A Good-For-Nothing | Page 6

a voice which
sounded almost tender, "then I should like to talk to you as I would to
my own brother; but--"
"No, not brother, Bertha," cried he, with sudden vehemence; "I love
you better than I ever loved any earthly being, and if you knew how
firmly this love has clutched at the roots of my heart, you would
perhaps--you would at least not look so reproachfully at me."
She dropped his hand, and stood for a moment silent.
"I am sorry that it should have come to this, Mr. Grim," said she,
visibly struggling for calmness. "And I am perhaps more to blame than
you."
"Blame," muttered he, "why are you to blame?"
"Because I do not love you; although I sometimes feared that this might
come. But then again I persuaded myself that it could not be so."
He took a step toward the door, laid his hand on the knob, and gazed
down before him.
"Bertha," began he, slowly, raising his head, "you have always
disapproved of me, you have despised me in your heart, but you
thought you would be doing a good work if you succeeded in making a
man of me."
"You use strong language," answered she, hesitatingly; "but there is
truth in what you say."

Again there was a long pause, in which the ticking of the old parlor
clock grew louder and louder.
"Then," he broke out at last, "tell me before we part if I can do nothing
to gain--I will not say your love--but only your regard? What would
you do if you were in my place?"
"My advice you will hardly heed, and I do not even know that it would
be well if you did. But if I were a man in your position, I should break
with my whole past, start out into the world where nobody knew me,
and where I should be dependent only upon my own strength, and there
I would conquer a place for myself, if it were only for the satisfaction
of knowing that I was really a man. Here cushions are sewed under
your arms, a hundred invisible threads bind you to a life of idleness and
vanity, everybody is ready to carry you on his hands, the road is
smoothed for you, every stone carefully moved out of your path, and
you will probably go to your grave without having ever harbored one
earnest thought, without having done one manly deed."
Ralph stood transfixed, gazing at her with open mouth; he felt a kind of
stupid fright, as if some one had suddenly seized him by the shoulders
and shaken him violently. He tried vainly to remove his eyes from
Bertha. She held him as by a powerful spell. He saw that her face was
lighted with an altogether new beauty; he noticed the deep glow upon
her cheek, the brilliancy of her eye, the slight quiver of her lip. But he
saw all this as one sees things in a half-trance, without attempting to
account for them; the door between his soul and his senses was closed.
"I know that I have been bold in speaking to you in this way," she said
at last, seating herself in a chair at the window. "But it was yourself
who asked me. And I have felt all the time that I should have to tell you
this before we parted."
"And," answered he, making a strong effort to appear calm, "if I follow
your advice, will you allow me to see you once more before you go?"
"I shall remain here another week, and shall, during that time, always
be ready to receive you."

"Thank you. Good-by."
"Good-by."
Ralph carefully avoided all the fashionable thoroughfares; he felt
degraded before himself, and he had an idea that every man could read
his humiliation in his countenance. Now he walked on quickly, striking
the sidewalk with his heels; now, again, he fell into an uneasy, reckless
saunter, according as the changing moods in' spired defiance of his
sentence, or a qualified surrender. And, as he walked on, the bitterness
grew within him, and he piteously reviled himself for having allowed
himself to be made a fool of by "that little country goose," when he was
well aware that there were hundreds of women of the best families of
the land who would feel honored at receiving his attentions. But this
sort of reasoning he knew to be both weak and contemptible, and his
better self soon rose in loud rebellion.
"After all," he muttered, "in the main thing she was right. I am a
miserable good-for-nothing, a hothouse plant, a poor stick, and if I
were a woman myself, I don't think I should waste my affections on a
man of that calibre."
Then