“Don’t bother about the past,” said Emily. “The future will be quite enough to occupy you if you look after it properly.”
The opera was La Bohème and Evelyn, busy with her great event, gave that lady and her sorrows little attention. “It’s dreadfully unreal, isn’t it?” she chattered. “Of course a man never could really care for a woman who had so little self-respect as that, could he? I’m sure a real man, like Edgar, would never act in that way with a woman who wasn’t married to him, could he?”
“I’m sure he’d despise all such women from the bottom of his heart,” said Emily, looking amusedly at the “canary, discoursing from its cage-world of the great world outside which it probably will never see.”
“I’ve had a lot of experience with that side of life,” continued the “canary.”
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Emily in mock horror. “Do they lead double lives in the nursery nowadays?”
“Mamma kept us close, you know. We live in such a dreadful neighbourhood—down in Grand Street. I was usually at grandfather’s up at Tarrytown when I wasn’t in school. But I had to come home sometimes. And I used to peep into the streets from the windows, and then I’d see the most awful women going by. It made me really sick. It must be dreadful for a woman ever to forget herself.”
“Dreadful,” assented Emily, resisting with no difficulty the feeble temptation to try to broaden this narrow young mind. “It would take years,” she thought, “to educate her. And then she probably wouldn’t really understand, would only be tempted to lower herself.”
The distinction between license and broad-mindedness was abysmal, Emily felt; but she also admitted—with reluctance—that the abyss was so narrow that one might inadvertently step across it, if she were not an Emily Bromfield, and, even then, very, very watchful.
She was turning into the Park at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street a few evenings later, on her way home from the office, when Stanhope, driving rapidly downtown, saw her, stopped his cab, got out and dismissed it. She had been revolving a plan for resuming her self-respect and her peace of mind, how she would talk with him when she saw him, would compel him to aid her in—then she saw him coming; and her face, coloured high by the sharp wind, flushed a hotter crimson; and her resolve fled.
“May I walk through the Park with you?” he said abruptly; and without waiting for her to assent, he set out with her in the direction in which she had been going. In a huge, dark overcoat, that came to within a few inches of the ground, he looked more tremendous than ever. And as Emily walked beside him, the blood surged deliriously through her veins. “This is the man of all men,” she thought. “And he loves me, loves me. And I was thinking that I must give him up. As if I could or would!”