Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 32

Mason lifted his eye-brows. "Ah! You drew the line at love and marriage.

Most women--"

Isabel resented this.

"I'm not 'most women'--I'm not even a type. Don't lecture me, please."

"I beg your pardon, Isabel; you're quite right." His tone was sincere, and restored peace. "I always except you in any generalization."

"This is the most significant thing of all," Isabel said finally. "The girl has set us talking of her as if she were a personage, instead of a girl from a Wisconsin valley--"

"That's true," Mason admitted. "She's of the countless unknown hundreds of the brightest minds from the country, streaming into the city side by side with the most vicious and licentious loafers of the towns. It leaves the country dull, but moral. The end is not yet. In the end the dull and moral people survey the ruined walls of the bright and vicious."

"And the dull and the moral are prolific," Sanborn put in.

"Precisely, and they can eat and sleep, which gives them long life and vast stomachs."

Roberts sprang up, "I propose to escape while I can. Mason is wound up for all night." There was a little bustle of parting, and eventually Sanborn and Mason walked off together.

"It's no time to go to sleep. Come to my room and smoke a pipe,"

suggested Mason. "I'm in a mood to talk if you're in a mood to listen."

Sanborn was a modest fellow, who admired his friend. "I am always ready to listen to you," he said.

"Probably that is your amiable weakness," Mason dryly responded.

CHAPTER XVIII

MASON TALKS ON MARRIAGE

Men are not easily intimate. They confide in each other rather seldom.

Of love and marriage coa.r.s.e men speak with sneers and obscene jests. Of these deep themes serious men speak in hints, with apologetic smiles, as if they were betraying a weakness, seldom going to any length of statement. They express their meaning in broken sentences--in indirect statements.

Sanborn had known Mason for some years. They were both from the country; Mason from a small interior town in Illinois, Sanborn from Indiana.

Mason was an older man than Sanborn, and generally presumed upon it, also upon Sanborn's reticence.

They rode up the elevator in the Berkeley flats in silence, and in silence they removed their coats and filled their pipes, and took seats before the fire. Mason was accustomed to say he supported two rooms and an open grate fire, and he regretted it was not cold enough to have the grate lighted for that evening.

They sat some minutes in smoke. Mason sitting low in his chair, with face in repose, looked old and tired, and Sanborn was moved to say:

"Mason, I'm going to ask you a plump question: Why don't you get married? You're getting old."

"I've tried to."

"What! tried to?"

"Exactly."

"That is incredible!"

"It is the fact," replied the older man, placidly.

Sanborn did not believe it. He knew Mason to be somewhat seclusive in his life, but he also knew the high place he held in the eyes of several women.

Mason went on finally, in his best manner, as Sanborn called it.

"For ten years I've been trying to marry, and I've been conscientious and thorough in my heart, too."

Sanborn was violently interested. He drew a long breath of smoke.

"What seems to be the matter?"

"Don't hurry me. For one thing, I suppose I've gone too far in my knowledge of women. I've gone beyond the capability of being bamboozled.

I see too much of the ropes and props that do sustain the pasteboard rosetree."

"That is flat blasphemy," put in Sanborn. "I know more about women than you do, and--"

"I don't mean to say that women deceive in a base way--often they are not intentionally deceptive; but hereditarily-transmitted, necessarily defensive wiles lead them to turn their best side toward men. Before I was thirty I could still call upon a young woman without observing she received me in a room shadowed to conceal her crows-feet. The pre-arranged position of the chairs and color of the lamp-shade did not trouble me."

He seemed to pause over some specific case. "And once I believed a girl wore a patch on her chin to conceal a sore. Now I know she does it to locate a dimple. I know perfectly well what any young woman would do if I called upon her tomorrow. She would take a seat so that the softest shadows would fall over her face. If she had good teeth she would smile often. If her teeth were poor she would be grave. If her arms were fair her sleeves would be loose, if they were thin she'd wear ruffles. If she had a fine bosom her dress would be open a little at the neck--"

"O look here, Mason!" Sanborn interrupted, "I can't listen to such calumny without protest."

"I don't mean to say that all this would be conscious. As a matter of fact it is innocent and unintentional. A woman does not deliberately say: 'I have a dimple, therefore I will smile.' She inherited the dimples and the smile from a long line of coquettes. Women are painfully alike from generation to generation. It's all moons.h.i.+ne and misty sky about their infinite variety."

"Suppose I grant that--who's to blame? mind you I don't grant it--but suppose I do, for argument."

"You are a lover and a fortunate man. You have in Isabel a woman of character. Mark you! These wiles and seductions on the part of women were forced upon them. I admit that they have been forced to use them in defense for a million years. Had they been our physical superiors unquestionably the lying graces would have been ours. At the same time it doesn't help me. I can't trust such past-masters in deceit, albeit they deceive me to my good."

"Are we not deceptive also? It seems to me the same indictment would hold regarding men."

"Undoubtedly--but we are not now under indictment. You asked me a question--I am answering it." This silenced Sanborn effectually. Mason refilled his pipe and then resumed:

"Again, I can't seem to retain a vital interest in any given case--that is to say, an exclusive interest."

"That is a relic of polygamy," Sanborn said. "I imagine we all have moments when we feel that old instinct tumbling around in our blood."

"I meet a woman today who seems to possess that glamour which the romantic poets and high-falutin novelists tell us the woman of our choice must have. I go home exulting--at last I am to reach the mystic happiness marriage is supposed to bring. But tomorrow I meet her and the glamour is faded. I go again and again, every spark of electric aureole vanishes; we get to be good friends, maybe--nothing more."

"Perhaps a friends.h.i.+p like that is the best plane for a marriage. Isabel and I have never pretended to any school-boy or school-girl sentiment."

Mason replied in such wise Sanborn did not know whether to think him bitterly in earnest or only lightly derisive.

"That would overturn all the sentiment and love-lore of a thousand years. It would make every poet from Sappho down to Swinburne a pretender or a madman. Such ideas are supreme treason to all the inspired idiots of poetry. No! glamour we must have."

Sanborn smiled broadly, but Mason did not see him.