The Fighting Chance Part 65

"If that is truth, it doesn't concern me," said Sylvia. "Grace, why will you pose, even if you are married? for you have a clean mind, and you know it!"

"I know it," sighed Mrs. Ferrall, closing her book again, but keeping the place with her finger; "and that's why I'm so curious about all these depraved people. I can't understand why writers have not found out that we women are instinctively innocent, even after we are obliged to make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, pa.s.sions of which we are ignorant--a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us, after all!"

Sylvia said slowly: "It sometimes plays a small part, after all."

"Always," insisted Grace with emphasis. "No carefully watched girl knows what it is, whatever her suspicions may be. When she marries, if she doesn't marry from family pressure or from her own motives of common-sense ambition, she marries because she likes the man, not because she loves him."

Sylvia was silent.

"Because, even if she wanted to love him," continued Grace, "she would not know how. It's the ingrained innocence which men encounter that they don't allow for or understand in us. Even after we are married, and whether or not we learn to love our husbands, it remains part of us as an educated instinct; and it takes all the scientific, selfish ruthlessness of a man to break it down. That's why I say so few among us ever comprehend the motives attributed to us in romance or in that parody of it called realism. Love is rarer with us than men could ever believe--and I'm glad of it," she said maliciously, with a final snap of her pretty teeth.

"It was on that theory you advised me, I think," said Sylvia, looking into the fire.

"Advised you, child?"

"Yes--about accepting Howard."

"Certainly. Is it not a sound theory? Doesn't it stand inspection?

Doesn't it wear?"

"It--wears," said Sylvia indifferently. Grace looked up from her open book. "Is anything amiss?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Of course you know, child. What is wrong? Has Howard made himself insufferable? He's a master at it. Has he?"

"No; I don't remember that he has.

I'm tired, physically. I'm tired of the winter."

"Go to Florida for Lent."

"Horror! It's as stupid as a hothouse. It isn't that, either, dear--only, when it was raining so deliciously the other day I was silly enough to think I scented the spring in the park. I was glad of a change you know--any excuse to stop this eternal carnival I live in."

"What is the matter?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, withdrawing her finger from the pages and plumping the closed book down on her knee. "You'd better tell me, Sylvia; you might just as well tell me now as later when my persistence has vexed us both. Now, what has happened?"

"I have been--imprudent," said Sylvia, in a low voice.

"You mean,"--Mrs. Ferrall looked at her keenly--"that he has been here?"

"No. I telephoned him; and I asked him to drive with me."

"Oh, Sylvia, what nonsense! Why on earth do you stir yourself up by that sort of silliness at this late date? What use is it? Can't you let him alone?"

"I--No, I can't, it seems. Grace, I was--I felt so--so strangely about it all."

"About what, little idiot?"

"About leaving him--alone."

"Are you Stephen Siward's keeper?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, exasperated.

"I felt as though I were, for awhile. He is ill."

"With an illness that, thank G.o.d, you are not going to nurse through life. Don't look at me that way, dear. I'm obliged to speak harshly; I'm obliged to harden my heart to such a monstrous idea. You know I love you; you know I care deeply for that poor boy--but do you think I could be loyal to either of you and not say what I do say? He is doomed, as sure as you sit there! He has fallen, and no one can help him. Link after link he has broken with his own world; his master-vice holds him faster, closer, more absolutely, than h.e.l.l ever held a lost soul!"

"Grace, I cannot endure--"

"You must! Are you trying to drug your silly self with romance so you won't recognise truth when you see it? Are you drifting back into old impulses, unreasoning whims of caprice? Have you forgotten what I know of you, and what you know of yourself? Is the taint of your transmitted inheritance beginning to show in you--the one woman of your race who is fas.h.i.+oned to withstand it and stamp it out?"

"I am mistress of my emotions," said Sylvia, flus.h.i.+ng.

"Then suppress them," retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, "before they begin to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen.

No disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental restlessness--the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if that poison is in you, it's well for you to know it."

"It is in me," said Sylvia, staring at the fire.

"Then you know what to do for it."

"No, I don't."

"Well, I do," said Grace decisively; "and the sooner you marry Howard and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you'll be.

That's where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you'd make it lively for us all."

"It is true," said Sylvia deliberately, "that I could not be treacherous to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what const.i.tutes treachery to myself."

"Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill," observed Grace tartly.

"But it doesn't seem to," mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals.

"That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what I feel for him."

"What do you feel?"

"I was in love with him. You knew it."

"You liked him," insisted Grace patiently.

"No--loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way, but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a young girl can't love--doesn't know how. But I do love, though it is true that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me.

The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything. Then--I don't know--somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here"--she laid her fingers on her throat--"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence--all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?"

For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil, looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become responsible for the patient.

"If you marry him," said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, "your life will become a h.e.l.l."

"Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?" asked Sylvia.

"How--to know that you had been dragged down?"

"No. I mean could I do anything for him?"