stir about more—meet the men who lead in the city. But it seems such a waste of time when I can come and call upon you.”
“But might it not be better in the long run if you did meet these men? Mightn’t it make your getting on quicker and easier?”
“Perhaps—if I were a gregarious animal, but I’m not. I’m shy and solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too, friends take up too much time. We have so little time and—we can spend it to so much better advantage—can’t we?”
Marian pushed herself closer against him and presently said dreamily: “So much happiness, such utter happiness which no one, nothing can take away. I wonder when and how the first storm will come?”
“It needn’t come at all—not for a long, long time. And when it does—we can weather it, don’t you think?”
During the next two months they were together more than they had been in the spring. He imposed day office hours upon himself and did no work in the evenings except the correcting of editorial proofs which he had sent to him at the house, at the theatre, or at whatever restaurant they were dining. And at midnight he called up the office on the telephone and talked with Mr. King or Mr. Vroom about the news in hand and the programme for presenting it in the next morning’s paper.
But as “people”—meaning Marian’s friends—returned to town, they fell into the former routine. It was in part his doing, in part hers. He was now thirty-seven years old and his mind, always of a serious cast, was intolerant of trifles and triflers.
Marian’s range of interests was shallower but much wider than his. Her beauty, her cleverness, her tact caused her to be sought. She invited many to their house and accepted more and more invitations. At first she never went without him. But he was sometimes compelled by his work to send her alone. He rarely went except for her sake—because he thought going about amused her. And he was glad and relieved when she began to go without him, instead of spending the evenings in solitude.
“There is no reason why you should punish yourself and punish me because you had the ill luck to marry a working-man,” he said. “It cannot be agreeable to sit here all by yourself evening after evening. And it depresses me when I am at the office at night to think of you as lonely. It makes me happier in my work—my pleasure, you know—to think of you enjoying yourself.”
“But aren’t you afraid that some one will steal me?” she asked, laughingly.
“Not I.” He was smiling proudly at her. “If you could be stolen, if you could be happier anywhere than with me, you have only to let me into the plot.”
“There are some women who would not like that.”
“And there are men who wouldn’t feel as I do. But you and I, we belong to a class all by ourselves, don’t we?”
Apparently they were as devoted each to the other as ever. But each now sought a separate happiness—he perforce in his work, she perforce in the only way left open to her. When they were together, which meant several hours every day and usually one whole day in the week, they were at once seemingly absorbed each in the other with all the rest as background. But none the less, they were leading separate lives, with separate interests, separate tastes, separate modes of thinking. The “bourgeois” life which they had planned—both standing behind the counter and both adding up the results of the day’s business after they had put up the shutters, two as one in all the interests of life—became a dead and forgotten dream.
On the way to or from the opera or a party, she would peep in on him, watching the back of his head as he bent over his desk or read away at some dull-looking book, wishing that he would feel her presence and turn with that smile which was always hers from him, yet fearing to make a sound and compel his attention.
“At times I think,” she said one day when he caught her in his arms on a sudden impulse and kissed her, “that the reason you don’t try to rule me is because you don’t care enough.”
“That’s precisely it.” He was smoothing her eyebrows with his forefinger. “I don’t care enough about ruling. I don’t care enough for the sort of love that responds to ‘must.’”
“But a woman likes to have ‘must’ said to her sometimes.”
“Does she? Do you? Well—I’ll say ‘must’ to you. You must love me freely and voluntarily, or not at all. You must do as you please.”
“But don’t you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you like—”
“But I couldn’t. Then you would no longer beyou. And I like you so well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head.”
Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was in danger. “Not of falling in love with some other man,” she thought, “for that’s impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I’d accept and that would lead on and on—where?”
She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away to Washington to assist the party leaders in putting through a difficult tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He expected to be gone a week; but week after week passed and he was still at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation, interest.
After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs. Provost’s next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her own age. Something in his expression—perhaps the amused way in which he studied the faces of the others—attracted her to him. She glanced over at his card. It read “Mr. Shenstone.”
“It doesn’t add much to your information, does it?” he smiled, as he caught her glance rising from the card.
“Nothing,” she confessed candidly. “I never heard of you before.”
“And yet I’ve been splashing about, trying to attract attention to myself, for twelve years.”
“Perhaps not in this particular pond.”
“No, that is true.”
“I was wondering what you do—lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man or what.
“And what did you conclude?”
“I concluded that you did nothing.”
“You are right. But I try—I paint.”
“Portraits?”
“Yes.”
“That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you’ll get no customers if you paint them as you see them.”
“I only see what they see when they look in the mirror.”
“Yes, but you see it impartial—or rather, I should say, cynically.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with the women.”
“Are you a ‘devil with the women’?”
“Not I—not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you—I am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so discontented?”
“Because I have nothing to occupy my mind.”
“No children?”
“None—and no dogs.”
“No husband?”
“Husbands are busy.”
“So you are the typical American woman—the American instinct for doing, the universal woman’s instinct for sunshine and laziness; the husband absorbed in his business or profession with his domestic life as an incident; the wife—like you.”
“That is right, and wrong—nearer right than wrong, a little unjust to the husband.”
“Oh, it’s probably your fault that you are not absorbed in his business or profession. It ought to be as much yours as his. What does he do?”
“He edits a newspaper.”
“Oh, he’stheMr. Howard. A very interesting, a very remarkable man.”
Marian was delighted by this appreciation. She talked with Shenstone again after dinner and was pleased that he was to be in the same box with her at the opera the next night. He had spent much of his time on the other side of the Atlantic. He was unusually well educated for an artist’s, and his mind was not developed in one direction only. Like Marian, his point of view was artistic and emotional. Like her he had a reverence for tradition, a deference to caste—the latter not offensive for the same reason that hers was not, because good birth and good breeding made him of the “high caste” and not a cringer with his eyes craned upward. It seemed in him, as in her, a sort of self-respect.
Marian showed a candid liking for his society and he was quick to take advantage of it. For a month they saw more and more each of the other, she discreet without deliberation and he discreet with deliberation. He talked to her of his work, of his ambition. He showed her himself without egotism. He made an impression upon her so distinct and so favourable that she admitted to herself that he was the most fascinating man—except one—whom she had ever met.
When Howard at last returned, defeated by corruption within his own party and for the time disgusted with politics, she at once had Shenstone at the house to dine. “What do you think of Mr. Shenstone?” she asked when they were alone.
“No wonder you’re enthusiastic about him. As he talked to me, I could hardly keep from laughing. It was your own views, almost your own words. He has the look of a great man. I think he will ‘arrive,’ as they say in the Bowery.”
Howard went out of his way to be agreeable to Shenstone, often inviting him to the house and giving him a commission to paint Marian. For the rest of the winter Shenstone was constantly in Marian’s company; so constantly that they were gossiped about, and all the women who were unpleasantly discussed “for cause” conspired to throw them together as much as possible.
One evening in the very end of the winter, Howard called to Marian from his dressing room: “Why, lady, Shenstone’s gone, hasn’t he? I’ve just read a note from him.”
There was a pause before Marian answered in a constrained voice: “Yes, he sailed to-day.”
Howard was tying his bow. He paused at the curious tone, then smiled mysteriously to himself. He put on his waistcoat and coat and knocked on the half-open door. “May I come in?” he asked.
“Yes—I’m waiting for dinner to be announced.”
She was sitting before the fire, very beautiful in her evening gown. She seemed not to observe that he had entered but stared on into the flames. He stood beside her, looking down at her with the half mocking, half tender smile. Presently he sat upon the arm of her chair and took one of her hands. “Poor, friendless, beautiful lady,” he said softly.
She glanced up quickly, her cheeks flaming but her eyes clear and frank. “Why do you say that?” she asked in the tone of one who knows why.
“Other women will not be her friends because they are jealous of her, and as for the men—how can a man be really a friend to a woman, a fascinating, sympathetic woman?”
Marian hid her face against the lapel of his coat. “He told me,” she whispered, “and then he went away.”
“He always does tell her. But——”
“But—what?”
“She doesn’t always send him away. Poor fellow! Still, he went into it with his eyes open.”
“He was very nice. He told it in a roundabout way. And I wasn’t a bit afraid that he’d—he’d—you know. But I got to thinking about how I’d feel if he did—did touch me. And it made me—nervous.”
There was a long pause, then she went on: “I wonder how you’d feel about touching another woman?”
“I? Dear me, I wonder! I never thought. You see I’m such a domestic, unattractive creature——”
“Don’t laugh at me, please,” she pleaded.
“I’m not laughing. Underneath, I’m thinking—thinking what I would do if I met you and lost you. It’s very black on the Atlantic for one pair of eyes to-night.”
“And the worst of it is,” she said, “that my vanity is flattered and I’m not really sorry for him.”
“Rather proud of her conquest, is she?”
“Yes, it pleased me to have him care.”
“She likes to think that he’ll carry his broken heart to the grave, does she?”
“Yes. Isn’t it shameful?”
“Shameful? Shameless. I have always held that even the best woman dearly loves to ruin a man. It’s such a triumph. And the more she loves him, the more she’d like to ruin him—that is, if ruin came solely through love for her and didn’t involve her.”
“But I would not want to ruin you.”
“If that seemed to be the supreme test of my love for you—are you sure? I’m not. There’s Thomas, knocking to announce dinner.”
The Shenstone incident was apparently closed. Marian, a most attractive woman of thirty, absorbed in a social life that demanded all her physical and mental energy as well as all of her time, did not long vividly remember him. But he had given her a standard by which she unconsciously measured her husband. She contrasted the life he had promised her, the life Shenstone reminded her of, with the life that was—so material, so suspiciously physical when it professed to be loving, so suspiciously chill when it professed to be friendly. She thrust aside these thoughts as disloyal and false. But they persisted in returning.
If she had been less appreciative of Howard’s intellect, less fascinated by the charm of his personality, she would soon have become one of the “misunderstood” women in search of “consolation.” Instead, she turned her mind in the direction natural to her character—social ambition.