Chapter 9

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_ CHAPTER IX

In no way was Norman's luck superior to most men's more splendidly than in that his inborn tendency to arrogant and extravagant desires was matched by an inborn capacity to get the necessary money. His luxurious tastes were certainly not moderated by his associations--enormously rich people who, while they could be stingy enough in some respects, at the same time could and did fling away fortunes in gratifying selfish whims--for silly showy houses, for retinues of wasteful servants, for gewgaws that accentuated the homeliness of their homely women and coarsened and vulgarized their pretty women--or perhaps for a night's gambling or entertaining, or for the forced smiles and contemptuous caresses of some belle of the other world. Norman fortunately cared not at all for the hugely expensive pomp of the life of the rich; if he had, he would have hopelessly involved himself, as after all he was not a money-grubber but a lawyer. But when there appeared anything for which he did care, he was ready to bid for it like the richest of the rich.

Therefore the investment of a few thousand dollars seemed a small matter to him. He had many a time tossed away far more for far less. He did not dole out the sum he had agreed to provide. He paid it into the Jersey City bank to the credit of the Chemical Research Company and informed its secretary and treasurer that she could draw freely against it. "If you will read the by-laws of the company," said he, "you will see that you've the right to spend exactly as you see fit. When the money runs low, let me know."

"I'll be very careful," said Dorothea Hallowell, secretary and treasurer.

"That's precisely what we don't want," replied he. He glanced round the tiny parlor of the cottage. "We want everything to be run in first-class shape. That's the only way to get results. First of all, you must take a proper house--a good-sized one, with large grounds--room for building your father a proper laboratory."

Her dazed and dazzled expression delighted him.

"And you must live better. You must keep at least two servants."

"But we can't afford it."

"Your father has five thousand a year. You have fifteen hundred. That makes sixty-five hundred. The rent of the house and the wages and keep of the servants are a charge against the corporation. So, you can well afford to make yourselves comfortable."

"I haven't got used to the idea as yet," said Dorothea. "Yes--we _are_ better off than we were."

"And you must live better. I want you to get some clothes--and things of that sort."

She shrank within herself and sat quiet, her gaze fixed upon her hands lying limp in her lap.

"There is no reason why your father shouldn't be made absolutely comfortable and happy. That's the way to get the best results from a man of his sort."

She faded on toward the self-effacing blank he had first known.

"Think it out, Dorothy," he said in his frankest, kindliest way. "You'll see I'm right."

"No," she said.

"No? What does that mean?"

"I've an instinct against it," replied she. "I'd rather father and I kept on as we are."

"But that's impossible. You've no right to live in this small, cramping way. You must broaden out and give _him_ room to grow. . . . Isn't that sensible?"

"It sounds so," she admitted. "But--" She gazed round helplessly--"I'm afraid!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I don't know."

"Then don't bother about it."

"I'll have to be very--careful," she said thoughtfully.

"As you please," replied he. "Only, don't live and think on a ten-dollar-a-week basis. That isn't the way to get on."

He never again brought up the matter in direct form. But most of his conversation was indirect and more or less subtle suggestions as to ways of branching out. She moved cautiously for a few days, then timidly began to spend money.

There is a notion widely spread abroad that people who have little money know more about the art of spending money and the science of economizing than those who have much. It would be about as sensible to say that the best swimmers are those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food--or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal--because they are ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family had had money. But never since she could remember had they been anything but poor.

She did not know how to spend money. She did not know prices or values--being in that respect precisely like the mass of mankind--and womankind--who imagine they are economical because they hunt so-called bargains and haggle with merchants who have got doubly ready for them by laying in inferior goods and by putting up prices in advance. She knew how much ten dollars a week was, the meaning of the twenty to thirty dollars a week her father had made. But she had only a faint--and exaggeratedly mistaken--notion about sixty-five hundred a year--six and a half thousands. It seemed wealth to her, so vast that a hundred thousand a year would have seemed no more. As soon as she drifted away from the known course--the thirty to forty dollars a week upon which they had been living--Dorothea Hallowell was in a trackless sea, with a broken compass and no chart whatever. A common enough experience in America, the land of sudden changes of fortune, of rosiest hopes about "striking it rich," of carelessness and ignorance as to values, of eager and untrained appetite for luxury and novelty of any and every kind.

At first any expenditure, however small, for the plainest comfort which had been beyond their means seemed a giddy extravagance. But a bank account--_and_ a check book--soon dissipated that nervousness. A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow--not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of tempting any and every kind of human nature, but still far from rapid. A piece of money reminds them vividly and painfully of the toil put into acquiring it; and they shy away from the pitfall of the facile check. With those born and bred as Dorothy was and elevated into what seems to them affluence by no effort of their own, the spreading is a tropical, overnight affair.

Counting all she spent and arranged to spend in those first few weeks, you had no great total. But it was great for a girl who had been making ten dollars a week. Also there were sown in her mind broadcast and thick the seeds of desire for more luxurious comfort, of need for it, that could never be uprooted.

Norman came over almost every evening. He got a new and youthful and youth-restoring kind of pleasure out of this process of expansion. He liked to hear each trifling detail, and he was always making suggestions that bore immediate fruit in further expenditure. When he again brought up the subject of a larger house, she listened with only the faintest protests. Her ideas of such a short time before seemed small, laughably small now. "Father was worrying only this morning because he is so cramped," she admitted.

"We must remedy that at once," said Norman.

[Illustration: "'It has killed me,' he groaned."]

And on the following Sunday he and she went house hunting. They found a satisfactory place--peculiarly satisfactory to Norman because it was near the Hudson tunnel, and so only a few minutes from his office. To Dorothy it loomed a mansion, almost a palace. In fact it was a modestly roomy old-fashioned brick house, with a brick stable at the side that, with a little changing, would make an admirable laboratory.

"You haven't the time--or the experience--to fit this place up," said Norman. "I'll attend to it--that is, I'll have it attended to." Seeing her uneasy expression, he added: "I can get much better terms. They'd certainly overcharge you. There's no sense in wasting money--is there?"

"No," she admitted, convinced.

He gave the order to a firm of decorators. It was a moderate order, considering the amount of work that had to be done. But if the girl had seen the estimates Norman indorsed, she would have been terrified. However, he saw to it that she did not see them; and she, ignorant of values, believed him when he told her the general account of the corporation must be charged with two thousand dollars.

Her alarm took him by surprise. The sum seemed small to him--and it was only about one fifth what the alterations and improvements had cost. Cried she, "Why, that's more than our whole income for a year has been!"

"You are forgetting these improvements add to the value of the property. I've bought it."

That quieted her. "You are sure you didn't pay those decorators and furnishers too much?" said she.

"You don't like their work?" inquired he, chagrined.

"Oh, yes--yes, indeed," she assured him. "I like plain, solid-looking things. But--two thousand dollars is a lot of money."

Norman regretted that, as his whole object had been to please her, he had not ordered the more showy cheaper stuff but had insisted upon the simplest, plainest-looking appointments throughout. Even her bedroom furniture, even her dressing table set, was of the kind that suggests cost only to the experienced, carefully and well educated in values and in taste.

"But I'm sure it isn't fair to charge _all_ these things to the company," she protested. "I can't allow it. Not the things for my personal use."

"You _are_ a fierce watchdog of a treasurer," said Norman, laughing at her but noting and respecting the fine instinct of good breeding shown in her absence of greediness, of desire to get all she could. "But I'm letting the firm of decorators take over what you leave behind in the old house. I'll see what they'll allow for it. Maybe that will cover the expense you object to."

This contented her. Nor was she in the least suspicious when he announced that the decorators had made such a liberal allowance that the deficit was but three hundred dollars. "Those chaps," he explained, "have a wide margin of profit. Besides, they're eager to get more and bigger work from me."

A few weeks, and he was enjoying the sight of her ensconced with her father in luxurious comfort--with two servants, with a well-run house, with pleasant gardens, with all that is at the command of an income of six thousand a year in a comparatively inexpensive city. Only occasionally--and then not deeply--was he troubled by the reflection that he was still far from his goal--and had made apparently absurdly little progress toward it through all this maneuvering. The truth was, he preferred to linger when lingering gave him so many new kinds of pleasure. Of those in the large and motley company that sit down to the banquet of the senses, the most are crude, if not coarse, gluttons. They eat fast and furiously, having a raw appetite. Now and then there is one who has some idea of the art of enjoyment--the art of prolonging and varying both the joys of anticipation and the joys of realization.

He turned his attention to tempting her to extravagance in dress. Rut his success there was not all he could have wished. She wore better clothes--much better. She no longer looked the poor working girl, struggling desperately to be neat and clean. She had almost immediately taken on the air of the comfortable classes. Rut everything she got for herself was inexpensive and she made dresses for herself, and trimmed all her hats. With the hats Norman found no fault. There her good taste produced about as satisfactory results as could have been got at the fashionable milliners--more satisfactory than are got by the women who go there, with no taste of their own beyond a hazy idea that they want "something like what Mrs. So-and-So is wearing." But homemade dresses were a different matter.

Norman longed to have her in toilettes that would bring out the full beauty of her marvelous figure. He, after the manner of the more intelligent and worldly-wise New York men, had some knowledge of women's clothes. His sister knew how to dress; Josephine knew how, though her taste was somewhat too sober to suit Norman--at least to suit him in Dorothy. He thought out and suggested dresses to Dorothy, and told her where to get them. Dorothy tried to carry out at home such of his suggestions as pleased her--for, like all women, she believed she knew how to dress herself. Her handiwork was creditable. It would have contented a less exacting and less trained taste than Norman's. It would have contented him had he not been infatuated with her beauty of face and form. As it was, the improvement in her appearance only served to intensify his agitation. He now saw in her not only all that had first conquered him, but also those unsuspected beauties and graces--and possibilities of beauty and grace yet more entrancing, were she but dressed properly.

"You don't begin to appreciate how beautiful you are," said he. It had ever been one of his rules in dealing with women to feed their physical vanity sparingly and cautiously, lest it should blaze up into one of those consuming flames that produce a very frenzy of conceit. But this rule, like all the others, had gone by the board. He could not conceal his infatuation from her, not even when he saw that it was turning her head and making his task harder and harder. "If you would only go over to New York to several dressmakers whose names I'll give you, I know you'd get clothes from them that you could touch up into something uncommon."

"I can't afford it," said she. "What I have is good enough--and costs more than I've the right to pay." And her tone silenced him; it was the tone of finality, and he had discovered that she had a will.

* * * * *

Never before had Frederick Norman let any important thing drift. And when he started in with Dorothy he had no idea of changing that fixed policy. He would have scoffed if anyone had foretold to him that he would permit the days and the weeks to go by with nothing definite accomplished toward any definite purpose. Yet that was what occurred. Every time he came he had in mind a fixed resolve to make distinct progress with the girl. Every time he left he had a furious quarrel with himself for his weakness. "She is making a fool of me," he said to himself. "She _must_ be laughing at me." But he returned only to repeat his folly, to add one more to the lengthening, mocking series of lost opportunities.

The truth lay deeper than he saw. He recognized only his own weakness of the infatuated lover's fatuous timidity. He did not realize how potent her charm for him was, how completely content she made him when he was with her, just from the fact that they were together. After a time an unsatisfied passion often thus diffuses itself, ceases to be a narrow torrent, becomes a broad river whose resistless force is hidden beneath an appearance of sparkling calm. Her ingenuousness amused him; her developing taste and imagination interested him; her freshness, her freedom from any sense of his importance in the world fascinated him, and there was a keener pleasure than he dreamed in the novel sensation of breathing the perfume of what he, the one time cynic, would have staked his life on being unsullied purity. Their relations were to him a delightful variation upon the intimacy of master and pupil. Either he was listening to her or was answering her questions--and the time flew. And there never was a moment when he could have introduced the subject that most concerned him when he was not with her. To have introduced it would have been rudely to break the charm of a happy afternoon or evening.

Was she leading him on and on nowhere deliberately? Or was it the sweet and innocent simplicity it seemed? He could not tell. He would have broken the charm and put the matter to the test had he not been afraid of the consequences. What had he to fear? Was she not in his power? Was she not his, whenever he should stretch forth his hand and claim her? Yes--no doubt--not the slightest doubt. But--He was afraid to break the charm; it was such a satisfying charm.

Then--there was her father.

Men who arrive anywhere in any direction always have the habit of ignoring the nonessential more or less strongly developed. One reason--perhaps the chief reason--why Norman had got up to the high places of material success at so early an age was that he had an unerring instinct for the essential and wasted no time or energy upon the nonessential. In his present situation Dorothy's father, the abstracted man of science, was one of the factors that obviously fell into the nonessential class. Norman knew little about him, and cared less. Also, he took care to avoid knowing him. Knowing the father would open up possibilities of discomfort--But, being a wise young man, Norman gave this matter the least possible thought.

Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other. Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the laboratory to dissociate the two ideas. Human beings--except his daughter--did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was somewhat in the nature of an abstraction. Norman, on the other hand, was intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in little else. He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into minds and souls. He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell--and began to admire him--and with a man of Norman's temperament to admire is to like.

He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that, far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and well-balanced mentality--a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be. History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman, practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an imagination. He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of the future and working only for it--but he soon came to think him n divine fool. And through Hallowell's spectacles he was charmed for many an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent, will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it over.

When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had difficulty in restraining his amusement. A new idea, in any line of thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous. Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make the vulgar gape in awe. He therefore had no science, that is, no knowledge--outside his profession--but only what is called learning, though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it. He had only the most meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane education, embryology. He knew nothing of what science had already done to destroy all the still current notions about the mystery of life and birth. He still laughed, as at a clever bit of legerdemain, when Hallowell showed him how far science had progressed toward mastery of the life of the lower forms of existence--how those "worms" could be artificially created, could be aged, made young again, made diseased and decrepit, restored to perfect health, could be swung back and forth or sideways or sinuously along the span of existence--could even be killed and brought back to vigor.

"We've been at this sort of thing only a few years," said Hallowell. "I rather think it will not be many years now before we shall not even need the initial germ of life to enable us to create but can do it by pure chemical means, just as a taper is lighted by holding a match to it."

Norman ceased to think of sleight-of-hand.

"Life," continued the juggler, transformed now into practical man, leader of men, "life has been demonstrated to be simply one of the forms of energy, or one of the consequences of energy. The final discovery is scientifically not far away. Then--" His eyes lighted up.

"Then what?" asked Norman.

"Then immortality--in the body. Eternal youth and health. A body that is renewable much as any of our inanimate machines of the factory is renewable. Why not? So far as we know, no living thing ever dies except by violence. Disease--old age--they are quite as much violence as the knife and the bullet. What science can now do with these 'worms,' as my daughter calls them--that it will be able to do with the higher organisms."

"And the world would soon be jammed to the last acre," objected Norman.

Hallowell shrugged his shoulders. "Not at all. There will be no necessity to create new people, except to take the place of those who may be accidentally obliterated."

"But the world is dying--the earth, itself, I mean."

"True. But science may learn how to arrest that cooling process--or to adapt man to it. Or, it may be that when the world ceases to be inhabitable we shall have learned how to cross the star spaces, as I think I've suggested before. Then--we should simply find a planet in its youth somewhere, and migrate to it, as a man now moves to a new house when the old ceases to please him."

"That is a long flight of the fancy," said Norman.

"Long--but no stronger than the telegraph or the telephone. The trouble with us is that we have been long stupefied by the ignorant theological ideas of the universe--ideas that have come down to us from the childhood of the race. We haven't got used to the new era--the scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three generations ago there was really no such thing as science."

"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Norman. "We certainly have got on very fast in those three generations."

"Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three. Science--chemistry--is going speedily to change all the conditions of life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing things--food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived much as they had for thousands of years. But it's very different to-day. It will be inconceivably different to-morrow."

Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the day--about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics, but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change all that--and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life--those realizations of ideas _compel_.

When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father's glowing imagination of genius waned before the daughter's physical loveliness and enchantment for him, he said to himself, "I'll keep away from him." Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the knowledge that they were moral.

"What is the matter with you to-day?" said Dorothy. "You are not a bit interesting."

"Interested, you mean," he said with a smile of raillery, for he had long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.

"Well, interested then," said she. "You are thinking about something else."

"Not now," he assured her.

But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her again--back where every glance at her gave him the most exquisite sensations. And when he came the following day he apparently had once more restored her father to his proper place of a nonessential. All that definitely remained of the day before's impression was a certain satisfaction that he was aiding with his money an enterprise of greater value and of less questionable character than merely his own project. But the powerful influences upon our life and conduct are rarely direct and definite. He, quite unconsciously, had a wholly different feeling about Dorothy because of her father, because of what his new knowledge of and respect for her father had revealed and would continue to reveal to him as to the girl herself--her training, her inheritance, her character that could not but be touched with the splendor of the father's noble genius. And long afterward, when the father as a distinct personality had been almost forgotten, Norman was still, altogether unconsciously, influenced by him--powerfully, perhaps decisively influenced. Norman had no notion of it, but ever after that talk in the laboratory, Dorothy Hallowell was to him Newton Hallowell's daughter.

When he came the following day, with his original purposes and plans once more intact, as he thought, he found that she had made more of a toilet than usual, had devised a new way of doing her hair that enabled him to hang a highly prized addition in his memory gallery of widely varied portraits of her.

The afternoon was warm. They sat under a big old tree at the end of the garden. He saw that she was much disturbed--and that it had to do with him. From time to time she looked at him, studying his face when she thought herself unobserved. As he had learned that it is never wise to open up the disagreeable, he waited. After making several futile efforts at conversation, she abruptly said:

"I saw Mr. Tetlow this morning--in Twenty-third Street. I was coming out of a chemical supplies store where father had sent me."

She paused. But Norman did not help her. He continued to wait.

"He--Mr. Tetlow--acted very strangely," she went on. "I spoke to him. He stared at me as if he weren't going to speak--as if I weren't fit to speak to."

"Oh!" said Norman.

"Then he came hurrying after me. And he said, 'Do you know that Norman is to be married in two weeks?'"

"So!" said Norman.

"And I said, 'What of it? How does that interest me?'"

"It didn't interest you?"

"I was surprised that you hadn't spoken of it," replied she. "But I was more interested in Mr. Tetlow's manner. What do you think he said next?"

"I can't imagine," said Norman.

"Why--that I was even more shameless than he thought. He said: 'Oh, I know all about you. I found out by accident. I shan't tell anyone, for I can't help loving you still. But it has killed my belief in woman to find out that _you_ would sell yourself.'"

She was looking at Norman with eyes large and grave. "And what did you say?" he inquired.

"I didn't say anything. I looked at him as if he weren't there and started on. Then he said, 'When Norman abandons you, as he soon will, you can count on me, if you need a friend.'"

There was a pause. Then Norman said, "And that was all?"

"Yes," replied she.

Another pause. Norman said musingly: "Poor Tetlow! I've not seen him since he went away to Bermuda--at least he said he was going there. One day he sent the firm a formal letter of resignation. . . . Poor Tetlow! Do you regret not having married him?"

"I couldn't marry a man I didn't love." She looked at him with sweet friendly eyes. "I couldn't even marry you, much as I like you."

Norman laughed--a dismal attempt at ease and raillery.

"When he told me about your marrying," she went on, "I knew how I felt about you. For I was not a bit jealous. Why haven't you ever said anything about it?"

He disregarded this. He leaned forward and with curious deliberateness took her hand. She let it lie gently in his. He put his arm round her and drew her close to him. She did not resist. He kissed her upturned face, kissed her upon the lips. She remained passive, looking at him with calm eyes.

"Kiss me," he said.

She kissed him--without hesitation and without warmth.

"Why do you look at me so?" he demanded.

"I can't understand."

"Understand what?"

"Why you should wish to kiss me when you love another woman. What would she say if she knew?"

"I'm sure I don't know. And I rather think I don't care. You are the only person on earth that interests me."

"Then why are you marrying?"

"Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about ourselves." He clasped her passionately, kissed her at first with self-restraint, then in a kind of frenzy. "How can you be so cruel!" he cried. "Are you utterly cold?"

"I do not love you," she said.

"Why not?"

"There's no reason. I--just don't. I've sometimes thought perhaps it was because you don't love me."

"Good God, Dorothy! What do you want me to say or do?"

"Nothing," replied she calmly. "You asked me why I didn't love you, and I was trying to explain. I don't want anything more than I'm getting. I am content--aren't you?"

"Content!" He laughed sardonically. "As well ask Tantalus if he is content, with the water always before his eyes and always out of reach. I want you--all you have to give. I couldn't be content with less."

"You ought not to talk to me this way," she reproved gently, "when you are engaged."

He flung her hand into her lap. "You are making a fool of me. And I don't wonder. I've invited it. Surely, never since man was created has there been such another ass as I." He drew her to her feet, seized her roughly by the shoulders. "When are you coming to your senses?" he demanded.

"What do you mean?" she inquired, in her childlike puzzled way.

He shook her, kissed her violently, held her at arm's length. "Do you think it wise to trifle with me?" he asked. "Don't your good sense tell you there's a limit even to such folly as mine?"

"What _is_ the matter?" she asked pathetically. "What do you want? I can't give you what I haven't got to give."

"No," he cried. "But I want what you _have_ got to give."

She shook her head slowly. "Really, I haven't, Mr. Norman."

He eyed her with cynical amused suspicion. "Why did you call me _Mr._ Norman just then? Usually you don't call me at all. It's been weeks since you have called me Mister. Was your doing it just then one of those subtle, adroit, timely tricks of yours?"

She was the picture of puzzled innocence. "I don't understand," she said.

"Well--perhaps you don't," said he doubtfully. "At any rate, don't call me Mr. Norman. Call me Fred."

"I can't. It isn't natural. You seem Mister to me. I always think of you as Mr. Norman."

"That's it. And it must stop!"

She smiled with innocent gayety. "Very well--Fred. . . . Fred. . . . Now that I've said it, I don't find it strange." She looked at him with an expression between appeal and mockery. "If you'd only let me get acquainted with you. But you don't. You make me feel that I've got to be careful with you--that I must be on my guard. I don't know against what--for you are certainly the very best friend that I've ever had--the only real friend."

He frowned and bit his lip--and felt uncomfortable, though he protested to himself that he was simply irritated at her slyness. Yes, it must be slyness.

"So," she went on, "there's no _reason_ for being on guard. Still, I feel that way." She looked at him with sweet gravity. "Perhaps I shouldn't if you didn't talk about love to me and kiss me in a way I feel you've no right to."

Again he laid his hands upon her shoulders. This time he gazed angrily into her eyes. "Are you a fool? Or are you making a fool of me?" he said. "I can't decide which."

"I certainly am very foolish," was her apologetic answer. "I don't know a lot of things, like you and father. I'm only a girl."

And he had the maddening sense of being baffled again--of having got nowhere, of having demonstrated afresh to himself and to her his own weakness where she was concerned. What unbelievable weakness! Had there ever been such another case? Yes, there must have been. How little he had known of the possibilities of the relations of men and women--he who had prided himself on knowing all!

She said, "You are going to marry?"

"I suppose so," replied he sourly.

"Are you worried about the expense? Is it costing you too much, this helping father? Are you sorry you went into it?"

He was silent.

"You are sorry?" she exclaimed. "You feel that you are wasting your money?"

His generosity forbade him to keep up the pretense that might aid him in his project. "No," he said hastily. "No, indeed. This expense--it's nothing." He flushed, hung his head in shame before his own weakness, as he added, in complete surrender, "I'm very glad to be helping your father."

"I knew you would be!" she cried triumphantly. "I knew it!" And she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him.

"That's better!" he said with a foolishly delighted laugh. "I believe we are beginning to get acquainted."

"Yes, indeed. I feel quite different already."

"I hoped so. You are coming to your senses?"

"Perhaps. Only--" She laid a beautiful white pleading hand upon his shoulder and gazed earnestly into his eyes--"please don't frighten me with that talk--and those other kisses."

He looked at her uncertainly. "Come round in your own way," he said at last. "I don't want to hurry you. I suppose every bird has its own way of dropping from a perch."

"You don't like my way?" she inquired.

It was said archly but also in the way that always made him vaguely uneasy, made him feel like one facing a mystery which should be explored cautiously. "It is graceful," he admitted, with a smile since he could not venture to frown. "Graceful--but slow."

She laughed--and he could not but feel that the greater laughter in her too innocent eyes was directed at him. She talked of other things--and he let her--charmed, yet cursing his folly, his slavery, the while. _

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Read previous: Chapter 8

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