As he talked on and on of Sperry's visit and the new projects, she listened, looking at his character in the light Brent had turned upon it--Brent who had in a few brief moments turned such floods of light upon so many things she had been seeing dimly or not at all.Moderate prosperity and moderate adversity bring out the best there is in a man; the extreme of either brings out his worst.The actual man is the best there is in him, and not the worst, but it is one of the tragedies of life that those who have once seen his worst ever afterward have sense of it chiefly, and cannot return to the feeling they had for him when his worst was undreamed of."I'm not in love with Brent," thought Susan."But having known him, Ican't ever any more care for Rod.He seems small beside Brent--and he _is_ small."Spenser in his optimistic dreaming aloud had reached a point where it was necessary to assign Susan a role in his dazzling career."You'll not have to go on the stage," said he."I'll look out for you.By next week Sperry and I will have got together a scenario for the play and when Sperry reads it to Fitzalan we'll get an advance of at least five hundred.So you and I will take a nice room and bath uptown--as a starter--and we'll be happy again--happier than before.""No, I'm going to support myself," said Susan promptly.
"Trash!" cried Spenser, smiling tenderly at her."Do you suppose I'd allow you to mix up in stage life? You've forgotten how jealous I am of you.You don't know what I've suffered since I've been here sick, brooding over what you're doing, to----"She laid her fingers on his lips."What's the use of fretting about anything that has to be?" said she, smilingly."I'm going to support myself.You may as well make up your mind to it.""Plenty of time to argue that out," said he, and his tone forecast his verdict on the arguing.And he changed the subject by saying, "I see you still cling to your fad of looking fascinating about the feet.That was one of the reasons I never could trust you.A girl with as charming feet and ankles as you have, and so much pride in getting them up well, simply cannot be trustworthy." He laughed.
"No, you were made to be taken care of, my dear."She did not press the matter.She had taken her stand; that was enough for the present.After an hour with him, she went home to get herself something to eat on her gas stove.
Spenser's confidence in the future did not move her even to the extent of laying out half a dollar on a restaurant dinner.
Women have the habit of believing in the optimistic outpourings of egotistical men, and often hasten men along the road to ruin by proclaiming this belief and acting upon it.
But not intelligent women of experience; that sort of woman, by checking optimistic husbands, fathers, sons, lovers, has even put off ruin--sometimes until death has had the chance to save the optimist from the inevitable consequence of his folly.When she finished her chop and vegetable, instead of lighting a cigarette and lingering over a cup of black coffee she quickly straightened up and began upon the play Brent had given her.She had read it several times the night before, and again and again during the day.But not until now did she feel sufficiently calmed down from her agitations of thought and emotion to attack the play understandingly.
Thanks to defective education the most enlightened of us go through life much like a dim-sighted man who has no spectacles.Almost the whole of the wonderful panorama of the universe is unseen by us, or, if seen, is but partially understood or absurdly misunderstood.When it comes to the subtler things, the things of science and art, rarely indeed is there anyone who has the necessary training to get more than the crudest, most imperfect pleasure from them.What little training we have is so limping that it spoils the charm of mystery with which savage ignorance invests the universe from blade of grass to star, and does not put in place of that broken charm the profounder and loftier joy of understanding.
To take for illustration the most widely diffused of all the higher arts and sciences, reading: How many so-called "educated" people can read understandingly even a novel, the form of literature designed to make the least demand upon the mind? People say they have read, but, when questioned, they show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with evidently faulty grasp of its meaning.
When the thing read is a play, almost no one can get from it a coherent notion of what it is about.Most of us have nothing that can justly be called imagination; our early training at home and at school killed in the shoot that finest plant of the mind's garden.So there is no ability to fill in the picture which the dramatic author draws in outline.Susan had not seen "Cavalleria Rusticana" either as play or as opera.But when she and Spenser were together in Forty-fourth Street, she had read plays and had dreamed over them; the talk had been almost altogether of plays--of writing plays, of constructing scenes, of productions, of acting, of all the many aspects of the theater.Spenser read scenes to her, got her to help him with criticism, and she was present when he went over his work with Drumley, Riggs, Townsend and the others.Thus, reading a play was no untried art to her.
She read "Cavalleria" through slowly, taking about an hour to it.She saw now why Brent had given it to her as the primer lesson--the simple, elemental story of a peasant girl's ruin under promise of marriage; of her lover's wearying of one who had only crude physical charm; of his being attracted by a young married woman, gay as well as pretty, offering the security in intrigue that an unmarried woman could not offer.
