Rose of Dutcher's Coolly Part 33

"So I say, marry young or marry on the impulse, or you'll come at last to my condition, when no head wears an aureole."

"I wonder what started you off on this trail, Mason?"

Mason pushed on resolutely:

"I have become interested and a.n.a.lytical in the matter. I follow up each case and catalogue it away. This failure due to a distressing giggle; that to an empty skull; this to a bad complexion; that to a too ready sentiment. If I could marry while the glamour lasts! I admit I have met many women whose first appeal filled me with hope; if I might contrive to marry then it might be done once for all. That, of course, is impossible, because no woman, I am forced to admit, would discover any seductive glamour in a taffy-colored blond like me. My glamour comes out upon intimate acquaintance."

"Perhaps the glamour needed could be developed on closer acquaintance with women who seem plain at first sight."

"Possibly! But I can't go about developing glamour in strange, plain women. They might not understand my motives."

Sanborn laughed dismally.

"Then the case seems to me hopeless."

"Precisely. The case seems hopeless. After ten years careful study of the matter I have come to the conclusion that I was born to something besides matrimony. Cases of glamour get less and less common now, and I foresee the time when the most beautiful creature in the world will possess no glamour."

Sanborn imaginatively entered into this gloomy mood. "Nothing will then remain but death."

"Exactly! Peaceful old age and decay. But there are deeper deeps to this marriage question, as I warn you now on the eve of your venture. I find in myself a growing inability to conceive of one woman in the light of an exclusive ideal, an ideal of more interest than all the world of women. I am troubled by the 'possible woman.'"

"I don't quite conceive----"

"I mean the woman who might, quite possibly, appeal to me in a more powerful and beautiful way than the one I have. I am not prepared as I approach the point to say I will love and cherish till death. In the unknown deeps of life there are other women, more alluring, more beautiful still. So I must refuse to make a promise which I am not sure I can keep."

"Isabel and I have agreed to leave that out of our ceremony," said Sanborn; "also the clause which demands obedience from her."

"I am watching you. If your experiment succeeds, and I can find a woman as fine and sensible and self-reliant--but there again my confounded altruism comes in. I think also of the woman. Ought I to break into the orderly progress of her life? I can't afford to throw myself away, I can't afford to place a barrier between me and the 'possible woman,'

and, per contra, neither can the woman afford to make a mistake; it bears harder upon women than it does upon men. When the glorious 'possible woman' comes along I want to be free. So the woman might reasonably want to be free when the ideal man comes along."

"If you really love, these considerations would not count."

Mason waved a silencing palm.

"That will do. I've heard those wise words before. I am ready to be submerged in such excluding emotions."

"Mason," said Sanborn, "one of two things I must believe: Either that you have fallen in love with that superb country girl tonight or you've been giving me a chapter from your new novel."

Mason looked around with a mystic gleam in his eyes.

"Well, which is it?"

CHAPTER XIX

ROSE SITS IN THE BLAZE OF A THOUSAND EYES

Life quickened for the coule girl. She accommodated herself to the pace of the daily papers with instant facility. She studied the amus.e.m.e.nt columns, and read the book reviews, and frequented the beautiful reading room of the Newberry library. She went to all the matinees, taking gallery tickets, of course, ever mindful of her slender resources--studying as truly, as intently, as if she were still at college.

She had told her father that three hundred dollars would carry her through till June, and she was determined it should do so. She had not begun to think of any work to do beyond her writing. Her mind was still in unrest--here life's problem was seemingly more difficult of solution than ever.

She took hold upon the city with the power of a fresh mind capable of enormous feeling and digesting. She seemed to be in the world at last, plunged in it, enveloped by it, and she came to delight in the roar and tumult of it all, as if it were the sound of winds and waters; and each day she entered upon a little wider circle of adventure. Once the first confusion was past, the movement and faces of the crowds were of endless interest to her. She walked down into the city every day, returning to her little nook in the noisy flat building, as the young eagle to its eerie above the las.h.i.+ng tree-tops. She was sitting above the tumult, as Mr. Mason had advised her to do.

She came soon to know that the west side of State street was tabooed by wealthy shoppers, who bought only on the east side; that Wabash avenue was yet more select, and that no one who owned a carriage ever traded in the bargain stores. She did all her shopping there because it was cheaper, but deep in her heart she felt no kins.h.i.+p with the cross, hurrying, pus.h.i.+ng, perspiring crowds in the bargain stores. Her place was among the graceful, leisurely, beautifully attired groups of people on the east side of State street. She was not troubled at this stage of her development by any idea of being faithful to the people of her own material condition and origin. She had always loved the graces and cleanlinesses of life, and her father, she knew to be a man of innate refinement. The idea of caste, of arbitrary cla.s.ses of people, had only come to her newly or obscurely through newspapers or novels. She did not like dirty people, nor surly people, nor boorish people. In fact, she did not cla.s.s people at all; they were individuals with her yet. She was allured by the conditions of life on the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive because the people lived such quiet, clean and joyous lives apparently, with time to think and be kind.

She met few people outside of the little circle at the boarding house, and an occasional visiting friend of Miss Fletcher or Mr. Taylor. Owen she saw much of, and he pleased her greatly. He was a man she could have married under some circ.u.mstances. He had means a plenty; he was an unusual character, clean-souled, almost elemental in his simple sincerity, but she considered him committed to Mary, and, besides, Mason had become a deterring cause, though she hardly realized that.

Through all the days which followed that evening at Dr. Herrick's she saw his face with growing distinctness. It was not a genial face, but it was one to remember, a face of power. The line of the lips, the half-averted chin, marked Mason's att.i.tude to be one of disgust or weariness. He was the most powerful man she had ever known, a man of critical insight, and for that reason especially she had sought in her last reading to please him. She had failed, and so she was afraid to see him again. When Isabel said to her:

"Mason is a man you should know. He can do a great deal for you in the city," Rose replied in her blunt fas.h.i.+on:

"I don't want him to do anything for me."

"O yes, you do! He's really a kind-hearted man. He puts on a manner which scares people sometimes, but he's a man of the highest character.

He's the greatest thinker I ever met--O I'm not disloyal to Dr. Sanborn, he's the _best_ man I ever met." There was a story in that tender inflection. "So you must let me send in something to Warren, and let him advise you."

Rose finally consented, but it seemed to her like laying an only child upon the rack. She had come almost to fear, certainly to dread, that strange, imperturbable man. His abiding-place and his office were alike so far removed from any manner of living she had knowledge of. He concealed his own likes and dislikes so effectually that not even Isabel (as she confessed) could learn them.

A few days after putting her packet of poems into Isabel's hands Rose received a note from her asking her to come over and see her--that she had an invitation for her.

"We are invited, you and Dr. Sanborn and I, to sit in a box at the symphony concert Sat.u.r.day night, with Mr. and Mrs. Harvey. Mrs. Harvey is one of my dearest friends, and I've talked about you so much she is eager to see you."

Rose took the matter very quietly. She was mightily pleased, but she was not accustomed to gus.h.i.+ng her thanks; besides, she had recovered her equilibrium.

Isabel was a little surprised at her coolness, but was keen enough to see that she did not mean to be ungrateful.

"I thought perhaps you'd like to advise about dress," she said. "The boxes are very brilliant, but you'll look well in anything. You won't need a bonnet, your hair is so pretty, and that little grey dress will do, with a little change."

"You know I'm a farmer's daughter," Rose explained; "I can't afford new dresses in order to go to the opera."

"I understand, my dear. I have my own limitations in that way. I keep one or two nice gowns and the rest of the time I wear a uniform. I told Mrs. Harvey you were poor like myself, and that we'd need to be the background for her, and she said she'd trust me."

What Mrs. Harvey had said was this: "My dear Isabel, you've got judgment, and if you say the girl's worth knowing I want to know her.

And if you say the girl will be presentable I'd like to have her come.

The boys are both in New York, anyway, and we've got three unoccupied seats."

"Now you come over to dinner with me Sat.u.r.day; come at five. I want you to help me dress. Doctor will be over, and we'll have a nice time before the carriage comes."

Rose was much more elated than she cared to show. Once as she sat in the gallery of the theatre and looked at the boxes she had shut her teeth in a vow: "I'll sit there where you do, one of these days!" and now it had come in a few weeks instead of years--like a fairy gift. She told Mary nothing about her invitation for several days. She dreaded her outcry, which was inescapable.

"Oh! isn't that fine! How you _do_ get ahead--what will you wear?"

"I haven't a bewildering choice," Rose said. "I thought I'd wear my grey dress."

"Oh, this is a wonderful chance for you! Can't you afford a new dress?"