Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

A MATRIMONIAL MISTAKE

Toward noon on a stifling July day, a woman, a young woman, left the main walk through the deserted college grounds at Battle Field, and entered the path that makes a faint tracing down the middle of Pine Point. That fingerlike peninsula juts far into Otter Lake; it is a thicket of white pines, primeval, odorous. Not a ripple was breaking the lake's broad, burnished reach. The snowy islets of summer cloud hung motionless, like frescoes in an azure ceiling. But among the pines it was cool, and even murmurously musical.

In dress the young woman was as somber as the foliage above and around her. Her expression, also, was somber—with the soberness of the ascetic, or of the exceedingly shy, rather than of the sad. She seemed to diffuse a chill, like the feel of a precious stone—the absence of heat found both in those who have never been kindled by the fire of life and in those in whom that fire has burned itself out. There was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance, no attempt to display to advantage good points that ought to have been charms. She was above the medium height, and seemed taller by reason of the singular conformation of her face and figure. Her face was long and slim, and also her body, and her neck and arms; her hands, ungloved, and her feet, revealed by her walking skirt, had the same characteristic; the line from her throat to the curve of her bosom was of unusual length, and also the line of her back, of her waist, of her legs. Her hair was abundant, but no one would have guessed how abundant, or how varied its tints, so severely was it plaited and bound to her head. Her eyes were of that long narrow kind which most women, fortunate enough to possess them, know how to use with an effect at once satanic and angelic, at once provoking and rebuking passions tempestuous. But this woman had somehow contrived to reduce even those eyes to the apparently enforced puritanism of the rest of her exterior. She had the elements of beauty, of a rare beauty; yet beautiful she was not. It was as if nature had molded her for love and life, and then, in cruel freakishness, had failed to breathe into her the vital breath. A close observer might have wondered whether this exterior was not a mask deliberately held immobile and severe over an intense, insurgent heart and mind. But close observers are few, and such a secret—if secret she had—would pass unsuspected of mere shallow curiosity.

Within a few yards of the end of the peninsula she lifted her gaze from the ground, on which it had been steadily bent. Across her face drifted a slight smile—cold, or was it merely shy? It revealed the even edge of teeth of that blue-white which is beautiful only when the complexion is clear and fine—and her complexion was dull, sallow, as if from recent illness or much and harassing worry. The smile was an acknowledgment of the salutation of a man who had thrown away a half-finished cigarette and had risen from the bench at the water's edge.

"How d'ye do, Neva," said he, politely enough, but with look and tone no man addresses to a woman who has for him the slightest sex interest.

"How are you, Horace," said she, losing the faint animation her smile had given her face. Somewhat constrainedly, either from coldness or from embarrassment, she gave him her hand.

They seated themselves on the bench with its many carvings of initials and fraternity symbols. She took advantage of his gaze out over the lake to look at him; but her eyes were inscrutable. He was a big, powerful-looking man—built on the large plan, within as well as without, if the bold brow and eyes and the strong mouth, unconcealed by his close-cropped fair mustache, did not mislead. At first glance he seemed about thirty; but there were in his features lines of experience, of firmness, of formed character, of achievement, that could not have come with many less than forty years. He looked significant, successful, the man who is much and shall be more. He was dressed more fashionably than would be regarded as becoming in a man of affairs, except in two or three of our largest cities. In contrast with his vivid, aggressive personality—or, was it simply because of shy, supersensitive shrinking in his presence?—the young woman now seemed colorless and even bleak.

After a silence which she was unable or unwilling to break, he said, "This is very mysterious, Neva—this sending for me to meet you—secretly."

"I was afraid it might not be pleasant for you—at the house," replied she hesitatingly.

His air of surprise was not quite sincere. "Why not?" he inquired. "There isn't anyone I esteem more highly than your father, and he likes me. If he didn't he would not have done all the things that put me under such a heavy debt of gratitude to him." His tone suggested that he had to remind himself of the debt often lest he should be guilty of the baseness of forgetting it.