A Man and a Woman

by Stanley Waterloo

Still, there were relations of things to be considered. There were people at home, and it would not do.

Then, just as he turned to refuge the woman who sat looking at him, the curtains parted again and a face appeared. It was the face of a woman, not of the world about him. It was some accident, some sinister, unexampled happening, which had brought the face to the surroundings. It gave to the wavering man a new idea of this world of shame and sin, and it may have been the deciding ounce.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING.

He turned, to the woman across the table: "All right; I will stay."

I am but telling the story of a man of whose life from this time for two years I know but little. He was always reticent about these years, yet always said he had no occasion to regret them. With the life's outlines, though, with what it really was, aside from details, I became, in a degree, familiar.

What does the average person in one class know of the life in another? There are "classes," certainly, with great bars between them here, though this is a republic, and all men and women are supposed to be free and equal and alike in most things. There are lower and wider grades of existence, such that the story of them may never be told save in patch-work or by inference, yet which have as full a history, and where there are loves and hates and hopes and despairs as deep as are ever felt in the mass where the creed-teachers and Mrs. Grundy and the legislatures are greater factors.

And of this more reckless, hopeless people Harlson learned much. With them he was; of them he could never fully be. The extent to which a man is permanently defiled by pitch-touching cannot, of course, be known. It depends upon the pitch and upon the man. It was not a quiet life the young man led! On the contrary, it was a very feverish one, for he labored hard in the office by day—he never for an instant abandoned his ambitions and his plans—and at night he drifted into the land where were warmth and light and lawlessness. He had his duty there, such as it might be, for he was both a gambler and a protector, and, young as he was, callow as he was, within a year he had become one in demand, no trifler at the table, and an object of rivalry among those whose regard means fee of body and of soul. He, himself, at that time, did not appreciate the remarkable nature of his changing. So rapidly he aged in knowledge of all undercurrents that he passed into full maturity without a comprehension of the change. It is said that some Indians teach their children to swim, not by repeated gentle lessons, but by throwing them into a deep stream recklessly, saving them only at the last moment. So had some power hurled Grant Harlson into the black waters, and he had not drowned, and had taken rank among strong swimmers.

It is, as I have said, difficult to write intelligently of this portion of this man's life. I want to do him justice, for I have always cared for him; yet, from the conventional point of view, at least, nothing can excuse his lapse at this one time. He should have continued starving, I suppose, as have so many others, and have either died or won, as they did, instead of tasting all that is denied, and gaining much knowledge of the world, of much use in the future, all at the expense, perhaps, of that purity attaching to certain ignorances, as much in the man as the woman, since between the sexes all things are relative.

There were enough odd things in this most odd career. There were friendships and feuds with those who were of the lower multitude morally, but who were politicians and had their followings. There were romances of the order which makes the story of Dumas such a success upon the stage, and risks and escapes enough to satisfy the hungriest of romance-readers. It was all grotesque in its grim reality, and the young man did not know it. He was an unconscious desperado, and the odd thing about it all was the ease with which he led the double life.