The Tyranny of Weakness | Page 9

at a wind
mill or something."
The man shook his head in mock distress.
"I knew it," he sighed, then his tone grew serious and he began to speak
rapidly. "You say I've known where you were for six years and that's
true. It's also true that until this summer, I haven't in any genuine sense
been the master of my movements. Four years were spent in college,
and two in law school. There were vacations, of course, but my mother
claimed them at home. She is dead now, and her last few years were
years of partial invalidism--so she wanted her family about her."
"Oh," the girl's eyes deepened with sympathy. "I didn't know that. She
was, I think, almost the loveliest woman I ever knew. She was
everything that blue blood ought to be--and so rarely is."
"Thank you. Yes, I think my mother was just that--but what I meant to
claim was that this summer is the first I have been free to use in
whatever way I wanted: the first time I've been able to say to myself,

'Go and do whatever seems to you the most delightful thing possible in
a delightful world.' What I did was to come to Cape Cod and why I did
it I've already told you."
Conscience studied his expression and back of the whimsical glint in
his eyes she recognized an entire sincerity. Perhaps he had retained out
of boyhood some of that militant attitude of believing in his dreams and
making them realities. She found herself hoping something of the sort
as she reminded him, "After I had outgrown pigtails, you know, they
would have let me read a letter from you--if it had arrived."
"Certainly. There were a good many times when I started to write; a
good many times when I got as far as a half-finished letter. But I
always tore it up. You see, it never appeared to me that that was the
way. A letter from me, after a long absence would have been a
shadowy sort of message. I couldn't guess how clearly you remembered
me or even whether you remembered me at all. You were a child then,
who was growing into a woman. Your life was an edifice which you
were building for yourself. What niches it had for what saints and
deities, I couldn't hope to know. I might have been scornfully thrust in
among the cobwebs with other promiscuous rummage of outgrown
days. I might have been hardly more important than the dolls that
preceded me in your affections by only a couple of years. How could I
tell?" He paused and questioned her with direct eyes. "No, I meant to
come back into your life not as a ghost speaking from the past but as a
man intent on announcing himself in person. It was no part of my
scheme that you should say, 'Oh, yes, I remember him. A long, thin kid
with a vile temper. I used to love to stir him up and hear him roar.'
That's why I never wrote."
Her smile was still a little doubtful and so he went on.
"It would have been too easy for you to have simply dropped me cold.
Now it happens that in life I am endowed with a certain india-rubber
quality. I am practically indestructible. When you biff me into the
corner I can come bouncing back for more. In short, I am not so easy to
be rid of, when I'm on the ground."

Conscience laughed. They were still young enough to respond
thrillingly to the remembered fragrance of honeysuckle and the
plaintive note of the whippoorwill, and perhaps to other memories, as
well.
She rose abruptly and went down to the water's edge where she stood
with the breeze whipping the silk draperies of her blue bathing skirt
against her knees and stirring her hair into a dark nimbus about her
head. After retrieving from the sand the blue cap and the blue stocking,
her companion followed her.
"Now that I'm here," he asseverated, "I hold that we stand just where
we stood when we parted."
But at that she shook her head and laughed at him. "Quite the reverse,"
she declared. "I hold that by years of penitence I've lived down my past.
We're simply two young persons who once knew each other."
"Very well," acceded he. "It will come to the same thing in the end. We
will start as strangers, but I have a strong conviction that when we
become acquainted, I'm going to dog your steps to the altar. I'm willing
to cancel all the previous chapter, except that I sha'n't forget it.... Can
you forget it?"
She flushed, but shook her head frankly, and answered without evasion,
"I haven't