His Sombre Rivals | Page 9

not come over and help entertain your father?"
"Yes," said the girl, earnestly. "It cannot seem strange to you that time
should often hang heavily on his hands, and I am grateful to any one
who helps me to enliven his hours."
Before Graham repassed under the apple-tree boughs he had fully
decided to win at least Miss St. John's gratitude.

CHAPTER III
THE VERDICT OF A SAGE
When Graham reached his room he was in no mood for sleep. At first
he lapsed into a long revery over the events of the evening, trivial in
themselves, and yet for some reason holding a controlling influence
over his thoughts. Miss St. John was a new revelation of womanhood to
him, and for the first time in his life his heart had been stirred by a
woman's tones and glances. A deep chord in his nature vibrated when
she spoke and smiled. What did it mean? He had followed his impulse
to permit this stranger to make any impression within her power, and
he found that she had decidedly interested him. As he tried to analyze
her power he concluded that it lay chiefly in the mirthfulness, the
joyousness of her spirit. She quickened his cool, deliberate pulse. Her
smile was not an affair of facial muscles, but had a vivifying warmth. It
made him suspect that his life was becoming cold and self- centred,
that he was missing the deepest and best experiences of an existence
that was brief indeed at best, and, as he believed, soon ceased forever.
The love of study and ambition had sufficed thus far, but actuated by
his own materialistic creed he was bound to make the most of life while
it lasted. According to Emerson he was as yet but in the earlier stages
of evolution, and his highest manhood wholly undeveloped. Had not
"music, poetry, and art" dawned in his mind? Was nature but a
mechanism after whose laws he had been groping like an anatomist
who finds in the godlike form bone and tissue merely? As he had sat
watching the sunset a few hours previous, the element of beauty had
been present to him as never before. Could this sense of beauty become
so enlarged that the world would be transfigured, "radiant with purple
light"? Morning had often brought to him weariness from sleepless
hours during which he had racked his brain over problems too deep for
him, and evening had found him still baffled, disappointed, and
disposed to ask in view of his toil, _Cui bono_? What ground had
Emerson for saying that these same mornings and evenings might be
filled with "varied enchantments"? The reason, the cause of these
unknown conditions of life, was given unmistakably. The Concord sage

had virtually asserted that he, Alford Graham, would never truly exist
until his one-sided masculine nature had been supplemented by the
feminine soul which alone could give to his being completeness and the
power to attain his full development.
"Well," he soliloquized, laughing, "I have not been aware that hitherto I
have been only a mollusk, a polyp of a man. I am inclined to think that
Emerson's 'Pegasus' took the bit--got the better of him on one occasion;
but if there is any truth in what he writes it might not be a bad idea to
try a little of the kind of evolution that he suggests and see what comes
of it. I am already confident that I could see infinitely more than I do if
I could look at the world through Miss St. John's eyes as well as my
own, but I run no slight risk in obtaining that vision. Her eyes are stars
that must have drawn worshippers, not only from the east, but from
every point of the compass. I should be in a sorry plight if I should
become 'all memory,' and from my fair divinity receive as sole response,
'Please forget.' If the philosopher could guarantee that she also would
be 'all eye and all memory,' one might indeed covet Miss St. John as
the teacher of the higher mysteries. Life is not very exhilarating at best,
but for a man to set his heart on such a woman as this girl promises to
be, and then be denied--why, he had better remain a polyp. Come,
come, Alford Graham, you have had your hour of sentiment--out of
deference to Mr. Emerson I won't call it weakness--and it's time you
remembered that you are a comparatively poor man, that Miss St. John
has already been the choice of a score at least, and probably has made
her own choice. I shall therefore permit no delusions and the growth of
no false hopes."
Having reached this prudent conclusion, Graham yawned, smiled at the
unwonted mood in