Mrs. Bromfield was made speechless by the postscript. Emily sat silent, looking at the letter on the table before her.
“Don’t be prejudiced against him, dear,” pleaded her mother.
“I imagine it doesn’t matter in the least what I think of him,” Emily replied. She rose and left the room, sending back from the doorway a short, queer laugh that made her mother feel how shut out she was from what was going on in her daughter’s mind.
If she could have seen into that small, ethereal-looking head she would have been astounded at the thoughts boiling there. Emily had been bred in an atmosphere of mercenary or, rather, “practical” ideas. But she was also a woman of sound and independent mind, in the habit of thinking for herself, and with strong mental and physical self-respect. She would have hesitated to marry unwisely for love. But she had been far from that state of self-degradation in which a young woman deliberately and consciously closes her heart, locks the door and flings the key away. Now however, the deepest instinct of the human animal—the instinct of self-preservation—was aroused in her. It seemed to her that an imperative command had issued from that instinct—a command at any cost to flee the living death of Stoughton.
That same afternoon Mrs. Bromfield learned—without having to ask a question—all that Stoughton knew about the Waylands: They were the pride of the town and also its chief irritation. It gloried in them because it believed that the report of their millions was as clamourous throughout the nation as in its own ears. It was exasperated against them, because it believed that they ought to live in Stoughton and be content with a life which it thought, or thought it thought, desirable above life in any other place whatsoever.
So as long as Mrs. Wayland lived, the family had spent at least half of each year there; and Stoughton, satisfied on that point, disliked them for other reasons, first of all for being richer than any one else. When Mrs. Wayland died, leaving an almost grown daughter and a son just going into trousers, General Wayland had put the girl in school at Dobbs Ferry-on-the-Hudson, the boy in Groton, had closed the house and made New York his residence. The girl died two years after the death of her mother. The boy went from Groton to Harvard, from Harvard to his father’s business—the Cotton Cloth Trust. The Wayland homestead, the most considerable in Stoughton with its two wings built to the original square house, with its conservatories and its stables, was opened for but a few weeks each winter. And then it was opened only in part—to receive the General on his annual business visit to the factories of the Stoughton Cotton Mills Company, the largest group in the “combine.” Sometimes he brought Edgar. But Edgar gave the young women of Stoughton no opportunities to ensnare him. He kept to his work and departed at the earliest possible moment. This year he had come alone, as his father had now put him in charge of their Stoughton interests.
CHAPTER IV.
A BLACK FLAG.
UNTIL Wayland saw Emily at church he had no intention to seize the opportunity which Mrs. Ainslie’s disinterested kindliness had made for him. Ever since he left the restraint of the “prep.” school for Harvard, with a liberal allowance and absolute freedom, women had been an important factor in his life; and they were still second only to money-making. But not such women as Emily Bromfield.
In theory he had the severest ideas of woman. Practically, his conception of woman’s sphere was not companionship or love or the family, not either mental or sentimental, but frankly physical. And something in that element in Emily’s personality—perhaps the warmth of her beauty of form in contrast to the coldness of her beauty of face—made it impossible for this indulgent and self-indulgent young man to refrain from seeking her out. He was close with his money in every way except where his personal comfort or amusement was concerned. There he was generous to prodigality. And when he learned how poor the Bromfields were and how fiercely discontented Emily was in her Stoughton prison-cell, he decided that the only factor in the calculation was whether or not on better acquaintance his first up-flaring would persist.