Emanuel Bayard.
Helen frowned a little when she read this. No Bishop of a diocese, dictating the career of a deaconess, no village rector, guiding some anxious and aimless visiting young lady through the mild dissipations of parish benevolence, could have returned a more business-like, calm, even curt, reply.
The position of a man who may not love a woman and must not invite her to marry him—or, to put it a little differently, who must not love and cannot marry—is one which it seems to be asking too much of women to understand. At all events they seldom or never do. The withdrawals, the feints, the veils and chills and silences, by which a woman in a similar position protects herself, may be as transparent as golden mist to him whom she evades; but the sturdy retreat of a masculine conscience from a too tender or too tempting situation is as opaque as a gravestone to the feminine perception.
Accustomed to be eagerly wooed, Helen did not know what to make of this devotee who did not urge himself even upon her friendship. She had never given any man that treasure before. Like all high-minded women who have not spent themselves in experiments of the sensibilities, Helen regarded her own friendship as valuable. She would have preferred him to show, at least, that he appreciated his privilege. She would have liked him to make friendship as devotedly as those other men had made love to her.
His reserve, his distance, his apparent moodiness, and undoubted ability to live without seeing her except when he got ready to do so, gave her a perplexed trouble more important than pique.
Without ado or delay, she took the next electric car for Mrs. Slip’s.
Bayard received that afternoon, by the familiar hand of Joey Slip, this brief rejoinder:—
Dear Mr. Bayard,—This experienced boy seems to be on intimate terms with you, and offers to take my report, which stands thus: Johnny’s mother is in the Widows’ Home. Shall I write you details?
Truly yours,
H. C.