Half an hour later they were like a couple of chums who had known each other for years, and she was calling him Ben as if she had been raised with him.
That was not quite a year ago, and it is only introduced in order that the story might be told from the very beginning.
A thousand trifling things happen in life which often turn the tide or change the course of events. A man, because his watch is a few minutes late, misses a train which is wrecked and thus saves his life; again he goes down one street instead of another, for no reason that he knows of, and avoids a catastrophe or misses an opportunity; he goes here instead of there and something occurs which changes the course of his path from that point on to the grave. Call it fate if you like, but whatever it is it is inevitable and inexorable, and no human will has been found that is strong enough to resist it. It is like the call of “Hands up” coming from the desperado with a revolver. There is no alternative. In some cases it is impulse, a seventh sense, or pure luck—good or bad—according to results, or even intuition. The wise man says that what is to be will be and trails along in contentment. Others fight it out and come forth beaten in the end.
The two of this story came back to New York hopelessly in love with each other, and at that time, so far as I know, it wasn’t the commercial love of the twentieth century, ready to switch and change as soon as the sun went under the first cloud. They met two, three and four times a week, first in one place and then in another, and they knocked about town like a pair of happy-go-lucky Bohemians with the rent paid a year in advance.
“Some day,” he said to her once, “when I am quite free to do as I like I’m going to marry you, and then all of this running to cover like a pair of rabbits chased by a brown ferret that you can’t see will stop.”
“How do you know that I would marry you even if you wanted it?” she asked.
“We’ll argue that point when the time comes,” was the answer.
“Now that we’ve known each other for so long a time—at least it seems long to me—I’ve a confession to make to you. I ought to have told you before, but it isn’t too late now.”
“Save your confession as I’m saving mine,” he said. “I never knew these past life stories to do any good, for both men and women make mistakes, and they ought to do with them as the doctors do with their failures—bury them.”
“But we are doing wrong now.”