The quiet lower rooms struck her with their awful solemnity, added to her woe. She sat there at the dining room table, one hand clutching the forgotten lemon, the other flung on the red-checked table cloth, above her dark bowed head.
Two conflicts were raging within her. A twofold stream of disappointment overwhelmed. Not only had Philip not made love to her but he had despised her, not considered her the peer of his sisters. And how was she to mend her precarious fortunes? She was not strong, her mother was aging; suppose, before she got on her feet, she should fall back into the old hateful abyss. As it was she would never enter Mr. Marshall’s office again.
Her shame and despair heavy upon her, she buried her face deeper on her arm. Someone seemed to say, “Miss Maggie!”
She imagined it, she knew, but even if it were real she did not want to lift that heavy, heavy head.
A powerful but kind hand strove to lift it for her. She looked up then, a blinking figure of misery in the flickering gas flame.
“But Miss Maggie, t’aint ever you. Was you asleep or—was you crying?” Henderson Neal had come in, and spying the light in the dining room had come to investigate.
She blinked at him stupidly.
“Little Miss Maggie, what’s happened to you? You ain’t in trouble?”
“In awful trouble.” Her lips shaped the words stiffly.
His mind, accustomed to the ways of men, jumped to one dread conclusion. “You mean some good for nothin’ feller’s took advantage of you?”
She didn’t understand him at first. “What? Oh, that! No, of course not!” A spasm of horrible amusement crossed her tightly drawn features. “He—he wouldn’t touch me.”
She broke into passionate yet stifled weeping. Her mother must not hear her.
Neal’s face twitched. He picked her up in his steely arms, sat down in an old cavernous morris chair and held her back against him like a baby.
“Tell me about it, Miss Maggie; some of them tony fellers bothering you to marry them?”
The supposition was balm to her spirit, but she had schooled herself to honesty. “No, not that—one of them, oh, he never knew—I hoped, oh, Mr. Neal, you see I wanted him to like me—”
“And he doesn’t, and he’s been leading you on? The damned skunk. I’d like to kill him.”
“Don’t say that. He was just being kind. He’d probably be all right if he ever thought about me. You see, it’s his sisters, his sister,” she corrected herself, “she doesn’t consider me good enough.”
“Well, what’s she got to do with it? Can’t the feller speak for himself?”
“That’s just it, I used to go to see them, they don’t come to see me. If the sisters don’t want me, there’s no way I can reach him, particularly since he isn’t interested. I had just hoped that if he kept on seeing me, some day he would grow to like me.”
Neal was nonplussed. This was a puzzle.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Oh, I don’t know. And I’m losing my job now. I got it through them.”
“I see.” He sat silent, studying her a moment. “Look here, Maggie, whyn’t you marry me? I’m old and I’m rough and you see I ain’t no book-learnin’. But I can take care of you—you and your mother, too, and I can dress you pretty, like you’d ought to be, and with money and fine clothes you can do a little lordin’ on your own.”
She hated to offend him. He was so kind. “Mother would never hear of it,” she quavered for lack of a better answer.
“You don’t have to let her know about it,” he said, encouraged by her failure to refuse him flatly. “I’ll get a license in the morning and we’ll slip out after she goes to work. You won’t be sorry. I’ll be kind to you Maggie—girl. I’ve always wanted you to give me a chance.” He added a cunning afterthought.
“Show these stuck-up friends of yourn, and show ’em quick that you don’t have to go beggin’ for favors. There’s others, yes, not a man that comes into this house that wouldn’t be proud to marry you.”
She began to toy with the idea. Marriage with Neal was not what she wanted, but it represented to her security, a home for herself and her mother, freedom from all the little nagging worries that beset the woman who fights her own way through the world. Perhaps she had aimed too high. This was the sort of person with whom she had grown up; he would not, because he could not, look down on her lowliness. On the contrary, he would place her on a pedestal.
“I’ll think about it,” she promised him finally.
But he knew if she did not take him now, she would never take him. She knew it, too.
He set her gently in the chair, and knelt in front of her, barring her escape with his powerful body.
“Listen, Maggie, marry me now, tomorrow. We’ll go to Atlantic City for a few weeks, and come back and go to housekeeping. I don’t have to live here. I just stayed on, first because it was clean and your mother was honest and then because I liked you. I ain’t no lawyer, nor doctor, nor in none of the fine positions your friends hold, but I handle a good bit of money and I’ll get you everything you want.”
He did have money, she knew that. She supposed she ought to find out exactly how he made it. But of course he was honest. And anyway she was too tired, too weak to bother. She could feel his strong will impinging on her own, beating hers down.
“I’ll do it, Mr. Neal.”
“My name’s Henderson, Maggie. You will, you mean it?”
“Yes, tomorrow. But
