Would his hand be raised in deadly fray to avenge the undeserved taunt which yet he knew not how to repel?
O, Vincent!
Rose's refusal of Doctor Perry but added fuel to the flame; it is the unattainable we seek, the unattainable only that we fancy can satisfy; the unattainable that at any cost we must have.
How could he give her up? How think of her in the great, busy, wicked city, to which she was going, unfriended and penniless? Was there no way he could be of service to her? No way in which, without offending her sensitiveness, he could shield her from suffering and insult. Who was the father of her child? She "still loved him," believed him true to her—looked forward to the time when his honor should be vindicated on her behalf.
The doctor knew more of the world. The film would fall from her eyes by and by; he would wait patiently for that moment: then, perhaps, she would not turn away from him. She was too noble to cherish the memory of one she believed to be base. What alliance could purity have with pollution? Poor, trusting, wronged Rose! How immeasurably superior was she even now, and scorned thus, to the pharisaical of her own sex who, intrenched outwardly in purity, and pointing the finger of scorn at the suspected of their own sex, yet hold out the ready hand of welcome to him who comes into their presence, foul from the pollution of promiscuous harlotry.
Beautiful consistency! Pure Christianity! From the decision of such an incompetent tribunal, thank God! Rose could appeal to a Higher Court.
Rose was a daily marvel to the conceited Fritz. Accustomed in his grosser moments to those debasing liaisons which so infallibly unfit a man for the society of the pure in heart, he could not comprehend the reserve—even hauteur—with which the pretty Rose repelled every advance to an acquaintance.
At first, his surprised vanity whispered that it was only a cunning little ruse, to enhance the value of surrender, but this astute conclusion was doomed to be quenched by Rose's determinate and continued persistency. Then Fritz had fallen into the common error of fancying that to know one woman was to know the whole sex; not dreaming that it is necessary to begin with a different alphabet, in order to read understandingly each new female acquaintance;—a little fact which most men blunder through life without finding out.
In vain he displayed his white hands. In vain he donned successively his black suit, his gray suit, and his drab suit (which last he never resorted to except in very obstinate cases); in vain he tied his cravats in all sorts of fanciful forms; in vain he played "sick" in his crimson silk dressing-gown, or languished on deck in his Jersey overcoat. In vain he, who detested children, made advances through Charley, who was now convalescent; in vain he remarked in Rose's hearing that "his gloves needed mending," and that "the buttons were off his linen." Rose might as well have been deaf, dumb, and blind, for all the notice she took of him.