Lola

by Owen Davis

Lola had been the first well-bred girl he had ever known, and all that was good in his nature had been stirred by the first meeting with her. Her reproaches for his deceit about his wife had really hurt him, and the shock he had experienced when he believed himself to have been the cause of her death had been the one terrible experience of his shallow life. He had been taken to the police station, and while waiting for his lawyer to arrange for his release on bail had been informed that the girl was not seriously hurt and that there was no charge against him.

His relief from his feeling of horror and remorse was naturally great, but he made up his mind that it was quite hopeless to expect Lola’s forgiveness, and when he met her one day on Broadway, shortly after her recovery, he was about to pass her without any other greeting than a bow, when to his great surprise she stopped him and, without any reference either to the accident or to his deceit about his marriage, chatted with him so gayly and so pleasantly that he took heart and invited her to drop into a restaurant with him for a cup of tea.

From her manner, as she entered the great room filled with laughing, chattering, well-dressed men and women, he could hardly be blamed for not knowing that this was the first time in all her life that she had ever been in such a place.

Neither her father nor John Dorris were rich men; they knew nothing of the life that is reflected in such place; to John a few visits with her, to the theatre, long walks in the Park, or quiet evenings in the apartment won the natural development of their intimacy, and Dr. Barnhelm knew as little as he cared, which was not at all, about the sham glitter and forced gayety of the great eating places that have done so much to destroy the home life of the average New Yorker.

In these surroundings, in an atmosphere of false luxury, of noise, heat, and confusion, against a background of painted women and flushed and loud-voiced men, the real reverence he had always had for her began rapidly to disappear, and he found himself looking upon her simply as a charming and beautiful young girl, who, as a matter of course, was to be pursued as diligently and as relentlessly as circumstances would allow. After all, the respect the world has for us is usually the measure of our own respect for ourselves, and as Lola made no effort to rebuke his rather daring advances, they naturally increased in freedom until in all the great room there was no gayer table than theirs.

Many heads were turned toward them, many questions were asked about who this new beauty could be. Fenway seemed to be known to almost everyone, and several times men came up to the table and spoke to him, but if they had hoped to be introduced to his companion they were disappointed, and they went away muttering angrily.

Lola would drink nothing but tea; in fact she needed nothing stronger; the intoxication of the scenes is as complete sometimes as the intoxication of strong drink, and to this girl, seeing for the first time a glimpse of the thing that to her seemed life, came the birth of a desire that never again left her, the desire to know everything, to experience everything, to live as those persons about her seemed to be living, without thought of anything but the pleasure of the moment, and had she known the price that all who live that life must surely pay, she would still have gone on.

This was the first of several meetings, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of Mrs. Harlan, to whom he later introduced her. She had frankly told him that first day that her father would never consent to allow him to come to their home, and he had been well content to meet her in places where less restraint was necessary.

To his great surprise, however, he found Lola much better able to protect herself than he had expected. She was what Mrs. Harlan described, after the first time she met her, as “a mighty smooth proposition,” and although he knew himself by this time to be madly in love with her, he could not flatter himself with the hope that she was in the very least inclined to allow him to make a fool of her. Mrs. Harlan in fact did not hesitate to inform him that he was the one who was playing the fool. She rather coarsely described the affair as “a ten to one shot against him.”

“Why don’t you hurry up that divorce and marry the girl?” she demanded of him on the afternoon on which Lola had made the appointment to meet him. “You are crazy about her, and it’s the only way she’ll ever listen to you. If you don’t look out she’ll marry that young bank clerk and leave you flat.”