“It can’t be true,” he said. “No—it is impulse—pity—a sacrifice.”
She saw that his words were addressed to himself in reproach for listening to her. “It was unworthy of him,” she went on, “unworthy of his love for her. How could he imagine that only he knew what love is—the happiness of its pain, almost happier than the happiness of its joy? Why should I have sought freedom, independence, if not in order that I may use my life as I please, use it to win—and keep—the best?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said uncertainly. “You’ve made it impossible for me to do as I intended—at present.”
Emily’s spirits rose—in those days the present was her whole horizon. “Don’t be selfish,” she said in a tone of raillery. “Think of me, once in a while. And please try to think of me as capable of knowing my own mind. I don’t need to be told what I want.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said with mock humility. “I shall never be so impertinent again.”
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE HIGHWAY OF HAPPINESS.
EMILY often rebelled. Her common sense was always catching her at demanding, with the irrational arrogance of human vanity, that the course of the universe be altered and adjusted to her personal desires. But these moods came only after she and Stilson had not been together for a longer time than usual. When she saw him again, saw the look in his eyes—love great enough to deny itself the delight of expression and enjoyment—she forgot her complaints in the happiness of loving such a man, of being loved by him. “It might be so much worse, unbearably worse,” she thought. “I might lose what I have. And then how vast it would seem.”
Stilson always felt the inrush of a dreary tide when they separated. One day the tide seemed to be sweeping away his courage. Unhappiness behind him in the home that was no longer made endurable by Mary’s presence, now that her mother’s condition compelled him to keep her at the convent; contention, the necessity of saying and doing disagreeable things, ahead of him at the office—“I have always been a fool,” he thought, “a sentimental fool. No wonder life lays on the lash.” But he gathered a bundle of newspapers from the stand at Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue and, seating himself in the corner of the car, strapped on his mental harness and began to tug and strain at his daily task—“like a dumb ox,” he muttered.
He was outwardly in his worst mood—the very errand boy knew that it was not a good day to ask favours. A man to whom he had loaned money came in to pay it and, leaving, said: “God will bless you.” Stilson sat staring at a newspaper. “God will bless me,” he repeated bitterly. “I shall have some new misfortune before the day is over.”
And late that afternoon a boy brought him a note—he recognised the handwriting of the address as Marguerite’s. “The misfortune,” he thought, tearing it open. He read: