Miss Emory found it difficult to maintain the peace between them, but she admired Dan's mode of warfare. It was so conclusive, and he showed such grim strength in his ability to look out for himself.
But Dan felt that he must suffer by any comparison with the editor. He had no genius for trifles, but rather a ponderous capacity. He had worked hard, with the single determination to win success. He had the practical man's contempt, born of his satisfied ignorance for all useless things, and to his mind the useless things were those whose value it was impossible to reckon in dollars and cents.
He had been well content with himself, and now he felt that somehow he had lost his bearings. Why was it he had not known before that the mere strenuous climb, the mere earning of a salary, was not all of life? He even felt a sneaking envy of Ryder of which he was heartily ashamed.
Men fall in love differently. Some resist and hang back from the inevitable, not being sure of themselves, and some go headlong, never having any doubts. With characteristic singleness of purpose, Dan went headlong; but of course he did not know what the trouble was until long after the facts in the case were patent to every one, and Antioch had lost interest in its speculations as to whether the doctor's daughter would take the editor or the general manager, for, as Mrs. Poppleton, the Emorys' nearest neighbor, sagely observed, she was “having her pick.”
To Oakley Miss Emory seemed to accumulate dignity and reserve in the exact proportion that he lost them, but he was determined she should like him if she never did more than that.
She was just the least bit afraid of him. She knew he was not deficient in a proper pride, and that he possessed plenty of self-respect, but for all that he was not very dexterous. It amused her to lead him on, and then to draw back and leave him to flounder out of some untenable position she had beguiled him into assuming.
She displayed undeniable skill in these manoeuvres, and Dan was by turns savage and penitent. But she never gave him a chance to say what he wanted to say.
Ryder made his appeal to her vanity. It was a strong appeal. He was essentially presentable and companionable. She understood him, and they had much in common, but for all that her heart approved of Oakley. She felt his dominance; she realized that he was direct and simple and strong. Yet in her judgment of him she was not very generous. She could not understand, for instance, how it was that he had been willing to allow his father to go to work in the shops like one of the common hands. It seemed to her to argue such an awful poverty in the way of ideals.
The old convict was another stumbling-block. She had met him at the Joyces', and had been quick to recognize that he and Dan were very much alike—the difference was merely that of age and youth. Indeed, the similarity was little short of painful. There was the same simplicity, the same dogged stubbornness, and the same devotion to what she conceived to be an almost brutal sense of duty. In the case of the father this idea of duty had crystallized in a strangely literal belief in the Deity and expressed itself with rampant boastfulness at the very discomforts of a faith which, like the worship of Juggernaut, demanded untold sacrifices and apparently gave nothing in return.
She tried to stifle her growing liking for Oakley and her unwilling admiration for his strength and honesty and a certain native refinement. Unconsciously, perhaps, she had always associated qualities of this sort with position and wealth. She divined his lack of early opportunity, and was alive to his many crudities of speech and manner, and he suffered, as he knew he must suffer, by comparison with the editor; but, in spite of this, Constance Emory knew deep down in her heart that he possessed solid and substantial merits of his own.