"He probably doesn"t," was Madelene"s douche-like reply. "You attract him physically--which includes his feeling that you"d show off better than Theresa before the world for which he cares so much. But, after all, that"s much the way you care for him, isn"t it?"
Adelaide"s bosom was swelling and falling agitatedly. Her eyes flashed; her reserve vanished. "I"m sure he"d love me!" cried she. "He"d give me what my whole soul, my whole body cry out for. Madelene, you don"t understand! I am so starved, so out in the cold! I want to go in where it"s warm--and--human!" The truth, the deep-down truth, was out at last; Adelaide had wrenched it from herself.
"And Dory will not give you that?" said Madelene, all gentleness and sympathy, and treading softly on this dangerous, delicate ground.
"He gives me nothing!" exclaimed Adelaide bitterly. "He is waiting for me to learn to love him. He ought to know that a woman has to be taught to love--at least the sort of woman I am. He treats me as if I were his equal, when he ought to see that I"m not; that I"m like a child, and have to be shown what"s good for me, and _made_ to take it."
"Then, perhaps, after all," said Madelene slowly, "you do care for Dory."
"Of course I care for him; how could anyone help it? But he won"t let me--he won"t let me!" She was on the verge of hysteria, and her loss of self-control was aggravated by the feeling that she was making a weak, silly exhibition of herself.
"If you do care for Dory, and Dory cares for you, and you don"t care for Ross--" began Madelene.
"But I do care for Ross, too! Oh, I must be bad--bad! Could a nice woman care for two men at the same time?"
"I"d have said not," was Madelene"s answer. "But now I see that she could--and I see why."
"Dory means something to me that Ross does not. Ross means something that Dory does not. I want it all--all that both of them represent. I can"t give up Dory; I can"t give up Ross. You don"t understand, Madelene, because you"ve had the good luck to get it all from Arthur."
After a silence, Madelene said: "Well, Del, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing."
"That"s sensible!" approved Madelene. "If Ross really loves you, then, whether he can have you or not, he"ll free himself from Theresa. He simply couldn"t go on with her. And if you really care for him, then, when Dory comes home he"ll free you."
"That ought to be so," said Adelaide, not seeing the full meaning of Madelene"s last words. "But it isn"t. Neither Ross nor I is strong enough. We"re just ordinary people, the sort that most everybody is and that most everybody despises when they see them or read about them as they really are. No, he and I will each do the conventional thing. We"ll go our separate ways "--contemptuously--"the _easiest_ ways. And we"ll regard ourselves as martyrs to duty--that"s how they put it in the novels, isn"t it?"
"At least," said Madelene, with a calmness she was far from feeling, "both you and Ross have had your lesson in the consequence of doing things in a hurry."
"That"s the only way people brought up as we"ve been ever do anything. If we don"t act on impulse, we don"t act at all; we drift on."
"Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action." Madelene was again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself.
Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found Adelaide restored to her usual appearance--the fashionable, light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene"s common-sense a.n.a.lysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn"t name the third. What is it?"
"Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.
Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law"s level gaze. "Yes,"
was all she said.
A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem at all, so far as Dory or Ross"s wife is concerned; or the whole outside world, for that matter. It"s purely personal; it"s altogether the problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others"ll get over it; but can you?"
Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to another her naked soul, and that other a woman--true, an unusual woman, by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other than herself would know her as she really was--not at all the nice, delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels, who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I don"t care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of human nature."
CHAPTER XXV
MAN AND GENTLEMAN
A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of mind, coming home from supper at her mother"s, found Estelle Wilmot on the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with her at the Villa d"Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered that she had been blind to what was now obvious.
"Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle, "Perhaps he hasn"t told you that he was made superintendent of the cooperage to-day?"
Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing. "He was just telling me,"
replied she.
"I understand why you yielded," continued Adelaide to Lorry. "Arthur has been showing me the plans for the new factories. Gardens all round, big windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot, a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing rooms--everything! Who"d have believed that work could be carried on in such surroundings?"
"It"s about time, isn"t it," said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice, "that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?"
"How sensible that is!" said Del admiringly. "Yet n.o.body thinks of it."
"Why," Lorry went on, "the day"ll come when they"ll look back on the way we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes. The fellows that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don"t realize what ignorant savages they themselves are."
"They have no imagination," said Estelle.
"No imagination," echoed Lorry. "That"s the secret of the stupidity and the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing"s done to-day is the way it"ll always be done."
"I"m afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when these new plans are announced," said Del.
Arthur"s revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint X against him. Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling up "to save their children from fear of want"--as if that same "fear of want" were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human animal! They explained to their workmen that the university industries were not business enterprises at all, and therefore must not be confused and compared with enterprises that were "practical"; but the workmen fixed tenaciously upon the central fact that the university"s men worked at mechanical labor fewer hours each day by four to seven, and even eight, got higher wages, got more out of life in every way. Nor was there any of the restraint and degradation of the "model town." The workers could live and act as they pleased; it was by the power of an intelligent public opinion that Arthur was inducing his fellows and their families to build for themselves attractive homes, to live in tasteful comfort, to acquire sane habits of eating, drinking, and personal appearance. And no one was more amazed than himself at the swiftness with which the overwhelming majority responded to the opportunity. Small wonder that the other manufacturers, who at best never went beyond the crafty, inexpensive schemes of benevolent charity, were roaring against the university as a "hotbed of anarchy."
At Adelaide"s suggestion of the outburst that would follow the new and still more "inflammatory" revolution, Lorry shrugged his shoulders and laughed easily. "n.o.body need worry for that brother of yours, Mrs.
Hargrave," said he. "There may be some factories for sale cheap before many years. If so, the university can buy them in and increase its usefulness. Dory and Arthur are going to have a university that will be up to the name before they get through--one for all ages and kinds, and both s.e.xes, and for everybody all his life long and in all his relations."
"It"s a beautiful dream," said Del. She was remembering how Dory used to enlarge upon it in Paris until his eloquence made her feel that she loved him at the same time that it also gave her a chilling sense of his being far from her, too big and impersonal for so intimate and personal a thing as the love she craved. "A beautiful dream," she repeated with a sigh.
"That"s the joy of life," said Estelle, "isn"t it? To have beautiful dreams, and to help make them come true."
"And this one is actually coming true," said Lorry. "Wait a few years, only a few, and you"ll see the discoveries of science make everything so cheap that vulgar, vain people will give up vulgarity and vanity in despair. A good many of the once aristocratic vulgarities have been cheapened into absurdity already. The rest will follow."
"Only a few years?" said Del, laughing, yet more than half-convinced.
"Use your imagination, Mrs. Hargrave," replied Lorry, in his large, good-humored way. "Don"t be afraid to be sensible just because most people look on common sense as insanity. A hundred things that used to be luxuries for the king alone are now so cheap that the day-laborer has them--all in less than two lifetimes of real science! To-morrow or next day some one will discover, say, the secret of easily and cheaply interchanging the so-called elements. Bang! the whole structure of swagger and envy will collapse!"
They all laughed, and Del went into the house. "Estelle--no woman, no matter who--could hope to get a better husband than Lorry," she was thinking. "And, now that he"s superintendent, there"s no reason why they shouldn"t marry. What a fine thing, what an American thing, that a man with no chance at all in the start should be able to develop himself so that a girl like Estelle could--yes, and should--be proud of his love and proud to love him." She recalled how Lorry at the high school was about the most amusing of the boys, with the best natural manner, and far and away the best dancer; how he used to be invited everywhere, until excitement about fashion and "family" reached Saint X; how he was then gradually dropped until he, realizing what was the matter, haughtily "cut" all his former friends and a.s.sociates. "We"ve certainly been racing downhill these last few years. Where the Wilmots used to be about the only silly people in town, there are scores of families now with noses in the air and eyes looking eagerly about for chances to snub. But, on the other hand, there"s the university, and Arthur--and Dory." She dismissed Lorry and Estelle and Saint X"s fashionable strivings and, in the library, sat down to compose a letter to Dory--no easy task in those days, when there were seething in her mind and heart so much that she longed to tell him but ought not, so much that she ought to tell but could not.
Lorry had acted as if he were about to depart, while Adelaide was there; he resumed his seat on the steps at Estelle"s feet as soon as she disappeared. "I suppose I ought to go," said he, with a humorous glance up at her face with its regular features and steadfast eyes.
She ran her slim fingers through his hair, let the tips of them linger an instant on his lips before she took her hand away.
"I couldn"t let you go just yet," said she slowly, absently. "This is the climax of the day. In this great, silent, dim light all my dreams--all our dreams--seem to become realities and to be trooping down from the sky to make us happy."
A pause, then he: "I can see them now." But soon he moved to rise. "It frightens me to be as happy as I am this evening. I must go, dear. We"re getting bolder and bolder. First thing you know, your brother will be suspecting--and that means your mother."
"I don"t seem to care any more," replied the girl. "Mother is really in much better health, and has got pretty well prepared to expect almost anything from me. She has become resigned to me as a "working person."