People Like That | Page 9

because I want to know all sorts of people." Something in Selwyn's face stopped me, and, getting up from the sofa, I went over to the window and raised it slightly. My heart was pounding. I could laugh away the questions of others and ignore their comments, but with Selwyn this would be impossible. An overwhelming sense of distance and separation came over me demoralizingly as I pretended to rearrange the curtain, and for a moment words would not come.
I knew, of course, that Selwyn had neither patience nor sympathy with my desire to know more of life than I could learn in the particular world into which I had been born, but the keener realization to-night made between us a wide and separating gulf, and I felt suddenly alone and uncertain, and dispirited and afraid.
In our love of books, of digging deep into certain subjects, of historic questing and speculative discussions we are closely sympathetic, but in many viewpoints we are as apart as the poles. Perhaps we will always be.
Selwyn by heritage and training and natural inclination is conventional and conservative. I am not. To walk in beaten tracks is not easy for me. I want to explore for myself. He thinks a woman has no business in by-paths. Our opposing beliefs do not make for placid friendship.
It is Selwyn's indifference to life, to its problems and struggles and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond restraint. In his profession he is successful. His ambition makes him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human effort, the futility of striving, the emptiness of achievement, possesses him frequently, and in his dark days he pays the penalty of his points of view. If only he could see, could understand--.
I turned from the window and again sat down in my corner of the sofa and motioned him to take his seat.
"Don't let's argue to-night. I'm pretty tired and argument would do no good. We'd just say things we shouldn't. You said just now you doubted if you knew why I was here. I may not be sure of all my reasons, but one of them is, I wanted to get away from--there." My hand made motion in a vague direction intended for my former neighborhood.
"Do you find this section of the city a satisfactory change?" Selwyn's tone was ironic. He looked for a moment into the eyes I raised to his, then turned away and, hands in his pockets, began to walk up and down the room. When he spoke again his voice had changed.
"Don't mind anything I say to-night. I shouldn't have come. I'm a bit raw yet that you should have done this without telling me. You have a right to do as you choose, of course, only--. Besides getting away from your old life--were there other reasons?"
"Not very definite ones." Into my face came surge of color, and, turning, I cut off the light in the lamp behind me. "When one is in a parade one can't see what it looks like, very often doesn't understand where it is going. I want to see the one I was in, see from the sidewalk the kind of human beings who are in it, and what they are doing with their time and energies and opportunities and knowledge and preparedness and--oh, with all the things that make their position in life a more responsible one than--than the people's down here."
"Was it necessary to come to Scarborough Square to watch--your parade? One can stand off anywhere."
"But I don't want just to stand off. I want to see with the eyes of the people who look at us, the people who don't approve of us, though they envy us. We're so certain they're a hard lot to deal with, to do for, to make anything of--these people we don't know save from charity contact, perhaps,--that I've sometimes wondered if they ever despair of us, think we, too, are pretty hopeless and hard to--to wake up."
"And you imagine the opinions and conclusions of uneducated, untrained, unthinking people will give you light concerning the valuation of your class? It matters little what they think. They don't think!"
"Do you know many of these people of whose mental machinery you are so sure?" I smiled in the eyes which would not smile into mine. "Know them personally, I mean?"
"I do not." Selwyn's tone was irritable. "My business dealings with them have not inspired desire for a closer acquaintance. To get as much money as possible from the men who employ them and give in return as little work as they can, is the creed of most of them. You can do nothing with people like that. I know them better than you will ever know them."
"As a corporation attorney,