Page:Everywoman's World, Volume 7, Number 7.djvu/12

PAGE 10 ''When he touched her hand he had not meant to retain it, but he did; then he captured the other. "I am going to marry you, you know," he said. "Are you?” she asked. She had not thought about marriage, but, of course, if he said so, they would be married.''

REAMY, and living much in the dreams she fashioned from the old romances she read, Hope Fielding lived in a world unreal, but real to her.

To her father's lonely ranch in Alberta came three strangers talking of the railroad which was coming through; one of these, Conroy Edgerton, who had a daughter about Hope's age, sent her a box of chocolates. When the railroad did come Mr. Fielding, who was a path-maker, and not a money-maker, moved back farther north.

Hope was ambitious and needed money to pay her way through the Normal School. She went to the city and engaged as housemaid in a hotel where Evan Hardy—one of the men—was boarding. Here Conroy Edgerton came and she recognized him instantly. He was interested and they met a few times.

Jim Sanderson—a boarder—had been pursuing Hope for months and finding her alone made himself so objectionable that she knocked him down with the butt end of a revolver. Then she left the hotel and went home.

Hope taught school and found life flat and unprofitable; she made friends with Mary Dark and Mrs. Patton, and with Allen Kirby who happened to be Edgerton's chauffeur. He took her motoring until Edgerton came—then Edgerton took her. Edgerton offered to send her to college, but Hope refused. Ned Angell took her to the Tennis Club dance where she met Tony Yorke. She also saw Jim Sanderson, but kept her self-possession and appeared not to recognize him.

FOOL'S paradise is quite as good as a philosopher's heaven—while it lasts. And while there is a vast difference in essence between mere credulity and the trust engendered of good faith, the result is too often quite the ones same. Julie de Lespinasse has not been reckoned wanting in wit, but she never, even on her death-bed, perceived the asses' ears of her utterly selfish and unmanly lover. Hope was not another Julie, but neither was she quite a fool. Indeed, she followed a very ancient wisdom, knowing that

But it is too true that there is no wisdom that will serve as a cloak for all weathers. And Hope was not weather-wise.

She and Mary Dark were living together. They took the half of a private house from an old friend of Mary's; Mrs. Hamilton, by name. They had three rooms, transformed into a separate apartment, furnished with grass chairs and cushions and bookcases mainly, with a rag rug on the floor, chintz curtains, and a desk and drawing-board. The desk Mary kept in her bedroom, so she might sit there and read and write if Hope had guests. They had a geranium in a pot and fussed over it with ineffectual pleasure. Hope settled herself in the new rooms like a cat on a hearthrug. Watching her darning stockings, or sketching, or running ribbons through her lingerie, Mary felt the same tender amusement one derives from the antics of a kitten or a puppy. But, sometimes, when the girl had one of her rare restless fits, and prowled about softly, touching things here and there or standing with her face pressed to the window-pane looking down the dusty street, Mary's heart misgave her. She connected it readily with Tony Yorke's visits. He had called, more than once. Ned Angell came much oftener, taught Hope the guitar, and sang to her, but Hope received him exactly as she did the three boisterous Hamilton children.

Mrs. Hamilton was, in a sense, a friend of the left hand. "A remarkable woman," said Mary briefly, and left Hope to discover the meaning of the phrase. It was not too difficult. Mrs. Hamilton, without a grain of intellect, possessed a steady intelligence, a deep simplicity, and that genuine sweetness of soul which St. Paul defines as charity. She knew no one in "Society" save Mary, and cared not at all; she went out but little, did her own housework, kept her own counsel and that of her friends, and was sincerely fond of the two girls without in the least desiring to regulate their conduct or inquire into their affairs. Her children were kept in order, and brought more pleasure than annoyance.

Mary had few callers, though she went out a good deal. Occasionally Hope was asked, also, but the thought of a gathering filled her with dumb misery. Eleanor Travers had been to call on both girls; there was a faint under-current of alarmed curiosity in her manner, struggling with an instinctive liking for Hope; Mary had watched her with a lazy smile. Hope felt baffled; then dismissed the remembrance, and was glad Miss Travers was out when she returned the call.

Once she asked Allen Kirby to the house. He came readily and was obviously ill at ease. She was "away off" indeed, It was not the same girl who received him in a trailing gown and offered him chocolate in a fragile little cup as she who came flying out through the dark, short-skirted and sweatered, to scramble into the big automobile and crowd the engine to the limit of its capacity through the adventurous dark. So they kept to that.

Tony caught her in yet another phase. He came unexpectedly, when she thought he had forgotten. If he had never come, he would in time have become a sort of private legend to her.

Mrs. Hamilton let him in, but did not trouble to announce him. He found Hope a little dishevelled and fatigued, in a ruffled print house-frock, holding the Hamilton baby on her knee, and telling him stories with a slightly absent air. She was hardly thinking of the stories; her mind was really occupied pleasantly with the aspect of the room which she had just dusted and set in order. The geranium glistened from a late watering, sitting in the window where it caught the last daylight. The baby, with an expression of serious rapture, repeated after her such phrases of the story as caught his ear, and pored attentively over certain pictures Hope had drawn to make it clear to his youthful mind. She and Mary amused themselves so at times. The stories, Mary wrote; and Hope sketched for them as they progressed. When they were finished, the girls tore them up, or allowed them to accumulate in odd corners, thinking of them merely as divertisement.

HE did not rise at his entrance, but offered him her hand, still clutching little Bobby with a kind of desperation, and terribly conscious of her tumbled hair. Bobby had pulled it down into her eyes, and her collar was unfastened, and she felt too confused to correct either negligence. It would have been like decking herself for his approval, and she wanted him, somehow, to accept her as "a poor thing, but his own," without garnishment.

"How domestic you look," he said, laughing.

"But I am horribly domestic," she assured him. He laughed more, and insisted on hearing the rest of the story, looking at her sketches with real interest and some amazement, such as most of us feel when one we know displays a talent, however slight. Achievement, to the majority of us, seems to be possible only to persons we do not know: super-beings, not accessible in daily life.

"But you're alarmingly clever," he said, to her great embarrassment. She clutched Bobby till he squirmed and murmured, "No, no," very positively. Then the baby insisted on being let go: she led him to the door, came back and sat down tentatively. She felt as though she must entertain Tony, and at the same time as though she herself did not require any entertainment, but merely to sit and see him opposite her. But she must have talked of something, for they laughed a great deal in the next half-hour, and at the end of it he was sitting beside her on the cushioned wicker settee. The awkwardness had passed.

Tony Yorke enjoyed life a great deal because he never knew exactly what he was going to do, and so suffered no disappointments, while at the same time everything had for him the flavour of novelty. He had not meant to make love to Hope when he set out to see her, but neither had he any resolution formed against it. When he touched her hand in taking a match from her fingers, he had not meant to retain it, but he did. It lay in his, submissive and yet uncertain; and then he captured the other and drew her toward him. It was dusk now; she had not put on the lights, but her clear yet clouded blue eyes, fixed on his, had an illumination of their own, and her hands were pearly white in his brown ones. She said nothing as he bent to her, but watched him, and hew waited on her word, ready to release her, even while he still drew her closer. Then her eyelids fell softly, and he knew he was going to kiss her.

And when he touched her cool, trembling lips he knew, however incredible it would have seemed but an hour earlier that he loved her,

He had been aware of a kind of charm that had fallen on them at their first meeting, but had afterward put it down to the music, the excitement of the dance, the exotic atmosphere of an assemblage of young and light-hearted pleasure-seekers. Now, with her in his arms, he knew she had sounded the depths of his nature—shallow water all, but all of him. He was essentially a lover of women, not of one woman, but, at the least, he loved them all for their fineness, and his own type of woman was not the type that touched him emotionally. Rather, perhaps he was all things to all women, but himself first—and last.

His tribute was the conventional one, but still again his best, and all he had, and even a little more. For he spoke of marriage, not that night, but the next time. And he knew quite well that, by his own standard, he could not afford to marry. Subconsciously, he had always expected to marry a girl with money. Not for her money, but it would just happen so. Yet he said, after Hope had come forward timidly, and put her hands in his:

"I'm going to marry you, you know?" (See opposite page)