Part 54

"No," she said placidly. "I've always told you so."

He seized her in his arms, kissed her with a frenzy that was savage, ferocious. "You will drive me mad. You have driven me mad!" he muttered. And he added, unconscious that he was speaking his thoughts, so distracted was he: "You must love me--you must! No woman has ever resisted me. You cannot."

She drew herself away from him, stood before him like snow, like ice. "One thing I have never told you. I'll tell you now," she said deliberately. "I despise you."

He fell back a step and the chill of her coldness seemed to be freezing the blood in his veins.

"I've always despised you," she went on, and he shivered before that contemptuous word--it seemed only the more contemptuous for her calmness. "Sometimes I've despised you thoroughly--again only a little--but always that feeling."

For a moment he thought she had at last stung his pride into the semblance of haughtiness. He was able to look at her with mocking eyes and to say, "I congratulate you on your cleverness in concealing your feelings."

"It wasn't my cleverness," she said wearily. "It was your blindness. I never deceived you."

"No, you never have," he replied sincerely. "Perhaps I deserve to be despised. Again, perhaps if you knew the world--the one I live in--better, you'd think less harshly of me."

"I don't think harshly of you. How could I--after all you did for my father?"

"Dorothy, if you'll stay here and study for the stage--or anything you choose--I promise you I'll never speak of my feeling for you--or show it in any way--unless you yourself give me leave."

She smiled with childlike pathos. "You ought not to tempt me. Do you want me to keep on despising you? Can't you ever be fair with me?"

The sad, frank gentleness of the appeal swung his unhinged mind to the other extreme--from the savagery of passion to a frenzy of remorse. "Fair to you? No," he cried, "because I love you. Oh, I'm ashamed--bitterly ashamed. I'm capable of any baseness to get you. You're right. You can't trust me. In going you're saving me from myself." He hesitated, stared wildly, appalled at the words that were fighting for utterance--the words about marriage--about marrying her! He said hoarsely: "I am mad--mad! I don't know what I'm saying. Good-by--For God's sake, don't think the worst of me, Dorothy. Good-by. I will be a man again--I will!"

And he wrung her hand and, talking incoherently, he rushed from the room and from the house.

XII

He went straight home and sought his sister. She had that moment come in from tea after a matinee. She talked about the play--how badly it was acted--and about the women she had seen at tea--how badly dressed they were. "It's hard to say which is the more dreadful--the ugly, misshapen human race without clothes or in the clothes it insists on wearing. And the talk at that tea! Does no one ever say a pleasant thing about anyone? Doesn't anyone ever do a pleasant thing that can be spoken about? I read this morning Tolstoy's advice about resolving to think all day only nice thoughts and sticking to it. That sounded good to me, and I decided to try it." Ursula laughed and squirmed about in her tight-fitting dress that made an enchanting display of her figure. "What is one to do? I can't be a fraud, for one. And if I had stuck to my resolution I'd have spent the day in lying. What's the matter, Fred?" Now that her attention was attracted she observed more closely. "What have you been doing? You look--frightful!"

"I've broken with her," replied he.

"With Jo?" she cried. "Why, Fred, you can't--you can't--with the wedding only five days away!"

"Not with Jo."

Ursula breathed noisy relief. She said cheerfully: "Oh--with the other. Well, I'm glad it's over."

"Over?" said he sardonically. "Over? It's only begun."

"But you'll stick it out, Fred. You've made a fool of yourself long enough. What was the girl playing for? Marriage?"

He nodded. "I guess so." He laughed curtly. "And she almost won."

Ursula smiled with fine mockery. "Almost, but not quite. I know you men. Women do that sort of fool thing. But men--never--at least not the ambitious, snobbish New York men."

"She almost won," he repeated. "At least, I almost did it. If I had stayed a minute longer I'd have done it."

"You like to think you would," mocked Ursula. "But if you had tried to say the words your lungs would have collapsed, your vocal chords snapped and your tongue shriveled."

"I am not so damn sure I shan't do it yet," he burst out fiercely.

"But I am," said Ursula, calm, brisk, practical. "What's she going to do?"

"Going to work."