Alexander the Great
Alexander loved everything about Antoinette except her too pronounced fondness for the romantic. That perturbed him greatly. Nobody liked to be sentimental with a pretty girl more than did Alexander. If he could squeeze Antoinette's hand slyly at Ford's or the Academy when a "dark scene" was on, and get a sweet answering pressure; if he engineered his arm about her undisturbed when he took her driving on Druid Hill's unlighted roads of a summer night; if he hazarded an occasional kiss on her warm, cherry-red lips as they lingered in the parting on the front steps of her Harlem-avenue home—he was as pleased as any admiring lover could well be. And the next day in that dull, prosaic German-street office, pictures of Antoinette as she laughed, of Antoinette as she lowered her clear brown eyes after that kiss, would thrust themselves most impertinently into each page of the big ledger he had to post.
The trouble, however, with Antoinette from Alexander's viewpoint was that she was more romantic than that. It was all right for her to be a trusting little dear and allow him the occasional kiss or hug. But no adorer likes to be told that he doesn't come up to the lady's ideal, and that was what Antoinette had plainly given Alexander to understand in those moments when, spurred on by the kiss or the hug, he had sought to make her more truly his only and own. "The man I marry," vowed the darling Antoinette, "must be a hero. You're just an ordinary fellow. You're better than the rest I know, and I like you awfully much. But Alexander, dear," and she gave a little twist to the top button of his coat, "I don't love you, because you have never shown yourself capable of bold deeds or brave actions. I am woman enough to worship a man who can do things of that kind. The age of chivalry is not dead. There are heroes in this world, and though I'm awfully fond of you, Alexander, I'm going to wait until I meet my ideal." Then Alexander would hie himself to his Gilmor-street home and curse his luck. What could a plain, unassuming, workaday clerk do in the way of being a hero? Where did he have opportunities of meeting situations of peril in which he could prove his valor?
One of those evenings when Antoinette waxed confidential and revealed her true thoughts—evenings rare, because, as a rule, she was fencing coquettishy with tongue and eyes—she acknowledged that the nearest approach to her ideal that she had ever seen was a handsome, lithe young Atlantic City life guard. She put such a valuation upon the courage of this sun-bronzed, red-shirted Adonis that Alexander's jealousy rose to the fuming point. There pressed upon him the notion of going to the City-by-the-Sea, either to challenge this approximate ideal to mortal combat or of emulating his choice of occupation and working a lifeboat and a rescue-line himself. Then he reflected that, after all, he would rather be a live clerk in Baltimore than a dead hero in the restless ocean surf.
"It's all the fault of those blamed novels," muttered Alexander, in his wrath. "She has filled up her head with that silly trash until she has spoiled the finest girl on earth." He never met her on Lexington street that she was not on her way to or from the Enoch Pratt Library, or was carrying home the latest bit of fiction from the bookstores. The old and the new alike fed her imagination—Scott, the elder Dumas, the King Arthur romances, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, Hallie Erminie Rives, Laura Jean Libbey, Bertha M. Clay, Mrs. Alexander—all were fish for her net, tabloids for her mental digestion. "If she had her way, she would make me a Rob Roy, a Romeo, a Prisoner of Zenda, a Sir Gal—or whatever the dickens that old fellow's name was," vowed Alexander, who, it must be confessed, was not strong on literature.
For three hours and more he lay awake on his bed that night. He knew the length of time, because the wind was from the east and brought the sound of the City Hall's strike to him. How to gain Antoinette in marriage, how to meet her fancy of what a man ought to be, how to be a hero without an untimely fate in the flower of his youth—was ever lover more perplexed, more worried!
The next morning brought his deliverance. It came to him as he held himself in place on two inches of the footboard of a crowded open car. A queer spot for salvation to be handed to a despairing lover! Yet salvation is accustomed to odd performances. In this instance it popped into Alexander's mind so unexpectedly that he chuckled and made a seated individual think Alexander was reading the jokes of his penny paper over his shoulder. As a matter of fact, Alexander was soaring into a new and unexplored world. A great white light was leading him far from the madding crowd.
For three days chuckling alternated with heavy thinking. His mind was so engrossed with the probability of his deliverance from the trials and anxieties of trying vainly to please Antoinette that when he went, by appointment, to take her to Electric Park to see the vaudeville show he came perilously near telling her all about it. And that to the swain who hopes to capture a hesitating maiden would, as every masculine knows, have been fatal. As it was, Alexander's countenance was so benign and cheerful that the little lady noticed it.
"You've got a surprise for me, I know," she declared as she eyed him, pouting most charmingly.