The Perfume of Eros

He had got an idea that he ought to have something to do. The something which he hit on consisted in going downtown every day and standing, in a broker’s office, over a ticker. Such were the quantities of stupid money afloat that the ticker was very loquacious. It talked and talked, generally in jumps. As it jumped Annandale bought. As it continued to jump, he made. Whereupon he regarded himself as a born financier. It was an illusion which that year very many men shared.

But the illusion was agreeable to him. It was equally so to Fanny. It took him out of the way and induced pleasant dreams. He talked of drags and yachts. On fifty thousand a year these things are impossibilities. But Annandale, believing himself a born financier, believed, too, that the day was not remote when they would solidify into facts. Pending which, Fanny, from her own carriage, distributed to Annette, Juliette and the rest of them such orders as she liked.

It was in this carriage that Marie had seen her with Loftus. Others also saw her. Fanny being a little more than a bride and Loftus a good deal more than a beau, the spectacle caused comment. There were, though, other things that the future had in charge which were to cause more. But among those who beheld the particular spectacle was Fanny’s husband.

Annandale was in a hansom with Mr. Skitt, the broker in whose office he looked over the tape. As Fanny drove by, Annandale raised his hat, then, with a mimic which he meant to be humorously indignant, he shook his stick at Loftus much as though he were saying, “Aha! making up to my wife!”

Loftus entering into the spirit of the jest, ducked his head in feigned alarm.

“That’s a deuced pretty woman,” remarked Mr. Skitt when the carriage had passed.

“It is Mrs. Annandale,” his client returned with some hauteur.

“Oh, beg pardon, I didn’t know.”

“Yes,” Annandale resumed, “and that was Loftus, an old friend of mine.”

“Any relation to the Loftus?” Mr. Skitt, glad that the subject was out of the way, inquired.

“He is the Loftus,” Annandale, now entirely mollified, replied.

Others, however, took the spectacle less lightly. To Marie it was distressing. To Mrs. Price it was absurd. Mrs. Price had not seen it, but she heard of it. To air a few views on the subject she pounced in on Fanny the very next day. Loftus, however, was there at the time. She had to wait until he was gone. Then she let drive.

“Do you fancy,” she asked fiercely, “that this is London? Do you?” she repeated and menacingly pulled off a glove. “Don’t you know that you cannot have men hanging about you, and of all men that man? Great heavens, if you wanted him you should have taken him at the start.”

Fanny lit a cigarette, made a ring of smoke, poked a finger through it and in a sugary, demure little way which she sometimes affected, answered serenely: “At the finish perhaps I may yet.”

“What!” cried Mrs. Price.

But from the door a servant was announcing Miss Waldron. The girl swam in. Necessarily, for the time being, the subject was dropped. Later Mrs. Price got back to it, but without notable result, without obtaining either any elucidation of Fanny’s rather curious remark.

That though, with graver things, the future had in charge. Meanwhile Fanny, with nine servants and a housekeeper to run them, led the life of any other young society woman, the life of an objet de luxe.

This form of existence would have been quite to her liking if⁠—Yet is there not always an If? A poet declaimed on the subject two thousand years ago. Times have changed, customs with them, but not the human heart. Barring great wealth and its fanfares and accompaniments, Fanny had enough to throw the average woman into stupors of envy, enough also to even satisfy her, if only instead of one man she had married another. Annandale was very nice. He had but one defect. But that defect was fatal. He did not happen to be somebody else.

This defect Fanny had fancied that she could overlook. She was young, therefore ignorant, and, in fancying that she could ignore that fatal defect, fancied also that she had the ability to order herself about, to command her nature and dictate to her heart. The fallacy is common. Many of us have entertained it and kept at it too until the discovery is made that the heart is a force which we must yield to or break.

Fanny became aware of this shortly after Loftus returned. There in her existence was the If. As a consequence, although Annandale was quite perfect to her, his perfection was as nothing to his one defect.

Of this defect Annandale was wholly unconscious. Yet, though he could not see the mote in his own eye, there was one in Fanny’s which, though he saw, he was unable to define. It is true on the mote question he was not an expert. A husband, particularly when he happens to be big and blond, seldom is. Then, too, the effect of the mote was odd. It affected Fanny’s disposition. When he approached her he could not but notice that she became elusive. He could not but perceive that she was as afraid of a kiss as of a bee.

“What is the matter with you?” he inquired on one occasion when she appeared even more tantalizingly intangible than he had seen her yet.

“Women are the very devil,” he muttered as, without answering, she moved yet further away.

The question, though, was very unreasonable. So at least Mrs. Price, whom he tried to take into his confidence, assured him with fine scorn. “The idea of a man asking his wife what is the matter with her!” she exclaimed. “A man ought to know. If he doesn’t, how in the world can he expect her to?”

But that was before the episode with Loftus in the Park. Had Annandale gone