"If she accepts me, I'll make it impossible for her not to be happy," he said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion--not divine unselfishness but human--not the kind we read about and pretend to have --and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not having it--no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily lives--the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would make us happier to see happy. "She may think she cares for this young clerk--" so ran his thoughts--"but she doesn't know her own mind. When she is mine, I'll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare flower --and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!"
It would hardly be possible for a human being to pass a stormier night than was that night of his.
Alternations between hope and despair--fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her--those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations--in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness--her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form--He tossed about until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake it.
When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of the boy entering the room.
He reached for it with eager, trembling arm, drew back.
"Put it on the table," he said.
The boy left. He was alone. Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes. It contained his destiny. If she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured.
If she refused, he would cease to struggle. He rose, took from a locked drawer a bottle of rye whisky. He poured a tall glass--the kind called a bar glass--half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a quiver.
The shock brought him up standing. He looked and acted like his former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and read:
"I am willing to marry you, if you really want me.
I am so tired of struggling, and I don't see anything but dark ahead.--D. H."
Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed. He felt the blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until nearly one o'clock.
To an outsider there would have been a world of homely commonplace pathos in that little letter of the girl's if read aright, that is to say, if read with what was between the lines supplied. It is impossible to live in cities any length of time and with any sort of eyes without learning the bitter unromantic truths about poverty--city poverty. In quiet, desolate places one may be poor, very poor, without much conscious suffering. There are no teasing contrasts, no torturing temptations. But in a city, if one knows anything at all of the possibilities of civilized life, of the joys and comforts of good food, clothing, and shelter, of theater and concert and excursion, of entertaining and being entertained, poverty becomes a hell. In the country, in the quiet towns, the innocent people wonder at the greediness of the more comfortable kinds of city people, at their love of money, their incessant dwelling upon it, their reverence for those who have it, their panic-like flight from those who have it not. They wonder how folk, apparently human, can be so inhuman. Let them be careful how they judge. If you discover any human being anywhere acting as you think a human being should not, investigate all the circumstances, look thoroughly into all the causes of his or her conduct, before you condemn him or her as inhuman, unworthy of your kinship and your sympathy.
In her brief letter the girl showed that, young though she was and not widely experienced in life, she yet had seen the horrors of city poverty, how it poisons and kills all the fine emotions. She had seen many a loving young couple start out confidently, with a few hundred dollars of debt for furniture--had seen the love fade and wither, shrivel, die--had seen appear peevishness and hatred and unfaithfulness and all the huge, foul weeds that choke the flowers of married life. She knew what her lover's salary would buy--and what it would not buy--for two. She could imagine their fate if there should be three or more. She showed frankly her selfishness of renunciation. But there could be read between the lines--concealed instead of vaunted--perhaps unsuspected--her unselfishness of renunciation for the sake of her lover and for the sake of the child or the children that might be. In our love of moral sham and glitter, we overlook the real beauties of human morality; we even are so dim or vulgar sighted that we do not see them when they are shown to us.
As Norman awakened, he reached for the telephone, said to the boy in charge of the club exchange: "Look in the book, find the number of a lawyer named Branscombe, and connect me with his office." After some confusion and delay he got the right office, but Dorothy was out at lunch. He left a message that she was to call him up at the club as soon as she came in. He was shaving when the bell rang.
He was at the receiver in a bound. "Is it you?" he said.
"Yes," came in her quiet, small voice.
"Will you resign down there to-day? Will you marry me this afternoon?"
A brief silence, then--"Yes."
