“Of weary women—weary wives. The men are hobby-riders. They have just one interest and that usually small and dull—stocks or iron or real estate or hunting or automobiles. Our women are not like the English women—stupid, sodden. They are alive, acute. They wish to be interested. Their husbands bore them. So—well, what is the natural temptation to a lazy woman in search of an interest?”
“It’s like Paris—like France?”
“Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not fond of intrigue for its own sake—at least, not as a rule.”
“Doesn’t interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It’s the American blood coming out—the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well.”
“I doubt that,” replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. “When a woman loves a man, she wants to absorb him.”
Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed thought about Teddy Danvers’s fiancée—the first temptation that had entered his loneliness since Alice died.
In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and Alice to close—that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he, and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity presses.
In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly personified in this beautiful, graceful girl, at once appreciative and worthy of appreciation.
Perhaps she appealed most strongly to Howard in her vivid suggestion of the open air—of health and strength and nature. He had been leading a cloistered existence and his blood had grown sluggish. She gave him the sensation that a prisoner gets when he catches a glimpse from his barred window of the fields and the streams radiating the joy of life and freedom. And Marian was of his own kind—like the women among whom he had been brought up. She satisfied his idea of what a “lady” should be, but at the same time she was none the less a woman to him—a woman to love and to be loved; to give him sympathy, companionship; to inspire him to overcome his weaknesses by striving to be worthy of her; to bring into his life that feminine charm without which a man’s life must be cold and cheerless.
He knew that he could not marry her, that he had no right to make love to her, that it was unwise to go near her again. But he had no power to resist the temptation. And even in those days he had small regard for the means when the end was one upon which he had fixed his mind. “Why not take what I can get?” he thought, as he dreamed of her. “She’s engaged—her future practically settled. Yes, I’ll be as happy as she’ll let me.” And he resumed his idealising.