"Thank you, Williams," said Margaret sweetly. "Order the carriage to come round at once. Leave Mr. Craig in the drawing-room. I'll speak to him on the way out."
She dashed upstairs. "Selina! Selina!" she called. And when Selina came: "Let me see that hand. I hurt you because I got news that went through me like a knife. You understand, don't you?"
"It was nothing, Miss Rita," protested Selina. "I'd forgot it myself already."
But Margaret insisted on assuring herself with her own eyes, got blood on her white gloves, had to change them. As she descended she was putting on the fresh pair—a new pair. How vastly more than even the normal is a man's disadvantage in a "serious" interview with a woman if she is putting on new gloves! She is perfectly free to seem occupied or not, as suits her convenience; and she can, by wrestling with the gloves, interrupt him without speech, distract his attention, fiddle his thoughts, give him a sense of imbecile futility, and all the time offer him no cause for resentment against her. He himself seems in the wrong; she is merely putting On her gloves.
She was wrong in her guess that Arkwright had been at him. He had simply succumbed to his own fears and forebodings, gathered in force as soon as he was not protected from them by the spell of her presence. The mystery of the feminine is bred into men from earliest infancy, is intensified when passion comes and excites the imagination into fantastic activity about women. No man, not the most experienced, not the most depraved, is ever able wholly to divest himself of this awe, except, occasionally, in the case of some particular woman. Awe makes one ill at ease; the woman who, by whatever means, is able to cure a man of his awe of her, to make him feel free to be himself, is often able to hold him, even though he despises her or is indifferent to her; on the other hand, the woman who remains an object of awe to a man is certain to lose him. He may be proud to have her as his wife, as the mother of his children, but he will seek some other woman to give her the place of intimacy in his life.
At the outset on an acquaintance between a man and a woman his awe for her as the embodiment of the mystery feminine is of great advantage to her; it often gets him for her as a husband. In this particular case of Margaret Severence and Joshua Craig, while his awe of her was an advantage, it was also a disadvantage. It attracted him; it perilously repelled him. He liked to release his robust imagination upon those charms of hers—those delicate, refined beauties that filled him with longings, delicious in their intensity, longings as primeval in kind as well as in force as those that set delirious the savage hordes from the German forests when they first poured down over the Alps and beheld the jewels and marbles and round, smooth, soft women of Italy's ancient civilization. But at the same time he had the unmistakable, the terrifying feeling of dare-devil sacrilege. What were his coarse hands doing, dabbling in silks and cobweb laces and embroideries? Silk fascinated him; but, while he did not like calico so well, he felt at home with it. Yes, he had seized her, had crushed her madly in the embrace of his plowman arms. But that seemed now a freak of courage, a drunken man's deed, wholly beyond the nerve of sobriety.
Then, on top of all this awe was his reverence for her as an aristocrat, a representative of people who had for generations been far removed above the coarse realities of the only life he knew. And it was this adoration of caste that determined him. He might overcome his awe of her person and dress, of her tangible trappings; but how could he ever hope to bridge the gulf between himself and her intangible superiorities? He was ashamed of himself, enraged against himself for this feeling of worm gazing up at star. It made a mockery of all his arrogant, noisy protestations of equality and democracy.
"The fault is not in my ideas," thought he; "THEY'RE all right. The fault's in me—damned snob that I am!"
Clearly, if he was to be what he wished, if he was to become what he had thought he was, he must get away from this sinister influence, from this temptation that had made him, at first onset, not merely stumble, but fall flat and begin to grovel. "She is a superior woman—that is no snob notion of mine," reflected he. "But from the way I falter and get weak in the knees, she ought to be superhuman—which she isn't, by any means. No, there's only one thing to do—keep away from her. Besides, I'd feel miserable with her about as my wife." My wife! The very words threw him into a cold sweat.
So the note was written, was feverishly dispatched.