What Will People Say? A Novel 36 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 36Chapter 36
18
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 36
Chapter 36
HughesEnglish
"Is it possible that we're actually alone?" Forbes gloated, turning in his saddle to take her in in her brisk, youthful beauty.
"I shouldn't exactly call it alone up here on the mantelpiece of the world in broad daylight," Persis smiled. "But it's nice, isn't it?"
"Wonderful, to be riding with you!"
"I'm immensely happy," she said. "Even the horses know the difference. This morning they hated each other. They wouldn't trot in rhythm or alongside, and they fought like snapping-turtles. Now look at them nuzzle and flirt. Ouch! that's my game knee you're colliding with. It would be better if I rode side-saddle. There were advantages in old-fashioned ways. You ride splendidly, don't you?"
"Do I?" he said. "As you told me the first time I met you, I'm glad you like me."
"I more than that, now."
"More than like me?"
"Umm-humm!"
"Love me?"
"Umm-humm!"
"If I could only brush away all of these houses and people and take you in my arms! If this were only a Sahara or Mojave!"
"I doubt if there's a desert where nobody is peeking. They used to tell me that God was looking when no one else was."
"Well, He would understand."
"Maybe He would see too much. But the human beings don't understand. And they're everywhere. Oh, Lord, I'm so sick of other people's eyes and ears. All my life I've had them on me--servants', nurses', maids', waiters', grooms', footmen's! Sometimes I think I'd love to live on a desert island. Couldn't you buy me a desert island somewhere--a thoroughly equipped desert island with hot and cold water and automatic cooking?"
"I'll see if there's one in the market."
"It would be a fine addition to the same old town and country house and yacht. Had you thought where you will have your--our country place?"
"Er--no, I hadn't."
"Shall you have to be at your post much? Are the office-hours very strict?"
"Pretty strict. We'd have to live on Governor's Island, you know."
"Really? In one of those little houses?" He nodded. "I saw them there once when they gave a lawn fete. I never dreamed I'd live in one of them. They aren't very commodious, are they?"
"That depends."
"Nichette--she's my maid--would make an awful row, and my chauffeur--I suppose we could keep him? He expects to marry Nichette."
"Does he?"
"If they can stop fighting long enough to get married. Does a garage go with the house we should occupy there?"
"I doubt it."
"No garage!" she exclaimed. "How should we manage? It's rather awkward getting to the Island, too, as I remember--a ferry or something. I don't suppose you could arrange to live up-town and do your army work by telephone on rainy days?"
"I'm afraid not."
His heart was thumping. She grew more exquisite as she grew more fairy-like in her visions. He could not tell her the truth--not yet--not, at least, till they had passed through the woods ahead, where there was a promise of opportunity for at least a moment's embrace, at least one hasty kiss.
They jogged on in silence awhile, she pondering like a solemn child, he longing to give her the toys she kept imagining. They drew into the thicket, shady and soft with a breeze that wandered about murmuring "Woo! woo!" and leaves that whispered "Kiss! kiss!" and a deep forest voice that mumbled "Love!"
No one was visible ahead. He turned and stared back. They were shut in by a projecting hill that seemed to close after them like a door. He leaned sidewise with arm outstretched to enfold her waist. But with a quick lift of her hand and a scratch of the spur she carried her horse aside and ahead.
"You mustn't!" she warned. "Really!"
"But no one can see us."
"So we thought in the dark hall. And there was some one there. Do you know who it was?"
"I haven't been able to find out."
"I have!" She spoke triumphantly.
"Who was it, in Heaven's name?"
"Who would be your last guess?"
"Enslee."
"Why?"
"Because he smiled; because he let me ride with you."
"That shows how much a man's reasoning power is worth. That was just who it was."
"Why do you think so?"
"I know so. He told me."
Forbes was dazed; he marveled aloud: "And yet he smiled? He let me ride with you?"
She laughed. "Willie is such an idiot! He knew it was you; but he never dreamed that the woman was me. He thought the woman was Mrs. Neff or Winifred. That's why he smiled at you."
Forbes chuckled a moment, then flushed, as Persis went on:
"He could only hear our whispers, you know, and you can't distinguish whispers. He thought it was a great joke. He laughed his head off. And I laughed too. It was delicious. It came near being serious, though. What do you suppose? He heard the door open below and thought it was a burglar. He had a revolver and a flashlight. The flash wouldn't work--thank the Lord! So he was going to shoot first and then call, 'Who's there!' That would have been nice, wouldn't it? Then he heard our--our kisses. He didn't shoot. He kept quiet, smothering his snickers. He could only judge by the closing of the door who was who. He recognized your door, and he got mine mixed. But you're not laughing."
"It doesn't seem very funny to me," Forbes admitted. "My love for you is no joke. I don't enjoy sneaking about in dark halls and having you mistaken for some other woman."
She stared at him, and her mischief turned to a deep tenderness. She rode closer and put her free hand on his bridle-hand. "How right you are! That's the way I want you to feel, the way I want you to love me." And then she laughed again. "What do you suppose Willie told me? To-night he's going to wait till you sneak out with your lady bird, and then he's going to lock the door and make you beg for admission. That'll be nice, eh?"
"That means I can't be with you to-night."
"It seems so."
"And you won't let me kiss you now?"
"But we couldn't go spooning about in the daylight, could we? Not even if we were an old married couple, could we?"
"I suppose not. But when--when are we going to be an old married couple?"
"Whenever you say," she said, with a shy down-look. "We'd have to announce our engagement, I suppose, and then it would take a long time to get my clothes made."
"Would it?"
"Yes. I haven't a thing. I'm in perfect rags. And besides, a bride ought to begin new. Isn't it thrilling to be talking of such things! Am I blushing as red as I feel?"
"You're like a rose on fire."
"I feel deliciously a ninny. Can you get away from your hateful army for a good long honeymoon, do you suppose?"
"I don't know. Where would you like to go?"
"The Riviera isn't bad. A trip around the world would be pleasant."
"Wouldn't it!" he groaned. "But I'm afraid I couldn't."
"I suppose the country would be afraid to let you get so far away, with all this talk about trouble with the Mexicans. Oh, well, it doesn't matter so long as we are together, does it?"
"Do you feel that way?" he asked, hungrily.
"Terribly. I love you--I love you hideously much. Watch out! Will you never learn that somebody's always looking?--a whole picnic this time."
They were nearing Pocantico Lake. In a thicket on its shores a wagon-load of villagers had finished its basket-lunch and scattered in a rather dreary effort at inexpensive happiness.
Among the trees the wagon waited pitifully to take them back from their dingy cheer to their dull homes. It was rendered only the more pitiful by a strip of red-white-and-blue bunting. A coat of paint would have become it better.
While the horses cropped the grass soberly a pack of substantial wives cleared away such part of the debris of the banquet as was not scattered about the ground.
As Forbes and Persis rounded the turn that disclosed the revelers a homely couple evidently in search of a less populous nook severed a highly unromantic-looking clasp. It was hard to see how either took much pleasure from the other. The man was in his shirt-sleeves, with his hat askew; the girl, shapeless and freckled, in a shapeless freckled dress. They squinted their eyes against the sun, gaped at the tailor-made couple on the varnished horses, and stumbled in the roadside gully to let them pass.
"Isn't it ghastly?" Persis whispered. "They were trying to spoon--just as we were. And we both broke up both of us. It makes love rather a silly, shabby spectacle, doesn't it?"
"I don't think so," Forbes said. "I should say that instead of their making love shabby, love covered them with a little glory."
"That's a much prettier way to put it. But shabby people--oh Lord! Look at that family, dear! If that's wedded bliss, give me chloroform."
It was a doleful exhibit on the edge of the woods: a fat, paunchy, sweaty man was taking his picnic in carrying a squally, messy baby. Alongside him a bunchy woman with stringy hair waddled in answering stupidity, hanging to her husband's suspenders.
"You can't tell which of them's going to have the next one," Persis commented, before she caught herself. "Forgive me, I didn't realize how it would sound."
Forbes laughed sheepishly. "It was what I was thinking, too."
As they rode on she shuddered. "What an odious thing to be like that! Suppose you lost your job in the army and we got very poor, and I had to take in washing, and we had a lot of children; should we be like that, do you think?--should we?"
"You could never be anything that was not beautiful!" Forbes exclaimed, partly because he believed it to be unquestionable truth and partly to quell her ferocious repugnance for anything that was ugly and tawdry.
"Perhaps that awful man told that awful woman the same thing," she groaned, "and believed it! Come on; let's run away from it." She lifted her horse to a gallop and fled so fast that Forbes, for all the authority and help he gave his horse, could not overtake her, since hers was the better mount. As he followed, lumbering and scolding his black beast, he felt that she was indeed too fleet, too elusive for him ever to capture and keep.
But at length she relented, and reined in till he came abeam. Then she urged her horse on again, and they galloped in the mad swoop of a cavalry charge with boots griding together. She forgot her wounded knee, and he forgot his doubts of her.
There were narrow escapes, unexpected swerves round loitering wagons or deliberate wayfarers. Once she rode up a shelving bank to give him room to avoid a mangy canine landlord so earnestly attempting to evict a family of tenants from his left ear that he paid no heed to the risk of his own life or hers.
"If we ride fast on levels, we can take more time later," she said; "then they won't wonder at our being so late."
She was always thinking of what other people would think. He wished that she would forget the eternal audience, the unbroken spectators, now and then. And yet it was intelligent. It was wise. Only he loved her more when she was uttering those childish plans of hers for a life in which the funds were to be taken from a fairy purse automatically replenished as fast as it was depleted.
Yet he feared both of the women she was: the cautious and forethoughtful who might in all wisdom refuse his penury, and the spoiled demander who might resent it.
They trotted now into a park-like domain with roads branching out on either side. At the edge of each of them stood a sign-board warning against trespass and signed with the resounding name of the richest man on earth.
"They say he's worth a hundred or two hundred million dollars," Persis called across to Forbes.
"That ought to be enough," said Forbes. "It's more than we shall have." And he smiled at the comparison. Persis sighed:
"If he could lend us just one million for a few years we could make good use of it."
"I might ask him," said Forbes. "I'll send a boy over for it to-night."
He said it lightly, yet there was a sardonic bitterness in his smile. He understood for the moment why the established poor become so eager to take away from men who were once poor the wealth they have somehow amassed.
It seemed to Forbes that he would never reach the limit of this man's acres. But at last he escaped from the oppression of some one else's success. They cantered through a little village, and crossed rusty railroad-tracks into another ocean of sparsely settled country. It amazed Forbes to find so much wilderness so close to so vast a metropolis. There were long stretches where the woods on either side had a look of the primeval. He felt a longing to explore some of these leafy jungles. He told her his whim, and it was hers.
By and by they came to a grass-matted road that lost itself in ferns and undergrowth. Forbes looked at Persis. Her eyes consented. He laid his bridle-hand on the left side of his horse's mane and shifted his weight a trifle. And his horse shouldered hers into the jungle. Heads bent low, the horses mounted with cautious hoofs till the ferns were brushing their saddle-girths. The prattle of a brook somewhere lured them farther, and they pressed on into a fog of leaves and crackling boughs and flowers. Birds cried warnings and shot through the branches, bearing news of the invasion. Others in sentimental oblivion did not budge, but sat still and went on sawing the air with silver phrases shrilly sweet.
Suddenly the brook was visible, rushing here and there through the woods and making noises that were rapture just to hear. And with that music of water and woods, and that multitudinous beauty about them, they gazed only into each other's eyes, inclined together, and locked arms and breasts and lips in close embrace. They clung together till the soulless horses, nibbling here and there, sundered them.
And then they slid from the saddles and, slipping the bridles to their elbows, walked on with arms about each other's bodies and eyes so mutually engaged that they stumbled like blind folk. At last she sank to the ground at the edge of the brook, and he, instead of helping her up, dropped down at her side.
He took her into his arms again and kissed her and laughed at her.
"I reckon you'll warn me now that the horses are looking."
"No," she said; "but one of them is standing on one of my coat-tails."
So he rose and led the horses to a tree a few paces off and tied them there. When he came back he found her swinging her little boots over a still pool in an alcove of the brook. Its quiet surface mirrored her feet from beneath quaintly. "We're at the antipodes already," he laughed. She put out her hand beggingly.
"It's secluded enough for a smoke. Can you give me a cigarette? I forgot mine." He had nothing but a cigar, and she ventured a puff or two of that, then gave it back and sighed, "I wish we were married and all."
"Why?"
"I'd take off my boots and dip my poor aching feet in that water."
"Why don't you?"
"In the first place, I don't know you well enough to go barefoot before you. In the second, somebody would be sure to come along."
"Not here," he urged.
"Well, then, there's that other Me down in the pool watching this Me, and saying, 'Don't make a fool of yourself, honey.'"
"There are two Persises, then?"
"At least a hundred. But there's one down there. Look, you can see her yourself!"
She knelt above the water-glass, and he bent over to gaze. He saw her looking up at him, and his own image looking up close to hers. They smiled and made faces like children. And when he rubbed his cheek against hers the images imitated the foolishness.
"See, they're mocking us," she said. A little breeze wrinkled the mirror, and she cried: "They're frowning! They want us to be sensible! Come along! They'll be missing us at home."
"At home?" he echoed, reprovingly.
"At Willie's, I mean," she corrected. And then she put his hands away and spoke earnestly. "It came mighty near being home to me. I have a confession to make. I ought to have made it before. I have been amazed at myself for not telling you, for taking your love when I had no right to."
He stared at her in terror, and she smiled with pride at his fear and babbled on almost incoherently.
"Don't be afraid--though I'm glad you are. But I hope you won't despise me. But I couldn't seem to help myself. You're really to blame for being so terribly overwhelming. You see, I--I--I've told you how often Willie Enslee proposed to me, and--well, one day--that very day you saw me in my old hat--the first time, you know--well, I had just had a talk with my father, and the poor old boy was all cut up about his--his money matters. He's too nice and sweet to be much of a financier, you know, and--well, I was scared to death, and I thought the world was coming to an end, and I'd better--better get aboard the ark, you know--and I hadn't met you then, you know, and Willie proposed again, and I--I accepted him."
"You promised to be his wife!" Forbes whispered, chokingly.
"Yes," she answered. "I--you see, I didn't know you. I didn't dream I should ever meet anybody who would--would thrill me--that's the only word--as you did, as you do. I didn't imagine that I should ever love as other people do--insanely, madly, dishonorably--anythingly to be with the one I loved. And I didn't dare give up Willie till I was sure I loved you, and when I was sure I loved you, I--it seemed so hateful even to mention his name. It would have been like--like this."
With her heel she pushed a rock into the water, and it thumped and splashed and curdled the little pool.
"That's the effect his name would have had on our moonlight, and I couldn't tell you then. Will you forgive me, or do you think I'm a hopeless rotter and a sneak?"
He smiled at her mixed vocabulary, and gathered her into his arms. "My love! My Persis! But you'll tell him now, won't you?"
"Oh, now, yes!" she cried, ecstatic as a comforted child. "You are glorious to forgive me so easily, and not be nasty and lecture-y. And see the pool; it's all smooth and clear again."
He looked, and held back the confession he was about to make in his turn. The mention of his poverty would be pushing another rock into the pool. And he wondered if the mirror would clear after that. He could forgive her her betrothal to Enslee because that was of the past; but the lack of money was not a matter for forgiving and forgetting; it was something to endure. It was asking love to accept poverty as a concubine or a mother-in-law.
He kept silent on that score, and they murmured their loves and kissed and laughed with contentedness purling through their hearts, and the world far away. She glanced back at the horses blissfully tearing young leaves from high branches.
"We ought to keep those horses as a souvenir of our engagement. It would be a pity to let any one else ride the dear old brutes, wouldn't it?"
"It would, indeed!" he said.
"Let's buy them from Willie. He would sell them for a song."
"That's a fine idea," Forbes answered, with a gulp. He knew how much horses like these were worth--and saddles, bridles, and stables.
"We shouldn't want to ride in a car all the time, should we?" she asked.
"No, indeed," he answered. She was at her fairy plans again, and his heart sickened.
"We mustn't let ourselves get fat. Of all things we must avoid that," she said. "We might have just a little car like Winifred's--to hold only two. I could drive down and get you and bring you home. It would save wear on our limousine--or perhaps we won't get a limousine just yet. If we didn't have a big car it would be a good excuse for not having a lot of people tagging round with us everywhere, wouldn't it? I feel an awful longing for a lot of solitude with just you and me. I suppose we'll have to put up with the United States army. But I want to shake the gang I've been running with--at least for a year or so, till you and I can get acquainted. Will you buy me a little car like Winifred's--a good one? There's no use wasting money on the cheap kind. The good little ones cost as much as the good big ones; but once they're paid for, they don't run up repair bills, and they take you where you're going instead of dying under you half-way there. Will you buy me a little car for just us? You can get a darling for about twenty-five hundred; I was asking Winifred."
He made no answer. She turned and looked at him and saw on his face the look she had seen on her father's that day--the look a man wears when he cannot buy his beloved what she pleads for. Now, as then, Persis felt ashamed rather than resentful, and she hastened to add:
"If you can't afford it, old boy, say so. You mustn't mind me. My father says I'm a terrible asker. Just say No, and I won't mind. Promise me that, dear. I want to be a good economical housewife to you; and I was only thinking that if we had a little car it would save taking the big car out, and that saves tires and gasolene and general upkeep."
He heard Enslee's words, "It's the upkeep that costs," and they mocked him again. He realized that in persuading this girl to choose him instead of Enslee, who had already chosen her, he was not only robbing her of a yacht, a palace, two or three palaces, half a dozen automobiles, servants, and servants of servants, foreign travel and foreign clothes and jewels--he was not only robbing her of such things, but he was asking her to learn a new way of life, a habit of infinite denial, eternal economy, and meager amusement.
Experience and common sense--for he had them in large measure in his ordinary life--seemed to bend down and say: "Let your sea-gull go. She'll die in your cage, or she'll break it apart."
But she was in his arms. She was leaning against him, flicking his boots with her riding-crop, and loving him, contented utterly. Romance elbowed Reason aside and said: "See how happy she is. It isn't money that makes happiness. You're sitting on the edge of a silly little brook in somebody's backwoods, and you're happy as a king and queen on a throne of gold."
Common Sense grinned: "Suppose it should rain? This is all very well for a while, but what of next winter?"
Reason and Romance wrangled in his head while she was babbling something in her elfin economy about, "So we won't have two cars yet, just one, a nice big 1913 six, with my chauffeur to run it. Father pays him fifteen hundred a year, and that's good pay. Don't you let him wheedle you out of a penny more."
Forbes' heart cried aloud within him: "My God! her very chauffeur gets nearly as much as I do!" This was the spark of resentment that gave him his start. He spoke bitterly, almost glad that she was dazed. And he put her away from him that both might be free. And he savagely kicked a rock into the smiling little pool and watched it grow turbid as he poured out his confession.
"Listen, honey; you've got a wrong idea of my situation. I'm to blame for it, I reckon. I've been meaning to speak about it, but I didn't--for just the same reason that kept you quiet about Enslee. I'm not rich, honey. I didn't tell anybody I was rich, but the idea got started from Ten Eyck's fool joke about seeing me coming out of a big bank. I told him the truth, and now I must tell you. You'll hate me, but you've got to know some time. I'm not rich, honey."
"What of it, dear?" she said, creeping toward him. "I love you for yourself. I never thought you were rich like Willie. I gave up all that gladly."
"But I'm what you would call--a pauper, I suppose. I have only my army pay."
"Isn't that enough?"
"Plenty of couples seem to be happy on it, but they're mostly the sons and daughters of army people. You've been brought up so differently. Wild extravagances for our people would be shabby makeshifts to you."
"Don't you think I'd be able to adapt myself?"
"Would you?"
"I should hope so. How much is your army pay, if you don't mind my asking?"
"As first lieutenant I get a little over two thousand."
"Two thousand a week? Why, that's not bad at all. Why did you frighten me?"
He laughed aloud, and she corrected herself.
"Oh, two thousand a month. That's about twenty-five thousand a year. It isn't much, is it? But we could skimp and scrape, and we'd have each other."
She had given him his death-blow unwittingly.
He smiled dismally, and groaned:
"Two thousand a year with forage."
She stared at him in unbelief. "Two thousand a year with forage! We couldn't eat the forage, could we? They give you a pittance like that for being an officer and a gentleman and a hero?"
"The hero business is the worst paid of all. Look at the firemen."
"But, my dear, two thousand a--why, our chef gets more than that, and our chauffeur nearly as much; and my father's secretary--everybody gets more than that."
"Not everybody. The vast majority of people get much less. But that's what I get."
She had been prepared for self-denial, but this was self-obliteration. If he had told her that he had the yellow fever she could hardly have felt sorrier for him, or more appalled at the prospect of their union. She loved him, perhaps, the more for the pity that welled up in her. She denounced the government for a miser.
"We're better paid than other armies," said Forbes. "Officers in foreign armies are supposed to have private fortunes."
"I don't wonder," she gasped. "And you haven't any?" He shook his head. "No relatives?"
"None that aren't poorer than I am."
She put out her hand and caressed his brow. "Poor boy, it's cruel, it's hateful! Willie Enslee with all that money, and you with two thousand a year! And no prospects for more?"
"Well, I hope to be promoted captain very shortly--any day now I should get my commission. That carries with it twenty-four hundred a year."
She sighed. "The little car I wanted would cost more than that. Well, let it go. Walking is healthier. It would save the chauffeur's wages, too. And my maid--I don't know what Nichette would say. But--well, let her go. Let everything go but you."
She clasped her arms round him, and he clutched her tight; but his embrace was like a farewell. She was infinitely pathetic to him. She had so much sophistication, and was so innocent of so much. She kissed him tenderly, but her mood was an elegy.
"That knocks out my wedding plans, too, doesn't it? It was the dream of all my life, the ambition of all my girlhood." And she fell to musing aloud. "Many's the night I've lain awake planning that wedding, and that divine wedding-gown all of ivory satin--with a train a mile long, and with point lace like whipped cream all over it, and the veil floating in a cloud about me. And I was to have counts and barons and things for ushers, and the belles of the season for bridesmaids--all very envious of me. And the cathedral was to be one ocean of flowers and silk ribbons, and--and I was to have at least an archbishop to marry me. And the presents! Oh, they were to have been so glorious that everybody that gave them would be bankrupted for life and hate me; and there were to be no duplicates. And the bridegroom was to be so wealthy that all the bridesmaids would loathe me for winning him. And we were to go away in a private car to a palace built brand new just for me."
He was so fascinated with watching her soul in debate with itself that he did not speak. He just held her fast and listened. She went on:
"It was a silly dream. It's not the ceremony that counts--it's the long life after. Love's the main thing, isn't it?"
He lifted her gauntleted hand to his cheek and said nothing. She was silent a long while. Then she pondered aloud again: "I wonder what sort of a poor man's wife I'll make. I'm afraid I'll be an awful failure. You know, we were poor once--yes. My father got squeezed in a corner, and nearly went bankrupt. Oh, but mother and I had to skimp and scrape! I had to turn my old gowns, give up our box at the opera, sell my saddle-horses. We couldn't go to dinners or receptions because we couldn't return them. We sat at home and received--indignant creditors. Oh, the bills, the bills--my God, the bills!
"At the end of a year father found a man who was unbusinesslike enough to put him on his feet again. It was Willie Enslee, of course. We had money once more; we could hold our heads high, snub those who snubbed us, get even with those who had patronized us, or--ugh! insulted us with their sympathy. Oh, money is a great thing, isn't it? It was like coming out of a cave again into the sunlight. I used to say I would face anything rather than poverty again.
"And think of it, Harvey, when we were at our poorest we were spending thirty or forty thousand a year. And we called it poverty. But you and I--two thousand a year--and forage!
"Why, Harvey, it would take you a year and a half of work to pay for the little car I wanted--if we did without a big car and didn't spend a cent on clothes or theaters or the opera or taxies or the seaside or Europe or entertaining people or servants' wages, and--and ate only the forage. We couldn't have a chauffeur. I couldn't have my maid. I couldn't have any friends--what should I do? I couldn't have anything! Those two horses I wanted would cost a year of your salary. My dressmaker's bills are four or five times as much, and at that I never have anything to wear. Why, Harvey, it's frightful! I never knew what money meant before. I don't see how we could ever manage it. I don't see how."
She put his arms away as if they irked her and hampered her breath. She was breathing hard. Merely to imagine a life devoid of everything she had always found about her was like a suffocation. She was understanding how a fish must feel when it is drawn from the water and flung to stifle on dry pebbles. She suffered such dismay as overwhelms a rat in the bell of an air-pump when the experimenter begins to create a vacuum.
She had seen poverty and its wreckage, and her mind was filled with pictures, not from the charming homes of moderate means, but from the slums that she had visited once and avoided thereafter as a nightmare. She had had friends who had gone into bankruptcy and slunk off into obscurity to hide its penalties. One very dear woman, whose husband lapsed from affluence to mediocrity, had written a few little notes, calmly taken an overdose of a headache powder, stretched herself out on her mortgaged chaise-longue and fallen asleep over an unusually sedative novel. Persis had received one of the notes.
Good-by, Persis dear. You know the situation, and you at least will understand. Would it be too much trouble for you to have a little talk with the undertaker man and have things as nicely managed as possible? Don't let them treat me too shabbily, will you? I couldn't rest easily even There. You understand, don't you?
Persis had understood, and, being in funds at the time, had seen all conducted with taste and even with a little splendor.
To every one his or her especial cowardice. Persis, so brave in so many ways, was afraid of creepy things like caterpillars and creditors and poverty. They spoiled for her everything that they touched, flower or ceremony or future.
She was silent a long while. Forbes longingly set his arms about her; but she did not respond; her hands were idly rolling her riding-crop up and down the shin of her boot, for she was thinking hard.
Forbes felt that he clung to the mere clothes of her soul. Herself was already gone from him. Yet he loved her so that he found her not unworthy nor selfish nor craven, but infinitely precious and beautiful, difficult to win and wear.
A great many shining throngs of water went down the brook, making all the conversation there was, before Persis began to flog her boots with her riding-crop. She wanted to groan, but as was her custom in torment, smiled instead; and, having something of tragic solemnity to utter, put it forth with a plucky flippancy:
