"Damn it, Do," he said, with a new respect, "I wish you'd let me buy you a diamond necklace or an automobile. This money burns my pocket!"
"Presents, all you wish. Send me a little bouquet of orchids, if it will make you feel better," she said, descending the stairs. "Orchids I never get tired of. If I were rich I'd wear a new bunch every day. Pouffé has such exquisite ones...."
The stairs were so dark that she had to feel her way: she could smile without fear of detection.
"He will leave an order for a bouquet every day," she thought confidently, and she began busily to calculate the advantages of her understanding with that justly fashionable florist.
CHAPTER VI
Of all the men Dodo met, paraded and ticketed to her own satisfaction, Mr. Orlando B. Peavey was perhaps the one she had the most difficulty in keeping in the status quo. Not that a wounding thought could ever cross his timid imagination, but that she feared a crisis which by every art she sought to postpone. On the day he found courage to propose, she knew their friendship would end. This exact and vigorous man of business, indefatigable, keen and abrupt in the conduct of affairs, was as shy and disturbed in her presence as a wild fawn. At the age of twelve he had been forced, by the sudden death of his father, to give up an education and fling himself into the breach. For thirty-five years he had worked as only an American can who is resolute, ambitious, passionately enwrapped in work, without the distractions of a youth that had been closed to him, or without other knowledge of women than the solitary devotion he gave to an invalid mother, who querulously and jealously claimed his few spare hours. All the depth of sentiment and affection he lavished in small attentions on this invalid. Yet at her death a great emptiness arrived—life itself seemed suddenly incomprehensible.
For the first time he perceived that he had almost reached fifty, and had he taken stock of his demands on life he would have found that business had ceased to be a means, but had become the sole end, the day and the night of his existence. Several times he had had a furtive desire to marry, to create a home, to look upon children whom he might shower with the enjoyments of youth, which he might thus in a reflected way experience. But the complaining shadow at his side was a jealous tyrant, always on the watch for such an eventuality, bitterly resisting it with hysterical reproaches and frightened prognostications of abandonment. But when at last, two years ago, he had found his life set in solitary roads, he had at first said to himself that the opportunity had come too late, that he was past the age when marriage would be safe. The word "safe" was characteristic of the man. He had a horror of becoming ridiculous.
Nevertheless, a life which had been conceived in sacrifice could not endure selfishly. There were great depths of compassion, yearnings toward the ideal in this walled-in existence, that had to be fed. He felt imperatively the need of doing good, of generosity toward some other human being. He thought of adopting a child, and as this idea grew he was surprised to find that his thoughts constantly formed themselves not in the image of his own sex, but of a young girl, fragile and unprotected, innocent, with the dawning wonder of the world in her eyes, light of foot, warm of voice, with the feeling of the young season of spring in the rustle of her garments.