These things are all familiar to the modern reader. He has heard about them. Indeed, most readers have themselves sprung from some such atmosphere, and know, to their sorrow, how the 19th century prepared one for life. But Helen, like most of us, thought herself the exception rather than the rule. When she came home, after commencement exercises in her twelfth year, bearing the “best scholarship” cup, and a prize for a theme about the life of Christ, she experienced, for the first time, that feeling of confidence in her own mental prowess, which was to accompany her through life. Henceforth, the pleasure of exercising her mind was among the greatest of all pleasures. Henceforth, she could not be content with accepting everything on faith. And, perhaps, at this point we may place the beginning of a conflict in her nature which she never quite succeeded in solving.
Of course the difficulty grew slowly and imperceptibly. She was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. She took her vows with the utmost solemnity, her whole nature responding passionately to the mystery of her religion. After confirmation there was a deep sense of responsibility toward God, as well as an appeal, derived from the beauty of the Christian conception, which aroused a strain of poetry in her. And these things were only intensified as she grew to understand the prerogatives and the subtleties of womanhood. At school she was respected for her brilliance and conscientiousness, and loved for her dark eyes and hair, her slim figure, and the frank, open-hearted way she had of talking to people. She was not a “leader”, because her intense religious faith made her a trifle “different”. Yet the girls felt that they could always go to her when assistance of any kind was needed. And the boys who fell in love with her eyes were always treated in the kindest, most sympathetic way. They did not know how much it thrilled her to have a crowd of them to “manage”, nor how many hours she had spent scheming for secret and complicated flirtations.
However, “the truth will out”, and it soon became whispered that Helen was a “flirt”—although “just in fun”. Indeed, the game held a dual fascination for her, because it not only satisfied her love of emotional excitement and mystery, but also supplied a field of activity into which her mind could overflow. Neither her teachers nor her parents recognized this. They smiled, in a reminiscent way, and rejected the thought that Helen was learning to play with fire.
When she was sixteen, she played once too often, with a boy named Harry McMichael, who was a freshman football hero at Harvard. His vigorous personality, and the almost savage way he took her hand, after she had tempted him for several days “in fun”, quite swept her away, so that her puritanism seemed all afloat in a flood of emotions. She had never thought of this contingency. Heretofore, she had been mistress, not only of her lovers, but of herself also. Yet this time the dams seemed to break. And she found herself leading Harry on, quite delicately—unsatisfied until he had kissed her. She even made him do it more than once, although, as it appeared to him, reluctantly.
After this episode her conscience roused itself from a New England slumber, and asserted the old principles, even to the verge of extreme asceticism. But there was no longer the old mystery lurking in life; and, coincidently, there was no longer the old fascination in the communion service. She wrote Harry a letter saying that they had done wrong; they must never do it again. But she could not really believe this—what was there wrong about it, anyway? At the time, it was beautiful. And there ought to be nothing left for regret save perhaps the memory of that beauty. It seemed to her extremely narrow to eliminate this kind of relationship from life entirely—to sit back and wait for a stupid old husband. She read a good deal of Shelley, and managed, against all odds, to skim through a book by Havelock Ellis. Reason, she said, ought to dominate life—reason and beauty. So she smoked a cigarette and experienced a wild, imaginative thrill—a thrill which only ended in the old pangs of conscience which seemed to curse her in every new venture.
A more trying experience arrived a year later, when she met John Emerson, from Williams, flirted with him in her usual manner, and was for a second time overcome by her emotions. In this case, however, she had been even more the aggressor than in the former, and poor John, who had himself a puritan ancestry and a dim belief in the ways of God, could do nothing but respond to her clever insinuations. Four or five times they met, during the summer. Each time, it seemed to Helen that a new world had been opened up before her. Each time, the old world receded a step, though tearing with it part of her heart. Yet John announced one night, passionately, that he loved her and wanted to marry her. She was overwhelmed. She had not thought of love—like that. She did not love John. She wept.
Here at last common sense came to perform a function which religion seemed powerless to perform. John held her tightly and stroked her dark hair, but she writhed inwardly. A kind of agony petrified her. This was her work—her damnable thoughtlessness. She had made him love.
Of course it all ended in a tragedy, and she had to send John away, definitely. The old religion was sought as a refuge from strife. It afforded immeasurable comfort. God seemed clothed in His truest light—that of the forgiver—the comforter. Her heart could not worship Him enough, and her lips could not satisfy all that she had to say in prayer. True, she never gave up her flirtations. They seemed to be an indispensable outlet to her nature. But experience had taught her the boundary lines which lie between men and women. This, and a refreshed enthusiasm for the church guided her life successfully for the ensuing six or seven years.
She was twenty-four when she met Roger Lockwood. It was at a fancy dress ball in Hartford, to which she had come a trifle reluctantly, since the prospect of a repetition of familiarly identical scenes did not stimulate her imagination. However, once having arrived, she found herself enjoying the gayly colored dresses and the jazz music. She quite lost herself in the crowd of faces before her. As in her coming-out year, she allowed her consciousness of self to be swept away, and, urged on by the music, confronted one partner after another with a rapid-fire of conversation and glances from her eyes. She seemed almost to dominate the room at times—especially to-night—although she could have given no very definite reason for it. Perhaps it was merely that her ever active nature was seeking some new and more thrilling experience.
Roger, on the other hand, was not participating to any great extent in the dancing. He was something of a ludicrous figure—calm, passive, tall, and dressed as a young Southern gentleman of the thirties, in brown plaid trousers, high collar, and black bow tie. He wandered listlessly from one corner of the room to another, keeping his eyes upon the figures of the dancers, but rarely cutting in. He seemed to be searching for something intangible—so intangible that he did not know what it was. He could merely contemplate the faces around him, and follow the rhythm of the music in an imaginative way. Roger was a visitor at Hartford. He was up there seeking merely for diversion. He wanted to divert his mind from the constantly recurrant thoughts of his fiancée, who had gone with her family to Europe for the winter.