CHAPTER V
BUT it seemed rather unimportant, except to three rather frowzy, struggling persons, what was happening to Fliss. The important thing was what was happening to Cecily—what did happen during those next three marvelous months of her life. However much Dick might have been willing to drift along through a prolonged love-making and slow courtship, however much Cecily’s parents might have wished for such developments, it was soon obvious that they were impossible. The young freshness, the rarity, of Cecily attracted other men. There was one, one desperately in earnest older man, who even spoke to Cecily of marriage and drove her, white and trembling, to her mother. After that, a new diffidence, a new hesitation in her manner towards Dick puzzled him and stimulated him.
“I see nothing to do except let Dick Harrison try,” said Mrs. Warner rather sadly to her husband. “I don’t want any of the rest of them to take the bloom off Cecily with a lot of coarse, commonplace love-making. She’s too young, but she’s also too attractive. And it will come to Dick sooner or later, if she cares anything at all about him. I feel curiously helpless.”
“Dick fills the bill pretty well, after all, doesn’t he? He has a good record, a clean bill of health, and they would live here in town so that you could keep an eye on her.”
Dick found things made easy for him—opportunity easy, that is. His love-making was no easier for him than a man’s serious love-making ever is. He felt it was a time which harrowed his very soul, a time when a new character and a new psychology seemed to grow up in him, decrying everything he had ever done in his life—a time of strange humilities and reverences, soaring plans and queer discouragements. But the night came when he did ask Cecily to marry him and at the fright in her eyes regained his own courage.
Cecily did not answer him at once. He had laid his hope before her with a simplicity that surprised himself, for he had been full of fine phrases the day before. And then, when the moment came, he could only hold out his arms in helpless appeal and plead, “If you’ll marry me, Cecily, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make and keep you happy. I will—truly.”
Cecily only looked at him, drawing away a little from his eagerness. A moment before she had been all gayety. But the very word “marry” stirred depths in her which were frightening. And again she was in the convent, listening to the Jesuit priest, hearing him tell them of the choices before women. She was afraid and allured—and stirred. Those same choices pressing upon her—Dick no longer just a companion, just fun to be with, but Dick wanting to marry her! It was enough to make her spirit draw back as it did. Dick could get no answer. And he had grace enough not to press for one. But Cecily’s mother, seeing what had happened in the new awkwardness between Dick and her daughter, knew that the time for interference had come. She found Cecily sitting in her room, looking into space, much as Mother Fénelon had found her on the last day of the retreat. Cecily took her mother’s hand as she sat down beside her and held it, and the simple gesture affected Mrs. Warner greatly.
“Dicks wants me to marry him,” said Cecily, without classifying.
“Dick loves you,” her mother answered.