“Elena!” I began—“wait, just a moment! I’m in anger now—!” It was not much to stammer out, but for me, who have the Townsend temper, it was very hard to say.
“You talk about loving me! and I believe you do love me, in at any rate a sort of way. But you’ll never forget, you never have forgotten, those ancestors of yours who were in the House of Burgesses when I hadn’t any ancestors at all. It isn’t fair, because we haven’t got the chance to pick our parents, and it’s absurd, and—it’s true. The woman is my mother, and I’ll be like her some day, very probably. Yes, she is ignorant and tacky, and at times she is ridiculous. She hadn’t even the smartness to notice it when you made a fool of her; and if anybody were to explain it to her she would just laugh and say, ‘Law, I don’t mind, because young people always have to have their fun, I reckon.’ And she would forgive you! Why, she adores you! she’s been telling me for months that you’re ‘a heap the nicest young man that visits with me.’ ”
Afterward Elena paused for an instant. “I think that is all,” she said. “It’s a difference that isn’t curable. Yes, I simply wanted to tell you that much, and then ask you to go, I believe—”
“So you don’t wish me, Elena, in the venerable phrase, to make an honest woman of you?”
She had half turned, standing, in pink and silver fripperies, with one bared arm resting on the chair back, in one of her loveliest attitudes. “What do you mean?”
“I was referring to what happened the other night, after the Allardyce dance.”
And Elena smiled rather strangely. “You baby! how much would it shock you if I told you no woman really minds about that either? Anyway, you have broken your solemn promise,” she said, with indignation.
“Ah, but perfidy seemed, somehow, in tone with an establishment wherein one concludes the evening’s entertainment by physical assault upon the guests. Frankly, my dear”—I observed, with my most patronizing languor—“your breeding is not quite that to which I have been accustomed, and I have had a rather startling glimpse of Lena Vokins, with all the laboriously acquired veneering peeling off. Still, in view of everything, I suppose I do owe it to you to marry you, if you insist—”
“Insist! I wouldn’t wipe my feet on you!”
“That especial demonstration of affection was not, as I recall, requested of you. So it is all off? along with the veneering, eh? Well, perhaps I did attach too much importance to that diverting epilogue to the Allardyce dance. And as you say, Elena—and I take your word for it, gladly—once one has become used to granting these little favors indiscriminately—”
“Get out of my house!” Elena said, quite splendid in her fury, “or I will have you horsewhipped. I was fond of you. You would not let me be in peace. And I didn’t know you until tonight for the sneering, stuck-up dirty beast you are at heart—” She came nearer, and her glittering eyes narrowed. “And you have no hold on me, no letters to blackmail me with, and nobody anywhere would take your word for anything against mine. You would only be whipped by some real man, and probably shot. So do you remember to keep a watch upon that lying, sneering mouth of yours! And do you get out of my house!”
“It is only rented,” I submitted: “yet, after all, to boast vaingloriously of their possessions is pardonable in those who have risen in the world, and aren’t quite accustomed to it. …” There were a pair of us when it came to tempers.
VIII
And I went homeward almost physically sick with rage. I knew, even then, that, while Elena would forgive me in the outcome, if I set about the matter properly, I could never bring myself to ask forgiveness. If only she had been in the wrong, I could have eagerly gone back and have submitted to the extremest and the most outrageous tyranny she could devise.
But—although I would never have blackmailed her, I think—she had been mainly in the right. She had humiliated me, with a certain lack of decorum, to be sure, but with some justice: and to pardon plain retaliation is beyond the compass of humanity. At least, it ranks among achievements which have always baffled me.
XXII
He Cleans the Slate
I
It was within a month of this other disaster that Jasper Hardress came to America, accompanied by his wife. They planned a tour of the States, which they had not visited in seven years, and more particularly, as his forerunning letter said, they meant to investigate certain mining properties which Hardress had acquired in Montana. So, not unstirred by trepidations, I met them at the pier.
For I was already in New York, in part to see a volume of my short stories through the press—which you may or may not have read, in its elaborate “gift-book” form, under the title of The Aspirants—and in part about less edifying employments. I was trying to forget Elena, and in Lichfield it was not possible to induce such forgetfulness without affording unmerited pleasure for gabbling busybodies. … It was not in me to apologise, except in a letter, where the wording and interminable tinkering with phraseology would enable me to forget it was I who was apologising, until a bit of nearly perfect prose was safely mailed; and I knew she would not read any letter from me, because Elena comprehended that I always persuaded her to do what I prompted, if only she listened to me.
As it was, I talked that morning for an hour or more with fat Jasper Hardress. … Even now I find the two errands which brought him to America of not unlaughable incongruity.
II
For, first, he came as an agent
