“Must you go up to that tiresome old college
again to-night?”
Pouting lips and delicate brows fretted
in pretty importunity over the troubled eyes enforced
the pleading tones, and yet the young man to whom
they were addressed found strength to reply:
“I ’m afraid I can’t
get rid of it. I particularly promised Sturgis
I would look in on him, and it won’t do for
me to cut my acquaintance with the class entirely
just because I ’m having such a jolly time down
here.”
“Oh, no, you don’t think
it jolly at all, or you would n’t be so eager
to go away. I ’m sure I must be very dull
company.”
The hurt tone and pretended pique
with which she said this were assuredly all that was
needed to make the petite teaser irresistible.
But the young man replied, regarding her the while
with an admiration in which there was a singular expression
of uneasiness:
“Can’t, Annie, ’pon honor.
I ’m engaged, and you know
“’I could not
love thee, dear, so much,
Loved
I not honor more!’”
And transferring her hand to his lips
he loosed its soft, lingering clasp and was gone,
stopping at the gate to throw back a kiss to her as
she stood in the porch, by way of amends for his hasty
parting.
“George Hunt, you ’re an infernal scamp!”
These were the opprobrious words he
muttered to himself as he passed out of earshot.
The beneficent common law does not condemn a man merely
on his own confession unless circumstances in evidence
lend probability to his self-accusation. Before
we coincide in Mr. Hunt’s opinion of himself,
let us therefore inquire into the circumstances.
He was in the last term of senior year at college. For the past year he had been boarding at the Giffords', and Annie and he had fallen in love. The fall on
his part had been quite voluntary and deliberate. He had fallen in love because it was the correct thing for a young collegian, engaged in the study of the humanities, to
be in love, and made him feel more like a man than smoking, drinking, or even sporting a stove-pipe hat and cane. Vanity aside, it was very jolly to have a fine, nice
girl who thought no end of a fellow, to walk, talk, and sing with, and to have in mind when one sang the college songs about love and wine with the fellows. And it
gave him also a very agreeable sense of superior experience as he mingled in their discussions of women and the tender passion.
But withal he was a conscientious,
kind-hearted young fellow enough, and had suffered
occasional qualms of conscience when little words or
incidents had impressed him with the knowledge that
Annie’s love for him was a more serious matter
than his for her. He felt that by insisting on
exchanging the pure gold of her earnest affection for
the pinchbeck of his passing fancy, she was making
a rogue of him. He should be in no position to
marry for years, nor did he want to; and if he had
wanted to, though he felt terribly hard-hearted when
he owned it to himself, his feeling toward Annie was
not quite so deep as to be a real wish to marry her.
As his last year in college approached its end, he
had thought more and more of these things, and had
returned from his last vacation determined to begin
to draw gradually away from her, and without any shock
to bring their relations back to the footing of friendship.
The idea seemed a very plausible one, but it is scarcely
necessary to state that, living in the same house,
and frequently alone with her, it took about a week
and a few dozen reproachful glances from grieving
eyes to melt this artificial ice with a freshet of
affection, and when, a couple of months later, he
calmly reviewed the situation, he found himself involved
perceptibly deeper than ever, on account of the attempt
at extrication.
Only two or three weeks of the term
remained, and it was too late to repeat the unsuccessful
experiment. He had tried his best and failed,
and nothing remained but to be as happy as possible
with her in the short time left. Then she must
get over her disappointment as other girls did in
like cases. No doubt some woman would hurt his
feelings some day, and so make it square. He
took much satisfaction in this reflection. But
such cynical philosophy did not lull his conscience,
which alternately inspired his manner with an unwonted
demonstrativeness and tenderness, and again made him
so uncomfortable in her presence that he was fain
to tear himself away and escape from her sight on any
pretext. Her tender glances and confiding manner
made him feel like a brute, and when he kissed her
he felt that it was the kiss of a Judas. Such
had been his feelings this evening, and such were the
reflections tersely summed up in that ejaculation, “George
Hunt, you ’re an infernal scamp!” On arriving
at Sturgis’s room, he found it full of tobacco
smoke, and the usual crowd there, who hailed him vociferously.
For he was one of the most popular men in college,
although for a year or so he had been living outside
the buildings. Several bottles stood on the tables,
but the fellows had as yet arrived only at the argumentative
stage of exhilaration, and it so happened that the
subject under discussion at once took Hunt’s
close attention. Mathewson had been reading the
first volume of Goethe’s autobiography, and was
indulging in some strictures on his course in jilting
Frederica and leaving the poor girl heartbroken.
“But, man,” said Sturgis,
“he didn’t want to marry her, and seeing
he didn’t, nothing could have been crueler to
her, to say nothing of himself, than to have done
so.”
“Well, then,” said Mathewson,
“why did he go and get her in love with him?”
“Why, he took his risk and she
hers, for the fun of the game. She happened to
be the one who paid for it, but it might just as well
have been he. Why, Mat, you must see yourself
that for Goethe to have married then would have knocked
his art-life into a cocked hat. Your artist has
just two great foes, laziness and matrimony.
Each has slain its thousands. Hitch Pegasus to
a family cart and he can’t go off the thoroughfare.
He must stick to the ruts. I admit that a bad
husband may be a great artist; but for a good husband,
an uxorious, contented husband, there’s no chance
at all.”
“You are neither of you right,
as usual,” said little Potts, in his oracular
way.
When Potts first came to college,
the fellows used to make no end of fun of the air
of superior and conclusive wisdom with which he assumed
to lay down the law on every question, this being the
more laughable because he was such a little chap.
Potts did not pay the least attention to the jeers,
and finally the jeerers were constrained to admit that
if he did have an absurdly pretentious way of talking,
his talk was unusually well worth listening to, and
the result was that they took him at his own valuation,
and, for the sake of hearing what he had to say, quietly
submitted to his assumption of authority as court of
appeal. So when he coolly declared both disputants
wrong, they manifested no resentment, but only an
interest as to what he was going to say, while the
other fellows also looked up curiously.
“It would have been a big mistake
for Goethe to have married her,” pursued Potts,
in his deliberate monotone, “but he was n’t
justified on that account in breaking her heart.
It was his business, having got her in love with him,
to get her out again and leave her where she was.”
“Get her out again?” demanded
Mathewson. “How was he to do that?”
“Humph!” grunted Potts.
“If you have n’t found it much easier to
lose a friend than to win one, you ’re luckier
than most. If you asked me how he was to get
her in love with him, I should have to scratch my head,
but the other thing is as easy as unraveling a stocking.”
“Well, but, Potts,” inquired
Sturgis, with interest, “how could Goethe have
gone to work, for instance, to disgust Frederica with
him?”
“Depends on the kind of girl.
If she is one of your high-steppers as to dignity
and sense of honor, let him play mean and seem to do
a few dirty tricks. If she’s a stickler
for manners and good taste, let him betray a few traits
of boorishness or Philistinism; or if she has a keen
sense of the ridiculous, let him make an ass of himself.
I should say the last would be the surest cure and
leave least of a sore place in her feelings, but it
would be hardest on his vanity. Everybody knows
that a man would ‘rather seem a scamp than a
fool.’”
“I don’t believe there’s
a man in the world who would play the voluntary fool
to save any woman’s heart from breaking, though
he might manage the scamp,” remarked Mathewson.
“And anyhow, Potts, I believe there ’s
no girl who would n’t choose to be jilted outright,
rather than be juggled out of her affections that
way.”
“No doubt she would say so,
if you asked her,” replied the imperturbable
Potts. “A woman always prefers a nice sentimental
sorrow to a fancy-free state. But it isn’t
best for her, and looking out for her good, you must
deprive her of it. Women are like children, you
know, our natural wards.”
This last sentiment impressed these
beardless youths as a clincher, and there was a pause.
But Mathewson, who was rather strong on the moralities,
rallied with the objection that Potts’s plan
would be deceit.
“Well, now, that’s what
I call cheeky,” replied its author, with a drawl
of astonishment. “I suppose it wasn’t
deceit when you were prancing around in your best
clothes both literally and figuratively, trying to
bring your good points into such absurd prominence
as to delude her into the idea that you had no bad
ones. Oh, no, it’s only deceit when you
appear worse than you are, not when you try to appear
better. Strikes me that when you ’ye got
a girl into a fix, it won’t do at that time of
day to plead your conscience as a reason for not getting
her out of it. Seeing that a man is generally
ready to sacrifice his character in reality to his
own interests, he ought to be willing to sacrifice
it in appearance to another’s.”
Mathewson was squelched, but Sturgis
came to his relief with the suggestion:
“Would n’t a little genuine
heartache, which I take it is healthy enough, if it
is n’t pleasant, be better for her than the cynical
feeling, the disgust with human nature, which she would
experience from finding her ideal of excellence a
scamp or a fool?”
The others seemed somewhat impressed,
but Potts merely ejaculated,
“Bosh!” Allowing a brief
pause for this ejaculation to do its work in demoralizing
the opposition he proceeded. “Sturgis, you
remember ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’
and how Titania, on the application of Puck’s
clarifying lotion to her eyes, perceives that in Bottom
she has loved an ass. Don’t you suppose
Titania suffered a good deal from the loss of her
ideal?”
There was a general snicker at Sturgis’s expense.
“Well, now,” continued
Potts gravely, “a woman who should fall in love
with one of us fellows and deem him a hero would be
substantially in Titania’s plight when she adored
Bottom, and about as much an object of pity when her
hero disclosed an asininity which would be at least
as near to being his real character as the heroism
she ascribed to him.”
“That ’s all very well,”
said Merril dryly, “but it strikes me that it’s
middling cheeky for you fellows to be discussing how
you ’ll jilt your sweethearts with least expense
to their feelings, when the chances are that if you
should ever get one, you ’ll need all your wits
to keep her from jilting you.”
“You are, as usual, trivial
and inconsequential this evening, Merril,” replied
Potts, when the laughter had subsided. “Supposing,
as you suggest, that we shall be the jilted and not
the jilters, it will be certainly for our interest
that the ladies should spare our feelings by disenchanting
us, saying, as it were, the charm backward
that first charmed us. He who would teach the
ladies the method and enlist their tender hearts in
its behalf would be, perhaps, the greatest benefactor
his much-jilted and heart-sore sex ever had. Then,
indeed, with the heart-breakers of both sexes pledged
to so humane a practice, there would be no more any
such thing as sorrow over unrequited affections, and
the poets and novelists would beg their bread.”
“That is a millennial dream,
Potts,” responded Merril. “You may
possibly persuade the men to make themselves disagreeable
for pity’s sake, but it is quite too much to
expect that a woman would deliberately put herself
in an unbecoming light, if it were to save a world
from its sins.”
“Perhaps it is,” said
Potts pensively; “but considering what perfectly
inexhaustible resources of disagreeableness there are
in the best of us and the fairest of women, it seems
a most gratuitous cruelty that any heart should suffer
when a very slight revelation would heal its hurt.
We can’t help people suffering because we are
so faulty and imperfect, but we might at least see
that nobody ever had a pang from thinking us better
than we are.”
“Look at Hunt!” said Sturgis.
“He does n’t open his mouth, but drinks
in Potts’s wisdom as eagerly as if he did n’t
know it was a pump that never stops.”
There was a general laugh among those
who glanced up in time to catch the expression of
close attention on Hunt’s face.
“Probably he ’s deliberating
on the application of the Potts patent painless cure
to some recent victim of that yellow mustache and goatee,”
suggested Merril, with the envy of a smooth-faced youth
for one more favored.
Hunt, whose face had sprung back like
a steel-trap to its usual indifferent expression,
smiled nonchalantly at Merril’s remark.
One whose reticent habit makes his secrets so absolutely
secure as Hunt’s private affairs always were
is stirred to amusement rather than trepidation by
random guesses which come near the truth.
“If I were situated as Merril
flatteringly suggests, I should enjoy nothing better
than such an experiment,” he replied deliberately.
“It would be quite a novel sensation to revolutionize
one’s ordinary rule of conduct so as to make
a point of seeming bad or stupid. There would
be as much psychology in it as in an extra term, at
least. A man would find out, for instance, how
much there was in him besides personal vanity and
love of approbation. It would be a devilish small
residue with most of us, I fancy.”
The talk took a new turn, and the
fun grew fast and furious around Hunt, who sat puffing
his pipe, absorbed in contemplation. At about
half-past nine, when things were getting hilarious,
he beat a retreat, followed by the reproaches of the
fellows. He was determined to administer the first
dose of Potts’s painless cure to his interesting
patient that very evening, if she had not already
retired. He was in high good humor. Potts
was a brick; Potts was a genius. How lucky that
he had happened to go up to college that night!
He felt as if an incubus were lifted off his mind.
No more pangs of conscience and uncomfortable sense
of being a mean and cruel fellow, for him. Annie
should be glad to be rid of him before he had ended
with her. She should experience a heartfelt relief,
instead of a broken heart, on his departure. He
could n’t help chuckling. He had such confidence
in his nerve and his reticent habit that his confidence
and ability to carry out the scheme were undoubting,
and at its first suggestion he had felt almost as much
relief as if he had already executed it.
On arriving home, he found Annie sewing
alone in the parlor, and a little offish in manner
by way of indicating her sense of his offense in leaving
her to spend the evening alone.
“Really, Annie,” he said,
as he sat down and unfolded the evening paper, “I
try to give you all the time I can spare. If,
instead of sulking, you had taken a piece of paper
and calculated how many hours this week I have managed
to give you my company, you would scarcely have felt
like repining because you could n’t see me for
an hour or two this evening.”
That was the first gun of the campaign.
She looked up in blank surprise, too much astonished,
for the moment, to be indignant at such a vulgarly
conceited remark from him. Without giving her
time to speak, he proposed to read the newspaper aloud,
and at once began, making a point of selecting the
dullest editorials and the flattest items and witticisms,
enlivening them with occasional comments of studied
insipidity, and one or two stories, of which he carefully
left out the “nubs.” He was
apparently making an unusual effort all the while to
be entertaining, and Annie, finding no opening for
expressing her vexation, finally excused herself and
went upstairs, with no very angelic expression of
countenance.
“Pretty well for a beginning,”
was Hunt’s muttered comment as he laid down
the paper.
At breakfast Mr. Gifford asked him:
“Shall I give you some tongue?”
Looking around with the air of one saying a good thing,
he replied:
“Thank you, I have enough of my own.”
The silence was painful. Mr.
Gifford looked as if he had lost a near friend.
Mrs. Gifford at length, remembering that Hunt was a
guest, forced a momentary, ghastly smile. Annie
was looking melancholy enough before, but a slight
compression of the lips indicated that she had received
the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in
jokes stamp the joker as a natural inferior in the
eyes of even the most rabid of social levelers.
Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives
quite the sickening sense of disappointment in the
perpetrator imparted by a genuinely bad or stale joke.
Two or more similar sensations coming near together
are multiplied by mutual reverberations so as to be
much more impressive than if they occurred at considerable
intervals. Hunt’s tongue joke not only
retroacted to deepen the impression of vulgarity which
his last evening’s performance had given Annie,
but in turn was made to appear a far more significant
indication of his character on account of its sequence
to that display.
That evening he made her a little
present, having selected as a gift a book of the day
of which he had chanced to overhear her express to
a third person a particularly cordial detestation.
It was decidedly the best book of the year, he said;
he had read it himself. She was obliged to thank
him for it, and even to tell one or two polite fibs,
which wrenched her terribly, and the memory of which
lent a special spite to the vehemence with which she
threw the book into a corner on reaching her room.
Then she went remorsefully and picked it up again,
and after holding it awhile irresolutely, proceeded
to hide it away in a far corner of one of the least
used drawers of her bureau.
Not sleeping very well that night,
she came downstairs next morning just as Hunt was
leaving. He kissed his hand to her and called
out “Aw revore.” At first she was
merely puzzled, and smiled, and then it occurred to
her that it was doubtless the barbarous way he pronounced
au revoir, and the smile gave place to an expression
of slight nausea. As Hunt well knew, her pet
aversion was people who lugged mispronounced French
phrases into their conversation under the impression
that they imparted a piquant and graceful effect.
It was a touch of vulgarity which inspired her with
a violent contempt absurdly disproportioned to the
gravity of the offense. It had always been a cherished
theory of hers that there were certain offenses in
manners which were keys to character. If persons
committed them, it implied an essential strain of
vulgarity in their dispositions. Judged by this
theory, where would her lover come out?
Hunt managed to get into a political
discussion with Mr. Gifford at table that noon, talking
in a rather supercilious tone, and purposely making
several bad blunders, which Mr. Gifford corrected rather
pointedly. Annie could not help observing that
her lover’s conceit and ignorance of the subjects
discussed seemed about equal.
“How do you like your book?” he asked
that evening.
She murmured something confusedly.
“Haven’t begun it yet?”
he inquired in surprise. “Well, when once
you do, I ’m sure you ’ll not lay it down
till it’s finished. And, by the way, your
judgment in literary matters is so good, I ’d
like to get your opinion on the essay I ’m getting
up for Commencement. I think it’s rather
the best thing I ’ve written.”
He proceeded to read what purported
to be a sketch of its argument, which proved to be
so flat and vapid that Annie blushed with shame for
his mental poverty, and was fain to cover her chagrin
with a few meaningless comments.
Her mind was the theatre of a struggle
between disgust and affection, which may be called
ghastly. Had he been openly wicked, she would
have known how to give a good account of all disloyal
suggestions to desert or forget him. But what
could she do against such a cold, creeping thing as
this disgust and revulsion of taste, which, like the
chills of incipient fever, mingled with every rising
pulse of tender feeling? Finally, out of her
desperation, she concluded that the fault must be
with her; that she was fickle, while he was true.
She tried hard to despise herself, and determined
to fight down her growing coldness, and reciprocate
as it deserved the affection with which he was so lavish.
The result of these mental exercises was to impart
a humility and constrained cordiality to her air very
opposite to its usual piquancy and impulsiveness,
and, by a sense of her own shortcomings, to distract
her mind from speculation, which she might otherwise
have indulged, over the sudden development of so many
unpleasant qualities in her lover. Though, indeed,
had her speculations been never so active and ingenious,
the actual plan on which Hunt was proceeding would
probably have lain far beyond the horizon of her conjecture.
Meanwhile, Hunt was straitened for
time; only eight or ten days of the term were left,
and in that time he must effect Annie’s cure,
if at all. A slow cure would be much more likely
to prove a sure one, but he must do the best he could
in the time he had. And yet he did not dare to
multiply startling strokes, for fear of bewildering
instead of estranging her, and, possibly, of suggesting
suspicion. Stimulated by the emergency, he now
began to put in some very fine work, which, although
it may not be very impressive in description, was probably
more effective than any other part of his tactics.
Under guise of appearing particularly attentive and
devoted, he managed to offend Annie’s taste
and weary her patience in every way that ingenuity
could suggest. His very manifestations of affection
were so associated with some affectation or exhibition
of bad taste, as always to leave an unpleasant impression
on her mind. He took as much pains to avoid saying
tolerably bright or sensible things in his conversation
as people generally do to say them. In all respects
he just reversed the rules of conduct suggested by
the ordinary motive of a desire to ingratiate one’s
self with others.
And by virtue of a rather marked endowment
of that delicate sympathy with others’ tastes
and feelings which underlies good manners, he was
able to make himself far more unendurable to Annie
than a less sympathetic person could have done.
Evening after evening she went to her room feeling
as if she were covered with pin-pricks, from a score
of little offenses to her fastidious taste which he
had managed to commit. His thorough acquaintance
with her, and knowledge of her aesthetic standards
in every respect, enabled him to operate with a perfect
precision that did not waste a stroke.
It must not be supposed that it was
altogether without sharp twinges of compunction, and
occassional impulses to throw off his disguise and
enjoy the bliss of reconciliation, that he pursued
this cold-blooded policy. He never could have
carried it so far, had he not been prepared by a long
and painful period of self-reproach on account of his
entanglement. It was, however, chiefly at the
outset that he had felt like weakening. As soon
as she ceased to seem shocked or surprised at his
disclosures of insipidity or conceit, it became comparatively
easy work to make them. So true is it that it
is the fear of the first shocked surprise of others,
rather than of their deliberate reprobation, which
often deters us from exhibitions of unworthiness.
In connection with this mental and
moral masquerade, he adopted several changes in his
dress, buying some clothes of very glaring patterns,
and blossoming out in particularly gaudy neckties
and flashy jewelry. Lest Annie should be puzzled
to account for such a sudden access of depravity,
he explained that his mother had been in the habit
of selecting some of his lighter toilet articles for
him, but this term he was trying for himself.
Didn’t she think his taste was good? He
also slightly changed the cut of his hair and whiskers,
to affect a foppish air, his theory being that all
these external alterations would help out the effect
of being a quite different person from the George Hunt
with whom she had fallen in love.
Lou Roberts was Annie’s confidante,
older than she, much more dignified, and of the reticent
sort to which the mercurial and loquacious naturally
tend to reveal their secrets. She knew all that
Annie knew, dreamed, or hoped about Hunt; but had
never happened to meet him, much to the annoyance
of Annie, who had longed inexpressibly for the time
when Lou should have seen him, and she herself be
able to enjoy the luxury of hearing his praises from
her lips. One evening it chanced that Lou called
with a gentleman while Hunt had gone out to rest himself,
after some pretty arduous masquerading, by a little
unconstrained intercourse with the fellows up at college.
As he returned home, at about half-past nine, he heard
voices through the open windows, and guessed who the
callers were.
As he entered the room, despite the
disenchanting experiences of the past week, it was
with a certain pretty agitation that Annie rose to
introduce him, and she looked blank enough when, without
waiting for her offices, he bowed with a foppish air
to Lou and murmured a salutation.
“What, are you acquainted already?” exclaimed
Annie.
“I certainly did not know that
we were,” said Lou coldly, not thinking it possible
that this flashily dressed youth, with such an enormous
watch-chain and insufferable manners, could be Annie’s
hero.
“Ah, very likely not,”
he replied carelessly, adding with an explanatory
smile that took in all the group: “Ladies’
faces are so much alike that, ’pon my soul,
unless there is something distinguished about them,
I don’t know whether I know them or not.
I depend on them to tell me; fortunately they never
forget gentlemen.”
Miss Roberts’s face elongated
into a freezing stare. Annie stood there in a
sort of stupor till Hunt said briskly:
“Well, Annie, are you going
to introduce this lady to me?”
As she almost inaudibly pronounced
their names, he effusively extended his hand, which
was not taken, and exclaimed:
“Lou Roberts! is it possible?
Excuse me if I call you Lou. Annie talks of you
so much that I feel quite familiar.”
“Do you know, Miss Roberts,”
he continued, seating himself close beside her, “I
’m quite prepared to like you?”
“Indeed!” was all that
young lady could manage to articulate.
“Yes,” continued he, with
the manner of one giving a flattering reassurance,
“Annie has told me so much in your favor that,
if half is true, we shall get on together excellently.
Such girl friendships as yours and hers are so charming.”
Miss Roberts glanced at Annie, and
seeing that her face glowed with embarrassment, smothered
her indignation, and replied with a colorless “Yes.”
“The only drawback,” continued
Hunt, who manifestly thought he was making himself
very agreeable, “is that such bosom friends always
tell each other all their affairs, which of course
involve the affairs of all their friends also.
Now I suppose,” he added, with a knowing grin
and something like a wink, “that what you don’t
know about me is n’t worth knowing.”
“You ought to know, certainly,” said Miss
Roberts.
“Not that I blame you,”
he went on, ignoring her sarcasm. “There’s
no confidence betrayed, for when I ’m talking
with a lady, I always adapt my remarks to the ears
of her next friend. It prevents misunderstandings.”
Miss Roberts made no reply, and the
silence attracted notice to the pitiable little dribble
of forced talk with which Annie was trying to keep
the other gentleman’s attention from the exhibition
Hunt was making of himself. The latter, after
a pause long enough to intimate that he thought it
was Miss Roberts’s turn to say something, again
took up the conversation, as if bound to be entertaining
at any cost.
“Annie and I were passing your
house the other day. What a queer little box
it is! I should think you ’d be annoyed
by the howlings of that church next door. The
------ are so noisy.”
Hunt, of course, knew that, and had
advisedly selected her denomination for his strictures.
But he replied as if a little confused by his blunder:
“I beg your pardon. You don’t look
like one.”
“How do they usually look?” she asked
sharply.
“Why, it is generally understood
that they are rather vulgar, I believe, but you, I
am sure, look like a person of culture.”
He said this as if he thought he were conveying a
rather neat compliment. Indignant as she was,
Miss Roberts’s strongest feeling was compassion
for Annie, and she bit her lips and made no reply.
After a moment’s silence, Hunt
asked her how she liked his goatee. It was a
new way of cutting his whiskers, and young ladies were
generally close observers and therefore good judges
of such matters. Annie, finding it impossible
to keep up even the pretense of talking any longer,
sat helplessly staring at the floor, and waiting in
nerveless despair for what he would say next, fairly
hating Lou because she did not go.
“What’s come over you,
Annie?” asked Hunt briskly. “Are you
talked out so soon? I suppose she is holding
back to give you a chance to make my acquaintance,
Miss Roberts, or do let me call you Lou. You must
improve your opportunity, for she will want to know
your opinion of me. May I hope it will prove
not wholly unfavorable?” This last was with a
killing smile.
“I had no idea it was so late.
We must be going,” said Miss Roberts, rising.
She had been lingering, in the hope that something
would happen to leave a more pleasant impression of
Hunt’s appearance, but seeing that matters were
drifting from bad to worse, she hastened to break
off the painful scene. Annie rose silently without
saying a word, and avoided Lou’s eyes as she
kissed her good-by.
“Must you go?” Hunt said.
“I ’m sure you would not be in such haste
if you knew how rarely it is that my engagements leave
me free to devote an evening to the ladies. You
might call on Annie a dozen times and not meet me.”
As soon as the callers had gone, Hunt
picked up the evening paper and sat down to glance
it over, remarking lightly as he did so:
“Rather nice girl, your friend,
though she does n’t seem very talkative.”
Annie made no reply, and he looked up.
“What on earth are you staring
at me in such an extraordinary manner for?”
Was he then absolutely unconscious
of the figure he had made of himself?
“You are not vexed because I
went out and left you in the early part of the evening?”
he said anxiously.
“Oh, no, indeed,” she wearily replied.
She sat there with trembling lip and
a red spot in each cheek, looking at him as he read
the paper unconcernedly, till she could bear it no
longer, and then silently rose and glided out of the
room. Hunt heard her running upstairs as fast
as she could, and closing and locking her chamber
door.
Next day he did not see her till evening,
when she was exceedingly cold and distant, and evidently
very much depressed. After bombarding her with
grieved and reproachful glances for some time, he came
over to her side, they two having been left alone,
and said, with affectionate raillery:
“I ’d no idea you were
so susceptible to the green-eyed monster.”
She looked at him, astonished quite out of her reserve.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, you need n’t pretend
to misunderstand,” he replied, with a knowing
nod. “Don’t you suppose I saw how
vexed you were last night when your dear friend Miss
Roberts was trying to flirt with me? But you need
n’t have minded so much. She is n’t
my style at all.”
There was something so perfectly maddening
in this cool assumption that her bitter chagrin on
his account was a fond jealousy, that she fairly choked
with exasperation, and shook herself away from his
caress as if a snake had stung her. Her thin
nostrils vibrated, her red lips trembled with scorn,
and her black eyes flashed ominously. He had only
seen them lighten with love before, and it was a very
odd sensation to see them for the first time blazing
with anger, and that against himself. Affecting
an offended tone, he said:
“This is really too absurd,
Annie,” and left the room as if in a pet, just
in time to escape the outburst he knew was coming.
She sat in the parlor with firm-set lips till quite
a late hour that evening, hoping that he would come
down and give her a chance to set him right with an
indignant explanation. So humiliating to her did
his misunderstanding seem, that it was intolerable
he should retain it a moment longer, and she felt
almost desperate enough to go and knock at his door
and correct it. Far too clever a strategist to
risk an encounter that evening, he sat in his room
comfortably smoking and attending to arrears of correspondence,
aware that he was supposed by her to be sulking desperately
all the while. He knew that her feeling was anger
and not grief, and while, had it been the latter,
he would have been thoroughly uncomfortable from sympathy,
he only chuckled as he figured to himself her indignation.
At that very moment, she was undoubtedly clenching
her pretty little fists, and breathing fast with impotent
wrath, in the room below. Ah, well, let her heart
lie in a pickle of good strong disgust overnight,
and it would strike in a good deal more effectually
than if she were allowed to clear her mind by an indignant
explanation on the spot.
The following day he bore himself
toward her with the slightly distant air of one who
considers himself aggrieved, and attempted no approaches.
In the evening, which was her first opportunity, she
came to him and said in a tone in which, by this time,
weariness and disgust had taken the place of indignation:
“You were absurdly mistaken
in thinking that Miss Roberts was trying to flirt.”
“Bless your dear, jealous heart!”
interrupted Hunt laughingly, with an air of patronizing
affection. “I’d no idea you minded
it so much. There, there! Let’s not
allude to this matter again. No, no! not another
word!” he gayly insisted, putting his hand over
her mouth as she was about to make another effort
to be heard.
He was determined not to hear anything,
and she had to leave it so. It was with surprise
that she observed how indifferently she finally acquiesced
in being so cruelly misunderstood by him. In the
deadened state of her feelings, she was not then able
to appreciate the entire change in the nature of her
sentiments which that indifference showed. Love,
though rooted in the past, depends upon the surrounding
atmosphere for the breath of continued life, and he
had surrounded her with the stifling vapors of disgust
until her love had succumbed and withered. She
found that his exhibitions of conceit and insipidity
did not affect her in the same way as before.
Her sensations were no longer sharp and poignant,
but chiefly a dull shame and sense of disgrace that
she had loved him. She met his attentions with
a coldly passive manner, which gave him the liveliest
satisfaction. The cure was succeeding past all
expectation; but he had about time for one more stroke,
which would make a sure thing of it. He prepared
the way by dropping hints that he had been writing
some verses of late; and finally, with the evident
idea that she would be flattered, gave out that his
favorite theme was her own charms, and that she might,
perhaps, before long receive some tributes from his
muse. Her protests he laughed away as the affectations
of modesty.
Now Hunt had never actually written
a line of verse in his life, and had no intention
of beginning. He was simply preparing a grand
move. From the poet’s corner of rural newspapers,
and from comic collections, he clipped several specimens
of the crudest sort of sentimental trash in rhyme.
These he took to the local newspaper, and arranged
for their insertion at double advertising rates.
A few days later, he bustled into the parlor, smirking
in his most odious manner, and, coming up to Annie,
thrust an open newspaper before her, marked in one
corner to call attention to several stanzas
“Written for the
‘Express.’ To A E G D.”
With sinking of heart she took the
paper, after ineffectually trying to refuse it, and
Hunt sat down before her with a supremely complacent
expression, to await her verdict. With a faint
hope that the verses might prove tolerable, she glanced
down the lines. It is enough to say that they
were the very worst which Hunt, after great industry,
had been able to find; and there he was waiting, just
the other side the paper, in a glow of expectant vanity,
to receive her acknowledgments.
“Well, what do you think of
it? You need n’t try to hide your blushes.
You deserve every word of it, you know, Miss Modesty,”
he said gayly.
“It’s very nice,”
replied Annie, making a desperate effort.
“I thought you ’d like
it,” he said, with self-satisfied assurance.
“It’s queer that a fellow can’t lay
on the praise too thick to please a woman. By
the way, I sent around a copy to Miss Roberts, signed
with my initials. I thought you ’d like
to have her see it.”
This last remark he called out after
her as she was leaving the room, and he was not mistaken
in fancying that it would complete her demoralization.
During the next week or two he several times brought
her copies of the local paper containing equally execrable
effusions, till finally she mustered courage
to tell him that she would rather he would not publish
any more verses about her. He seemed rather hurt
at this, but respected her feelings, and after that
she used to find, hid in her books and music, manuscript
sonnets which he had laboriously copied out of his
comic collections. It was considerable trouble,
but on the whole he was inclined to think it paid,
and it did, especially when he culminated by fitting
music to several of the most mawkish effusions,
and insisting on her playing and singing them to him.
As the poor girl, who felt that out of common politeness
she could not refuse, toiled wearily through this
martyrdom, writhing with secret disgust at every line,
Hunt, lolling in an easy-chair behind her, was generally
indulging in a series of horrible grimaces and convulsions
of silent laughter, which sometimes left tears in
his eyes, to convince Annie, when she turned
around to him, that his sentiment was at least genuine
if vulgar. Had she happened on one of these occasions
to turn a moment before she did, the resulting tableau
would have been worth seeing.
Hunt had determined to both crown
and crucially test the triumph of Potts’s cure
in Annie’s case by formally offering himself
to her. He calculated of course that she was
now certain to reject him, and that was a satisfaction
which he thought he fairly owed her. She would
feel better for it, he argued, and be more absolutely
sure not to regard herself as in any sense jilted,
and that would make his conscience clearer. Yes,
she should certainly have his scalp to hang at her
girdle, for he believed, as many do, that next to
having a man’s heart a woman enjoys having his
scalp, while many prefer it. Six weeks ago he
would have been horrified at the audacity of the idea.
His utmost ambition then was to break a little the
force of her disappointment at his departure.
But the unexpected fortune that had attended his efforts
had advanced his standard of success, until nothing
would now satisfy him but to pop the question and
be refused.
And still, as the day approached which
he had set for the desperate venture, he began to
get very nervous. He thought he had a sure thing
if ever a fellow had, but women were so cursedly unaccountable.
Supposing she should take it into her head to accept
him! No logic could take account of a woman’s
whimsies. Then what a pretty fix he would have
got himself into, just by a foolhardy freak!
But there was a strain of Norse blood in Hunt, and
in spite of occasional touches of ague, the risk of
the scheme had in itself a certain fascination for
him. And yet he could n’t help wishing
he had carried out a dozen desperate devices for disgusting
her with him, which at the time had seemed to him too
gross to be safe from suspicion.
The trouble was that since he loved
her no more he had lost the insight which love only
gives into the feelings of another. Then her every
touch and look and word was eloquent to his senses
as to the precise state of her feeling toward him,
but now he was dull and insensitive to such direct
intuition. He could not longer feel, but could
only argue as to how she might be minded toward him,
and this it was which caused him so much trepidation,
in spite of so many reasons why he should be confident
of the result. Argument as to another’s
feelings is such a wretched substitute for the intuition
of sympathy.
Finally, on the evening before the
day on which he was to offer himself, the last of
his stay at the Giffords’, he got into such a
panic that, determined to clinch the assurance of
his safety, he asked her to play a game of cards,
and then managed that she should see him cheat two
or three times. The recollection of the cold
disgust on her face as he bade her good-evening was
so reassuring that he went to bed and slept like a
child, in the implicit confidence that four horses
could n’t drag that girl into an engagement
with him the next day.
It was not till the latter part of
the afternoon that he could catch her alone long enough
to transact his little business with her. Anticipating,
or at least apprehending his design, she took the greatest
pains to avoid meeting him, or to have her mother with
her when she did. She would have given almost
anything to escape his offer. Of course she could
reject it, but fastidious persons do not like to have
unpleasant objects put on their plates, even if they
have not necessarily to eat them. But her special
reason was that the scene would freshly bring up and
emphasize the whole wretched history of her former
infatuation and its miserable ending, an
experience every thought of which was full of shame
and strong desire for the cleansing of forgetfulness.
He finally cornered her in the parlor alone.
As she saw him approaching and realized that there
was no escape, she turned and faced him with her small
figure drawn to its full height, compressed lips, pale
face, and eyes that plainly said, “Now have
it over with as soon as possible.” One
hand resting on the table was clenched over a book.
The other, hanging by her side, tightly grasped a
handkerchief.
“Do you know I ’ve
been trying to get a chance to speak with you alone
all day?” he said.
“Have you?” she replied in a perfectly
inexpressive tone.
“Can’t you guess what I wanted to say?”
“I ’m not good at conundrums.”
“I see you will not help me,”
he went on, and then added quickly, “it’s
a short story; will you be my wife?”
As he said the words, he felt as the
lion-tamer does when he puts his head in the lion’s
jaws. He expects to take it out again, but if
the lion should take a notion His suspense
was, however, of the shortest possible duration, for
instantly, like a reviving sprinkle on a fainting
face, the words fell on his ear:
“I thank you for the honor,
but I ’m sure we are not suited.”
Annie had conned her answer on many
a sleepless pillow, and had it by heart. It came
so glibly, although in such a constrained and agitated
voice, that he instantly knew it must have been long
cut and dried.
It was now only left for him to do
a decent amount of urging, and then acquiesce with
dignified melancholy and go off laughing in his sleeve.
What is he thinking of to stand there gazing at her
downcast face as if he were daft?
A strange thing had happened to him.
The sweet familiarity of each detail in the petite
figure before him was impressing his mind as never
before, now that he had achieved his purpose of putting
it beyond the possibility of his own possession.
The little hands he had held so often in the old days,
conning each curve and dimple, reckoning them more
his hands than were his own, and far more dearly so;
the wavy hair he had kissed so fondly and delighted
to touch; the deep dark eyes under their long lashes,
like forest lakes seen through environing thickets,
eyes that he had found his home in through so long
and happy a time, why, they were his!
Of course he had never meant to really forfeit them,
to lose them, and let them go to anybody else.
The idea was preposterous, was laughable.
It was indeed the first time it had occurred to him
in that light. He had only thought of her as losing
him; scarcely at all of himself as losing her.
During the whole time he had been putting himself
in her place so constantly that he had failed sufficiently
to fully canvass the situation from his own point of
view. Wholly absorbed in estranging her from
him, he had done nothing to estrange himself from
her.
It was rather with astonishment and
even an appreciation of the absurd, than any serious
apprehension, that he now suddenly saw how he had
stultified himself, and come near doing himself a fatal
injury. For knowing that her present estrangement
was wholly his work, it did not occur to him but that
he could undo it as easily as he had done it.
A word would serve the purpose and make it all right
again. Indeed, his revulsion of feeling so altered
the aspect of everything that he quite forgot that
any explanation at all was necessary, and, after gazing
at her for a few moments while his eyes, wet with a
tenderness new and deliciously sweet, roved fondly
from her head to her little slipper, doating on each
feature, he just put out his arms to take her with
some old familiar phrase of love on his lips.
She sprang away, her eye flashing with anger.
He looked so much taken aback and
discomfited that she paused in mere wonder, as she
was about to rush from the room.
“Annie, what does this mean?”
he stammered. “Oh, yes, why, my
darling, don’t you know, did n’t
you guess, it was all a joke,
a stupid joke? I ’ve just been pretending.”
It was not a very lucid explanation,
but she understood, though only to be plunged in greater
amazement.
“But what for?” she murmured.
“I did n’t know I loved
you,” he said slowly, as if recalling with difficulty,
and from a great distance, his motives, “and
I thought it was kind to cure you of your love for
me by pretending to be a fool. I think I must
have been crazy, don’t you?” and he smiled
in a dazed, deprecating way.
Her face from being very pale began
to flush. First a red spot started out in either
cheek; then they spread till they covered the cheeks;
next her forehead took a roseate hue, and down her
neck the tide of color rushed, and she stood there
before him a glowing statue of outraged womanhood,
while in the midst her eyes sparkled with scorn.
“You wanted to cure me,”
she said at last, in slow, concentrated tones, “and
you have succeeded. You have insulted me as no
woman was ever insulted before.”
She paused as if to control herself;
for her voice trembled with the last words. She
shivered, and her bosom heaved once or twice convulsively.
Her features quivered; scorching tears of shame rushed
to her eyes, and she burst out hysterically:
“For pity’s sake never let me see you
again!”
And then he found himself alone.