“It’s just a chance it wasn’t you.”
“Don’t you see that it wouldn’t be a chance if men treated all women as well as you’d have treated me?”
“Men would have to feel about all women as I feel about you before that could come about, and that wouldn’t even be desirable. It certainly isn’t practical politics.”
“Oh, I wish I were clever and could argue. I know there are things to say only I don’t see how to put them.”
“There’s this to say”—he stood up, a little impatiently—“I’ve never posed as a passive individual. If I see things in my way I”—he made an expressive little gesture—“I set them aside. If I hurt Mrs. Locke in setting her aside, I’m sorry. But women have no business being in the way at such times.”
“I am glad to think you aren’t in your heart taking it as lightly as you pretend.”
But the incident rather spoilt things. Instead of being able to yield unreservedly to the comfort, yes, the joy of his being there, a counter influence was at work. A watchfulness, critical, even painful. Not so much of Cheviot as of herself. Was she the kind of girl Mrs. Locke had meant?—the kind who said, “I’m all right. What does it matter about other women.” Something in her soul revolted at the charge. In other moods she was conscious only of a blind rebellion against this evil trick fate had played her—perversely thrusting into the foreground a thing so little representative of the man. Offering this, forsooth, as a symbol of all that lay behind. A lying symbol. He wasn’t like that. Was he? He had been “frantic” about her. Ah, the subtle danger of that solace, feeding self-love, divorcing her from her less fortunate sisters.
Few people minded the lowering weather the next day, since it brought a sight of land. Yet one had need to be at sea for a week and a half to find comfort in this vision of a dim gray rock rising out of a gray sea to starboard; or on the port side, a range of snow-flecked hills, with clouds hanging low over the crater of an extinct volcano. How bleak the world up here in the Aleutians! Then suddenly, for Hildegarde, the chill vision warmed and glowed. “This is the kind of thing John Galbraith is looking at on the other side of the globe!”
To every one’s huge satisfaction the Los Angeles, skirting Ounalaska, showed no sign of pausing. Instead of turning off toward Dutch Harbor to learn if the ice had yielded up yonder and the way was clear, boldly the ship took the short cut through Unimak Pass into the Bering Sea. What splendid time they were making under the convoy of this best of all captains! People went about boasting, “Nome by Sunday!”