Champney Googe knew perfectly well that this cross current of influence was diametrically opposed to his own course of life as he had marked it out for himself; knew that this was a species of self-gratification in which he had no business to indulge; he knew, moreover, that from the moment he should make an earnest effort to win Alice Van Ostend and her accompanying millions, this self-gratification must cease. He told himself this over and over again; meanwhile he made excuse—a talk with the manager of the quarries, a new order of weekly payments to introduce and regulate with Romanzo Caukins, the satisfactory pay-master in the Flamsted office, a week-end with his mother, the consideration of contracts and the erection of a new shed on the lake shore—to visit Flamsted several times during the autumn, winter, and early spring.
At last, however, he called a halt.
Alice Van Ostend, young, immature, amusing in her girlish abandon to the delight of at last "coming out", was, nevertheless, rapidly growing up, a condition of affairs that Champney was forced rather unwillingly to admit just before her first large ball. As usual he made himself useful to Alice, who looked upon him as a part of her goods and chattels. It was in the selection of the favors for the german to be given in the stone house on the occasion of the coming-out reception for its heiress, that his eyes were suddenly opened to the value of time, so to say; for Alice was beginning to patronize him. By this sign he recognized that she was putting the ten years' difference in their ages at something like a generation. It was not pleasing to contemplate, because the winning of Alice Van Ostend was, to use his own expression, in a line coincident with his own life lines. Till now he believed he was the favored one; but certain signs of the times began to be provocative of distrust in this direction.
He asked boldly for the first dance, for the cotillon, and the privilege of giving her the flowers she was to wear that night. He assumed these favors to be within his rights; she was by no means of his way of thinking. It developed during their scrapping—Champney had often to scrap with Alice to keep on a level with her immaturity—that there was another rival for the cotillon, another, a younger man, who desired to give her the special flowers for this special affair. The final division of the young lady's favors was not wholly reassuring to Mr. Googe. As a result of this awakening, he decided to remain in New York without farther visits to Flamsted until the Van Ostends should have left the city for the summer.
But in the course of the spring and summer he found it one thing to call a halt and quite another to make one. The cross current of influence, which had its source in Flamsted, was proving, against his will and judgment, too strong for him. He knew this and deplored it, for it threatened to carry him away from the shore towards which he was pushing, unawares that this apparently firm ground of attainment might prove treacherous in the end.
"Every man has his weakness, and she's mine," he told himself more than once; yet in making this statement he was half aware that the word "weakness" was in no sense applicable to Aileen. It remained for the development of his growing passion for her to show him that he was wholly in the wrong—she was his strength, but he failed to realize this.
Champney Googe was not a man to mince matters with himself. He told himself that he was not infatuated; infatuation was a thing to which he had yielded but few times in his selfish life. He was ready to acknowledge that his interest in Aileen Armagh was something deeper, more lasting; something that, had he been willing to look the whole matter squarely in the face instead of glancing askance at its profile, he would have seen to be perilously like real love—that love which first binds through passionate attachment, then holds through congenial companionship to bless a man's life to its close.
"She suits me—suits me to a T;" such was his admission in what he called his weak moments. Then he called himself a fool; he cursed himself for yielding to the influence of her charming personality in so far as to encourage what he perceived to be on her part a deep and absorbing love for him. In yielding to his weakness, he knew he was deviating from the life lines he had laid with such forethought for his following. A rich marriage was the natural corollary of his determination to advance his own interests in his chosen career. This marriage he still intended to make, if possible with Alice Van Ostend; and the fact that young Ben Falkenburg, an old playmate of Alice's, just graduated from college, the "other man" of the cotillon favors, was the first invited guest for the prospective cruise on Mr. Van Ostend's yacht, did not dovetail with his intentions. It angered him to think of being thwarted at this point.
"Why must such a girl cross my path just as I was getting on my feet with Alice?" he asked himself, manlike illogically impatient with Aileen when he should have lost patience with himself. But in the next moment he found himself dwelling in thought on the lovely light in the eyes raised so frankly to his, on the promises of loyalty those same eyes would hold for him if only he were to speak the one word which she was waiting to hear—which she had a right to hear after his last visit in July to Flamsted.
If he had not kissed her that once! With a girl like Aileen there could be no trifling—what then?