All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly
to her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had
secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after
all, not have worried; and the real climax was that
he himself, at all events, needn’t. “You’ll
never find out.”
CHAPTER III
It was all to have made, none the less, as I have
said, a date; which came out in the fact that again
and again, even after long intervals, other things
that passed between them were in relation to this hour
but the character of recalls and results. Its
immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten
insistence—almost to provoke a reaction;
as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and
as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been
visited by one of his occasional warnings against
egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently
on the whole, his consciousness of the importance
of not being selfish, and it was true that he had
never sinned in that direction without promptly enough
trying to press the scales the other way. He
often repaired his fault, the season permitting, by
inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera;
and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show
he didn’t wish her to have but one sort of food
for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there
with him a dozen nights in the month. It even
happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally
went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening,
and, the better to make his point, sat down to the
frugal but always careful little supper that awaited
his pleasure. His point was made, he thought,
by his not eternally insisting with her on himself;
made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that,
her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it,
they went over passages of the opera together.
It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however,
that he reminded her of her not having answered a
certain question he had put to her during the talk
that had taken place between them on her last birthday.
“What is it that saves you?”—saved
her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from
the usual human type. If he had practically escaped
remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important
particular, what most men do—find the answer
to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a
woman no better than himself—how had she
escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it
was, since they must suppose it had been more or less
noticed, have failed to make her rather positively
talked about?
“I never said,” May Bartram replied, “that
it hadn’t made me a good deal talked about.”
“Ah well then you’re not ‘saved.’”
“It hasn’t been a question for me.
If you’ve had your woman I’ve had,”
she said, “my man.”
