“I wonder,” said Emily doubtingly, “do the divorced people set so bad an example as those who live together hating each the other, degrading themselves, and teaching their children to quarrel. And haven’t flippant people always been flippant, and won’t they always continue to be?”
“It may be so, but men and women ought to know what they are about before they—” Stilson paused and suddenly remembered. “I shan’t finish that sentence,” he said, with a short laugh. “I don’t know what you know about me, and I don’t want to. I can’t talk of my affairs where they concern other people. But I feel that I must——”
“You need not, dear,” said Emily. “I think I understand how you are situated. And—I—I—Well, if the time ever comes when things are different, then—” She dropped her serious tone—“Meanwhile, I’m ‘by the grace of God, free and independent’ and——”
“I love you,” he said, the hot tears standing in his eyes as he kissed her hand. “Ever since the day you came back from the mines, I’ve known that I loved you. And ever since then, it’s been you, always you. The first thought in the morning, the last thought at night, and all day long whenever I looked up—you, shining up there where I never hope to reach you. Not shining for me, but, thank God, shining on me, my Emily.”
“And now—I’ve come down.” She was laughing at him in a loving way. “I’m no longer your star but—only a woman.”
“Only a woman!” He drew a long breath and his look made her blood leap and filled her with a sudden longing both to laugh and to cry.
CHAPTER XXXI.
WHERE PAIN IS PLEASURE.
THAT fall and winter Emily and Stilson met often in the walk winding through the Park from Seventy-second street to the Plaza. Usually it was on Wednesday morning—his “lazy day”; always it was “by accident.” Each time they separated they knew they were soon to meet again. But the chance character of their meetings—once in a while they did miss each the other—maintained a moral fiction which seemed to them none the less vital to real morals because it was absurd.
What with their work and meetings to look forward to and meetings to look back upon, time did not linger with them. Often they were happy. Rarely were they miserable, and then, instead of yielding to despair and luxuriating in grief and woe, they fought valiantly to recover the tranquillity which would enable them to enjoy what they might have and to be mutually helpful. They were not sentimental egotists. They would have got little sympathy from those who weep in theatres and blister the pages of tragic fiction. Neither tried to pose before the other or felt called upon to tickle his own and the other’s vanity with mournful looks and outbursts. They loved not themselves, but each the other.
They suffered much in a simple, human way—not the worked-up anguish of the “strong situation,” but just such lonely heartaches as visit most lives and make faces sober and smiles infrequent and laughter reluctant, as early youth is left behind. And they carefully hid their suffering each from the other with the natural considerateness of unselfish love.