Anon.”
Nevertheless, it was a much chastened, even saddened, Mr. Francis who returned to work the following morning. He had lived in his dreams, his romances had been the deepest and sweetest part of his life, for so long that such a reality as his engagement to Mrs. Benson hurt him through and through.
Perhaps any reality in the matter of romance would have hurt him. He had become a confirmed dreamer, even as he had become a confirmed bachelor, and he was not fitted to cope with practical details. Even the preparations, the hundred and one rather sordid arrangements, he would have had to go through in order to marry his latest ideal would probably have saddened him a good deal. It was thrice in vain that he attempted to be practical in the matter of marriage with Mrs. Benson; he suffered by every necessary preparation that brushed the star-dust off the butterfly’s wings of his dream ideal of love—suffered agonies that gave him a feeling of weakness in the diaphragm and in the knees.
Until eleven o’clock he was busy with the morning instalment of traveling-salesmen who came to offer their wares. This duty disposed of, he strolled out into the department where he was supposed to oversee the stock and clerks. Wicked hopes that she, the lady of his dream romance, would return he suppressed so firmly that he had a continuous ache in his throat. Gone were his shimmering dreams, his vistas of poetic reverie. He threw himself desperately into the business of arranging displays, stationing clerks, verifying price-tags. He was thoroughly melancholy and businesslike and stern-faced and miserable.
His evenings at the boarding-house were even more uncomfortable than his days in the store. Mrs. Benson had lost no time in announcing her engagement, and Mr. Francis now occupied the place of honor at her right hand at meals; he had long refused this place through feelings of delicacy about trespassing on Mrs. Benson’s known reverence for her late husband, and the honor sat heavily upon him. The smiles and insinuations of the boarders, the sordid jocularity of it all, seared his soul. Idealist that he was, his sense of humor was not much developed; and remarks like, “Can’t you just see Mr. Francis walking the floor with a bundle of yell in his arms?” sent all the blood from his heart into his face, and back again, in two frantic leaps.
On one point he was trying to be firm: he would not let Mrs. Benson read in “The Book of his Heart.” She found it on the second evening of their prenuptial bliss in the front parlor, and triumphantly drew it forth. Desperately he reclaimed his property; frantically he argued that it was sacred to him, that there were some things they wouldn’t have to share in common. No theory could have been more repugnant to Mrs. Benson, and none could have so solidified her determination to read that “Personal Journal” from cover to cover. The issues were pitched, the armies drawn up, the bugles blown; and struggle as he would, Mr. Francis realized that he was foredoomed to the woe of the vanquished. She would read the book, she would despise it, and she would burn it because of its wicked references to women other than herself. Realizing this certain outcome, Mr. Francis vacillated between the wisdom of burning the book himself and the wickedness of hiding it and telling her that he had burned it. In the meantime he kept his coat buttoned and his door locked.
On Thursday, April 28, he wrote at one o’clock in the morning:
“God have mercy on me, a miserable sinner! She was in again to-day, and I adore her still.
“I could not greet Mrs. Benson as usual this evening. I could not. She insisted, but I said I had a sore throat and might infect her. She said I must have a doctor, but I was firm, I declared I would get along all right. She came up with a mustard-plaster while I was retiring. I could not let her in. It was terrible. Several of the boarders heard her; I could hear them laughing. The knowledge of my turpitude debases me like a crawling worm. I have always striven to live an upright life, so that I could look all men and women in the face. My duty is plain. Shall I be a hypocrite and deceiver? Shall I give up my self-respect, which has meant so much to me all these years? I am in a terrible dilemma.
“I will rise at five o’clock and leave the house before any one is stirring to-morrow morning. But what shall I do to-morrow evening? Heaven help and guide me!