At a five-o’clock in that amiable region which is known as the American colony, Sally made him such little tentative advances as a woman may. Agilely he extracted himself from her ambuscades. Ordinarily, he might have stormed them. That would have been only civil. But what ordinarily would have been civil, in this instance, would have been base. He was bound by bonds that to certain natures are the strongest of all. Apart from which he had no desire to encourage Sally. Maud left him none.
A fortnight after the episode of the little token, the girl and her father sailed for Paris. Welden accompanied them and it was in Paris that the consummation of the agreement occurred.
Previously the matter was somewhat debated. Maud Barhyte knew many things, among others, that once upon a time it had been heretical to think, heretical, also, to love. She knew, furthermore, that since then progress had liberated thought without, however, completely emancipating the heart. But, she had argued, the right to think and the right to love being both fundamental in human nature, one is as clear as the other, and while, to the bigot, any freedom in love may be heretical still, none the less, such liberty is permissible, provided the appearances are preserved, and no one else is injured.
These views she put before Welden. Their fallacy was patent to him. For while the whole moral value of marriage may subsist in a union which is contracted solely in the consciences of those who enter into it, and while such a union may not only present but preserve the entire and eternal law of Right, yet, when such a union is contracted in conditions such as theirs, there is an injury to others. There is an injury, though it be but potential, to the unborn. There is a further injury, and a grave one, to the woman, often, also, to the man. A woman is never completely woman except in the family, and there can be no family once certain conventions are contravened. These conventions, which jurists did not invent, or codes originate, are exterior to woman, superior to man, and, when disregarded, inimical to both of them.
But, though the fallacy of the girl’s views was patent to Welden, the fallacy of refuting them was patent as well. The rare gifts of the gods should be piously accepted, never refused. Apart from which, in the way we live now, men of the world do not recite moral maxims after the manner of Confucius. Welden was too modern for that, and incidentally too hungry. But he saved his conscience.
“Your views,” he declared, “are as adorable as they are advanced; but they would be still more adorable were they antiquated enough to induce you to marry me.”
“Dearest,” she replied, “have we not been all over that?”
They had indeed. At the time they were in New York. In the after joy which love and life in Paris brought, neither, between them, could have discovered a regret, the vain desire merely that it should never end, never! and in a world where all things must and do.
Meanwhile felicity was theirs, one so full, so absorbing, so intense and eager that sometimes from their commingled breath, rose the deceiving image of felicities larger and more fair. Sometimes, from the fountain of delight, a clear jet falling in drizzling sheaves, shook stars in their eyes and ears. Sometimes the pulsations of love swept over them like tides. Sometimes the waters lifted them, sank them, lowered them deeper, caught, carried and drifted them, hour long, unappeasably, from night to dawn. Once, from the mysterious affinities that similarise the flesh and spirit, a fear seemed to mount and warn of a catastrophe unknown, yet near.
The latter impression, wholly momentary and immediately forgot, came later. At the time being, their clear sky was cloudless. Intermediately, for general convenience, they were but another engaged couple, and it was by the simple expedient of announcing the engagement that Welden, at a five-o’clock in the Avenue Marceau, extricated himself from Sally’s ambuscades.
“To Maud Barhyte!” exclaimed Sally, who certainly took her defeat very well, “how perfectly dear! I was thinking of her only the other day.”
Sally, like her mother, sometimes spoke truly. In this instance, what she said was exact. She had been thinking of a resemblance that existed between Mme. Oppensheim and Maud.
“Where is she?” she continued. “And where are you? I want you both to dinner.”
“Thank you,” Welden replied. “Maud is at the Mirifique, in the Rue de la Paix, and I am across the street.”
“How nice and convenient that is. Well, tell her with my love, that I am coming to see her at once.”
Sally smiled and nodded and turned. “Bonjour, Madame de Chose!” she said to a woman. “Bonjour, Prince!” she repeated to a man. “How sweet you look, Pinkey!” she added to a girl. “Bonjour! Bonjour!”
Sally certainly took her defeat very well. In the crowded salons of Mrs. Cawtree, her hostess, a New Yorker who had lived so long in Paris, that she was unaware how Parisian New York has become; in the spacious and peopled rooms she looked far more victorious than vanquished, and incidentally very sweet. “But too animated,” Mrs. Cawtree, to whom such attenuations were pleasing, afterward declared.
Welden fell back and away. Presently in a motor-cab he was sailing down the Champs Élysées, and on to the Cercle de l’Escrime, a fencing club, of which he was a member, where, when in Paris, he usually went for a bout each day.
The bout served a double purpose. It combined practice and pleasure. It did more. It helped to keep him in that condition of supple vigour which it is the mere duty of an idler and particularly of a lover to maintain. To this condition other causes were contributory. He had a hack
