I rather thought I deserved it. But it has ever been one of my vanities to pretend to take my successes as matters of course, and even to depreciate them. They say the English invariably win in diplomacy because they act dissatisfied with what they get, never grumbling so sourly as when they capture the whole hog. I can believe it. That has been my policy, and it has worked rather well. Still, any policy works well if the man has the gift for success. “Twenty-five per,” I repeated, to impress it still more deeply upon her and to revel in the thrilling words. “Before I get through I’ll make them pay me what I’m worth.”
“Do you think you’ll ever be making more than that?” exclaimed she, wonderingly.
“I’ll be getting two thousand some day,” said I, far more confidently than I felt.
“Oh—Godfrey!” she said softly.
And as I looked at her I for the first time felt a certain peculiar thrill that comes only when the soul of the woman a man loves rushes forth to cling to his soul. In my life I have never had—and never shall have—a happier moment.
Once more patience, gentle reader! I know this bit of sordidness—this glow of sentiment upon a vulgar material incident—disgusts your delicate soul. I am aware that you have a proper contempt for all the coarse details of life. You would not be gentle reader if you hadn’t. You would be a plain man or woman, living busily and usefully, and making people happy in the plain ways in which the human animal finds happiness. You would not be devoting your days to making soul-food out of idealistic moonshine and dreaming of ways to dazzle yourself and your acquaintances into thinking you a superior person.
“Do you know,” said my pretty Edna, advancing her bond at least halfway toward meeting mine, “do you know, I’ve had an instinct, a presentiment of this? I was dreaming it when I woke up this morning.”
I’ve observed that every woman in her effort to prove herself “not like other girls” pretends to some occult or other equally supranatural quality. One dreams dreams. Another gets spirit messages. A third has seen ghosts. Another has a foot which sculptors have longed to model. A fifth has a note in her voice which the throat specialists pronounce unique in the human animal and occurring only in certain rare birds and Sarah Bernhardt. I met one not long ago who had several too many or too few skins, I forget which, and as a result was endowed with I cannot recall what nervous qualities quite peculiar to herself, and somehow most valuable and fascinating. In that early stage of her career my Edna was “hipped” upon a rather commonplace personal characteristic—the notion that she had premonitions, was a sort of seeress or prophetess. Later she dropped it for one less tiresome and overworked. But I recall that even in that time of my deepest infatuation I wished to hear as little as possible about the occult. Of all the shallow, foggy fakes that attract ignorant and miseducated people the occult is the most inexcusable and boring. A great many people, otherwise apparently rather sensible, seem honestly to believe in it. But, being sensible, they don’t have anything to do with it. They treat it as practical men treat the idiotic in the creeds and the impossible in the moral codes of the churches to which they belong—that is, they assent and proceed to dismiss and to forget.
However, I was not much impressed by Edna’s attempt to dazzle me with her skill as a Sibyl. But I was deeply impressed by the awe-inspiring softness and shapeliness of her hand lying prisoner in mine. And I was moved to the uttermost by the kisses and embraces we exchanged in the gathering dusk. “I love you,” she murmured into my ecstatic ear. “You are so different from the other men round here.”
I dilated with pride.