“I’ve never thought of marrying her,” he replied quietly. “Why, she has a lover already.”
At this Mrs. Callendar’s countenance assumed an expression of passionate interest. “But she is not that sort ... not a demi-mondaine. She is an honest woman ... a cold woman. One can see that.”
He smiled, this time even more softly and mockingly and into the gray eyes there came a gleam of ironical humor. “It was Sabine who said she had a lover,” he said. “You remember, Miss Tolliver told us nothing of what has happened to her since she came here.... Besides, cold women are the most successful. They do not lose their heads.”
31
IF Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that left her uneasy and disturbed.
Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps, even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always good and generous. There were, of course, such things as “bad women” but these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace. These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any one like Richard Callendar.
In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry’s (for he made no effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the depths of her mother’s teachings, that what she did was an improper and even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack of experience ... a step which later on she might not have risked.
There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she would blush as if suddenly overcome by a sense of his presence, for he was charming to her—gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its existence.
One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became a blagueur, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.
It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.