The Great God Success Part 14

"Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule."

"Doesn't interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It's the American blood coming out--the pa.s.sion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well."

"I doubt that," replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. "When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him."

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers's fiancee--the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close--that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him.

Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.

Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air--of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind--like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a "lady" should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him--a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man's life must be cold and cheerless.

He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. "Why not take what I can get?" he thought, as he dreamed of her. "She's engaged--her future practically settled. Yes, I'll be as happy as she'll let me." And he resumed his idealising.

At his time of life idealisation is still not a difficult or a long process. And in this case there was an ample physical basis for it--and far more of a mental basis than young imagination demands. He took the draught she so frankly offered him; he added a love potion of his own concocting, and drank it off.

He was in love.

XI.

TRESPa.s.sING.

For the first time since he had been in newspaper work, Howard came to the office the next day in a long coat and a top hat. He left early and went for a walk in the Avenue. But Miss Trevor was neither driving nor walking. He repeated this excursion the next afternoon with better success. At Fortieth Street he saw her and her cousin half a block ahead of him. He walked slowly and examined her. She was satisfactory from the aigrette in her hat to her heels--a long, narrow, graceful figure, dressed with the expensive simplicity characteristic of the most intelligent cla.s.s of the women of New York and Paris. She walked as if she were accustomed to walking. Mrs. Carnarvon had that slight hesitation, almost stumble, which indicates the woman who usually drives and never walks if she can avoid it. As they paused at the crowded crossing of Forty-second Street he joined them. When Mrs. Carnarvon found that he was "just out for the air" she left them, to go home--in Forty-seventh Street, a few doors east of the Avenue.

"Come back to tea with her," she said as she nodded to Howard.

"We have at least an hour." Howard was looking at Miss Trevor with his happiness dancing in his eyes. "Why shouldn't we go to the Park?"

"I believe it's not customary," objected Miss Trevor in a tone that made the walk in the Park a certainty.

"I'm glad to hear that. I don't care to do customary things as a rule."

"I see that you don't."

"Do you say so because I show what I am thinking so plainly that you can't help seeing it--and don't in the least mind?"

"Why shouldn't you be glad to be alive and to be seeing me this fine winter day?"

"Why indeed!" Howard looked at her from head to foot and then into her eyes.

"We are not in the Park yet." Miss Trevor accompanied her hint with a laugh and added: "I feel reckless to-day."

"You mean you forget that there is any to-morrow. _I_ have shut out to-morrow ever since I saw you."

"And yesterday?" She noted that he coloured slightly, but continued to look at her, his eyes sad. "But there is a to-morrow," she went on.

"Yes--my work, my career is my to-morrow and yours is----"

"Well?"

"Your engagement, of course."

Miss Trevor flushed, but Howard was smiling and she did not long resist the contagion.

"My to-morrow," he continued, "is far more menacing than yours. Yours is just an ordinary, every-day, cut-and-dried affair. Mine is full of doubts and uncertainties with the chances for failure and disappointment. If I can turn my back on my to-morrow, surely you can waive yours for the moment?"

"But why are you so certain that I wish to?"

"Instinct. I could not be so happy as I am with you if you were not content to have me here."

They spoke little until they were well within the Park. There they turned down a by-path and took the walk skirting the lower lake. Miss Trevor looked at Howard with a puzzled expression.

"I never met any one like you," she said. "I have always felt so sure of myself. You take me off my feet. I feel as if I did not know where I was going and--didn't much care. And that's the worst of it."

"No, the best of it. You are a star going comfortably through your universe in a fixed orbit. You maintain your exact relations with your brother and sister stars. You keep all your engagements, you never wobble in your path--everything exact, mathematical. And up darts a wild-haired, impetuous comet, a hurrying, bustling, irregular wanderer coming from you don't know where, going you don't know whither. We pa.s.s very near each to the other. The social astronomers may or may not note a little variation in your movement--a very little, and soon over. They probably will not note the insignificant meteor that darted close up to you--close enough to get his poor face sadly scorched and his long hair cruelly singed--and then hurried sadly away. And----"

"And--what? Isn't there any more to the story?" Marian's eyes were shining with a light which she was conscious had never been there before.

"And--and----" Howard stopped and faced her. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat. He looked at her in a way that made the colour fly from her face and then leap back again. "And--I love you."

"Oh"--Marian said, hiding her face in her white m.u.f.f. "Oh."

"I don't wish to touch you," he went on, "I just wish to look at you--so tall, so straight, so--so alive, and to love you and be happy." Then he laughed and turned. "But you'll catch cold. Let us walk on."

"So you are trying to make a career?" she asked after a few minutes'

silence.

"Yes--trying--or, rather, I was. And shall again when you have gone your way and I mine."

Marian was amazed at herself. Every tradition, every instinct of her life was being trampled by this unknown whom she had just met. And she was a.s.sisting in the trampling. In fact it was difficult for her to restrain herself from leading in the iconoclasm. She looked at him in wonder and delighted terror.

"Why do you look at me in that way?" he said, turning his head suddenly.

"Because you are stronger than I--and I am afraid--yet I--well--I like it."

"It is not I that is stronger than you, nor you that are stronger than I. It is a third that is stronger than both of us. I need not mention the gentleman's name?"

"It is not necessary. But I'd like to hear you p.r.o.nounce it. At least I did a moment ago."

"I'll not risk repet.i.tion. I've been thinking of what might have been."

"What?" Marian laughed a little, rather satirically. "A commonplace engagement and a commonplace wedding and a commonplace honeymoon leading into a land of commonplace disillusion and yawning--or worse?"