"Of course I"m glad to be in the firm," I admitted.
It was a new tack for Nancy, rather a disquieting one, this discussion of my affairs, which she had so long avoided or ignored. "You are getting what you have always wanted, aren"t you?"
I wondered in some trepidation whether by that word "always" she was making a deliberate reference to the past.
"Always?" I repeated, rather fatuously.
"Nearly always, ever since you have been a man."
I was incapable of taking advantage of the opening, if it were one. She was baffling.
"A man likes to succeed in his profession, of course," I said.
"And you made up your mind to succeed more deliberately than most men. I needn"t ask you if you are satisfied, Hugh. Success seems to agree with you,--although I imagine you will never be satisfied."
"Why do you say that?" I demanded.
"I haven"t known you all your life for nothing. I think I know you much better than you know yourself."
"You haven"t acted as if you did," I exclaimed.
She smiled.
"Have you been interested in what I thought about you?" she asked.
"That isn"t quite fair, Nancy," I protested. "You haven"t given me much evidence that you did think about me."
"Have I received much encouragement to do so?" she inquired.
"But you haven"t seemed to invite--you"ve kept me at arm"s length."
"Oh, don"t fence!" she cried, rather sharply.
I had become agitated, but her next words gave me a shock that was momentarily paralyzing.
"I asked you to come here to-day, Hugh, because I wished you to know that I have made up my mind to marry Hambleton Durrett."
"Hambleton Durrett!" I echoed stupidly. "Hambleton Durrett!"
"Why not?"
"Have you--have you accepted him?"
"No. But I mean to do so."
"You--you love him?"
"I don"t see what right you have to ask."
"But you just said that you invited me here to talk frankly."
"No, I don"t love him."
"Then why, in heaven"s name, are you going to marry him?"
She lay back in her chair, regarding me, her lips slightly parted. All at once the full flavour of her, the superfine quality was revealed after years of blindness.--Nor can I describe the sudden rebellion, the revulsion that I experienced. Hambleton Durrett! It was an outrage, a sacrilege! I got up, and put my hand on the mantel. Nancy remained motionless, inert, her head lying back against the chair. Could it be that she were enjoying my discomfiture? There is no need to confess that I knew next to nothing of women; had I been less excited, I might have made the discovery that I still regarded them sentimentally. Certain romantic axioms concerning them, garnered from Victorian literature, pa.s.sed current in my mind for wisdom; and one of these declared that they were p.r.o.ne to remain true to an early love. Did Nancy still care for me? The query, coming as it did on top of my emotion, brought with it a strange and overwhelming perplexity. Did I really care for her? The many years during which I had practised the habit of caution began to exert an inhibiting pressure. Here was a situation, an opportunity suddenly thrust upon me which might never return, and which I was utterly unprepared to meet. Would I be happy with Nancy, after all? Her expression was still enigmatic.
"Why shouldn"t I marry him?" she demanded.
"Because he"s not good enough for you."
"Good!" she exclaimed, and laughed. "He loves me. He wants me without reservation or calculation." There was a sting in this. "And is he any worse," she asked slowly, "than many others who might be mentioned?"
"No," I agreed. I did not intend to be led into the thankless and disagreeable position of condemning Hambleton Durrett. "But why have you waited all these years if you did not mean to marry a man of ability, a man who has made something of himself?"
"A man like you, Hugh?" she said gently.
I flushed.
"That isn"t quite fair, Nancy."
"What are you working for?" she suddenly inquired, straightening up.
"What any man works for, I suppose."
"Ah, there you have hit it,--what any man works for in our world.
Power,--personal power. You want to be somebody,--isn"t that it? Not the n.o.blest ambition, you"ll have to admit,--not the kind of thing we used to dream about, when we did dream. Well, when we find we can"t realize our dreams, we take the next best thing. And I fail to see why you should blame me for taking it when you yourself have taken it. Hambleton Durrett can give it to me. He"ll accept me on my own terms, he won"t interfere with me, I shan"t be disillusionized,--and I shall have a position which I could not hope to have if I remained unmarried, a very marked position as Hambleton Durrett"s wife. I am thirty, you know."
Her frankness appalled me.
"The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive yourself. You throw a glamour over things. You want to keep your cake and eat it too.
"I don"t see why you say that. And marriage especially--"
She took me up.
"Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? Unless she is married, and married well, according to the money standard you men have set up, she is n.o.body. We can"t all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to imagine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. What is left? Nothing but marriage. I"m hard and cynical, you will say, but I have thought, and I"m not afraid, as I have told you, to look things in the face. There are very few women, I think, who would not take the real thing if they had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn"t be willing to do their own cooking in order to get it."
She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room.
"For G.o.d"s sake, don"t do this, Nancy!" I begged.
But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she had not heard me.
"If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you tell me?" I asked.
"Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I once was, to what you once were," she said. "A--a sort of good-bye to sentiment."
"Nancy!" I said hoa.r.s.ely.