The Call of the Blood | Page 4

could do something for him, though his gift of beauty could do nothing for me--in the way of development. And that, too, seemed to lead me a step towards him. Finally--well, one day I knew I wanted to marry him. And so, Emile, I'm going to marry him. Here!"
She held out to him his cup full of tea.
"There's no sugar," he said.
"Oh--the first time I've forgotten."
"Yes."
The tone of his voice made her look up at him quickly and exclaim:
"No, it won't make any difference!"
"But it has. You've forgotten for the first time. Cursed be the egotism of man."
He sat down in an arm-chair on the other side of the tea-table.
"It ought to make a difference. Maurice Delarey, if he is a man--and if you are going to marry him he must be--will not allow you to be the Egeria of a fellow who has shocked even Paris by telling it the naked truth."
"Yes, he will. I shall drop no friendship for him, and he knows it. There is not one that is not honest and innocent. Thank God I can say that. If you care for it, Emile, we can both add to the size of the letter bundles."
He looked at her meditatively, even rather sadly.
"You are capable of everything in the way of friendship, I believe," he said. "Even of making the bundle bigger with a husband's consent. A husband's--I suppose the little Townly's upset? But she always is."
"When you're there. You don't know Evelyn. You never will. She's at her worst with you because you terrify her. Your talent frightens her, but your appearance frightens her even more."
"I am as God made me."
"With the help of the barber. It's your beard as much as anything else."
"What does she say of this affair? What do all your innumerable adorers say?"
"What should they say? Why should anybody be surprised? It's surely the most natural thing in the world for a woman, even a very plain woman, to marry. I have always heard that marriage is woman's destiny, and though I don't altogether believe that, still I see no special reason why I should never marry if I wish to. And I do wish to."
"That's what will surprise the little Townly and the gaping crowd."
"I shall begin to think I've seemed unwomanly all these years."
"No. You're an extraordinary woman who astonishes because she is going to do a very important thing that is very ordinary."
"It doesn't seem at all ordinary to me."
Emile Artois began to stroke his beard. He was determined not to feel jealous. He had never wished to marry Hermione, and did not wish to marry her now, but he had come over from Paris secretly a man of wrath.
"You needn't tell me that," he said. "Of course it is the great event to you. Otherwise you would never have thought of doing it."
"Exactly. Are you astonished?"
"I suppose I am. Yes, I am."
"I should have thought you were far too clever to be so."
"Exactly what I should have thought. But what living man is too clever to be an idiot? I never met the gentleman and never hope to."
"You looked upon me as the eternal spinster?"
"I looked upon you as Hermione Lester, a great creature, an extraordinary creature, free from the prejudices of your sex and from its pettinesses, unconventional, big brained, generous hearted, free as the wind in a world of monkey slaves, careless of all opinion save your own, but humbly obedient to the truth that is in you, human as very few human beings are, one who ought to have been an artist but who apparently preferred to be simply a woman."
Hermione laughed, winking away two tears.
"Well, Emile dear, I'm being very simply a woman now, I assure you."
"And why should I be surprised? You're right. What is it makes me surprised?"
He sat considering.
"Perhaps it is that you are so unusual, so individual, that my imagination refuses to project the man on whom your choice could fall. I project the snuffy professor--Impossible! I project the Greek god--again my mind cries, 'Impossible!' Yet, behold, it is in very truth the Greek god, the ideal of the ordinary woman."
"You know nothing about it. You're shooting arrows into the air."
"Tell me more then. Hold up a torch in the darkness."
"I can't. You pretend to know a woman, and you ask her coldly to explain to you the attraction of the man she loves, to dissect it. I won't try to."
"But," he said, with now a sort of joking persistence, which was only a mask for an almost irritable curiosity, "I want to know."
"And you shall. Maurice and I are dining to-night at Caminiti's in Peathill Street, just off Regent Street. Come and meet us there, and we'll all three spend the evening together. Half-past eight, of course no evening