For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning, at the door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely: "When I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it's the last word I ever speak, I thought you understood—that you knew how I felt. I was even fool enough to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I can say. I haven't any other excuses."
For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and I shan't change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you can just come to me. I shan't stop caring for you, and if you choose to come, I'll be waiting. I believed you were meant for me when I first saw you—and I believe it now. In spite of all you say, I am going to keep on believing it—"
He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway. While she looked after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play, they'd have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork," she thought humorously, "but this is real life, and I've just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday. He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever stop in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted it when I was twenty—and so does Ben O'Hara."
A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together, oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs and out of the house.
By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was still in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light of reason, why had she been so indignant? There had been a misapprehension; he had thought that she was in love with him, and thinking so, he had kissed her. That was the case plainly stated; and what was there in this to send a burning, rush of anger to her heart? What was there in this that had made her turn and insult him? For the first time in her life she had lost her temper without cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly, like a fury. And beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some vague, incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur—of a feeling of, humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a knowledge deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled in the moment when she lay in O'Hara's arms.
A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had left the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no longer jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued, through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from the crowd to herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or turned aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with the life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant morning in September, and then again when she walked home with O'Hara in the winter's dusk—which had released a new faculty in her soul, and had given her a fresh perception of human responsibilities—this had deserted her so utterly that she could barely remember its miraculous visitation. Then her personal life had seemed to become a part of the life of the street, of the sky, of the mysterious city outlined against the gray background of dusk. To-day she walked alone and without sympathy through the crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that she had lost her share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of the men and women around her—those lethargic foreign faces which crowded out the finer American type—awoke in her the sensation of hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She thought gloomily: "I have lost the vision—there is no hope either for me or for America except in the clear vision of the future." And while she spoke there passed over her the vague feeling of loss, of something missing, as if a precious possession had slipped from her grasp.
Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock, when she put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly: "What can be the matter with me? Before I go home I'll take a taxicab and drive up Riverside for an hour. If only the children were here, I should not feel so depressed." She remembered regretfully that Archibald and Fanny would be away all summer; and then from thinking of her children, she passed by almost insensible degrees of despondency to meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!
As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in the centre of the floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold before one of the elaborately decorated French mirrors. While she advanced the red-gold waves, worn with extreme flatness over a forehead of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a minute in the smallest and roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high, fluting note of delighted ejaculation.
"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York for! Now, isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face flashed back from the mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice, still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:
"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"