“We had no more than settled down from that and were just having a good little talk, after the passengers had stopped looking at us, when the porter appeared, bringing a basket of white flowers with two turtle-doves suspended from the handle, and Brian Beck’s card on it. I wish you could have heard the people laugh. I declare to you, Ruth, when I saw that great white thing coming and knew what it meant, it looked as big as a billiard-table to me. I was going to pay the fellow to take it out again, but no—Frankie wanted it. She made me put it down on the opposite seat and there it stood. Those sickening birds were too much for me, so I jerked them off and threw them out of the window, conscious that my face was very red and that I was amusing more people than I had bargained for.
“When the time came for me to get off and take the train back, Frankie implored me to go on with her, urging how strange it would look to people, who all thought we were married, to see me disappear and have her go on alone. I railed at the idea, but she was in earnest, and when I told her positively that I couldn’t—thinking more, I must admit, of the state of my affairs than of hers—she began to cry under her veil. That settled it. Of course I couldn’t stand it to see the girl I loved cry, so I went home with her, fell deeper in love every minute I was there, and came away feeling like a cur because I had not spoken to her father. Her people met me in the cordial, honest manner of those who have faith in mankind, but I couldn’t look them in the face without flinching.
“Since I came back, of course, I’ve been visiting Louise as usual. I told her all about the rice and flowers, thinking that if she quarrelled with me about the affair she would break off the engagement. But she only laughed and said it served me right for flirting with every girl that came along, and didn’t even reproach me. She has absolute faith in me. She doesn’t believe I could sink so low as I have, any more than she could. She has idealized me until I don’t dare to breathe for fear of destroying the illusion. She thinks that I love her in the way she loves me, but I couldn’t. It isn’t in me, Ruth. I don’t even love Frankie that way. To tell the truth, Louise is too good for me. She is magnificent, but I am rather afraid of her. She has so many ideals and is so intense. Her faith in me makes me shiver. I am not a bit comfortable with her. I do not even understand how she can love me so much. I am nothing extraordinary, but if you knew the way she treats me, you would think I was Achilles or some of those Greek fellows. She has refused better and richer men than I. Norris Whitehouse has loved her all her life, and you know what a splendid man he is, but Louise ridicules the idea of ever caring for anybody but me. She is so perfect that there is absolutely no flaw in her for me to recognize and feel friendly with. She reads me like a book, but I am less acquainted with her than I was before we were engaged. She says such beautiful things to me sometimes, things that are far beyond my comprehension, and she can get so uplifted that I feel as if I never had met her. There’s no use in talking; after a girl falls in love with a man she often ceases to be the girl he courted.”
I recalled what I had said to Percival—“Often a woman denies herself the expression of the best part of her love, for fear that it will be either a puzzle or a terror to her lover.” Such a saying belonged to Percival. I shouldn’t think of repeating it to Charlie, for he could not comprehend it. I should puzzle him as much as Louise did. It made me heartsick. How could even Charlie Hardy so persistently misunderstand the grandeur of Louise King? Yet how could such a glorious girl imagine herself in love with nice, weak, agreeable Charlie Hardy?
Louise is a younger, handsomer, more impetuous, less clever edition of Rachel Percival; but she is of that order. She is less concentrated and more emotional than Rachel. I did not quite know how a great sorrow would affect Louise. Rachel would use it as a stepping-stone towards heaven.
I have seen a young, untried race-horse with small, pointed, restless ears; with delicate nostrils where the red blood showed; with full, soft eyes where fire flashed; with a satin skin so thin and glossy that even the lightest hand would cause it to quiver to the touch; where pride and fire and royal blood seemed to urge a trial of their powers; and I have thought: “You are capable of passing anything on the track and coming under the wire triumphant and victorious; or you might fulfil your prophecy equally well by falling dead in your first heat, with the red blood gushing from those thin nostrils. We can be sure of nothing until you are tried, but it is a quivering delight to look at you and to share your impatience and to wonder what you will do.”
Occasionally I see women who affect me in the same way—idealists, capable of being wounded through their sensitiveness by things which we ordinary mortals accept philosophically; capable also of greater heights of happiness and lower depths of misery, but of suffering most through being misunderstood. To this class Rachel and Louise belong. Rachel, in Percival, has reached a haven where she rides at anchor, sheltered from such storms as had hitherto almost engulfed her, and growing more heroically beautiful in character day by day. Poor Louise is still at sea, with a great storm brewing. How hard, how terribly hard, to talk to Charlie Hardy about her, when, after the solemnity of an engagement tie between them, he was capable of misunderstanding, not only her, but the whole situation so blindly! But what a calamity it would be if Louise should marry him!
“Go on, Ruth. Say something, do. I imagine all sorts of things while you just sit there looking at me so solemnly. I realize that I am in a tight place. I did hope that you could see some way out of it for me; but I know, by the way you act, that you think I ought to give up Frankie—dear little girl!—and marry Louise, and by Jove! if you say it’s the handsome thing to do, I’ll do it.”
This still more effectually closed my lips. He so evidently thought that he was being heroic. He added rather reluctantly, “I must say that I suppose Frankie Taliaferro would get over it much more easily than Louise could.”
“Charlie,” I said slowly, “you don’t mean to be, but you are too conceited to live. I wonder that you haven’t died of conceit before this.”