Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/915

Rh skin and huge projecting front teeth full of gold, when a man's whole Self was one passion for beauty, one aspiration to express it!

"Oh!" cried Gertrude, her voice sharp, hurt. "How could she?" Her attitude was all-protective. He saw tears in her eyes.

"Why, you dear girl!"

"There—never mind me," she apologized, with a sob of laughter and a crying twist of a smile. "I just can't bear to have anything suffer. I'm always burdening mother here with starved cats and mutilated curs; and it's the ugly, stupid, ill-natured youngsters in the class I take to. I suppose it's fellow-feeling; and I want to make it up to them, give them a chance. You see, I know just how it is." It was partly offering the consolation of the tola of black-mustard seed, partly the natural human impulse to match experiences and confide in a confidant. "I've always been handicapped and left out too. It's like being shut in a contracting prison-cell whose walls come a little nearer every day. With me it's the State boundaries and long division when I'm just longing to live. Oh, I thoroughly enjoy the children, yes; but nothing ever happens to me. I feel like running away to Chicago or New York. Don't you love a big city? People talk of its artificiality. Why, it's as elemental as a storm, as stimulating, and, I suppose, as exhausting.

"But the country—" the poet began.

"Yes, I love the country; it's real, too. In the country one can see the day; in town it's only the weather. But the big city is like the mountains or sea. One could really live—and love—in either place. Oh yes," she laughed, with a becoming color as his eyebrows lifted, "everybody else has aspirations too, you see. That's all part of a pet day-dream I used to keep when I was young, and fed on a One Man, an Only Man diet. Dangerous things, these carnivorous day-dreams!"

"The idea of your using the past tense!"

"Ah, so you appreciated that subtle epitaph? Drop a tear with me." So one presses a bruise to see how sore it is. "But you're not surprised? Don't the natural histories state how short the life is of a day-dream in captivity?"

Humor protected the admission, and Darcy laughed with her, both warmed again by that sense of mutual good-will. "You're the best fellow I know, Miss Renshaw. You've quite made me forget," he added. "But even you can't quite understand. You're naturally bright and brave, and I But then I've never had any one who cared or understood or appreciated, even at home,—oh, there least of all! I've been lonely all my life, and now"—he drooped—"the one work that has made it worth while is evidently no good."

"Nonsense!" Gertrude sounded fairly indignant. "Lots of your things are good. So many modern poets just blow bubbles of mysticism; one touches them to see what they really are, and there's nothing there. Or they write mere metre that swings through the head and out; one can't remember a phrase of it, and it never meant anything, anyway. Everything of yours I know has some beautiful idea, and yet there's mystery and music in them all, too."

Darcy listened, detached and judicial. "Do you really think so? No, no,"—he began to smile in spite of himself,—" of course I can't question your critical ability, can I?" He hastily assumed an alias for his pleasure. "But are you sure you're not a jollier? How do you make every man feel that you like him and like him?"

"I don't. Not every one."

He always liked that honest way she had. Now his fingers closed over hers, that, warm and quick, met his simply. Then she realized that he was looking at her as if he had never seen her before. The hour's implication of a tacit, a unique, intimacy had drawn round them a magic circle over which no outsider could step, which shut them in, alone, remote. In the pause the sense of nearness grew strong, too strong to bear. Uncertainly, she drew away.

Instantly his face clouded. "Of course. What a fool I am! You've never even given me a thought!"

"Why, you never asked me to!"

"But now? Oh, I didn't understand, myself! I feel as if I had just emerged from bathing, after some occult anointing, in the pool of Siloam." Indeed, Gertrude felt that her own eyes must just