Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

"Perhaps," she admitted.

He laughed. "There's truth in that." He was about to say, "I'm still just as much of a Philistine as I used to be"; but he refrained—something in her atmosphere forbade reminiscence or hint of any connection whatever between their present and their past.

"You're like Boris in one respect," she went on. "Nothing interests you but what is immediately useful to you."

"He's over head in love with you—isn't he?" Armstrong blurted.

Her face did not change by so much as a shade. She gave not an outward hint that she knew he had rudely flung himself against the barrier between them, to enter her inmost life on his own ruthless terms of masculine intolerance of feminine equality of right. She continued to look tranquilly at him, and, as if she had not heard his question, said, "You don't go out home often?"

The rebuke—the severest, the completest, a woman can give a man—flooded his face with scarlet to the line of his hair. "Not—not often," he stammered. "That is, not at all."

"Father and I visit with each other every few weeks," she continued. "And I take the home paper." She nodded toward a copy of the Battle Field Banner, conspicuous on the table beside him. "Even the advertisements interest me—'The first strawberries now on sale at Blodgett's'—you remember Blodgett, with his pale red hair and pale red eyes and pale red skin, and always in his shirt sleeves, with a tooth-brush, bristle-end up, in his vest pocket? And I read that Sam Warfield and his sister Mattie 'Sundayed' at Rabbit's Run, as if I knew and loved the Warfields."

This connecting of her present self with her past had the effect of restoring him somewhat. It established the bond of fellow-townsmen between them. "I too take the Banner," said he. "It's like a visit at home. I walk the streets and shake hands with the people. I'm glad I come from there—but I'm glad I came."

But he could not get his ease. It seemed incredible, not, as he would have expected, that they were such utter strangers, but that they had ever been even acquaintances. Not the present, but the past, seemed a trick of the imagination upon his sober senses. His feeling toward her reminded him of how he used to regard her when he, delivering parcels from his father's little store, came upon her, so vividly representing to him her father's power and position in the community that he could not see her as a person. While she continued to talk, pleasantly, courteously, as to an acquaintance from the same town, he tried to brace himself by recalling in intimate detail all they had been to each other; but by no stretch of fancy could he convince himself of the truth. No, it was not this woman who had been his wife, who had dressed and undressed before him in the intimacy of old-fashioned married life, who had accepted his embraces, who had borne him a child.

When he rose to go, it was with obvious consciousness of his hands and feet; and he more than suspected her of deliberately preventing him from recovering himself. "She's determined I shan't fail to learn my lesson," he thought, as he stood in the outer hall, waiting for the elevator, and recovering from his awkward exit.