Chapter X

Horatia made another effort to stop Anthony. She found herself disturbed beyond all control by this love of his. It seemed to her that such a thing had no right to exist in the same world with her feeling for Jim. She did not want to hurt Anthony--she did not want to argue about his love. She merely wanted his love not to exist--not to be there to affront her. If ever a woman’s psychology was pure in trying to arrest the affections of a man, Horatia’s was. So it was not enough to refuse Anthony. He must be recreated into the jolly friend that he had been. She would not have him as a lover. All this she tried to tell him and of course in the telling she laid herself open to misconstruction.

For Anthony could not see but that the discussion itself was a sign of his growing importance in her eyes. To him it probably would have been natural enough to have her refuse him and then decline to see him at all. But that did not suit Horatia. She wanted him to be just a friend--to stop loving her. He was comparatively acquiescent. He told her that he thought she might some time come to care for him, and when she protested in real horror, he was gentlemanly enough to yield the point and adjust his conversation to the comfortable tone she wanted. It cheered Horatia immensely. She was too inexperienced to know that men have always yielded to women in form when they won a victory in fact. There was a new vigor in Anthony’s walk as he left her after that.

That talk straightened “everything out,” according to Horatia, and she went to her window and drew a long breath of relief. She was clean again and fit for Jim. How tremendously she loved Jim that day! She wanted to bring him something finer, something cleaner, something purer than anyone in the world had ever brought to any man. She wanted to bring him all that the world could give a man. Her ardor almost frightened him that night. It was so great--so tempestuous.

“How can women play with men they love?” she wondered. “I suppose it’s because they don’t love. You’re warned to keep your distance--to give a little at a time. Why I--I want to give everything in the world all at once--everything. And then I wouldn’t have enough. I want to do foolish, extravagant things to show you my love--only because it is love they wouldn’t be foolish or extravagant.”

“Do you know how I love you?” asked Jim. “I love you as a man loves a woman once in a long, long while, so much that all the primal things, the violent things have been refined out of it. I love you so much that the lightest touch of your hand on my shoulder turns me to fire and so much that if it would harm a hair of your head or bring a shadow of trouble to your soul, I’d never see you again. I love you because you are beautiful of body--that least and first--and I love your fine, clean soul which is like a candlelight before the altar of life, and I love--most of all, your warm, warm heart that warms everything which is near it at all. No--most of all I love you and I’d love you if you were ugly and vicious and cold--because you’d be you. You attached me and you’ll never shake me off now.”

No--for all his protestations that he would give her up if it were best for her, his arms around her did not seem to be willing to even give her up for a moment. They were talking a little more practically now. _The Journal_ was really commencing to pay and an amazing offer had come to Langley offering him an editorship on an Eastern paper. But he had refused it, with Horatia’s connivance, because they both felt that they did not want to leave so soon the lake and the city which had brought them together and the familiar office.

“A flat it will have to be.”

“But some day there will be the house with the dark oak hall,” he promised. “Some day there will be those sunny guest-rooms. Once, Horatia, I had a little money and I lost it all. It was what my father left me. Well, I never missed it. I didn’t care--much. But now I covet that money. I see things in windows that I want to give you. I want to smother you with presents.”

“You’re a capitalist in spirit for all your protestations!”

“Don’t you dare tell anyone, but I’ve the making of a rare one in me. All that I care about just now is giving things to you--myself and other things.”

“You care about your work.”

“Ah, but that’s so that I may be more worthy to give myself to you.”

“But this flat business!”

They thought perhaps that they could marry in the autumn. Late autumn with the leaves turning to wonderful colors and the lake shimmering with the first cold winds. It would put spirit into that most marvellous of honeymoons. And after that they would come back to the office--and the flat.

“Let’s look at flats and furniture--sort of surreptitiously----” begged Horatia.

He was stern.

“If this is to be a secret,” he said, “how on earth can we go about asking for furniture? Now I will tell you anyway that we are not going to buy much furniture. And I will show you why we are not if you will call on me next Sunday morning.”

“You have furniture of your own.”

“I have a few nice things--not awfully valuable--but you shall see.”

She saw them and they were far more lovely than he had told her. His little apartment was much more luxurious than she had imagined. There were small, beautiful rugs and several pictures which had signatures which startled Horatia, and an inlaid table stood beside a great velvet chair and faced another chair, a rocker, low-seated and high-backed, not at all a man’s chair.

“I suppose I was rocked to sleep in that chair,” said Langley whimsically.

He showed her the dining-room with its smooth-oiled mahogany table and then laid his hand lightly on the panel of the other door.

“In there,” he said softly, “is the bedroom furniture which was my mother’s. Would you like that too?”

The color faded from Horatia’s cheeks and the gravity of her eyes deepened.

“I want it,” she answered.

Her pallor frightened him.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you, darling?”

“A little afraid of life--not you--and the curious thing is that I don’t know what part of life does frighten me. It’s only that sometimes there seem to be so many things I don’t know yet--or understand----”

Langley often thought of her as she was when she said those words, standing in his shadowy living-room, with the light from the window on her face half-turned away from him towards things she did not understand. So young--so instinctively brave and so instinctively honest. And so beautiful.

“I shall tell you of as many as I can and there will be things we both don’t understand that we must find out together. But we will go--hand in hand--with our heads up--to meet them.”

She turned and caught his hands in her own outstretched ones.

“Oh, let us start, soon--soon,” she begged. “I want to go with you.”

“Yes--soon,” answered Langley. His head was high and his face the face of a young man. “Soon--my darling--wife.”