Part 67

"Where have you been keeping yourself of late? Busy with the writing, I suppose?"

"I owe you an apology," said Selma, in a queer, suppressed voice. "I have been hating you, and trying to think of some way to keep you and Victor Dorn apart. I thought it was from my duty to the cause. I've found out that it was a low, mean personal reason."

Jane had stopped short, was regarding her with eyes that glowed in a pallid face. "Because you are in love with him?" she said.

Selma gave a quick, shamed nod. "Yes," she said--the sound was scarcely audible.

Selma's frank and generous--and confiding--self-sacrifice aroused no response in Jane Hastings. For the first time in her life she was knowing what it meant to hate.

"And I've got to warn you," Selma went on, "that I am going to do whatever I can to keep you from hindering him. Not because I love him, but because I owe it to the cause. He belongs to it, and I must help him be single-hearted for it. You could only be a bad influence in his life. I think you would like to be a sincere woman; but you can't. Your class is too strong for you. So--it would be wrong for Victor Dorn to love and to marry you. I think he realizes it and is struggling to be true to himself. I intend to help him, if I can."

Jane smiled cruelly. "What hypocrisy!" she said, and turned and walked away.

VIII

In America we have been bringing up our women like men, and treating them like children. They have active minds with nothing to act upon. Thus they are driven to think chiefly about themselves. With Jane Hastings, self-centering took the form of self-analysis most of the time. She was intensely interested in what she regarded as the new development of her character. This definite and apparently final decision for the narrow and the ungenerous. In fact, it was no new development, but simply a revelation to herself of her own real character. She was seeing at last the genuine Jane Hastings, inevitable product of a certain heredity in a certain environment. The high thinking and talking, the idealistic aspiration were pose and pretense. Jane Hastings was a selfish, self-absorbed person, ready to do almost any base thing to gain her ends, ready to hate to the uttermost any one who stood between her and her object.

"I'm certainly not a lovely person--not a lovable person," thought she, with that gentle tolerance wherewith we regard our ownselves, whether in the dress of pretense or in the undress of deformed humanness. "Still--I am what I am, and I've got to make the best of it."

As she thought of Selma's declaration of war she became less and less disturbed about it. Selma neither would nor could do anything sly. Whatever she attempted in the open would only turn Victor Dorn more strongly toward herself. However, she must continue to try to see him, must go to see him in a few days if she did not happen upon him in her rides or walks. How poorly he would think of her if he knew the truth about her! But then, how poor most women--and men, too--would look in a strong and just light. Few indeed could stand idealizing; except Victor, no one she knew. And he was human enough not to make her uncomfortable in his presence.

But it so happened that before she could see Victor Dorn her father disobeyed Dr. Charlton and gave way to the appetite that was the chief cause of his physical woes. He felt so well that he ate the family dinner, including a peach cobbler with whipped cream, which even the robust Jane adventured warily. Martha was dining with them. She abetted her father. "It's light," said she. "It couldn't harm anybody."

"You mustn't touch it, popsy," said Jane.

She unthinkingly spoke a little too commandingly. Her father, in a perverse and reckless mood, took Martha's advice. An hour later Dr. Charlton was summoned, and had he not arrived promptly----

"Another fifteen or twenty minutes," said he to the old man when he had him out of immediate danger, "and I'd have had nothing to do but sign a certificate of natural death."

"Murder would have been nearer the truth," said Martin feebly. "That there fool Martha!"

"Come out from behind that petticoat!" cried Charlton. "Didn't I spend the best part of three days in giving you the correct ideas as to health and disease--in showing you that ALL disease comes from indigestion--ALL disease, from falling hair and sore eyes to weak ankles and corns? And didn't I convince you that you could eat only the things I told you about?"

"Don't hit a man when he's down," groaned Hastings.

"If I don't, you'll do the same idiotic trick again when I get you up--if I get you up."

Hastings looked quickly at him. This was the first time Charlton had ever expressed a doubt about his living. "Do you mean that?" he said hoarsely. "Or are you just trying to scare me?"

"Both," said Charlton. "I'll do my best, but I can't promise. I've lost confidence in you. No wonder doctors, after they've been in practice a few years, stop talking food and digestion to their patients. I've never been able to convince a single human being that appetite is not the sign of health, and yielding to it the way to health. But I've made lots of people angry and have lost their trade. I had hopes of you. You were such a hopeless wreck. But no. And you call yourself an intelligent man!"

"I'll never do it again," said Hastings, pleading, but smiling, too--Charlton's way of talking delighted him.

"You think this is a joke," said Charlton, shaking his bullet head. "Have you any affairs to settle? If you have, send for your lawyer in the morning."

Fear--the Great Fear--suddenly laid its icy long fingers upon the throat of the old man. He gasped and his eyes rolled. "Don't trifle with me, Charlton," he muttered. "You know you will pull me through."

"I'll do my best," said Charlton. "I promise nothing. I'm serious about the lawyer."

"I don't want no lawyer hanging round my bed," growled the old man. "It'd kill me. I've got nothing to settle. I don't run things with loose ends. And there's Jinny and Marthy and the boy--share and share alike."

"Well--you're in no immediate danger. I'll come early to-morrow."

"Wait till I get to sleep."