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"Yes, I know you did." Thea walked over to the old-
fashioned mantel and held her hands down to the glow of
the fire. "I owe so much to you, and that's what makes
things hard. That's why I have to get away from you
altogether. I depend on you for so many things. Oh, I did
even last winter, in Chicago!" She knelt down by the
grate and held her hands closer to the coals. "And one
thing leads to another."
Ottenburg watched her as she bent toward the fire. His
glance brightened a little. "Anyhow, you couldn't look as
you do now, before you knew me. You WERE clumsy. And
whatever you do now, you do splendidly. And you can't
cry enough to spoil your face for more than ten minutes.
It comes right back, in spite of you. It's only since you've
known me that you've let yourself be beautiful."
Without rising she turned her face away. Fred went on
impetuously. "Oh, you can turn it away from me, Thea;
you can take it away from me! All the same--" his spurt
died and he fell back. "How can you turn on me so, after
all!" he sighed.
"I haven't. But when you arranged with yourself to
take me in like that, you couldn't have been thinking
very kindly of me. I can't understand how you carried it
through, when I was so easy, and all the circumstances were
so easy."
Her crouching position by the fire became threatening.
Fred got up, and Thea also rose.
"No," he said, "I can't make you see that now. Some
time later, perhaps, you will understand better. For one
thing, I honestly could not imagine that words, names,
meant so much to you." Fred was talking with the des-
peration of a man who has put himself in the wrong and
who yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct.
"Suppose that you had married your brakeman and lived
with him year after year, caring for him even less than you
do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would
have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has
a name in good standing. To me, that seems--sickening!"
He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea
remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs
up to the hearth for her.
"Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea." He
began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back
again, while she sat down compliantly. "Don't you know
most of the people in the world are not individuals at all?
They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot
of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same
season, dance at the same parties, are married off in
groups, have their babies at about the same time, send
their children to school together, and so the human crop
renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality
of the forms they go through as they know about the
wars they learn the dates of. They get their most per-
sonal experiences out of novels and plays. Everything is
second-hand with them. Why, you COULDN'T live like that."
Thea sat looking toward the mantel, her eyes half closed,
her chin level, her head set as if she were enduring some-
thing. Her hands, very white, lay passive on her dark
gown. From the window corner Fred looked at them and
at her. He shook his head and flashed an angry, tormented
look out into the blue twilight over the Square, through
which muffled cries and calls and the clang of car bells
came up from the street. He turned again and began to
pace the floor, his hands in his pockets.
"Say what you will, Thea Kronborg, you are not that
sort of person. You will never sit alone with a pacifier and
a novel. You won't subsist on what the old ladies have put
into the bottle for you. You will always break through
into the realities. That was the first thing Harsanyi found
out about you; that you couldn't be kept on the outside.
If you'd lived in Moonstone all your life and got on with
the discreet brakeman, you'd have had just the same
nature. Your children would have been the realities then,
probably. If they'd been commonplace, you'd have killed
them with driving. You'd have managed some way to
live twenty times as much as the people around you."
Fred paused. He sought along the shadowy ceiling and
heavy mouldings for words. When he began again, his
voice was lower, and at first he spoke with less conviction,
though again it grew on him. "Now I knew all this--oh,
knew it better than I can ever make you understand!
You've been running a handicap. You had no time to lose.
I wanted you to have what you need and to get on fast--
get through with me, if need be; I counted on that. You've
no time to sit round and analyze your conduct or your
feelings. Other women give their whole lives to it. They've
nothing else to do. Helping a man to get his divorce is a
career for them; just the sort of intellectual exercise they
like."
Fred dived fiercely into his pockets as if he would rip
them out and scatter their contents to the winds. Stop-
ping before her, he took a deep breath and went on
again, this time slowly. "All that sort of thing is foreign
to you. You'd be nowhere at it. You haven't that kind of
mind. The grammatical niceties of conduct are dark to
you. You're simple--and poetic." Fred's voice seemed
to be wandering about in the thickening dusk. "You won't
play much. You won't, perhaps, love many times." He
paused. "And you did love me, you know. Your railroad
friend would have understood me. I COULD have thrown you
back. The reverse was there,--it stared me in the face,--
but I couldn't pull it. I let you drive ahead." He threw
out his hands. What Thea noticed, oddly enough, was the
flash of the firelight on his cuff link. He turned again.
"And you'll always drive ahead," he muttered. "It's your
way."
There was a long silence. Fred had dropped into a chair.
He seemed, after such an explosion, not to have a word
left in him. Thea put her hand to the back of her neck and
pressed it, as if the muscles there were aching.
"Well," she said at last, "I at least overlook more in you
than I do in myself. I am always excusing you to myself.
I don't do much else."
"Then why, in Heaven's name, won't you let me be your
friend? You make a scoundrel of me, borrowing money
from another man to get out of my clutches."
"If I borrow from him, it's to study. Anything I took
from you would be different. As I said before, you'd be
keeping me."
"Keeping! I like your language. It's pure Moonstone,
Thea,--like your point of view. I wonder how long you'll
be a Methodist." He turned away bitterly.
"Well, I've never said I wasn't Moonstone, have I? I
am, and that's why I want Dr. Archie. I can't see anything
so funny about Moonstone, you know." She pushed her
chair back a little from the hearth and clasped her hands
over her knee, still looking thoughtfully into the red coals.
"We always come back to the same thing, Fred. The name,
as you call it, makes a difference to me how I feel about
myself. You would have acted very differently with a girl
of your own kind, and that's why I can't take anything
from you now. You've made everything impossible. Being
married is one thing and not being married is the other
thing, and that's all there is to it. I can't see how you
reasoned with yourself, if you took the trouble to reason.
You say I was too much alone, and yet what you did was
to cut me off more than I ever had been. Now I'm going
to try to make good to my friends out there. That's all
there is left for me."
"Make good to your friends!" Fred burst out. "What
one of them cares as I care, or believes as I believe? I've
told you I'll never ask a gracious word from you until I
can ask it with all the churches in Christendom at my
back."
Thea looked up, and when she saw Fred's face, she
thought sadly that he, too, looked as if things were spoiled
for him. "If you know me as well as you say you do, Fred,"
she said slowly, "then you are not being honest with your-
self. You know that I can't do things halfway. If you kept
me at all--you'd keep me." She dropped her head wearily
on her hand and sat with her forehead resting on her
fingers.
Fred leaned over her and said just above his breath,
"Then, when I get that divorce, you'll take it up with me
again? You'll at least let me know, warn me, before there
is a serious question of anybody else?"
Without lifting her head, Thea answered him. "Oh, I
don't think there will ever be a question of anybody else.
Not if I can help it. I suppose I've given you every reason
to think there will be,--at once, on shipboard, any time."
Ottenburg drew himself up like a shot. "Stop it, Thea!"
he said sharply. "That's one thing you've never done.
That's like any common woman." He saw her shoulders
lift a little and grow calm. Then he went to the other side
of the room and took up his hat and gloves from the sofa.
He came back cheerfully. "I didn't drop in to bully you
this afternoon. I came to coax you to go out for tea with
me somewhere." He waited, but she did not look up or
lift her head, still sunk on her hand.
Her handkerchief had fallen. Fred picked it up and put
it on her knee, pressing her fingers over it. "Good-night,
dear and wonderful," he whispered,--"wonderful and dear!
How can you ever get away from me when I will always
follow you, through every wall, through every door, wher-
ever you go." He looked down at her bent head, and the
curve of her neck that was so sad. He stooped, and with
his lips just touched her hair where the firelight made it
ruddiest. "I didn't know I had it in me, Thea. I thought
it was all a fairy tale. I don't know myself any more." He
closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "The salt's all gone
out of your hair. It's full of sun and wind again. I believe
it has memories." Again she heard him take a deep breath.
"I could do without you for a lifetime, if that would give
you to yourself. A woman like you doesn't find herself,
alone."
She thrust her free hand up to him. He kissed it softly,
as if she were asleep and he were afraid of waking her.
From the door he turned back irrelevantly. "As to your
old friend, Thea, if he's to be here on Friday, why,"--he
snatched out his watch and held it down to catch the light
from the grate,--"he's on the train now! That ought to
cheer you. Good-night." She heard the door close.
III
ON Friday afternoon Thea Kronborg was walking ex-
citedly up and down her sitting-room, which at that
hour was flooded by thin, clear sunshine. Both windows
were open, and the fire in the grate was low, for the day was
one of those false springs that sometimes blow into New
York from the sea in the middle of winter, soft, warm,
with a persuasive salty moisture in the air and a relaxing
thaw under foot. Thea was flushed and animated, and she
seemed as restless as the sooty sparrows that chirped and
cheeped distractingly about the windows. She kept looking
at the black clock, and then down into the Square. The
room was full of flowers, and she stopped now and then to
arrange them...
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