“It is the truth. I did not,” he admitted quickly and waited. He could not be sure she got it, the compliment implied. He remembered her as merely sensible, not smart. “You have changed, grown or something,” he resumed. “I couldn’t be expected to know you. All the other girls here look just as they did when I left here two years ago. But you don’t; you are amazingly different. How did you do it?” he exclaimed, regarding her with charmed amazement.
He saw her take it, caught the glance she gave him one instant before she dropped it. The faintest smile sweetened the comers of her mouth. He got that too.
If only he had known of the tears she had shed after the visit to the bank, what a triumph! Fortunately, men do not know what maidens confess with tears to their pillows. If they did it would change many a courtship to one kind or another of ruthless tyranny.
We who study love as if it were a medicine or a disease sometimes speak of “love at first sight,” as if this were an unusual seizure. But love is always love at first sight. You may know this man or he may know you for years without getting that angle of vision; but if you ever do, it is as if you had never really seen him before. In a moment you have endowed him with attributes his Maker would never have squandered on a man of that quality. This is what love is, the conferring of virtues and qualities upon the object of your awakened emotion like so many degrees. He may be a drug clerk, or a chicken-breasted, fat man, or a swank young rascal, but from that moment when love gets sight of him he is a fellow of the royal society of heroes, and you may be so bemused you live a lifetime with him, always conferring more degrees to keep him tenderly concealed from your clearer vision. Or it may happen in a year or twenty years the scales fall from your eyes. Then love becomes a servant, and life a tragedy. But there is nothing in the Scriptures against such a servant or such a life. Rather, I should say the Scriptures make wide and permanent provisions for this deflation in the marital relation.
CHAPTER V
From this day George Cutter spent his spare time in and about the Adams cottage. You might have inferred that he was a homeless man. He accompanied Helen to such entertainments as society consisted of in Shannon, chiefly picnics and fishing excursions at this season of the year. He was by nature an importunate lover, and he was in love. He did not ask himself whether Helen would make a suitable wife for such a man as he was, and would become. He did not know what kind of man he was. He only knew that he wanted this girl, and that no other man should have her.
The decision was natural, entirely creditable. But the approach must be made. So far as he was concerned he was ready to propose to Helen at once; girls, however, were squeamish in matters of love. His instinct warned him that he might lose by an immediate declaration. He spent the time agreeably displaying his wares. He was a university man. He had a smattering of ideas, caught carelessly and selected from the mouthings of this professor and that. He had no doubt that he could make an impression. Helen was village born, village bred. It was well enough to startle her into a profound admiration. Nothing subdued and impressed a woman like brains. He not only had brains, he had views.
Bear in mind this was twenty years ago. The muckrakers were still mucking in the best magazines. The “social conscience,” a favorite phrase at the time, had passed the period of gestation, and had become a sentimental conviction claimed by the best people. Old patriarchal Russian anarchists with pink whiskers, spewed out of Russia, were pouring into this country, the shade of their whiskers due entirely to the action of the salt air during the voyage over on the dye used upon these whiskers by way of disguise until they were safe in a clean land. They brought their doctrines with them. They created a market for socialism, radicalism and communism.