"Really?" said Jane. "Why, I thought you told me at one time that you were in love with me?"
"And I always have been, dear—and am," said Davy, in his deepest, tenderest tones. "And now that I am winning a position worthy of you——"
"I'll see," cut in Jane. "Let's not talk about it tonight." She felt that if he kept on she might yield to the temptation to say something mocking, something she would regret if it drove him away finally.
He was content. The ice had been broken. The Selma Gordon business had been disposed of. The way was clear for straight-away love-making the next time they met. Meanwhile he would think about her, would get steam up, would have his heart blazing and his words and phrases all in readiness.
Every human being has his or her fundamental vanity that must be kept alive, if life is to be or to seem to be worth living. In man this vanity is usually some form of belief in his mental ability, in woman some form of belief in her physical charm. Fortunately—or, rather, necessarily—not much is required to keep this vanity alive—or to restore it after a shock, however severe. Victor Dorn had been compelled to give Jane Hastings' vanity no slight shock. But it recovered at once. Jane saw that his failure to yield was due not to lack of potency in her charms, but to extraordinary strength of purpose in his character. Thus, not only was she able to save herself from any sense of humiliation, but also she was without any feeling of resentment against him. She liked him and admired him more than ever. She saw his point of view; she admitted that he was right—IF it were granted that a life such as he had mapped for himself was better for him than the career he could have made with her help.
Her heart, however, was hastily, even rudely thrust to the background when she discovered that her brother had been gambling in wheat with practically her entire fortune. With an adroitness that irritated her against herself, as she looked back, he had continued to induce her to disregard their father's cautionings and to ask him to take full charge of her affairs. He had not lost her fortune, but he had almost lost it. But for an accidental stroke, a week of weather destructive to crops all over the country, she would have been reduced to an income of not more than ten or fifteen thousand a year—twenty times the income of the average American family of five, but for Miss Hastings straitened subsistence and a miserable state of shornness of all the radiance of life. And, pushing her inquiries a little farther, she learned that her brother would still have been rich, because he had taken care to settle a large sum on his wife—in such a way that if she divorced him it would pass back to him.
In the course of her arrangings to meet this situation and to prevent its recurrence she saw much of Doctor Charlton. He gave her excellent advice and found for her a man to take charge of her affairs so far as it was wise for her to trust any one. The man was a bank cashier, Robert Headley by name—one of those rare beings who care nothing for riches for themselves and cannot invest their own money wisely, but have a genius for fidelity and wise counsel.
"It's a pity he's married," said Charlton. "If he weren't I'd urge you to take him as a husband."
Jane laughed. A plainer, duller man than Headley it would have been hard to find, even among the respectabilities of Remsen City.
"Why do you laugh?" said Charlton. "What is there absurd in a sensible marriage?"