A Woman Ventures: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

In one respect Washington society is unequalled. Nowhere else is a girl able so quickly and at so early an age to get so complete an equipment of worldly knowledge. Emily’s three years under the tutelage of cynical Mrs. Ainslie had made her nearly as capable to see through men as are acute married women. Following the Washington custom of her day, she had gone about with men almost as freely as do the girls of a Western town. And the men whom she had thus intimately known were not innocent, idealising, deferential Western youths, but men of broad and unscrupulous worldliness. Many of them were young diplomats, far from home, without any sense of responsibility in respect of the women of the country in which they were sojourners of a day. They played the game of “man and woman” adroitly and boldly.

Emily understood Wayland only so far as the clean can from theoretical experience understand the unclean. Thus far she quickly penetrated into his intentions toward her and his ideas of her. He was the reverse of complex. He had not found it necessary to employ in these affairs the craft he was beginning to display in business, to the delight of his father. His crude and candid method of conquest had been successful hitherto. Failure in this instance seemed unlikely. And there were no male relatives who might bring him to an uncomfortable accounting.

Two weeks after he met Emily—weeks in which he had seen her several times—he went to her house for dinner. She had been advancing gradually, in strict accordance with her plan of campaign. Wayland had unwittingly disarmed himself and doubly armed her by giving undue weight to her appearance of extreme youth and golden inexperience, and by overestimating his own and his money’s fascinations. He had not a suspicion that there was design or even elaborate preparation in the vision which embarrassed and fired him as he entered the Bromfields’ parlour. She was in a simple black dinner gown, which displayed her arms and her rosy white shoulders. And she had a small head and a way of doing her hair that brought out the charm of every curve of her delicate face. Instead of looking cold this evening, she put into her look and smile a seeming of—well, more than mere liking, he thought.

It happened to be one of Mrs. Bromfield’s good days, so she rambled on, covering Wayland’s silence. Occasionally—not too often—Emily lifted her glance from her plate and gave the young man the full benefit of her deep, dark, violet eyes. When Mrs. Bromfield spoke apologisingly of the absence of wine, he was surprised to note that he had not missed it.

But after dinner, when he was alone in the sitting-room with Emily, he regretted that he had had nothing to drink. He could explain his timidity, his inability to get near the subject uppermost in his mind only on the ground that he had had no stimulus to his courage and his tongue. All that day he had been planning what he would say; yet as he went home in his automobile, upon careful review of all that had been said and done, he found that he had made no progress. The conversation had been general and not for an instant personal to her. The only personalities had been his own rather full account of himself, past, present and future—a rambling recital, the joint result of his nervousness and her encouragement.

“At least she understands that I don’t intend to marry,” he thought, remembering one part of the conversation.

“There’s nothing in marriage for me,” he had said, after a clumsy paving of the way.

“Of course not,” she had assented. “I never could understand how a young man, situated as you are, could be foolish enough to chain himself.”

And then, as he remembered with some satisfaction, she added the only remark she had made which threw any light upon her own feelings and ideas: “It would be as foolish for you to marry, as it would be for me to refuse a chance to get out of this dreadful place.”

As he reflected on this he had no suspicion of subtlety. It did not occur to him that she hardly deserved credit for frankly confessing what could not be successfully denied or concealed, or that she might have confessed in order to put him off his guard, to make him think her guilelessly straightforward.