The Conflict Part 15

"We can't accept," said Dorn--a finality.

"But you could use it to build up the paper," urged Jane, to detain him.

"The paper was started without money. It lives without money--and it will go on living without money, or it ought to die."

"I don't understand," said Jane. "But I want to understand. I want to help. Won't you let me?"

He shook his head laughingly. "Help what?" inquired he. "Help raise the sun? It doesn't need help."

Jane began to see. "I mean, I want to be helped," she cried.

"Oh, that's another matter," said he. "And very simple."

"Will YOU help me?"

"I can't. No one can. You've got to help yourself. Each one of us is working for himself--working not to be rich or to be famous or to be envied, but to be free."

"Working for himself--that sounds selfish, doesn't it?"

"If you are wise, Jane Hastings," said Dorn, "you will distrust--disbelieve in--anything that is not selfish."

Jane reflected. "Yes--I see," she cried. "I never thought of that!"

"A friend of mine, Wentworth," Victor went on, "has put it wonderfully clearly. He said, 'Some day we shall realize that no man can be free until all men are free.'"

"You HAVE helped me--in spite of your fierce refusal," laughed Jane.

"You are very impatient to go, aren't you? Well, since you won't stay I'll walk with you--as far as the end of the shade."

She was slightly uneasy lest her overtures should be misunderstood. By the time they reached the first long, sunny stretch of the road down to town she was so afraid that those overtures would not be "misunderstood" that she marched on beside him in the hot sun. She did not leave him until they reached the corner of Pike avenue--and then it was he that left her, for she could cudgel out no excuse for going further in his direction. The only hold she had got upon him for a future attempt was slight indeed--he had vaguely agreed to lend her some books.

People who have nothing to do get rid of a great deal of time in trying to make impressions and in speculating as to what impressions they have made. Jane--hastening toward Martha's to get out of the sun which could not but injure a complexion so delicately fine as hers--gave herself up to this form of occupation. What did he think of her? Did he really have as little sense of her physical charm as he seemed? No woman could hope to be attractive to every man. Still--this man surely must be at least not altogether insensible. "If he sends me those books to-day--or tomorrow--or even next day," thought Jane, "it will be a pretty sure sign that he was impressed--whether he knows it or not."

She had now definitely pa.s.sed beyond the stage where she wondered at herself--and reproached herself--for wishing to win a man of such common origin and surroundings. She could not doubt Victor Dorn's superiority. Such a man as that didn't need birth or wealth or even fame. He simply WAS the man worth while--worth any woman's while. How could Selma be a.s.sociated so intimately with him without trying to get him in love with her? Perhaps she had tried and had given up?

No--Selma was as strange in her way as he was in his way. What a strange--original--INDIVIDUAL pair they were!

"But," concluded Jane, "he belongs with US. I must take him away from all that. It will be interesting to do it--so interesting that I'll be sorry when it's done, and I'll be looking about for something else to do."

She was not without hope that the books would come that same evening.

But they did not. The next day pa.s.sed, and the next, and still no books. Apparently he had meant nothing by his remark, "I've some books you'd be interested to read." Was his silence indifference, or was it shyness? Probably she could only faintly appreciate the effect her position, her surroundings produced in this man whose physical surroundings had always been as poor as her mental surroundings--those created by that marvelous mind of his--had been splendid.

She tried to draw out her father on the subject of the young man, with a view to getting a hint as to whether he purposed doing anything further. But old Hastings would not talk about it; he was still debating, was looking at the matter from a standpoint where his daughter's purely theoretical ac.u.men could not help him to a decision.

Jane rather feared that where her father was evidently so doubtful he would follow his invariable rule in doubtful cases.

On the fourth day, being still unable to think of anything but her project for showing her prowess by conquering this man with no time for women, she donned a severely plain walking costume and went to his office.

At the threshold of the "Sanctum" she stopped short. Selma, pencil poised over her block of copy paper and every indication of impatience, albeit polite impatience, in her fascinating Cossack face, was talking to--or, rather, listening to--David Hull. Like not a few young men--and young women--brought up in circ.u.mstances that surround them with people deferential for the sake of what there is, or may possibly be, in it--Davy Hull had the habit of a.s.suming that all the world was as fond of listening to him as he was of listening to himself. So it did not often occur to him to observe his audience for signs of a willingness to end the conversation.

Selma, turning a little further in her nervousness, saw Jane and sprang up with a radiant smile of welcome.

"I'm SO glad!" she cried, rushing toward her and kissing her. "I've thought about you often, and wished I could find time to come to see you."

Jane was suddenly as delighted as Selma. For Selma's burst of friendliness, so genuine, so unaffected, in this life of blackness and cold always had the effect of sun suddenly making summer out of a chill autumnal day. Nor, curiously enough, was her delight lessened by Davy Hull's blundering betrayal of himself. His color, his eccentric twitchings of the lips and the hands would have let a far less astute young woman than Jane Hastings into the secret of the reason for his presence in that office when he had said he couldn't "afford" to go.

So guilty did he feel that he stammered out:

"I dropped in to see Dorn."

"You wished to see Victor?" exclaimed the guileless Selma. "Why didn't you say so? I'd have told you at once that he was in Indianapolis and wouldn't be back for two or three days."

Jane straightway felt still better. The disgusting mystery of the books that did not come was now cleared up. Secure in the certainty of Selma's indifference to Davy she proceeded to punish him. "What a stupid you are, Davy!" she cried mockingly. "The instant I saw your face I knew you were here to flirt with Miss Gordon."

"Oh, no, Miss Hastings," protested Selma with quaint intensity of seriousness, "I a.s.sure you he was not flirting. He was telling me about the reform movement he and his friends are organizing."

"That is his way of flirting," said Jane. "Every animal has its own way--and an elephant's way is different from a mosquito's."

Selma was eyeing Hull dubiously. It was bad enough for him to have taken her time in a well-meaning attempt to enlighten her as to a new phase of local politics; to take her time, to waste it, in flirting--that was too exasperating!

"Miss Hastings has a sense of humor that runs riot at times," said Hull.

"You can't save yourself, Davy," mocked Jane. "Come along. Miss Gordon has no time for either of us."

"I do want YOU to stay," she said to Jane. "But, unfortunately, with Victor away----" She looked disconsolately at the half-finished page of copy.

"I came only to s.n.a.t.c.h Davy away," said Jane.

"Next thing we know, he'll be one of Mr. Dorn's lieutenants."

Thus Jane escaped without having to betray why she had come. In the street she kept up her raillery. "And a WORKING girl, Davy! What would our friends say! And you who are always boasting of your fastidiousness! Flirting with a girl who--I've seen her three times, and each time she has had on exactly the same plain, cheap little dress."

There was a nastiness, a vulgarity in this that was as unworthy of Jane as are all the unlovely emotions of us who are always sweet and refined when we are our true selves--but have a bad habit of only too often not being what we flatter ourselves is our true selves. Jane was growing angry as she, away from Selma, resumed her normal place in the world and her normal point of view. Davy Hull belonged to her; he had no right to be hanging about another, anyway--especially an attractive woman. Her anger was not lessened by Davy's retort. Said he:

"Her dress may have been the same. But her face wasn't--and her mind wasn't. Those things are more difficult to change than a dress."

She was so angry that she did not take warning from this reminder that Davy was by no means merely a tedious retailer of stale commonplaces.

She said with fine irony--and with no show of anger: "It is always a shock to a lady to realize how coa.r.s.e men are--how they don't discriminate."

Davy laughed. "Women get their rank from men," said he coolly.

"In themselves they have none. That's the philosophy of the peculiarity you've noted."

This truth, so galling to a lady, silenced Jane, made her bite her lips with rage. "I beg your pardon," she finally said. "I didn't realize that you were in love with Selma."

"Yes, I am in love with her," was Davy's astounding reply. "She's the n.o.blest and simplest creature I've ever met."

"You don't mean you want to marry her!" exclaimed Jane, so amazed that she for the moment lost sight of her own personal interest in this affair.

Davy looked at her sadly, and a little contemptuously.

"What a poor opinion at bottom you women--your sort of women--have of woman," said he.