Rose was very glad to have him take a seat near, and they were friends at once. They naturally fell upon Mary as a topic. Mr. Taylor spoke of her quietly:
"Mary"s a fine girl," he said. "I don"t like to see her work. I don"t like to see any woman do work like that. I don"t claim any right to say what women shall do or not do, but I imagine they wouldn"t go into shops if they were not, in a way, forced into it."
Rose defended the right of a girl to earn her own living. He hastened to explain further:
"Of course a woman should be free and independent, but is she free when pressure forces her into typewriting or working in a sweat-shop?"
Rose turned his thoughts at last by asking about the West. He expanded like flame at the thought.
"Ah! the old equatorial wind is blowing today, and my hair crackles with electricity." He smiled as he ran his hands through his hair. "On such days I long for my pony again. Sometimes, when I can"t stand it any longer, I take a train to some little station and go out and lie flat down on the gra.s.s on my back, so that I can"t see anything but sky; then I can almost imagine myself back again where the lone old peaks bulge against the sky. Do you know John Muir and Joaquin Miller?"
Rose shook her head. His eyes glowed with enthusiasm.
"There are two men who know the wilderness. Your Th.o.r.eau I"ve read, but he don"t interest me the way these Rocky Mountain fellows do. Your eastern fellows don"t really know a wilderness--they"re sort o" back pasture explorers. John isn"t a bit theatrical, he"s been there. He doesn"t take a train of guides to explore a glacier, he sticks a crust of bread in his belt along with a tin cup, and goes alone. I"ve been with John in the Sierras, and once he came over into my range."
Rose defended Emerson and Th.o.r.eau as if she were the easterner this Colorado hunter considered her. As she talked he fixed great absent-minded eyes upon her, and absorbed every line of her face, every curve of her lips--every changing wave of color.
"I don"t care for the wilderness as you do. What is a bird compared to a man, anyway? I like people. I want to be where dramas are being played.
Men make the world, bears don"t." She ended hotly.
He slowly withdrew his gaze.
"I guess you"re right." He smiled a wise smile. "If the wilderness had been everything in the world, I wouldn"t be here. A woman is more than a flower. A woman would make my mountains a paradise."
"You have no right to ask a woman to go there with you--not to stay,"
she added quickly.
His smile pa.s.sed.
"You"re right again. Unless I could find a woman who loves the wilderness as I do."
"That is out of the question," she replied. "No woman loves the wilderness--as a home. All women love cities and streets and children."
She had a young person"s readiness to generalize, and pitilessly flung these hopeless truisms at him. He arose, apparently made sadder by them.
He sighed.
"But civilization carries such terrible suffering with it."
Rose went to her room and looked at her other letters of introduction.
Should she present them? What would be the use. The scene with Dr.
Herrick had not been pleasant; true, it had apparently brought her a friend, but it was a rigorous experience, and she hardly felt it worth while at the moment to go through another such scene to win another such friend.
She fell to looking over her ma.n.u.scripts. They were on lined paper, st.i.tched together at the top. They were imitative, of course, and leaned toward the Elizabethan drama, and toward Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, so far as verse-form went. There were also essays which she had written at college, which inquired mournfully, who will take the place of the fallen giants, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson? She had eloquent studies of Hugo and valiant defences of d.i.c.kens. She reflected in her writing (naturally) all the conventional positions in literature. She stood upon the graves of the dead as if she feared they might be desecrated.
She was a pupil, and as a pupil she had considered literature as something necessarily afar off, in England or France, in Boston and Cambridge, though she had come to think Chicago might be a place suitable for a humble beginning, but that it might be the subject of literature had not occurred to her. She had never known a person who had written a book. Professor Ellis and the President had written scientific treatises, but, not being a fool, she knew there was a difference between getting an article into a country weekly and getting into a big daily, to say nothing of the great magazines. She wished for advice.
Being out in the world now, something must be done with her writings.
These essays were good and thoughtful, they represented study and toil, but they did not represent her real self, her real emotions, any more than her reading represented her real liking. Her emotions, big, vital, contemporaneous, had no part in this formal and colorless pedantry. Of this she was still ignorant, however.
She was sorting her poems over and dreaming about them when Mary came home.
"O, you dear! I"ve been thinking about you all day. Did you see your woman doctor?"
"Yes."
"Did you like her?"
"Well, I don"t know--yes, I think I do. I didn"t at first."
"Where else did you go?"
"Nowhere. I came home to lunch."
"Eat alone?" Mary was taking off her things and was more than usually fragmentary.
"No. Mr. Taylor was there." Mary faced her.
"Now see here, Rose Dutcher, do you want to break my heart into smithereens? If you do, you go on lunching with Owen Taylor."
Rose laughed at her tone of simulated sorrow and dismay.
"He moved down to my end of the table, too."
Mary plumped into a chair and stared.
"Well, that finishes me. I"m coming home to lunch after this. If you prove a _terrater_, I"ll have your back hair, Rose Dutcher."
"I couldn"t help it. He didn"t want to shout at me across the table."
Mary"s voice softened.
"What did you talk about?"
"He talked about you."
"Did he? What did he say?"
"He said you were a good girl, and you are."
"Is that all?"
"What more could you ask?"
"He might "ave praised me beauty!" Then she laughed and rushed at Rose and hugged her for some reason not expressed.
"Isn"t he just grand?"
"I"m going out to dinner Sunday night!"