Chapter V

A notice posted the following day to the effect that for some time the reading-room would be closed one day in the week for repairs, gave Harrison an excuse for insisting on weekly repetitions of what he called their historical picnics.

Miss Midland let herself be urged into these with a half-fearful pleasure which struck the young American as pathetic. "Anybody can see she's had mighty few good times in _her_ life," he told himself. They "did" Fontainebleau,[129-1] Pierrefonds,[129-2] Vincennes,[129-3] and Chantilly[129-4]--this last expedition coming in the first week of May, ten days before Miss Midland was to leave Paris. They were again favored by wonderfully fine spring weather, so warm that the girl appeared in a light-colored cotton gown and a straw hat which, as her friend told her, with the familiarity born of a month of almost uninterrupted common life, made her look "for all the world like a picture."

After their usual conscientious and minute examination of the objects of historical interest, they betook themselves with their lunch-basket to a quiet corner of the park, by a clear little stream, on the other side of which a pair of white swans were building a nest. It was very still, and what faint breeze there was barely stirred the trees. The English girl took off her hat, and the sunlight on her blonde hair added another glory to the spring day.

They ate their lunch with few words, and afterward sat in what seemed to the American the most comfortable and companionable of silences, idly watching a peacock unfold the flashing splendor of his plumage before the old gray fountain. "My! My! My!" he murmured finally. "Isn't the world about the best place!"

The girl did not answer, and, glancing at her, he was startled to see that her lips were quivering. "Why, Miss Midland!" he cried anxiously. "Have you had bad news?"

She shook her head. "Nothing new."

"What's the matter?" he asked, coming around in front of her. "Perhaps I can help you even if it's only to give some good advice."

She looked up at him with a sudden flash. "I suppose that, since you are so much engaged, you think you would make a good father-confessor!"

"I don't see that that has anything to do with it," he said, sitting down beside her, "but you can bank on me for doing anything I can."

"You don't see that that has anything to do with it," she broke in sharply, with the evident intention of wounding him, "because you are very unworldly, what is usually called very unsophisticated."

If she had thought to pique him with this adjective, she was disarmed by the heartiness of his admission, "As green as grass! But I'd like to help you all the same, if I can."

"You don't care if you are?" she asked curiously.

"Lord no! What does it matter?"

"You may care then to know," she went on, still probing at him, "that your not caring is the principal reason for my--finding you interesting--for my liking you--as I do."

"Well, I'm interested to know that," he said reasonably, "but blessed if I can see why. What difference does it make to _you_?"

"It's a great surprise to me," she said clearly. "I never met anybody before who didn't care more about being sophisticated than about anything else. To have you not even think of that--to have you think of nothing but your work and how to 'mean well' as you say----" she stopped, flushing deeply.

"Yes, it must be quite a change," he admitted sobered by her tone, but evidently vague as to her meaning. "Well, I'm very glad you don't mind my being as green as grass and as dense as a hitching-block. It's very lucky for me."

A quick bitterness sprang into her voice. "I don't see," she echoed his phrase, "what difference it makes to _you_!"

"Don't you?" he said, lighting a cigarette and not troubling himself to discuss the question with her. She was evidently all on edge with nerves, he thought, and needed to be calmed down. He pitied women for their nerves, and was always kindly tolerant of the resultant petulances.

She frowned and said with a tremulous resentment, as if gathering herself together for a long-premediated attempt at self-defense. "You're not only as green as grass, but you perceive nothing,--any European, even the stupidest, would perceive what you--but you are as primitive as a Sioux Indian, you have the silly morals of a non-conformist preacher,--you're as brutal as----"

He opposed to this outburst the impregnable wall of a calm and meditative silence. She looked angrily into his quiet eyes, which met hers with unflinching kindness. The contrast between their faces was striking--was painful.

She said furiously, "There is nothing to you except that you are stronger than I, and you know it--and that _is_ brutal!" She paused a long moment, quivering, and then relapsed into spent, defeated lassitude,--"and I like it," she added under her breath, looking down at her hands miserably.

"I don't mean to be brutal," he said peaceably. "I'm sorry if I am."

"Oh, it's no matter!" she said impatiently.

"All right, have it your own way," he agreed, good-naturedly, shifting into a more comfortable position, and resuming his patient silence. He might have been a slightly pre-occupied but indulgent parent, waiting for a naughty child to emerge from a tantrum.

After a while, "Well, then," she began as though nothing had passed between them since his offer to give her advice, "well then, if you want to be father-confessor, tell me what you'd do in my place, if your family expected you as a matter of course to--to----"

"What do they want you to do?" he asked as she hesitated.

"Oh, nothing that they consider at all formidable! Only what every girl should do--make a good and suitable marriage, and bring up children to go on doing what she had found no joy in."

"Don't you do it!" he said quietly. "Nobody believes more than I do in marrying the right person. But just marrying so's to _be_ married--that's Tophet! Red-hot Tophet!"[133-1]

"But what else is there for me to do?" she said, turning her eyes to him with a desperate hope in his answer. "Tell me! My parents have brought me up so that there is nothing I can fill my life with, if--I think, on the whole, I will be more miserable if I don't than if I----"

"Why, look-y-here!" he said earnestly. "You're not a child, you're a grown woman. You have your music. You could earn your living by that. Great Scott! Earn your living scrubbing floors before you----"

She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Ah, but I am so alone against all my world! Now, here, with you, it seems easy but--without any one to sustain me, to----"

Harrison went on: "Now let me give you a rule I believe in as I do in the sun's rising. Never marry a man just because you think you could manage to live with him. Don't do it unless you are dead sure you couldn't live without him!"

She took down her handkerchief, showing a white face, whose expression matched the quaver in her voice, as she said breathlessly: "But how if I meet a man and feel I cannot live without him, and he is already--" she brought it out squarely in the sunny peace,--"if he is already as good as married!"

He took it with the most single-hearted simplicity. "Now it's you who are unsophisticated and getting your ideas from fool novels. Things don't happen that way in real life. Either the man keeps his marriage a secret, in which case he is a sneak and not worth a second thought from any decent woman, or else, if she had known all along that he was married, she doesn't get to liking him that way. Don't you see?"

She looked away, down the stream for a moment with inscrutable eyes, and then broke into an unexpected laugh, rising at the same time and putting on her hat. "I see, yes, I see," she said. "It is as you say, quite simple. And now let us go to visit the rest of the park."