“You mustn’t talk to me about Evelyn,” Emily interrupted. “It’s not fair to her. You compel me to seem to play the traitor to her. I must not know anything about your and her affairs.”
There was a moment’s silence, then she went on: “She is my friend, and, I hope, always shall be. It would pain me terribly if she should suspect; and it would be an unnecessary pain to her. A man ought never to tell a woman, or a woman a man, anything, no matter how true it is, if it’s going to rankle on and on, long after it’s ceased to be true. And your feeling for me isn’t important even now. If you marry her, resolve to make her happy. And if you never create any clouds, there’ll never be any for her—and soon won’t be any for you.”
He left her after a few minutes, and his last look—all around the room, then at her—was so genuinely unhappy that it saddened her for the evening. “Fate is preparing a revenge upon me,” she thought dejectedly. “I can feel it coming. Why can’t I, why won’t I, put Arthur out of my mind?” And then she scoffed at herself unconvincingly for calling Stanhope, Arthur, for permitting herself to be swept off her feet by the middle-aged husband of a middle-aged wife, the father of grown children. “How Evelyn would shrink from me if she knew—and yet——”
What kind of honour, justice, is it, she thought, that binds him to his wife, that holds us apart? With one brief life—with only a little part of that for intense enjoyment—and to sacrifice happiness, heaven, for a mere notion. “What does God care about us wretched little worms?” she said to herself. “Everywhere the law of the survival of the fittest—the best law after all, in spite of its cruelty. And I am the fittest for him. He belongs to me. He is mine. Why not?—Why can’t I convince myself?”
Evelyn asked Emily to go with her to the opera the following Saturday afternoon. They met in the Broadway lobby of the Metropolitan, and Emily at once saw that Evelyn was “engaged.” She was radiant with triumph and modest importance. “You’re the first one I’ve told outside the family. I haven’t even written to Catherine Folsom—she’s to be my maid of honour, you know. We promised each other at school.”
“He will make you happy, I’m sure.” Emily was amused at Evelyn’s child-like excitement, yet there were tears near her eyes too. “What an infant she is,” she was thinking, “and how unjust it is, how dangerous that she should have to get her experience of man after she has pledged herself not to profit by it.”
“Oh, I’m sure I shall be,” said Evelyn. “We’ll have everything to make us happy. And I shall be free. I do hate being watched all the time and having to do just what mamma says.”
“Yes, you will be very free,” agreed Emily, commenting to herself: “What do these birds bred in captivity ever know about freedom? She has no idea that she’s only being transferred to a larger cage where she’ll find a companion whom she may or may not like. But—they’re often happy, these caged birds. And I wonder if we wild birds ever are?”
Evelyn was prattling on. “He asked me in such a nice way and didn’t frighten me. I’d been afraid he’d seize me—or—or something, when the time came. And he had such a sad, solemn look. He’s so experienced! He hinted something about the past, but I hurried him away from that. Sam says men all have knowledge of the world, if they’re any good. But I’m sure Edgar has always been a nice man.”