Phoebe was a sprinter, capable of effort if the effort need not be sustained. She had attracted Reuben, and in the doing it had submitted to severe self-discipline, to a vigilance and a courage which went beyond those of the normal Phoebe. Accomplishment went to her head like wine; she wasn’t prudent Phoebe on a day when, as their horses were at the door, a message came from Everett asking Reuben to go at once to discuss some detail of equipment of the now nearly completed factory. She wasn’t prudent or she would never have taken such an occasion to plead that he had promised her that day for riding. She knew what his factory meant to him, knew, too, how jealous he was of his hard-won knowledge, how keen to match it against Everett’s older experience; yet she asked him to imply, by keeping a promise to ride, that she came before the factory. And he loved her. Whatever the depth of his love, whatever the chances that this was the love that lasts, he loved her then. “Tell Mr. Everett,” he said to the messenger, “that I authorize him to use his own judgment.”
Which Everett very gladly did, promptly and, he thought, irremediably. It was a point on which he had his own ideas, differing from Reuben’s, and carte blanche at this stage, after the endless controversies, of Reuben’s obstinate collaboration, was a godsend that Everett wasn’t going to throw away by being dilatory.
It resulted that when Reuben next visited the works, he was confronted by a fait accompli, and by Everett’s hardly concealed smirk of glee. “The thing, as you see, is done now. I had your authority to do as I thought best,” said Everett.
“Then undo and re-do,” said Reuben, sourly.
“Pull down!” gasped Everett. “But—”
“You heard me,” growled Reuben, turning on his heel from a disgruntled architect who had been too previous with self-congratulations on getting his own way for once.
And Phoebe was triumphing at home, secure of her Reuben, in ecstasy at her tested power over him.
Reuben, too, was thinking of that power, of how he had yielded to it, of Samson and Delilah and of the dry-rot that sets in in a man’s strength when he delivers his will into a woman’s keeping. It was a dark, inscrutable Reuben who came home that night to Bradshaw’s; beyond Phoebe’s skill to smooth away the irritation furrows from that brow. She used her artless remedy; she fed him well, and persuaded herself that no more was wrong than that he came in hungry. He was watching her that night with critical eyes and she was aware of nothing but that his gaze never left her: its fidelity rejoiced her.
He flung himself vigorously at work, after that. There was woman, a snare, and work, the sane alternative, there was the zest of it, the mere exercise of it to sweat evil humors out of a man. By now he knew all that Bradshaw’s factory could teach him, and, by his inspections of modern factories, much more; but his own place was not quite ready, his organization was complete on paper and till the day came for applying his knowledge, time had to be filled somehow and as well at Bradshaw’s as anywhere else. Phoebe found herself neglected. He did not ride, or, if he did, it was alone. It came to her that she had made too sure of him; he hadn’t mentioned marriage, he was drifting from her. What could she do to bind him to her?
Then he relented. She was suffering and he thought, in a tender mood, that it hurt him to see her suffer. Wasn’t he making a mountain of a molehill, wasn’t he unjust to blame her for the consequences of his weakness? He was a most chivalrous gentleman when he next invited her to ride with him, and she accepted, meekly. There lay the difference between the then and the now. Then they were comrades, now he condescended and he did not know it. But it was still his thought that Phoebe was to be his wife, and in the comfortable glow of forgiveness, in horse-exercise on a pleasant afternoon with one whose complexion was proof against any high light, who was a plucky rider and his accustomed fellow on these rides, they achieved again a genuine companionship. His doubts and her fears alike dissolved in what seemed the mellowed infallibility of that perfect afternoon.