“I’m not. We are good friends, in a sense; far better than we have ever been before. We found we were in accord––after all.”
He looked at her in the same helpless fashion Luke had adopted.
“She will divorce you and marry someone else and continue to be a Gorgeous Girl,” Mary finished, quietly. “No terrible fate will overtake her, nothing occur to rouse or develop her abilities. She will remain young and apparently childish until she suddenly reaches the stately dowager age overnight. Gorgeous Girls are like gypsies––they should either be very young and lissom or old, crinkled, and vested with powers of fortune-telling––the middle stage is impossible. I realized this morning that I’ve been fooling myself, all the heart in me trying to be 100 per cent efficient, when I really want to be a Gorgeous Girl––fluffy, helpless––a blooming little idiot. And I’m glad you have come so I can tell you.”
“You don’t mean that,” he corrected.
“Being incurably honest I am bound to tell tales on myself. Yes, I do mean it. I’d probably be rushing round for freckle lotion and patent nose pins, to give me a Greek-boy effect. I’d take to swathing myself in chiffons and have my hair a different tint each season. I think every business woman would do the same, too––if she had the chance. We have to fool ourselves to keep on going down the broad highway; or else we would be sanitarium devotees, 318 neurasthenic muddles. So we strike our brave pose and call ourselves superwomen, advanced feminists, and all the rest of the feeble rubbish until the right man comes along. Sometimes he never comes––so we keep right ahead, growing dry as dust at heart and even fooling ourselves. I did. But it took your wife to show me my smug conceit, my fancy that I was a bulwark of commerce, so proper, so perfect! She showed me that I was just plain woman making the best of having been born into the twentieth century! There is a Gorgeous Girl in all of us, Steve. So I can’t advise or comfort or do any of the things I used to––a bag of tricks we women in business have adopted to make the heart loneliness the less. Go away and make good! That is just what she told you––isn’t it? You will never believe in any of us again. And I don’t know that you should, after all. For cave men need Gorgeous Girls.”
Steve was laughing down at her. “True––but they need the right Gorgeous Girl. I’m glad you have finally told the truth; I always suspected it. You have over-emphasized it somewhat––and the woman I married was unfairly over-emphasized as well. But in the main, what you have said is the truth. I assure you I am twice as glad to have an incentive instead of a lady directress. And I want you to be helpless––if you can; and fluffy––if you will! Don’t you see that you are the right Gorgeous Girl––and she was the wrong one––and I’m the culprit? Why, Mary, the worst thing you could do would be to descend upon me in curl papers under a pink net cap. Even that prospect does not frighten me!”
“Are you going away?” she asked, shyly.
“Not far––nothing spectacular or romantic. I’m done with that. Beatrice goes West, I believe. She is quite happy. She is going to New York first to get her divorce wardrobe. It is her father I pity––he has to face another son-in-law,” Steve laughed. “I am merely going to work for an old and reliable firm––use my nest egg for a house. A brown-shingled house, I think, with plain yard and a few ambitious shrubs blooming along the walks. I don’t know what they will be; I leave that to you!”
Luke wondered why he was not called upon for action, but he wondered still more as Mary came presently to ask that he tell Steve good-night. Her gray eyes were like captured sunrise.