“I suppose he’s—tremendously in love with her?” Emily tried in vain to prevent herself from stooping to this question.
“I don’t know,” replied Miss Furnival. “Mr. Gammell told me he wasn’t. He says Stilson is a sentimentalist. It seems there is a child—some say a boy, some say a girl. She first told Stilson it was his, and then that it wasn’t. Mr. Gammell says Stilson stays on to protect the child from her. She’s a terror when she goes on one of her sprees—and she goes oftener and oftener as she grows older. You can always tell when she’s on the rampage by the way Stilson acts. He goes about, looking as if somebody had insulted him and he’d been too big a coward to resent it.”
Instead of being saddened by this recital, Emily was in sudden high spirits and her eyes were dancing. “I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she thought, “but I can’t help it. I wish to feel that he loathes her.” Then she said aloud in a satirical tone, to carry off her cheerful expression: “I had no idea we had such a hero among us. And Mr. Stilson, of all men! I’m afraid it’s a piece of Park Row imagination. Probably the truth is—let us say, less romantic.”
“You don’t know Mr. Gammell,” Miss Furnival sighed. “He’s the last man on earth to indulge in romance. He thinks Stilson ridiculous. But I think he’s fine. He’s the best of a few good men I’ve known in New York who weren’t good only because of not having sense enough to be otherwise.”
“Good,” repeated Emily in a tone that expressed strong aversion to the word.
“Oh, mercy no! I don’t mean that kind of good,” said Miss Furnival. “He’s not the kind of good that makes everybody else love and long for wickedness.”
After this Emily found herself making trips to the news-department on extremely thin pretexts, and returning cheerful or depressed according as she had succeeded or failed in her real object. And she began to think—to hope—that Stilson came to the Sunday department oftener than formerly. When he did come—and it certainly was oftener—he merely bowed to her as he passed her desk. But whenever she looked up suddenly, she found his gaze upon her and she felt that her vanity was not dictating her interpretation of it. She had an instinct that if he knew or suspected her secret or suspected that she was guessing his secret, she would see him no more.
As the months passed, there grew up between them a mutual understanding about which she saw that he was deceiving himself. She came to know him so well that she read him at sight. Being large and broad, he was simple, tricking himself when it would have been impossible for him to have tricked another. And it made her love him the more to see how he thought he was hiding himself from her and how unconscious he was of her love for him.
She had no difficulty in gratifying her longing to hear of him. He was naturally the most conspicuous figure in the office and often a subject of conversation. She was delighted by daily evidences of the power of his personality and by tributes to it. For Park Row liked to gossip about his eccentricities,—he was called eccentric because he had the courage of his individuality; or about his sagacity as an editor, his sardonic wit, his cynicism concealing but never hindering thoughtfulness for others. Shrinking from prying eyes, he was always unintentionally provoking curiosity. Hating flattery, he was the idol and the pattern of a score of the younger men of the profession. His epigrams were quoted and his walk was copied, his dress, his way of wearing his hair. Even his stenographer, a girl, unconsciously and most amusingly imitated his mannerisms. All the indistinct and inferior personalities about him, in the hope of making themselves less indistinct and inferior, copied as closely as they could those characteristics which, to them, seemed the cause of his standing up and out so vividly. One day Emily was passing through an inside room of the news-department on her way to the Day Telegraph Editor. Stilson was at a desk which he sometimes used. He had his back toward her and was talking into the portable telephone. She glanced at the surface of his desk. With eyes trained to take in details swiftly, she saw before she could look away an envelope addressed to Boughton and Wall, the publishers, a galley proof projecting from it, and on the proof in large type: “17 In Many Moods.”
“He has written a book,” she thought, “and that is the title.” And she was filled with loving curiosity. She speculated about it often in the next six weeks; then she saw it on a table in Brentano’s.