Those people who are always afraid of new customs have dreaded public life for women lest it should destroy modesty and rob them of the protection of guardians, duennas, and chaperons. But the world seems to have to have a certain amount of decency to get along on, at all, and provides for it among humans about as well as it provides for the protection of other plants and animals, letting many suffer and perish and some prosper.
The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in spasms of anxiety over other people’s souls would have given up Mamise and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them, their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances and crowds.
Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these anguishes were as futile as prayers for the 222 moon. Outside of office hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.
These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more than a mother’s vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls or yashmaks will infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good deal of time––and very dolefully.
Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy, the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing human was alien to her.
Davidge had spoken of marriage––had told her that he was a candidate for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.
When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man’s to crush. But fate provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood by, and the day’s work was waiting to be done.
Davidge went to his desk tremulous; Mamise to her typewriter. She hammered out a devil’s tattoo on it, and he devoured estimates and commercial correspondence, while an aromatic haze enveloped them both as truly as if they had been faun and nymph in a bosky glade.
Miss Gabus played Mrs. Grundy all morning and at the noon hour made a noble effort to rescue Mamise from any opportunity to cast an evil spell over poor Mr. Davidge. Women have a wonderful pity for men that other women cultivate! Yet all that Miss Gabus said to Miss Webling was: