One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Again the figure crossed the firelight between the muslin curtains, and to Stephen Culpeper, standing alone in the snow outside, that large impending presence embodied all that he and his kind had hated and feared for generations. It embodied among other disturbances the law of change; and to Stephen and his race of pleasant livers the two sinister forces in the universe were change and death. After all, they had made the world, these pleasant livers; and what were those other people—the people represented by that ominous shadow—except the ragged prophets of disorder and destruction?

Turning away, Stephen descended the wide brick walk which fell gradually, past the steps of the library and the gaunt railing round a motionless fountain, to the broad white slope of the Square with its smoky veil of twilight. Farther away he saw the high iron fence and heard the clanging of passing street cars. On his left the ugly shape of the library resembled some crude architectural design sketched on parchment.

As he approached the fountain, a small figure in a red cape detached itself suddenly from the mesh of shadows, and he recognized Patty Vetch, the irrepressible young daughter of the Governor. He had seen her the evening before at a charity ball, where she had been politely snubbed by what he thought of complacently as "our set." From the moment when he had first looked at her across the whirling tulle and satin skirts in the ballroom, he had decided that she embodied as obviously as her father, though in a different fashion, the qualities which were most offensive both to his personal preferences and his inherited standards of taste. The girl in her scarlet dress, with her dark bobbed hair curling in on her neck, her candid ivory forehead, her provoking blunt nose, her bright red lips, and the inquiring arch of her black eyebrows over her gray-green eyes, had appeared to him absurdly like a picture on the cover of some cheap magazine. He had heartily disapproved of her, but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been on the cover of a magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never have bought it. He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they were inherited from the early eighties and his mother had implanted them), and he would have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not exactly a lady. Though he was broad enough in his views to realize that types repeat themselves only in variations, and that girls of to-day are not all that they were in the happy eighties—that one might make up flashily like Geraldine St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain in all essential social values "a lady"—still he was aware that the external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and fascinated attention.

As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground. When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small muff of feathers.

"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I came out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."

"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"

She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."

He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't be surprised if you get a sprained ankle."

"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."