Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/384

358 till I get things clear in my own mind. Then I'll tell you all about it."

And Dora waited.

When Ware came home, the first thing he said was that Dora was thinner; but he had hardly time to speak of it and scold her for it, a worried wrinkle coming between his eyebrows, and kiss Amy, and say she was a villain to have let her mother get thin, when Adèle called him into the library to write an answer to a despatch.

"I think you had better decline," she said, "because—" and then the door closed.

Dora picked up a bit of sewing, and Henry Austin saw that she put the needle in with uncertain fingers. He got up abruptly, and said good night, and betook himself to his club.

"Mormonism!" he said to himself, as old Mrs. Strong had said six months before. "And yet they are both such good people. And what are you going to do about it, Henry Austin?"

And the scars did not throb at all.

Well, as far as he was concerned, there was, of course, one thing he could try to do, and very likely he would not succeed. He had failed before when he had more to offer. Still, he could try So the very next afternoon he gathered together the manuscript on which he had worked all winter—a pleasing, well-bred, ineffective manuscript, much like the pleasing, well-bred man himself,—and he took it to the creator out at Linden Hill.

She was in the library writing notes at Augustine's long mahogany table, with its clutter of silver furnishings, and its orderly piles of docketed papers and letters—the orderliness was hers. She looked up at Henry Austin over her glasses, with charming welcome.

"How nice this is! What! did you bring your manuscript? Good. I want to talk to you about it."

Austin let her talk, and bore the relentless surgery of her criticism without flinching, for the reason that he hardly heard it. She was genuinely interested, however, and after the first ruthless slashes, she found herself able to praise and to appreciate. But in the midst of it, Henry Austin suddenly pushed the manuscript aside, and leaning over the table that was between them, he said,

"Adèle, I think you had better marry me."

Her dumfounded look was not flattering, but the momentary speechlessness of her astonishment gave him the opportunity to explain.

"You know I wanted you years ago, and I want you now. But never mind that. I think you'd better marry me for other reasons—that is, if you don't dislike me, Adèle?"

"Of course I don't dislike you," she said, when she could get her breath, "but, my dear Henry, you are raving crazy! I am a grandmother. Have you forgotten that?"

"Not at all. That's the reason we had better get married. Adèle, you are robbing Augustine, and you've got to stop it."

In her bewilderment she was not at once angry. She repeated, vaguely: "Robbing? Augustine? Harry, you are certainly mad!"

"No, I'm not mad—at least not in the sense you mean. It's like this: You've made Augustine;—well and good. You dug him up out of a barn-yard and put him on his feet on the stage. Well and good. Now let him alone! He has a right to be let alone. Stop being a crutch to the fellow. Let him walk; let him run; let him fly if he can. Or else let him tumble down in the ditch. But do, for Heaven's sake, let him alone!"

By this time the anger in his eyes had kindled a flame in hers; a dark color came up into her face.

"Mr. Austin, I am at a loss to understand—"

"I think I could make you understand," he said, dryly, "but I'd rather not."

"Rather not?"

"Let me make what I said about Ware clearer. You know, Adèle, how profoundly I admire his genius, and how entirely I know that his genius would never have found expression without you? Well, there has come a point in his development when your personality is dominating it, and limiting it, and—"

Austin paused, in a cold perspiration of effort. To tell a small truth and keep quite clear of a large truth was not easy to a temperamentally truthful man. "You are cramping the man fearfully—