Chapter XXXI: The Stodgy Man

Mrs. Talbot was beginning to break. Her bones ached barometrically before rain; she noticed that after she had been on her feet a great deal, on cleaning days for instance, her ankles began to puff. Also she learned to avoid short breath by taking the stairs more easily. Sometimes she grew dizzy and little black specks floated before her eyes.

Fortunately she regarded her symptoms as a series of disconnected, unrelated phenomena. The heart was one thing, the liver another, rheumatism a third. Swollen joints were still different. That came from overdoing. For different diseases different remedies. She took her medicine very conscientiously, treating her symptoms, not her annodomini.

She thought of her children as young, not of herself as old. She wasn't sixty yet, just the time when people learn at last to profit by experience--the same age as most of the people she knew, Mrs. Conway, for instance, and Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Keough and Mrs. Cochrane.

The last two had recently been the victims of a sad and striking coincidence. They had lost their husbands within twenty-four hours of each other, in the preceding February, on the seventh and eighth of the month as Mrs. Talbot recalled it, anyway it was of a Tuesday and Wednesday. Dan Keough, to be sure, had been ailing some time, but it would have been a day's journey to find a heartier looking man than Jerry Cochrane, up to the very day he came home coughing. And a week after, they laid him out.

They say a green Christmas makes a fat churchyard, and goodness knows last winter proved it. It had been very wet and sloppy, hardly any snow at all until January, and then it didn't last long. She had followed the hearse to Calvary one, two, three, four times in a twelvemonth. The climate had lately changed for the worse. She could remember when all the Christmases were white and didn't use to kill people.

The first time that Georgia suggested giving up housekeeping, mama vehemently repudiated the idea. The third time she agreed to it, but on one sole condition, namely, that the change was to be only temporary. They were to take another flat as soon as she got to feeling more like herself again.

The family moved to the parlor floor of a long and narrow gray block house farther north. What had been designed, in 1880, for the front parlor was now the living room of the suite. Georgia put a piano in it, and Al a rack of bulldog pipes and a row of steins, like college men. The back parlor became Mrs. Talbot's room, the dining room Georgia's, and Al took the small one in the rear, overlooking the back yard.

The meals were served, 7 to 8:30, 1 to 2, 6 to 7, in the half-basement immediately under the front parlor. They were standardized--corned beef Thursday, fish Friday, roast beef Saturday, chicken Sunday. Mrs. Talbot and her children had their own private table, and they gave her the best seat with her back to the window, as titular head of the family. They had an arrangement that the young folks were never to be away from supper at the same time and leave mama alone.

Georgia saw no reason why she should not now and then accept an invitation from some man or other to dine and go to the theatre, provided she had sized him up for a decent sort. She always made the condition, though, that she would provide the theatre seats, which she usually managed to do inexpensively, owing to her acquaintance with advance men and agents in a rush to get their Sunday flimsies written.

At intervals she received an avowal which flattered her sufficiently, if made well. And she had plenty of hints that she might evoke a declaration without any serious difficulty.

But she had very little trouble in keeping men where she wanted them, for she had the faculty of knowing what they were going to think before they thought it.

A young, pink-cheeked, country lawyer lately moved in from Iowa, and famous there as a stump orator, gave her the biggest surprise. She liked him; she appreciated he had real brains. But on the very first evening that they ever went anywhere together, when he was driving her home from the play, he became suddenly and violently obsessed with the idea that a taxicab was liberty hall. After a few seconds' struggle, she rapped on the window, made the chauffeur stop, and went home in the car after a few pat words to her host.

There came from him next morning by special messenger sixteen closely and cleverly written pages, which started with a graceful and humble expression of contrition and ended with an offer of marriage.

The messenger was to wait an answer. He didn't have to wait long. She at once accepted the apology and rejected the proposal.

She admitted frankly that as a rule she liked men much better than women (except, of course, L. Frankland). They had a bigger outlook. But she didn't want and wouldn't have even the mildest sort of a flirtation.

She thought it would be cheap and cowardly and absurd, after murdering real love as she had done, to philander across its grave.

When at last she was able to pay back Mason's loan in full, with accumulated interest, she was surprised to find how little happier it made her. For nearly three years she had lived with her debt on the assumption that it was life's most insupportable burden. Now that it was settled, she began to realize that she had entertained the angel of success in disguise. The debt had been her most dynamic inspiration.

The man she loved had borrowed to lend to her. Quite possibly in so doing he had saved her life. In return she had broken her promise to marry him. Immediately he had begun to prosper and she to fall on evil days. Pride could not be more humiliated. To save her face before him, it was absolutely indispensable for her to prosper also in her turn, by her own will and skill; to pay him off to the last accumulated mill of interest; to prove to him that she had done as well without him as he had done without her; to make him know that she was very, very happy and content.

When her hopes came true and she enlarged her quarters and took a third assistant and opened a checking account, and alternated Saturdays off with L. Frankland; when her hopes came true they weren't hopes any more, but history. For anyone with the gambler's instinct, and Georgia had more than a little of it, yesterday is a dull affair compared with to-morrow.

It gives one a mighty respectable feeling to have the receiving teller smile and say, "What--you--again?" when you come to his window. Then he writes a new total in your book in purple ink and you peek at it once or twice on your way back to the office.

Yes, success was very sweet and creditable. It did away with a heap of worry around the first of the month; any woman is happier for not having to make last year's suit do; and people are certainly more polite. Money's the oil of life. But it isn't life.

If you're only thirty, and the dollar's all you want, or get--Georgia leaned back in her pivot chair and stretched her arms above her head and yawned, ho-ho-hum, the stodgy man will get you if you don't watch out.

"Frank," she asked, "do you ever feel like an automaton that's been wound up and has to keep going till it runs down!"

"Sure. Everybody does, now and then."

"But what's the use? what's the answer?" continued Georgia querulously.

L. Frankland looked over her spectacles and her shoulder, her hands still on the keyboard. "The answer," she said vivaciously, "for a woman is a man; for a man the answer is a woman. Whoever made us knew what he was about, and don't you forget it. What's your idea?"

"Let's hear yours out first."

"Once when I was a young thing," said L. Frankland, swinging around, "I waited for an hour in my wedding dress, but--he never came. He was killed on the way to the church by a runaway horse. I decided to remain true to his memory. I had other chances afterwards, when I was still a young thing," she smiled whimsically, "but I refused them. I'm sorry now."

"Frank, you remember my telling you about that money I owed to the man I--spoke about?"

"Yes."

"And how it worried me?"

"Yes."

"Well, I paid it off last week, and I've been miserable ever since."

"That's because you felt you were snapping the last thread. Is he still in love with you?"

"No. At least I don't see how he could be. It's been so long, and the last time he saw me," Georgia laughed unhappily, "I wasn't very lovely."

"If he saw you now, young lady, he'd have nothing to complain of," was the cheerful retort. "By the way, has he sent you a receipt for the money?"

"No, not yet."

"The best sign in the world," said L. Frankland, slapping her knee excitedly.

"Why?"

"Because it shows he's thinking about it. It's not routine to him. Georgia, if you have another chance given you, don't be afraid to take life in your own hands," the old maid said gently, "if you know that you love him."

"I have always known that, since the beginning," the young woman answered slowly, "but even if by a miracle he still--does, it is too late now. I've taken three of the best years of my life away from him and wasted them, thrown them away. You know how it is with us women. We have only twenty years or so when men really want us. More than half of mine are gone. It wouldn't be fair to go to him now. He should marry a young girl. He is a young man."

"You've wasted a lot of time already, and to make up for it you'll waste the rest. That's supreme logic. And yet," with heavy sarcasm, "man says we can't reason."

Georgia smiled at her friend's earnestness. "Oh, I'm in the rut, Frank. What's the use of talking any more about me? Come on to lunch. The girls," she nodded in the direction of the three employes in the outer office, "can hold the fort for an hour. There isn't much doing."

When their meal was finished they matched for the check, and L. Frankland was stuck. "Do one thing anyway," she said as she swept up her change, minus a quarter, "get your divorce. Then you can marry him straight off, if he asks you again--and you change your mind. You wouldn't like to go through all that rigmarole under his eyes, while he was standing by, waiting."

"No--I guess I won't bother. What's the use? I won't change my mind. Here I be and here I stay."

"You're a big fool," responded L. Frankland. "That's what I think."