Our sympathy lay with the cabaret veteran rather than with Meenie. Of course, we did not expect Miss Weston to enjoy her predicament, but when a man asked her, "Are you going to sing 'As Once in May' to-night?" we could not quite see why Mr. Merrick found it necessary to report the fact that:
"She started, and the man told himself that he had really stumbled on a singular study.
"'Yes,' she faltered."
To us it seemed a simple question simply put. After all, it was fortunate that the young man did not begin with "Will you have a drink?" Brutal and insulting language of that sort would certainly have sent Meenie straight into hysterics. Even when the young man dropped in the next night there seemed to be nothing in his conversation to alarm our heroine excessively, but Merrick is wedded to the notion that virtue in a woman is a sort of panic. A good name, he seems to believe, is something which a woman carries tightly clasped in both arms like a bowl of goldfish. To stumble would be almost as fatal as to fall.
"I came to talk to you again, if you'll let me," said the young man.
"You know very well that I can't help it," our heroine answered. This was not polite, but at least it had a more engaging quality of boldness than anything she had said before. But soon she was fluttering again. "Oh, you have only to say I'm a nuisance! I assure you that if you'd rather I left you alone I won't speak another word," continued the young man. This seemed reassuring enough, but it has a devastating effect upon our heroine, for we find that "Her mouth twitched, and she looked at the ground."
Eventually she and the young man were married. He had spoken to her without an introduction, and he was enough of a gentleman to realize that he must right the wrong and make an honest woman of her.
Although we have not yet finished the book, we rather suspect that they will not be very happy. Merrick's good women never are. They all suffer terrifically just because they lack the ability to bulwark their virtue behind a couple of snappy comebacks, such as, "Where do you get that stuff?" or, "How do you get that way?"
Just Around the Corner
We sometimes wonder just how and what Joseph Conrad would have written if he had never gone to sea. It may be that he would never have written at all if he had not been urged on by the emotion which he felt about ships and seas and great winds. And yet we regret sometimes that he is so definitely sea-struck. After all, Conrad is a man so keen in his understanding of the human heart that he can reach deep places. It is sometimes a pity, therefore, that he is so much concerned with researches which take him down into nothing more than water, which, even at its mightiest, is no such infinite element as the mind of man.