“Forgive me—I—” he said, stepping back suddenly. “I—I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“No—you couldn’t do that—never,” she said quietly.
“You—you’re so pretty tonight—I couldn’t help it,” he said. To himself he vowed he would never let himself be tempted again—not that night.
“I’m going to take you to your home,” he said, when after small conversation they returned.
“Sure.”
He was surprised and delighted at this, but almost immediately to be generous he said:
“No, no, I won’t.”
“I don’t care.”
They had reached their corner.
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“At eight.”
“Yes.”
He resisted a great temptation, and offered his hand. She took it suddenly in both of hers and brought it to her lips as she had done in the hospital.
“You’ve been white, awful white to me,” she said, and flitted away into the engulfing night.
When he left her, her words came back to him, and brought an unrest. He had almost yielded to what he had vowed never to do, he, who only wanted her to feel his respect. Yet the next day seemed endless. He regretted that he had not gone to where she lived, for then he could have found her in the afternoon.
A shower passed during the day, leaving the streets moist and luminous with long lances of light and star points on the wet stones. He went breathlessly as he had never gone before, a little troubled, always reasoning with his conscience.
“It was only a crazy spell,” he said to himself. “I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be careful, now.”
When he reached the lamppost another figure was there, Muriel Stacey, painted and overdressed, and in her hand was a white letter, that he saw halfway up the block. He stopped short, frowning.
“Where’s Fanny?”
“Here’s a note she sent you,” said the girl; “she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“This morning.”
He looked at the envelope; his name was written there in a childish, struggling hand.
“All right; thank you,” he said suffocating. He left hurriedly, physically uncomfortable in the presence of Muriel Stacey, her friend. At the first lamppost he stopped, broke the envelope, and read the awkward, painfully written script.
“I’m going away, it’s best for you and me I know it. Guess I would care too much and I’m not good enough for you. Don’t you be angry with me. Good luck. God bless you.
He slipped it hurriedly in his pocket, and set off at a wild pace. And suddenly his conscience, his accusing conscience, rose up. He saw where he had been going. It brought him a solemn moment. Then he remembered the girl. He took the letter from his pocket and held it clutched like a hand in his hand.
“Good God,” he said, “I wonder what’ll become of her?”
He had found so much good that the tragedy revolted him. So he went through the busy streets with their flare and ceaseless motion, in the wet of the night, watching with solemn, melancholy eyes, other women pass with sidelong glances. All the horror and the hopelessness of a life he could not better thronged over him, and he stood a long while looking down the great bleak ways, through the gates that it is better not to pry ajar.
Then in a revulsion of feeling, terrified at what he divined, he left and went, almost in an instinct for protection, hurriedly to the Story home, white and peaceful under the elms. He did not go in, but he stood a little while opposite, looking in through the warm windows at the serenity and the security that seemed to permeate the place.
When he returned to his rooms, Joe and Regan were there. He sat down directly and told them the whole story, showing them her letter.
“She went away—for my sake,” he said. “I know it. Poor little devil. It’s a letter I’ll always keep.” Solemnly, looking at the letter, he resolved to put this with the one, the first from Jean Story, and reverently he felt that the two had the right to be joined.
“What’s terrible about it,” he said, talking out his soul, “is that there’s so much good in them. And yet what can you do? They’re human, they respond, you can’t help pitying them—wanting to be decent, to help—and you can’t. It’s terrible to think that there are certain doors in life you open and close, that you must turn your back on human lives sometimes, that things can’t be changed. Lord, but it’s a terrible thing to realize.”
He stopped, and he heard Regan’s voice, moved as he had never heard it, say:
“That’s my story—only I married.”
Suddenly, as though realizing for the first time what he had said, he burst out: “Good God, I never meant to tell. See here, you men, that’s sacred—you understand.”
And Dink and Joe, looking on his face, realized all at once why a certain gentler side of life was shut out to him, and why he had never gone to the Storys’.
XXVII
One result of Stover’s sobering experience with Fanny Le Roy was that he met the problem of the senior elections with directness and honesty. What Brockhurst had said of the injurious effect of secrecy and ceremony on the imagination had always been with him. Yet in his desire to stand high in the eyes of Jean Story, to win the honors she prized, he had quibbled over the question. Now the glimpse he had had into the inscrutable verities of human tragedy had all at once lifted him above the importance of local standards, and left him with but one desire—to be true to himself.
The tests that had come to him in his college life had brought with them a maturity of view beyond that of his fellows. Now that he seriously debated the question, he said to himself that he saw great evils in the system: that on the average intelligence this thraldom to formula and awe at the assumption of mystery had undeniably a narrowing effect, unworthy of a great university
