A Woman Ventures: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

“This morning’s is the third complaining cable you’ve had from the office,” she answered.

He looked at her, suspecting an evasion, but he went back to London. The unpleasant truth was that he had worn out his welcome. She had never before been with him continuously for so much as a week. Now, in the crowded and consecutive impressions of these thirty uninterrupted days, all the qualities which repelled her stood out, stripped of the shimmer and glamour of novelty. And as she was having more and more difficulty in deceiving herself and in spreading out the decreasing area of her liking for him over the increasing gap where her love for him had been, he, in the ironical perversity of the law of contraries, became more and more demonstrative and even importunate. Many times in her effort to escape him and the now ever-impending danger of open rupture, she was driven to devices which ought not to have deceived him, perhaps did not really deceive him.

When he was gone she sat herself down to a “good cry”—an expression of overwrought nerves rather than of grief.

But after a few weeks she began to be lonely. The men she met were of two kinds—those she did not like, all of whom were willing to be friends with her on her terms; those she did like more or less, none of whom was willing to be with her on any but his own terms. And so she found herself often spending the most attractive part of the day—the evening—dismally shut up at home, alone or with some not very interesting girl. She had never been so free, yet never had she felt so bound. With joy all about her, with joy beckoning her from the crowded, fascinating boulevards, she was a prisoner. She needed Marlowe, and she sent for him.

She was puzzled by the change in him. She had only too good reason to know that he loved her as insistently as ever, but there was a strain in his manner and speech, as if he were concealing something from her. She caught him looking at her in a peculiar way—as if he were angry or resentful or possibly were suspecting her changed and changing feelings toward him. And he had never been less interesting—she had never before heard him talk stupidities and lifeless commonplaces or break long silences with obvious attempts to rouse himself to “make conversation.”

She was not sorry when he went—he stayed four days longer than he had intended; but she was also glad to get a message from him ten days later, announcing a week-end visit. The telegram reached her at dejeuner and afterward, in a better mood, she drove to the Continental Hotel, where she sometimes heard news worth sending. She sat at a long window in the empty drawing-rooms and watched a light and lazy snow drift down.

As it slowly chilled her to a sense of loneliness, of disappointment in the past, of dread of the future, she became conscious that a man was pointedly studying her. She looked at him with the calm, close, yet repelling, stare which experience gives a woman as a secure outlook upon the world of strange men. This strange man was not ungracefully sprawled in a deep chair, his top hat in a lap made by the loose crossing of his extremely long and extremely strong legs. His feet and hands were proportionate to his magnitude. His hands were white and the fingers in some way suggested to her a public speaker. He had big shoulders and a great deal of coat—a vast overcoat over a frock coat, all made in the loosest English fashion. She had now reached his head—a large head with an aggressive forehead and chin, the hair dark brown, thin on top and at the temples, the skin pallid but healthy. His eyes were bold and keen, and honest. He looked a tremendous man, and when he rose and advanced toward her she wondered how such bulk could be managed with so much grace. “An idealist,” she thought, “of the kind that has the energy to be very useful or very dangerous.”

“You are alone, mademoiselle,” he said, in French that was fluent but American, “and I am alone. Let us have an adventure.”

Emily’s glance started up his form with the proper expression of icy oblivion. But by the time it reached the lofty place from which his eyes were looking down at her it was hardly more than an expression of bewilderment. To give him an icy stare would have seemed as futile as for the valley to try to look scorn upon the peak. Before Emily could drop her glance, she had seen in his eyes an irresistible winning smile, as confiding as a boy’s, respectful, a little nervous, delightfully human and friendly.

“I can see what you are,” he continued in French, “and it may be that you see that I am not untrustworthy. I am lonely and shall be more so if you fail me. It seemed to me that—pardon me, if I intrude—you looked lonely also—and sad. Why should we be held from helping each the other by a convention that sensible people laugh at even when they must obey it?”