But she hesitated to go to Stilson. For she now knew the whole secret of his looks and actions, of which she had been thinking curiously ever since the morning of their chance meeting in the Park.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE TRUTH ABOUT A ROMANCE.
ONE half of that mystery had been betrayed by little Mary. The other half she might have known long before had she not held aloof from her fellow workers, except the few who did not gossip.
He was a Virginian. He had been brought up on a farm—an only son, carefully sheltered, tutored by his father and mother. He had gone up to Princeton, religious and reverential of the most rigid code of personal morals. His studies in science and philosophy had taken away his creed. But he the more firmly anchored himself to his moral code—not because he was prim or feeble or timid, but because to him his morality was his self-respect.
He graduated from Princeton at twenty and became a reporter on The World. He was released to New York—young, hot-blooded, romantic, daring. He rose rapidly and was not laughed at for his idealism and his Puritanism, partly because he was able, chiefly because he had that arrogant temperament which enforces respect from the irresolute, submissive majority.
One night, a few weeks before he was twenty-one, he went with Harry Penrose of the Herald to the opening of the season at the Gold and Glory. It was then in the beginning of its fame as the best music-hall in the country if not in the world. As they entered, the orchestra was playing one of those dashing melodies that seem to make the blood flow in their rhythm. The stage was thronged with a typical Gold and Glory chorus—tall, handsome young women with long, slender arms and legs. They were dancing madly, their eyes sparkling, their hair waving, the straps slipping from their young shoulders, their slim legs in heliotrope silk marking the time of the music with sinuous strokes from the stage to high above their heads and down again. Against this background of youth and joy and colour two girls were leading the dance. One of them was round and sensuous; the other thin with the pleasing angularity of a girl not yet a woman grown.
Instantly Stilson’s eyes were for her. He felt that he had never even imagined such grace. The others were smiling gaily, boldly, into the audience in teasing mock-invitation. Her lips were closed. Her smile was dreamy, her soul apparently wrapped in the delirium of the dance. Her whole body was in constant motion. It seemed to Stilson that at every movement of shoulders or hips, of small round arms or tapering legs, at every swing of that little head crowned with glittering waves of golden light, a mysterious, thrilling energy was flung out from her like an electric current. He who had not cared for women of the stage watched this girl as a child at its first circus watches the lady in tights and tarlatan. When the curtain went down, he felt that the lights were being turned off instead of on.
“Who is she?” he asked Penrose.
“Who?” said Penrose, looking at the women near by in the orchestra chairs. “Which one?”