Turning from her mirror, slowly the woman went to the great bunch of roses that stood upon her table. They were his roses; and they fitly expressed, in their costly beauty, the life that he was coming to offer to her. Very deliberately she bent over them, burying her face in the mass of rich color, inhaling deeply their heavy fragrance. Thoughtfully she considered them and all that, to her, they symbolized. But there was no flush upon her cheek now. There was no warmth in the light of her eyes. No glad excitement thrilled her. There was no trembling in her touch—no eager joyousness in her manner.
Suddenly, some roisterer, passing along the street with his companions, laughed a loud, reckless, half drunken, laugh that sounded in the quiet darkness with startling clearness.
The woman sprang back from the flowers as though a poisonous serpent, hidden in their fragrant beauty, had struck her. With a swift look of horror on her white face she glanced fearfully about the room.
Again the laugh sounded; this time farther down the street.
The woman sank into her chair, trembling with a nameless fear. To her, that laugh in the dark had sounded as the laughter of the crowd that day when she was forced so close to the outcast women who were in the hands of the police.
"But those women," argued the frightened woman with herself, "sell themselves to all men for a price."
"And you," answered the heart of her womanhood, "and you, also, will sell yourself to one man, for a price. The wealth of womanhood committed to you—all the treasures that you have guarded so carefully—you will sell now to this good man for the price that he can pay. If he could not pay the price—if he came to you empty handed—would you say yes?"
"But I will be true to him," argued the woman. "I will give myself to him and to him only as wife to husband."
"You are being false to him already," replied her woman heart, "for you are selling yourself, not giving yourself to him. You are planning to deceive him. You would make him think that he is taking to himself a wife when, for a price, you are selling to him—something higher than a public woman, it is true—but something, as true, very much lower than a wife. What matter whether the price be in gold and silver or in property and social position—it is a price. Except he pay you your price he could not have you."
And what, thought the woman, what if—after she had crossed the threshold with this good man—after she had entered with him into the life that lay on the other side that door—what if, then, that other one should come? What if the one for whom her empty heart should have waited were to come and stand alone before that door through which she could not go back? And the children—the dear children of her dreams—what of them? Had not her unborn children the right to demand that they be born in love? And if she should say, "no," to this man—if she should turn once more away from the open door, through which he would ask her to go with him—what then? What if that one who had delayed his coming so long should never come?