§ 17
He took these rages of hers very humbly. He was becoming extraordinarily tame. “I suppose you find me exasperating,” he said, “but you must realize that I’m trying my best to understand you. You want me to make my life all over, and it isn’t easy for me to see the necessity of it. What harm do I do here, just by keeping to myself?”
Sylvia was touched by his tone, and she tried again to explain. “It isn’t that you keep to yourself,” she said. “You cultivate a contempt for your classmates, and they reply with hatred and envy, and so you break up college life. It’s true, isn’t it, that there’s a struggle going on now?”
“The class elections, you mean?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. So much bitterness and intriguing, because you keep to yourself! Why do you come to college at all? Surely you won’t say it’s the professors and the studies!”
“No,” said he, smiling in spite of himself.
“You come, and you make yourself into a kind of idol. Excuse me, if it isn’t polite, but what I said the other night is the truth—the Golden Calf! And what I say is, try the other plan a while. Stop thinking about yourself, and what they are thinking about you—above all, what they are thinking about your money. They won’t all be thinking about your money.”
He did not answer promptly. “Apparently,” she said, “you don’t feel quite sure. If you can’t, I know several real men that I could introduce you to—men right in your own class.”
“Who are they?”
She hesitated. She was about to say Frank Shirley, but concluded not to. “I met one the other day—he doesn’t belong to a club, yet he’s the most interesting person I’ve encountered here. He talked about you, and he wasn’t complimentary; but if you sought him out in the right way, and made it clear you weren’t trying to patronize him, I’m sure he’d be a friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Mr. Firmin.”
“Oh!” said van Tuiver, and looked annoyed.
“You know him?”
“By sight. He has a bitter tongue.”
“No more bitter than you need, Mr. van Tuiver—if you are going to hear the truth about yourself.”
The other hesitated. “I really do want to win your regard—” he began.
“I don’t want you to do anything to win my regard! If you do these things, it must be because you want to do them. At present you’re just your money, your position—your Royalty, as I’ve come to call it. But I’m not the least bit concerned about your Royalty; your houses and your servants and your automobiles are a bore to me—worse than that, they’re wicked, for no man has a right to spend so much money on himself, to have a whole house to himself——.”
“Please,” he pleaded, “stop scolding about my house. I couldn’t change now, for it’s only a couple of weeks to Commencement.”
“It would have all the more effect,” she declared, “if you moved into a dormitory now. Here are the class elections, and your class split up——”
“You don’t realize my position,” he interrupted. “It’s not merely a question of what I want. There’s Ridgely Shackleford, our candidate for class president; if I deserted him and went over to the ‘Yard,’ they’d say I was a traitor, a coward—worse than that, they’d say I was a fool! I wouldn’t have a friend left in the college.”
“You really think it would be so bad?”
“It would be worse. I haven’t told you half. When the story got about, I’d become a booby in society; I’d have to give up my clubs, I’d be a complete outcast. I tell you, you simply can’t break down the barriers of your class.”
Sylvia sat in silence, pondering his words. Suddenly she became aware that he was gazing at her eagerly. “Miss Castleman,” he began, his voice trembling slightly, “what I want above all else is your friendship. I’d do anything to win it—I’d give up anything in the world. I have a regard for you—a most intense admiration. If I knew it would make me mean something to you—why then, I’d be willing to go to any extreme, to defy everybody else. But suppose I do this, and I’m left all alone——”
“If you did this you’d have new friends—real friends.”
“But the friend I want is you!”
Sylvia answered, “If you did what was right because it was right, if you showed yourself willing to dare something for the sake of principle—why then, right away you’d become worth while. You’d not have to ask for my friendship.”
He hesitated. “Suppose—suppose that I should find that I wanted more than friendship——”
She had been prepared for that—and she stopped him instantly. “Friendship comes first,” she said.
“But,” he pleaded, “give me some idea. Could I not expect——”
“You asked me to be a friend to you, to help you by telling you the truth. That is what we have been discussing. Pray let there be no mistake about it. Friendship comes first.”
Why did Sylvia take such a course with him? You would have a false idea of her character if you did not realize that it was the first time she had ever done such a thing—and that it was a hard thing for her to do. To refuse to let a man propose to her! To forbear to draw him on, to investigate him, to see what he would reply to various baffling remarks!
It was not because she was engaged to Frank Shirley. Under the code which Lady Dee had taught her that made simply no difference whatever. Under that code it was her duty to secure every man who came into her reach; she might remain uncertain in her own mind, she might continue to explore and experiment up to the very moment when the wedding ring was slipped upon her finger. Sylvia had never forgotten Aunt Lady’s vivid image: “Stand them up in a line, my child, and when you get ready, walk down the line and pick the one you want!”
She had set up a barrier before van Tuiver, and he pushed against it. The more firm she made it, the more he was moved to push. But suppose she gave way the least little bit, suppose he felt the barrier breaking—then would he not stop pushing, would he not shrink away? What fun to try him, to watch him hesitating, advancing and retreating, trembling with desire and with terror! To analyze the mixture of his longing and his caution, to add a little to the one or the other, and then see the result. Sylvia with a new man was like a chemist’s assistant, mixing strange liquids in a test-tube, possessed with a craze to know whether the precipitate would be red or green or yellow—and quite undeterred by the possibility of being blown through the skylight.
But tempting as was the game, she could not play it with Douglas van Tuiver. It was as if an angel stood between them with a flaming sword. Douglas van Tuiver was no subject for joke, he was not a man as other men—he was Royalty. With Royalty one must be stern and unfaltering. “Friendship comes first,” she had said; and though before that ride was over he had come again and again to the barrier, he never broke past it, nor felt any sign of its yielding to his touch.