"Oh!" I burst out crudely, "if you knew how sorry I am to have done anything to you, of all people, that displeased. If——" She recoiled; she drew back. I had ventured where angels feared to tread. The chain was not yet untangled, but she would not let me kneel there any longer. She rose; I too.
"My time is limited, as I said," she reminded me; "I am here on business. Let us endeavor to complete it, Miss Vars."
"Yes," I said, blushing scarlet, "let us, by all means. I'm sorry, excuse me, I'll go upstairs and see what else we have."
When Bob finally called at Van de Vere's I hadn't seen him for over a year. While I had been working so hard to establish myself in my new venture, Bob had been starting a brand-new law firm of his own, in a little town I had never heard of in the Middle West. He had severed all connections with the University when his mother had died. I knew as well as if he had told me that when he broke loose from any sort of steady salary he had abandoned all hope of persuading me to come and grow in his green-house, as he had once put it. It had been our original plan that Bob would work gradually into a law firm in Boston, at the same time retaining some small salaried position at the University enabling us to be married before he became established as a lawyer. Bob had been able to lay little by. His mother had required specialists and trained nurses. When I first realized that Bob had gone West and set about planning his life without reference to me I felt peculiarly free and unhampered. When he as much as told me that it was easier for him not to hear from me at all, than in the impersonal way I insisted upon, I was glad. I cared for Bob too much not to feel a little pang in my breast every time I saw my name and address written by his hand. And I wanted nothing to swerve me away from the goal I had my eyes set on—the goal of an acknowledged success as an independent, self-supporting human being.
When Bob first dropped in at Van de Vere's I hardly recognized him as the romantic figure who had wandered over brown hillsides with me, a volume of poetry stuffed into his overcoat pocket. No one would have guessed from this man's enthusiastic interest in the progressive spirit of the West that he had been born on Beacon Hill behind violet-shaded panes of glass. No one would have guessed, when he talked about cleaning out a disreputable school-board by means of the women's vote, that he had once opposed parades for equal suffrage in Massachusetts. When Bob shook hands with me, firmly, shortly, as if scarcely seeing me at all, I wondered if it might have slipped his mind that I was the girl he had once been engaged to marry.
He explained that he was in town on business, leaving the same evening. He could give me only an hour. There was a man he had to meet at his hotel at five. Bob was all nerves and energy that day. He talked about himself a good deal. They wanted to get him into politics out there in that wonderful little city of his. He'd been there only fourteen months, but it was a great place, full of promise—politics in a rather rotten condition—needed cleaning and fumigating. He'd a good mind to get into the job himself—in fact, he might as well confess he was in it to some extent. He was meeting the governor in Chicago the next night, or else he'd stay over and ask me to go to the theater with him.
I don't suppose Bob would have referred to the old days if I hadn't. It was I, who, when at last a lull occurred, said something about that time when he had found me struggling in a mire that threatened to drown, and I had grasped his good, strong arm.
"Wasn't it better, Bob," I asked, "that I should learn to swim myself, and keep my head above water by my own efforts?"
"It certainly seems to be what women are determined to do," he dodged.