One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Surely if any one has an opinion about that, it must be you," she rejoined as gravely as she could.

"I haven't; not the shadow of one." He was plainly puzzled. "I thought you might help me. You have a way of seeing things."

"Have I?" The spontaneous tribute touched her. "I wish I could see this, but I can't. Frankly, since you ask me, I may say that I have been troubled about it. There are things that Patty hides, even from me, and I think I have her confidence."

"I dare say you wonder why I have come to you to-day," he said. "I can handle most situations; but I have never had to handle the love affairs of a girl, and I'm perfectly capable of making a mess of them. Things like that are outside of my job."

He seemed to her a pathetic figure as he stood there, in his boyish embarrassment and his redundant vitality, confessing an inability to surmount the obstacle in his way. She had never known any one, man or woman, who was so obviously lacking in subtlety of perception, in all those delicate intuitions on which she relied more completely than on judgment for an accurate impression of life. Was he, with his bigness, his earnestness, his luminous candour, only an overgrown child? Even his physical magnetism, and she felt this in the very moment when she was trying to analyse it, even his physical magnetism might be nothing more than the spell exercised by primitive impulse over the too complex problems of civilization. She had heard that he was unscrupulous—vague charges that he had never been able to repel—yet she was conscious now of a secret wish to protect him from the consequences of his duplicity, as she might have wished to protect an irresponsible child. Some mysterious sense perception made her aware that beneath what appeared to be discreditable public actions there was the simple bed-rock of honesty. For the quality she felt in Vetch was a profound moral integrity, an integrity which was bred by nature in the innermost fibre of the man.

"If you will tell me—" she began, and checked herself with a sensation of helplessness. After all, what could he tell her that she did not know?

"I want to do what is right for her," he said abruptly. "I should hate for her to be hurt."

While he talked it seemed to Corinna that she was living in some absurd comedy, which mimicked life but was only acting, not reality. In her world of reserves and implications no man would have dared to make himself ridiculous by a visit like this.

"Do you believe that she cares for Stephen?" she asked bluntly.

"It didn't start with me. Miss Spencer, that's the lady who lives with us you know, is afraid that Patty sees too much of him. He is at the house every day—"