She looked at him with an expression in which amusement and curiosity were blended.
“I congratulate you,” she said, laughing, “upon the career in which it appears I had the honor to start you. Am I being told that you have taken up the law?”
“Not quite the whole of it as yet,” he said; “but when I am not doing errands for the office I am to some extent taken up with it,” and then he told her of his talk with his father and what had followed. She overcame a refractory kink in her silk before speaking.
“It takes a long time, doesn’t it, and do you like it?” she asked.
“Well,” said John, laughing a little, “a weaker word than ‘fascinating’ would describe the pursuit, but I hope with diligence to reach some of the interesting features in the course of ten or twelve years.”
“It is delightful,” she remarked, scrutinizing the pattern of her work, “to encounter such enthusiasm.”
“Isn’t it?” said John, not in the least wounded by her sarcasm.
“Very much so,” she replied, “but I have always understood that it is a mistake to be too sanguine.”
“Perhaps I’d better make it fifteen years, then,” he said, laughing. “I should have a choice of professions by that time at any rate. You know the proverb that ‘At forty every man is either a fool or a physician.’ ” She looked at him with a smile. “Yes,” he said, “I realize the alternative.” She laughed a little, but did not reply.
“Seriously,” he continued, “I know that in everything worth accomplishing there is a lot of drudgery to be gone through with at the first, and perhaps it seems the more irksome to me because I have been so long idly my own master. However,” he added, “I shall get down to it, or up to it, after a while, I dare say. That is my intention, at any rate.”
“I don’t think I have ever wished that I were a man,” she said after a moment, “but I often find myself envying a man’s opportunities.”
“Do not women have opportunities, too?” he said. “Certainly they have greatly to do with the determination of affairs.”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is the usual answer that woman’s part is to influence somebody. As for her own life, it is largely made for her. She has, for the most part, to take what comes to her by the will of others.”
“And yet,” said John, “I fancy that there has seldom been a great career in which some woman’s help or influence was not a factor.”
“Even granting that,” she replied, “the career was the man’s, after all, and the fame and visible reward. A man will sometimes say, ‘I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,’ but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does anyone else. It is his success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circumstance, real and powerful though it may be. I am not sure,” she added, “that woman’s influence, so called, isn’t rather an overrated thing. Women like to feel that they have it, and men, in matters which they hold lightly, flatter them by yielding, but I am doubtful if a man ever arrives at or abandons a settled course or conviction through the influence of a woman, however exerted.”
“I think you are wrong,” said John, “and I feel sure of so much as this: that a man might often be or do for a woman’s sake that which he would not for its sake or his own.”
“That is quite another thing,” she said. “There is in it no question of influence; it is one of impulse and motive.”
“I have told you tonight,” said John, “that what you said to me had influenced me greatly.”
“Pardon me,” she replied, “you employed a figure which exactly defined your condition. You said I supplied the drop which caused the solution to crystallize—that is, to elaborate your illustration, that it was already at the point of saturation with your own convictions and intentions.”
“I said also,” he urged, “that you had set the time for me. Is the idea unpleasant to you?” he asked after a moment, while he watched her face. She did not at once reply, but presently she turned to him with slightly heightened color and said, ignoring his question:
“Would you rather think that you had done what you thought right because you so thought, or because someone else wished to have you? Or, I should say, would you rather think that the right suggestion was another’s than your own?”
He laughed a little, and said evasively: “You ought to be a lawyer, Miss Blake. I should hate to have you cross-examine me unless I were very sure of my evidence.”
She gave a little shrug of her shoulders in reply as she turned and resumed her embroidery. They talked for a while longer, but of other things, the discussion of woman’s influence having been dropped by mutual consent.
After John’s departure she suspended operations on the doily, and sat for a while gazing reflectively into the fire. She was a person as frank with herself as with others, and with as little vanity as was compatible with being human, which is to say that, though she was not without it, it was of the sort which could be gratified but not flattered—in fact, the sort which flattery wounds rather than pleases. But despite her apparent skepticism she had not been displeased by John’s assertion that she had influenced him in his course. She had expressed herself truly, believing that he would have done as he had without her intervention; but she thought that he was sincere, and it was pleasant to her to have him think as he did.
Considering the surroundings and conditions under which she had lived, she had had her share of the acquaintance and attentions of agreeable men,
