“I have been wondering when you would look at me again,” said Alice with a small, sly smile.
“Why, you are a woman grown. Where is the little girl I knew, the little girl who used to look up to me?”
“Oh, she’s gone these two years. She proposed to you and, when you refused her, she—died.”
“Yes—we must be married,” Howard went on. “Why not? It is more convenient, let us say.”
Alice shook her head and put her cheek against his again and clasped his fingers in hers. “No, my instinct is against it. Some day—perhaps. But not now, not now. I want you. I want only you. We are together out here—out beyond the pale. Inside, others would come in and—and surely come between us. I want no others—none.”
VII. — A LITTLE CANDLE GOES OUT.
Howard was now thirty years old. Park Row had long ceased talking of him as a “coming man.” While his style of writing was steadily improving, he wrote with no fixed aim, wrote simply for the day, for the newspaper which dies with the day of its date. Some of his acquaintances wondered why a man of such ability should thus stand still. The less observant spoke of him as an impressive example of the “journalistic blight.” Those who looked deeper saw the truth—a dangerous facility, a perilous inertia, a fatal entanglement. Facility enabled him to earn a good living with ease, working as he chose. Inertia prevented him from seeking opportunities for advancement. Entanglement shut him off from the men and women of his own kind who would have thrust opportunities upon him and compelled him.
Howard himself saw this clearly in his occasional moods of self-criticism. But as he saw no remedy, he raged intermittently and briefly, and straightway relapsed. Vanity supplied him with many excuses and consolations. Was he not one of the best reporters in the profession? Where was there another, where indeed in any profession were there many of his age, making five thousand a year? Was he not always improving his mind? Was he not more and more careful in his personal habits? Was he not respected by all who knew him; looked upon as a successful man; regarded by those with whom he came in daily contact as a leader in the profession, a model for style, a marvel for facility and versatility and for the quantity of good “copy” he could turn out in a brief time? But with all the soothings of vanity he never could quite hide from himself that his life was a failure up to that moment.