The man was Welden, the girl was Maud Barhyte. She was standing. He was seated.
Beside him was a table on which was an Oxford edition, in Greek, of the old Sicilian poets. At the moment, it was the only book that the library contained. Opposite was a mantel, above it, a mirror. To the right was a piano, at the left a sofa. On the walls were pictures of former Barhytes, women with pointed bodices and powdered hair; men in vermilion with swords and lace jabots. In addition to the book, the table had on it a buvard, an elaborate service for writing, and a jewelled bag of gold mesh, which the girl had put down.
A little before, letting herself in with a latchkey, as was her custom, she had come from a drive. She wore a costume of light cloth, faintly blue, exquisitely embroidered. Beneath was silk and mousseline de soie, less durable, and more costly than the garment. On her head was a hat for which she had been charged eighty dollars. She had worn it once before, and might wear it once again.
The girl was not on that account a fool. She read Plato in the original, and what is less lovely and more difficult, she read Kant. What is unusual, she thought; what is exceptional, she meditated; what is remarkable, she prayed.
She prayed that she might do nothing that should not charm, say nothing that should not please.
Generally the prayer was granted, and sometimes more fully than she wished. Men on first meeting her forgot that they were conventional beings, and remembered that they were men.
“That ought not to be allowed,” the wit of a ballroom had remarked, when in shimmering white, this girl had passed. For in her eyes that were violet, in the rich orange of her hair, in the contour of her lips, that seemed meeting for love, in the oval of her perfect face, and in her figure that pulsated with health and with life, there was a charm too alluring, almost aphrodisiac.
Of the emotions that it aroused, the girl was aware. It mortified her extremely, and through her demeanour she tried to attenuate it. But from her voice, which was naturally low, she could not always banish caresses. She could not always eliminate the incandescence from her eyes. The more demure she tried to appear, the more desirable she became. Her prayer was, perhaps, only too fully granted.
Now, on this late mid-April afternoon, there came through the open windows the surrenders of spring, and the metallic roar of the city.
“If you won’t marry me, tell me why?” Welden was saying.
With that air of being somebody which certain New Yorkers occasionally attain, he sat, supple and vigorous, looking hungrily at her. The hunger, a hunger for her, for a year and a day he had tried to appease, but hitherto quite vainly.
In and about the girl’s lips a smile hovered deliciously.
“Supposing you wearied of me, what then?”
Welden laughed. “I never could.”
The hovering smile fluttered and fled. “Supposing, then, I wearied of you!”
Welden laughed again. “I would not let you.”
To that, the girl, with a movement of her head, assented.
“Perhaps. But does it not rather seem that affection is a thing which cannot be commanded? It seems so to me. It seems to me that it commands us. It seems to me too, that, the quantity being limited, some day it must give out. When it does, love ends. No effort can prevent it.”
Welden nodded. “Some day, yes. But a hundred years with you would be insufficient for me. I could love you all through this life, and all through another.”
The smile which momentarily had gone from the girl, rejoined her.
“ ‘In aeternum te adorabo,’ ” she quoted. “I know. I have heard it before. I have heard it said by people who, when I next heard of them, were applying for a divorce. I heard Rivers swear it to Beatrix Leroy. Where are they now?”
“In the hands of their lawyers, I believe.”
“Yet, almost the day before yesterday, they were apparently mad about each other, quite as much as we are, and probably more. Now, as you put it, they are in the hands of their lawyers. Then there are, or were, the Cottings, the Colvilles, the Methuens, the Lennox Joneses. Where are they?”
“In the same box, I suppose. But what of it? What have their various deviltries to do with us?”
“Everything. We might get in the same box ourselves.”
“Ce n’est pas la mer à boire,” Welden lapsing into French, as certain New Yorkers sometimes will, replied.
Again the girl assented. “For a man, certainly not. But for a woman, it rather proclaims the fact that she has put her love and life into the hands of an individual who has destroyed the one and ruined the other. Women endure much, and I could endure that on condition, however, that I alone were aware of it. But, to have it known, printed, discussed; to have my private misfortunes public property, no, I would rather—”
The girl hesitated as though at loss for a simile. Before she could find one, provided, that is, she wanted to, Welden cut in.
“But, Maud, are you not putting the tilbury before the tandem? That people do get divorces is obvious and in the majority of cases the reason is obvious also. Men here, as a rule, marry too young. They marry because they cannot decently get the girl otherwise, and as they afterward discover, it is not the girl, but a girl that they have got. To me, you are not a girl; you are the girl, the one girl in the whole wide world.”
Maud looked the matter over as it reached her, and indicated the flaw in it with a smile.
“We are taught that experience teaches, and I may suppose that you have had yours, many experiences, I dare
