Alone, she sat looking at the fire and thinking: “This is awful. I don’t believe anything is going to come of this. I believe I’ll send him a note tomorrow and tell him not to come any more.”
Someone tapped on the door; astonished that a caller should appear at such an hour, but not afraid, she opened it. It was Roger. He came striding into the room, flinging off his wet coat, and yet almost simultaneously catching her up in his arms. “It’s such a terrible night, Angèle; you can’t send me out in it. Why should I go when the fire is here and you, so warm and soft and sweet!”
All her strength left her; she could not even struggle, could not speak. He swept her up in his arms, cradling her in them like a baby with her face beneath his own. “You know that we were meant for each other, that we belong to each other!”
A terrible lassitude enveloped her out of which she heard herself panting: “Roger, Roger let me go! Oh, Roger, must it be like this? Can’t it be any other way?”
And from a great distance she heard his voice breaking, pleading, promising: “Everything will be all right, darling, darling. I swear it. Only trust me, trust me!”
Life rushed by on a great, surging tide. She could not tell whether she was utterly happy or utterly miserable. All that she could do was to feel; feel that she was Roger’s totally. Her whole being turned toward him as a flower to the sun. Without him life meant nothing; with him it was everything. For the time being she was nothing but emotion; he was amazed himself at the depth of feeling which he had aroused in her.
Now for the first time she felt possessive; she found herself deeply interested in Roger’s welfare because, she thought, he was hers and she could not endure having a possession whose qualities were unknown. She was not curious about his money nor his business affairs but she thirsted to know how his time away from her was spent, whom he saw, what other places he frequented. Not that she begrudged him a moment away from her side, but she must be able to account for that moment.
Yet if she felt possessive of him her feeling also recognized his complete absorption of her, so completely, so exhaustively did his life seem to envelop hers. For a while his wishes, his pleasure were the end and aim of her existence; she told herself with a slight tendency toward self-mockery that this was the explanation of being, of her being; that men had other aims, other uses but that the sole excuse for being a woman was to be just that—a woman. Forgotten were her ideals about her Art; her ambition to hold a salon; her desire to help other people; even her intention of marrying in order to secure her future. Only something quite outside herself, something watchful, proud, remote from the passion and rapture which flamed within her, kept her free and independent. She would not accept money, she would not move to the apartment on Seventy-second Street; she still refused gifts so ornate that they were practically bribes. She made no explanations to Roger, but he knew and she knew too that her surrender was made out of the lavish fullness and generosity of her heart; there was no calculation back of it; if this were free love the freedom was the quality to be stressed rather than the emotion.
Sometimes, in her inchoate, wordless intensity of feeling which she took for happiness, she paused to take stock of that other life, those other lives which once she had known; that life which had been hers when she had first come to New York before she had gone to Cooper Union, in those days when she had patrolled Fourteenth Street and had sauntered through Union Square. And that other life which she knew in Opal Street—aeons ago, almost in another existence. She passed easily over those first few months in New York because even then she had been approaching a threshold, getting ready to enter on a new, undreamed of phase of being. But sometimes at night she lay for hours thinking over her restless, yearning childhood, her fruitless days at the Academy, the abortive wooing of Matthew Henson. The Hensons, the Hallowells, Hetty Daniels—Jinny! How far now she was beyond their pale! Before her rose the eager, starved face of Hetty Daniels; now she herself was cognizant of phases of life for which Hetty longed but so contemned. Angela could imagine the envy back of the tone in which Hetty, had she but known it, would have expressed her disapproval of her former charge’s manner of living. “Mattie Murray’s girl, Angela, has gone straight to the bad; she’s living a life of sin with some man in New York.” And then the final, blasting indictment. “He’s a white man, too. Can you beat that?”
III
Roger’s father, it appeared, had been greatly pleased with his son’s management of the sawmills in Georgia; as a result he was making more and more demands on his time. And the younger man half through pride, half through that steady determination never to offend his father, was always ready to do his bidding. Angela liked and appreciated her lover’s filial attitude, but even in the period of her warmest interest she resented, secretly despised, this tendency to dependence. He was young, superbly trained; he had the gift of forming friendships whose strength rested on his own personality, yet he distrusted too much his own powers or else he was lazy—Angela could never determine which. During this phase of their acquaintanceship she was never sure that she loved him, but she was positive that if at this
