“Oh, it’s easy enough for you to talk; if you were in my place you might find it different.”
“That’s all right,” Lawrence went on, a smile on his freckled face. “You just come to the party; it’ll cost you only five, and Lavinia would like it. I know that. So do you.”
Marley did know it; and he felt a new disgust with himself that remained with him long after Lawrence had put on his new overcoat and left. He reproached himself bitterly, and he told himself that the best thing he could do would be to go away somewhere, and not tell Lavinia, or anybody.
“I’m only in her way, that’s all,” he thought as he opened his law-book, and bent it back viciously, so that it would stay open.
Ever since the fiasco of his plans as to a place with Carman, he had been seeking consolation in a new resolution to keep on patiently in the law; but it was a consolation that he had to keep active by a constant contemplation of himself as a young man who was making a brave and determined fight against heavy odds. It was difficult to sustain this heroic attitude in his own eyes and at the same time maintain that modesty which he knew would become him best in the eyes of others. The approach of the holiday season, the visible preparations on every hand and the gay spirits everywhere apparent had isolated him more than ever, and he had felt his alienation complete whenever he went to see Lavinia and found the whole Blair family in an excitement over their own festival. Marley would have liked to make Lavinia handsome gifts, but his debts were already large, relatively, and he rose to heights of self-denial that made him pathetic to himself, when he decided that he could give her nothing. Now that Lawrence was getting up a ball to which he knew Lavinia would like to go, as she had always gone to the balls that were not so frequent in Macochee as Lawrence wished they might be, he felt his humiliation deeper than ever. He put the matter honestly to Lavinia, however, and she said promptly:
“Why, I wouldn’t think of going.”
She looked up at him brightly, and then in an instant she looked down again. She relished the nobility of the attitude she had so promptly taken, but the woman in her prevailed over the saint, and told what a moment before she had determined not to tell:
“I’ve already declined one invitation.”
She saw the look of pain come into Marley’s eyes, and instantly she regretted.
“You have?” he said.