After all, this girl had been good to her. She would do what she could. She stood tall and straight against the curtains of the window facing the rest and breathing quickly.
“Yes—I know of him,” she said, answering their unspoken inquiry. “You think you know him through his books and the reviews and newspaper notices of him.” Her voice was ringing now and she touched the picture lightly and scornfully with her finger.
“I know him better than that. I know things of him that will not be told in newspaper paragraphs and book reviews.” She paused and her face grew whiter. “You read his stories, and because they are the best of their kind, the most correct, the most interesting, because his men are the men you like to know, men who are always as they should be to men, because there is an atmosphere of refinement and elegance and pleasing conventionality about them—you think they must be the reflex of himself. O yes! I know—the very last story—you have all read it—who could be more magnificent and correct than Roscommon? And you think him like his hero! There is not one of you but would feel flattered at his attentions, you might easily fall in love with him—I dare say you would scarcely refuse him—and yet”—she broke off suddenly.
“There was a girl,” she began after a moment’s hesitation, in a tone from which all the excitement had died, “a friend of mine, and she loved him. Perhaps you do not know that before he became famous he lived in a small Western town—she lived there too. They grew up together, and she was as proud of him—well, you know probably just how proud a girl can be of a boy who has played with her and scolded her and tyrannized over her and protected her and afterward loved her. For he did love her. He told her so a thousand times and he showed it
to her in a thousand ways. And she loved him! I cannot tell you what he was to her.” They were all looking curiously at her white face and she tried to speak still more calmly.
“Well, after a time his ambition—for he was very ambitious and very talented—made him restless. He wanted to go East—he thought he would succeed. She let him go freely, willingly. His success was hers, he said. Everything he was to do was for her, and she let him go, and she told him then that he could be free. But he was very angry. He said that he would never have thought of going but to be better worthy of her. He succeeded—you know—the world knows how well he has succeeded, and the world likes success, and what wonder that he forgot her. She was handsome—at least her friends told her so—but she was not like the girls he knows now. She was not rich, and she had never been used to the life of luxury and worldliness to which he had so quickly accustomed himself. But,” she went on, protestingly, as if in reply to some unspoken argument or some doubt that had assailed her, “she could have been all he wished her. She was quick and good to look at, and well-bred. She could have easily learned the world’s ways—the ways that have become so vital to him.”
She stopped, and then went on with an air of careful impartiality, as if trying to be just, to look at both sides of the question, and her beautiful face grew whiter with the effort.
“But, of course, she was not like the girls he had met. He used to write to her at first how disgusted he was when those elegant young ladies would pet him and make much of him and use him and his time as they did everything else in their beautiful, idle lives. He did not like it, he said; and then I suppose it amused him, and then fascinated him. They would not let him alone. They wanted him to put them in his stories, and he had to go to their dinners and to the opera with them. He said they wanted someone to ‘show off’; and at first he resented it, but little by little he came to like it and to find it the life he had needed and longed for, and to forget and despise the simpler one he had known in his youth——”