VIII
Grace had been home a week when she received a letter from Trenton, written in Pittsburgh. He was closing up his home; looking after the settlement of Mrs. Trenton’s estate. She had bequeathed her considerable property to the societies for social reform in which she had been interested. He hoped to be in Indianapolis shortly, he wrote, and continued:
... “My thoughts in these past weeks have not been happy ones; but I must turn now to the future. In my dark hours I have groped toward you, felt the need of your leading hand. I love you. That is the one great fact in the world. Whatever I have left to me of life is yours; and it is now my right to give it.... It was my fate, not my fault, that I learned to love you. Nothing can change that. Let me begin over again and prove my love for you—win you as it is a woman’s right to be won, in the world’s eyes. I want you to bear my name; belong to me truly, help me to find and keep the path of happiness.”
She did not understand herself as the days passed and she felt no impulse to reply. She loved him still—there was no question of that—but she tortured herself with the idea that he had written only from a chivalrous sense of obligation. Trenton was free; but she too was free; and marriage was an uncertain quantity. She encouraged in herself the belief that to marry him would be only to invite unhappiness. While she was still debating with herself, she learned from Irene that Trenton was again in town and working hard.
The new club for business girls, which Miss Reynolds decided to name Friendship House, was in process of furnishing and was to be opened on Thanksgiving Day.
Nothing in the preparations had proved so embarrassing as the choice of the first occupants. It might have seemed that all the young women in town were clamoring for admission and only fifty could be accommodated. Miss Reynolds and Grace spent many hours interviewing applicants. Then, too, there was the matter of working out a plan for the general management of Friendship House until the club members took hold of it for themselves.
“The girls can make their own rules,” said Miss Reynolds. “But I’m going to have one little rule printed and put in every room and worked into all the doormats and stamped into the linen—just two words—Be Kind! If we’d all live up to that this would be a lot more comfortable world to live in!”
Being so constantly at Miss Reynolds’s Grace had heard the Bob Cummingses mentioned frequently. The merger had obliterated the name from the industrial life of the city; the senior Cummings had gone West to live with his eldest son and Miss Reynolds had spoken frequently of the plight in which the collapse of the family fortunes had left Bob. Evelyn came in one morning when Grace was alone in the improvised office.
“We’ve sold our house,” she announced, after they had talked awhile. “It was mine, you know; a wedding present from my uncle. And I’ve got about a thousand a year. So I’m going to turn Bob loose at his music. He’s already got a job as organist in Dr. Ridgley’s church and he’s going to teach and do some lecturing on music. He can do that wonderfully.”
“That’s perfectly splendid!” said Grace warmly. “But it’s too bad—the business troubles. I’ve wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“Well, I’m not so sure any one ought to be sorry for us. Our difficulties have brought Bob and me closer together, and our chances of happiness are brighter than on our wedding day; really they are! I’m saying this to you because you know Bob so well, and I think you’ll understand.”
Grace was not sure that she did understand and when Evelyn left she meditated for a long time upon the year’s changes. She had so jauntily gone out to meet the world, risking her happiness in her confidence that she was capable of directing her own destiny; but life was not so easy! Life was an inexorable schoolmaster who set very hard problems indeed!
Irene, pretending to be jealous of Miss Reynolds, declared that there was no reason why Grace, in becoming a philanthropist should forget her old friends. This was on an afternoon when Grace, in Shipley’s to pick up some odds and ends for Friendship House, looked into the ready-to-wear floor for a word with Irene.
Hard-pressed to defend her neglect she accepted an invitation to accompany Irene and John to a movie that night.
“John will have to work for an hour or so but we can get in for the second show. You just come up to Judge Sanders’ office about eight and we can have an old-fashioned heart-to-heart talk till John’s ready. You never take me into your confidence any more,” she concluded with an injured air.
“I don’t have any confidences; but if I had you certainly wouldn’t escape.”
“You’re not seeing, Ward, I suppose?” Irene asked carelessly.
“No,” Grace replied with badly-feigned indifference. “I haven’t seen him and I have no intention of seeing him again.”
“I suppose it’s all over,” said Irene stifling a yawn.
“Yes, it’s all over,” Grace replied testily.
“Strange but Ward just can’t get that idea! Of course he’s had a lot to do and think about but he’d never force himself on you.”
“No; he wouldn’t do that,” Grace assented.
“Ward’s a free man,” said Irene dreamily. “He’ll probably marry again.”
“Irene! It was silly of me to be as crazy about him as I was. That freedom I used to talk about was all rubbish. We can’t do as we please in this world,—you and I both learned that! And after—well—after all that happened I could never marry Ward. And it would be a mistake for him to marry me—a girl—who——”
“Grace Durland!” Irene interrupted with lofty scorn, “you are talking like an idiot! You’re insulting yourself and you’re insulting Ward. I know a few things. He telephoned you at Miss Reynolds’s twice and asked to see you and you refused. Don’t let Miss Beulah Reynolds intimidate you! She took you to Colorado hoping you’d forget Ward!”
“Miss Reynolds is perfectly fine!” Grace flared. “She’s never said a word against Ward!”
“Oh, she wouldn’t need to say it! She’s just trying to keep you away from him. I’m not knocking Beulah—she’s all right; but when there’s a man in the world who is eating his heart out about you, you just can’t stick your nose in the air and pretend you don’t know he’s alive.”
Grace had been proud of her strength in denying Trenton the interview for which he had asked; but she left Irene with an unquiet heart. Trenton was lonely, and his letter had been written in a fine and tender spirit. She knew that she was guilty of dishonesty in trying to persuade herself that the nature of their past association made marriage with him impossible. He had said nothing that even remotely suggested this. On the other hand he had declared plainly that sooner or later he would have her, meaning, of course, through marriage. She despised herself for her inconsistencies. She had told him that she loved him; love alone could have justified their relationship; and yet she was viewing him in the harshest light without giving him the hearing for which he had asked at the earliest moment possible.