Yet he had wrought the wondrous, proposal-fraught change in Miss Clearwater. And he had done it by impudently pausing at her phaeton in Harrison’s main street and telling her, with exasperating indifference to her icy manner, that he could marry her if he wished but that he had no place in his life for such a person as she.
Why had this transformed her? For two reasons, both important to those men who would fain have influence over one—or more—of the female sex. The first is, that he had been able to impress upon her the fact that he was a worth-while person. The second is, that he, being serious and simple, had shown her that he, the man worth-while, meant it when he said she was not a girl a worth-while man would care to marry. With these two propositions firmly fixed in her head, Eleanor Clearwater could not fail to see that it was “up to” her to demonstrate her power over man.
She invited proposals—proposals not too obviously incited chiefly by her charms as an heiress. She got the proposals. But still she was not satisfied. There was one man—a homely man, but a man with far and away the handsomest soul she had ever seen—simple, proud, honest and fearless—looking from eyes that were the more beautiful for the rugged homeliness of the rest of his face. This man whom her woman’s heart defiantly told her was supremely worth-while—this man had said she was not worth-while. Therefore, there were worlds still defiantly unconquered—which meant that nothing was conquered. It irritated her—as her father had been irritated until all the lumber interests had been gathered in under his lordship. It irritated her yet more profoundly that such an absurdity as this gentle and friendly disdain of bucolic homeliness should irritate her. But she could not change her nature.
He had set her to thinking about him. He had her worried, as the saying is. And when a man gets a woman in that state, she will not emerge from it until something definite has occurred.
Woman has little to think about but men—thanks to a social system cunningly contrived by man for his own benefit. She thinks of man in general until she centers upon one man. She then thinks of him until she finds him out. When that comes to pass, she goes back to men in general, until a new personal interest develops. This, so long as any remnant of charm gives her hope. Man is woman’s career. Not so with men; not so with George Helm, State Senator-elect and desperately in earnest about making a career.
While Eleanor Clearwater was sleeping away the excitements of the Salfield ball in her attractive bedroom in the Clearwater palace, George Helm was at work several hundred miles away in his dingy back office in the Masonic Building at Harrison. When she should be awakened by her maid to dress for her first engagement of the day, she would soon be thinking of George Helm—thinking how ugly and obscure and ungainly he was—and what magnetic eyes he had. Thinking the more, the more she tried not to think. But George Helm was not thinking of her at all.
He was sitting beside the rickety old table in a wooden chair, a kitchen chair. It was tilted back and Helm’s long lank legs were tangled up with each other and with the rungs in amazing twists. Perhaps you have happened to know an occasional man—or woman—whose every act and trick of manner had an inexplicable fascination. When George Helm was self-conscious, he had no more magnetism than is inseparable from intelligent, sympathetic good nature sunning in a kindly keen sense of humor. But the instant he lost self-consciousness—as he always did on the platform, and as he was more and more doing in private life, now that he had begun to have success—that instant he became a magnet, one of those human magnets who interest you, no matter what they do, and in repose. Even in bed—that too short, sagging bed in the attic of Mrs. Beaver’s boarding-house—even as he lay doubled up, there was the fascination of the unique, the perfectly natural and unassuming.
As he sat twisted in and upon the wobbly kitchen chair, his friend, lazy Bill Desbrough, from across the hall, looked in every few minutes, hoping George would encourage him to enter. It was curious about George Helm, how in spite of his lack of what passes for dignity, no one ever—even in the days when he was thought to be a joke—“the boy with that beard”—no one ever ventured to interrupt him without an encouraging look from those deep-set blue-gray eyes.
At last George looked up and smiled as Bill stood in the doorway. He said: