“You've never had much to do with women, have you?” she finally said slowly in a musing tone.
“I wish that were true—almost,” replied I, on my mettle as a man, and resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague “confessions”—boastings disguised as penitential admissions—after the customary masculine fashion.
She smiled—and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. “A man and a woman can be a great deal to each other, I believe,” said she; “can be—married, and all that—and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met—more hopelessly strangers.”
“There's always a sort of mystery,” I conceded. “I suppose that's one of the things that keep married people interested.”
She shrugged her shoulders—she was in evening dress, I recall, and there was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on the new snow when the sun comes out.
“Mystery!” she said impatiently. “There's no mystery except what we ourselves make. It's useless—perfectly useless,” she went on absently. “You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed friendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd punish her for it by—by despising her.”
I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove that it is a Methuselah in experience.
“If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known,” said I, “do you suppose I could care for you as I do?”
I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of friendship and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.
In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good—whoever got into trouble through walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the “superhuman goodness” part of my theory down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide—really, it's a miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck, with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the spot. Never did a Jersey “jay” in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious old past-master of craft.