The Conflict Part 16

"What a poor opinion of men you mean," retorted she. "After a little experience of them a girl--even a girl--learns that they are incapable of any emotion that isn't gross."

"Don't be so ladylike, Jane," said Hull.

Miss Hastings was recovering control of herself. She took a new tack.

"You haven't asked her yet?"

"Hardly. This is the second time I've seen her. I suspected that she was the woman for me the moment I saw her. To-day I confirmed my idea.

She is all that I thought--and more. And, Jane, I know that you appreciate her, too."

Jane now saw that Davy was being thus abruptly and speedily confiding because he had decided it was the best way out of his entanglement with her. Behind his coolness she could see an uneasy watchfulness--the fear that she might try to hold him. Up boiled her rage--the higher because she knew that if there were any possible way of holding Davy, she would take it--not because she wished to, or would, marry him, but because she had put her mark upon him. But this new rage was of the kind a clever woman has small difficulty in dissembling.

"Indeed I do appreciate her, Davy," said she sweetly. "And I hope you will be happy with her."

"You think I can get her?" said he, fatuously eager. "You think she likes me? I've been rather hoping that because it seized me so suddenly and so powerfully it must have seized her, too. I think often things occur that way."

"In novels," said Jane, pleasantly judicial. "But in real life about the hardest thing to do is for a man to make a woman care for him--really care for him."

"Well, no matter how hard I have to try----"

"Of course," pursued Miss Hastings, ignoring his interruption, "when a man who has wealth and position asks a woman who hasn't to marry him, she usually accepts--unless he happens to be downright repulsive, or she happens to be deeply and hopefully in love with another man."

Davy winced satisfactorily. "Do you suspect," he presently asked, "that she's in love with Victor Dorn?"

"Perhaps," said Jane reflectively. "Probably. But I'd not feel discouraged by that if I were you."

"Dorn's a rather attractive chap in some ways."

Davy's manner was so superior that Jane almost laughed in his face.

What fools men were. If Victor Dorn had position, weren't surrounded by his unquestionably, hopelessly common family, weren't deliberately keeping himself common--was there a woman in the world who wouldn't choose him without a second thought being necessary, in preference to a Davy Hull? How few men there were who could reasonably hope to hold their women against all comers.

Victor Dorn might possibly be of those few. But Davy Hull--the idea was ridiculous. All his advantages--height, looks, money, position--were excellent qualities in a show piece; but they weren't the qualities that make a woman want to live her life with a man, that make her hope he will be able to give her the emotions woman-nature craves beyond anything.

"He is very attractive," said Jane, "and I've small doubt that Selma Gordon is infatuated with him. But--I shouldn't let that worry me if I were you." She paused to enjoy his anxiety, then proceeded: "She is a level-headed girl. The girls of the working cla.s.s--the intelligent ones--have had the silly sentimentalities knocked out of them by experience. So, when you ask her to marry you, she will accept."

"What a low opinion you have of her!" exclaimed Davy. "What a low view you take of life!"--most inconsistent of him, since he was himself more than half convinced that Jane's observations were not far from the truth.

"Women are sensible," said Jane tranquilly. "They appreciate that they've got to get a man to support them. Don't forget, my dear Davy, that marriage is a woman's career."

"You lived abroad too long," said Hull bitterly.

"I've lived at home and abroad long enough and intelligently enough not to think stupid hypocrisies, even if I do sometimes imitate other people and SAY them."

"I am sure that Selma Gordon would no more think of marrying me for any other reason but love--would no more think of it than--than YOU would!"

"No more," was Jane's unruffled reply. "But just as much. I didn't absolutely refuse you, when you asked me the other day, partly because I saw no other way of stopping your tiresome talk--and your unattractive way of trying to lay hands on me. I DETEST being handled."

Davy was looking so uncomfortable that he attracted the attention of the people they were pa.s.sing in wide, shady Lincoln Avenue.

"But my princ.i.p.al reason," continued Jane, mercilessly amiable and candid, "was that I didn't know but that you might prove to be about the best I could get, as a means to realizing my ambition." She looked laughingly at the unhappy young man. "You didn't think I was in love with you, did you, Davy dear?" Then, while the confusion following this blow was at its height, she added: "You'll remember one of your chief arguments for my accepting you was ambition. You didn't think it low then--did you?"

Hull was one of the dry-skinned people. But if he had been sweating profusely he would have looked and would have been less wretched than burning up in the smothered heat of his misery.

They were nearing Martha's gates. Jane said: "Yes, Davy, you've got a good chance. And as soon as she gets used to our way of living, she'll make you a good wife." She laughed gayly.

"She'll not be quite so pretty when she settles down and takes on flesh. I wonder how she'll look in fine clothes and jewels."

She measured Hull's stature with a critical eye. "She's only about half as tall as you. How funny you'll look together!" With sudden soberness and sweetness, "But, seriously, David, I'm proud of your courage in taking a girl for herself regardless of her surroundings.

So few men would be willing to face the ridicule and the criticism, and all the social difficulties." She nodded encouragingly. "Go in and win! You can count on my friends.h.i.+p--for I'm in love with her myself."

She left him standing dazedly, looking up and down the street as if it were some strange and pine-beset highway in a foreign land.

After taking a few steps she returned to the gates and called him: "I forgot to ask do you want me to regard what you've told me as confidential? I was thinking of telling Martha and Hugo, and it occurred to me that you might not like it."

"Please don't say anything about it," said he with panicky eagerness.

"You see--nothing's settled yet."

"Oh, she'll accept you."

"But I haven't even asked her," pleaded Hull.

"Oh--all right--as you please."

When she was safely within doors she dropped to a chair and burst out laughing. It was part of Jane's pa.s.sion for the sense of triumph over the male s.e.x to felt that she had made a "perfect jumping jack of a fool" of David Hull. "And I rather think," said she to herself, "that he'll soon be back where he belongs." This with a glance at the tall heels of the slippers on the good-looking feet she was thrusting out for her own inspection. "How absurd for him to imagine he could do anything unconventional. Is there any coward anywhere so cowardly as an American conventional man? No wonder I hate to think of marrying one of them. But--I suppose I'll have to do it some day. What's a woman to do? She's GOT to marry."

So pleased with herself was she that she behaved with unusual forbearance toward Martha whose conduct of late had been most trying.

Not Martha's sometimes peevish, sometimes plaintive criticisms of her; these she did not mind. But Martha's way of ordering her own life.

Jane, moving about in the world with a good mind eager to improve, had got a horror of a woman's going to pieces--and that was what Martha was doing.

"I'm losing my looks rapidly," was her constant complaint. As she had just pa.s.sed thirty there was, in Jane's opinion, not the smallest excuse for this. The remedy, the preventive, was obvious--diet and exercise. But Martha, being lazy and self-indulgent and not imaginative enough to foresee to what a pa.s.s a few years more of lounging and stuffing would bring her, regarded exercise as unladylike and dieting as unhealthful. She would not weaken her system by taking less than was demanded by "nature's infallible guide, the healthy appet.i.te." She would not give up the venerable and aristocratic tradition that a lady should ever be reposeful.

"Another year or so," warned Jane, "and you'll be as steatopygous as the bride of a Hottentot chief."

"What does steat--that word mean?" said Martha suspiciously.

"Look in the dictionary," said Jane. "Its synonyms aren't used by refined people."

"I knew it was something insulting," said Martha with an injured sniff.

The only concessions Martha would make to the latter-day craze of women for youthfulness were buying a foolish chin-strap of a beauty quack and consulting him as to whether, if her hair continued to gray, she would better take to peroxide or to henna.

Jane had come down that day with a severe lecture on fat and wrinkles laid out in her mind for energetic delivery to the fast-seeding Martha.

She put off the lecture and allowed the time to be used by Martha in telling Jane what were her (Jane's) strongest and less strong--not weaker but less strong, points of physical charm.

It was cool and beautiful in the shade of the big gardens behind the old Galland house. Jane, listening to Martha's honest and just compliments and to the faint murmurs of the city's dusty, sweaty toil, had a delicious sense of the superiority of her lot--a feeling that somehow there must be something in the theory of rightfully superior and inferior cla.s.ses--that in taking what she had not earned she was not robbing those who had earned it, as her reason so often a.s.serted, but was being supported by the toil of others for high purposes of aesthetic beauty. Anyhow, why heat one's self wrestling with these problems?

When she was sure that Victor Dorn must have returned she called him on the telephone. "Can't you come out to see me to-night?" said she.

"I've something important--something YOU'LL think important--to consult you about." She felt a refusal forming at the other end of the wire and hastened to add: "You must know I'd not ask this if I weren't certain you would be glad you came."