A WEEK after Evelyn’s call, the hall boy brought Edgar Wayland’s card to Emily. She was alone in the apartment, Joan having gone to the theatre with “her professor.” She hesitated, looked an apology to her writing spread upon the table, then told the boy to show him up. He was dressed with unusual care even for him, and his face expressed the intensity of tragic determination of which the human countenance is capable only at or before twenty-eight.
“I’ve never seen your apartment.” His glance was inspecting the room and the partly visible two rooms opening out of it. “It is so like you. How few people have any taste in getting together furniture and—and stuff.”
“When one has little to spend, one is more careful and thoughtful perhaps.”
“That’s the reason tenement flats are so tasteful.” Edgar’s face relaxed at his own humour, then with a self-rebuking frown resumed its former mournful inflexibility. “But I did not come here to talk about furniture. I came to talk about you and me. Emmy, was it final? Are you sure you won’t—won’t have me?”
Emily looked at him with indignant contempt, forgetting that Theresa had not said he was actually engaged to Evelyn. “I had begun to think you incapable of such—such baseness—now.”
“Baseness? Don’t, please. It isn’t as bad as all that—only persistence. I simply can’t give you up, it seems to me. And—I had to try one last time—because—the fact is, I’m about to ask another girl to marry me.”
Emily showed her surprise, then remembered and looked relieved. “Why—I thought you had asked her. I must warn you that I know her, and far too good she is for you.”
“You know her?”
“Yes—so let’s talk no more about it. I’ll forget what you said.”
“Well, what of it?” Edgar rose and faced her. “You are thinking it dishonourable of me to come to you this way. But you wrong me. If she never saw me again, she’d forget me in a year—or less. So I tell you straight out that I’m marrying her because I can’t get you. I’m desperate and lonesome and I want to have a home to go to.”