The firm, puckered, rather thick lips of Dr. Shonto made a corrugated horizontal line as he drank in the beauty of the picture the drooping girl unconsciously posed for him. He thought of his own pale-blue eyes, his sparse sandy eyebrows, his thin, neutral-coloured hair, his pitted, Gargantuan nose. But he straightened. He had the body of a gladiator, the heart of a knight, the soul of a poet, and his intellect had brought both fame and wealth to his feet. The doctor knew all this; he knew himself, his possibilities and his limitations. He wanted this girl—he deserved her—he had given up his important work to go with her on this impulsively planned expedition and shield her and win her. She was a combination of all that he desired in a wife. To let Andy Jerome take her away from him would be an injustice to all concerned. His brains and his character and his manhood had made an appeal to her, he felt. Were these attributes enough for her? Was not he possessed of attributes of sufficient worthiness to offer in exchange for her beauty and womanly charm? And some women, he knew, were strangely attracted by an ugly man who offers them virility and a masterful personality. And nearly all such women, he had noted in his vast experience of life, were lovely women and intensely feminine.
“Charmian,” he said suddenly, in a voice just loud enough to be heard above the boisterous laughter of the creek, “I’ve been thinking, since the night Andy and I first saw you at El Trono de Tolerancia, that maybe you’re the woman I have been waiting for and longing for ever since I became a man. I came upon this trip with you to find out if my intuition had told me right. It has. The last week of you has shown me that you and I will not be doing our full duty to life unless we are together.”
Her supple body tensed a trifle, then relaxed again. Her long lashes had lifted until he saw the silken sheen of her dark eyes, but now they were dropped once more.
“I’ll admit that I have gone about this thing with practicality,” he continued. “It is, perhaps, my scientific nature that caused me to. It’s better that way. It’s safest. Boys don’t make love as I am making it, but I’m no boy, though I’m none the less sincere. I look upon successful marriage as the ideal partnership. And you will realize when you are a little older, as I do, that companionship is the most important feature of married life. Don’t think that I don’t love you. I do—deeply. But I’m not offering you the blind, fiery, uncontrolled passion of a youth in his twenties. I’m offering you the sincere love of a mature, reasoning man. What do you think of it?”
Charmian Reemy opened her eyes and stole a quick glance at him. The colour in her face was heightened only a little; and, though her heart may have beat a little faster, she was not greatly confused. But a feeling of triumph glowed warm within her. That she, by the not consciously exercised force of her personality and feminine charm, had intrigued this man of big achievements into a proposal of marriage was thrilling.
He was so desperately in earnest that his homely face was transfigured. Facial ugliness she saw only in the light of great strength. His broad smile was winning, tolerant, unutterably tender. His eyes were kind, whimsical, wistful; and there was in them now a lustre that she never had seen glowing there before.
Inman Shonto was not ugly now. The great soul of the man had enthroned itself in his countenance. The effect was spellbinding.
Charmian had told herself that, if ever she married again, she would marry a big man, a man of accomplishment. Her husband had been a big man in his small way. He had been a money-maker, a George F. Babbitt, but the girl-wife had not been able to interest herself in his activities. He had created nothing, discovered nothing, added nothing to the knowledge or welfare of the race. Walter J. Reemy had been commonplace in every way—a man whose commonplace mind followed a daily routine of commonplaceness.
“You and I, Charmian,” the doctor was saying while she dreamed, “can make our life together an ideal one. Won’t you even consider it?”
She had closed her eyes again, but now she opened them and smiled at him half bashfully.