The slow color—even her blushes seemed deliberate—rose to her lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a smile and she waited.
He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous exasperation escapes through his muscles.
“And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!”
Her eyes triumphed for him. “In less!”
“The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then? It’s slaving one’s life away for a stranger!” He took her hands abruptly. “You’ll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the Mediterranean—”
She released herself. “If you think that—”
“I don’t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean.” He broke off incoherently. “I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean.” He caught her hands again. “Alexa—if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?”
“Could we?” she sighed, half yielding.
“In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes,” he pressed her. “Could you get on with one servant?”
“Could you get on without varnished boots?”
“Promise me you won’t go, then!”
“What are you thinking of, Stephen?”
“I don’t know,” he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his intention. “It’s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip the other day—”
“You’re not speculating?” she cried, with a kind of superstitious terror.
“Lord, no. This is a sure thing—I almost wish it wasn’t; I mean if I can work it—” He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave the situation the base element of safety.
“I don’t understand you,” she faltered.
“Trust me, instead!” he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on her abruptly, “If you go, you know, you go free,” he concluded.
She drew back, paling a little. “Why do you make it harder for me?”
“To make it easier for myself,” he retorted.
IV
Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual, turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for letters—collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
“I meant women—women’s letters.”
The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to—to some one person—a man; their husband—or—”
“Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
“Well—something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with lightness. “Didn’t Merimee—”
“The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
“Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
“There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
“Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she—were they—?” He chafed at his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
“If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth century correspondences might suit you better—Mlle. Aisse or Madame de Sabran—”
But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern—English or American. I want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.
The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
“Well, give me some of the French things, then—and I’ll have Merimee’s letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such base elements.
His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few lines—she seldom exceeded the first page—with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.
“My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after to-morrow. Please don’t come till then—I want to think the question over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be reasonable?”
It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some other, luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a fog.
“Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel’s presence than a surplice in the street.
“Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore instead of twenty.”
The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner’s intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of Apollinaris.
“You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases—“Some men,” Flamel irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”