The Wheel of Life

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

Then while he stood there, hesitating and indignant, the servant brought her a card, and as she took it from the tray, he saw a flush that was like a pale flame overspread her face.

"It's Mr. Kemper now," she said. "Why will you not stay and be good and forget?"

"I'd rather meet the devil himself at this minute," he cried in a boyish rage that brought tears to his eyes. "It seems to me that I spend half my life getting out of his way."

"But don't you like him?" she enquired curiously. "Every one likes him, I think."

"Well, I'm not every one," he blurted out angrily, "for I think him a consummate, thickheaded ass."

"Good heavens!" she gayly ejaculated, "what a character you give him." Then, as he was leaving the room, she reached out, and taking his hand, drew him against his will, back to his chair. "You shall not go like this—I'll not have it," she said. "Do you think I am a stone that I can bear to spoil all your beautiful triumph. Here, sit down and I promise to make you like both him and me."

As she finished, Kemper came in with his energetic step and his genial greeting, and she introduced the two men with a little flattering smile in Trent's direction. "You have the honour to meet our coming playwright," she added with a gracious gesture, skilfully turning the conversation upon the younger man's affairs, while she talked on with a sweetness which at once distracted and enraged him. He listened to her at first moodily and then with an attention which, in spite of his resolution, was fixed upon the fine points of his play as she made now and then friendly suggestions as to the interpretations of particular lines or scenes. The charming deference in her voice soothed his ruffled vanity and it seemed to him presently that the flattering intoxication of her praise sent his imagination spinning among the stars.

Kemper listened to it all with an intelligent and animated interest, and when he spoke, as he did from time to time, it was to put a sympathetic question which dismissed Trent's darling prejudice into the region of departed errors. To have held out against the singular attraction of the man, would have been, Trent thought a little later, the part of a perverse and stiffnecked fool. It was not only that he succumbed to Kemper's magnetism, but that he recognised his sincerity—his utter lack of the dissimulation he had once believed him to possess. Then, as Kemper sat in the square of sunlight which fell through the bow window, Trent noticed each plain, yet impressive detail of his appearance. He saw the peculiar roughness of finish which lent weight, if not beauty, to his remarkably expressive face, and he saw, too, with an eye trained to attentive observation, that the dark brown hair, so thick upon the forehead and at the back of the neck, had already worn thin upon the crown of the large, well-turned head. "In a few years he will begin to be bald," thought the younger man, "then he will put on glasses, and yet these things will not keep him from appealing to the imaginary ideal of romance which every woman must possess. Even when he is old he will still have the power to attract, if he cannot keep the fancy." But the bitterness had gone out of his thoughts, and a little later, when he left the house and walked slowly homeward, he discovered that a hopeless love might lend a considerable sweetness to a literary life. After all, he concluded, one might warm oneself at the flame, and yet neither possess it utterly nor be destroyed.

His mother sat knitting by the window when he entered the apartment, and he saw that the table was already laid for dinner in the adjoining room.

"I ordered dinner a little earlier for you," she explained as she laid aside the purple shawl while the ball of yarn slipped from her short, plump knees and rolled under the chair in which she sat. Never in his recollection had he seen her put aside her knitting that the ball did not roll from her lap upon the floor, and now as he stooped to follow the loosened skein, he wondered vaguely how she had been able to fill her life with so trivial and monotonous an employment.