“You’ve met Mr. Marlowe?” she said, in a cordial tone. “Don’t you think him clever? You may hear some gossip about him—and women. He’s good-looking, and—and much like all men in one respect. He’s the sort of man that is suspected of affairs, but whose name is never coupled with any particular woman’s. That’s a good sign, don’t you think? It shows that the gossip isn’t started or encouraged by him.”
“Is it—proper for me to go to dinner with him alone?”
“Why not? Of course, if they see you, they may talk about you. But what does that matter? It would be different if you were waiting with folded hands for some man to come along and undertake to support you for life. Then gossip might damage your principal asset. But now your principal asset isn’t reputation for conventionality, but brains. And you don’t have to ask favours of anybody.”
Marlowe and Emily had a table at the end of the walk parallel with the entrance-drive. The main subject of conversation was Emily—what she had done, what she could do, and how she could do it. “All that I’m saying is general,” he said. “I’ll help you to apply it, if I may. There’s no reason why you should not be doing well—making at least forty dollars a week—within six months. We’ll get up some Sunday specials together to help you on faster. The main point is a new way of looking at whatever you’re writing about. Your good taste will always save you from being flat or silly, even when you’re not brilliant.”
While Marlowe talked, Emily observed, as accurately as it is possible for a young person to observe when the person under observation is good-looking, young, of the opposite sex, and when both are, consciously and unconsciously, doing their utmost to think well each of the other. He had a low, agreeable voice, and an unusually attractive mouth. His mind was quick, his manner simple and direct. Although he was clearly younger than thirty-five, his hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples, and there were wrinkles in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. He made many gestures, and she liked to watch his hands—the hands of an athlete, but well-shaped.
“I ride and swim almost every day,” he said incidentally to some discussion about the sedentary life. And she knew why he looked in perfect health. Emily admired him, liked him, with the quick confidence of youth trusted him, before they had been talking two hours. And it pleased her to see admiration of her in his eyes, and to feel that he was physically and mentally glad to be near her.
As they were drinking champagne (slightly modified by apollinaris), the acquaintance progressed swiftly. It would have been all but impossible for her to resist the contagion of his open-mindedness, had she been so inclined. But she herself had rapidly changed in her month in New York. She felt that she was able to meet a man on his own ground now, and that she understood men far better, and she seemed to herself to be seeing life in a wholly new aspect—its aspect to the self-reliant and free. She helped him to hasten through those ante-rooms to close acquaintance, where, as he put it, “stupid people waste most of their time and all their chances for happiness.”
He had a way of complimenting her which was peculiarly insidious. He was talking earnestly about her work, his mind apparently absorbed. Abruptly he interrupted himself with, “Don’t mind my talking so much. It’s happiness. One is not often happy. And I feel to-night”—this with raillery in his voice—“like an orchid hunter who has been dragging himself through jungles for days and is at last rewarded with the sight of a new and wonderful specimen—high up in a difficult tree, but still, perhaps, accessible.” And then he went on to discuss orchids with her and told a story of an acquaintance, a half-mad orchid hunter—all with no further reference to her personality.
It was not until they were strolling through the Park toward Fifty-ninth street that the subject which is sure to appear sooner or later in such circumstances and conjunctions started from cover and fluttered into the open.
He glanced at the moon. “It would be impossible to improve upon that nice old lady up there as a chaperon, wouldn’t it?”