Anne O'Hagan

“ The thought of hurting him was not distasteful to Susan in the mood in which she was, though usually she was all exquisite, illogical, feminine tenderness for the pain that she could see.
"I suppose I do," she answered curtly. He studied her with an air of grave surprise for a moment.
"Your manner when you came down to dinner last night," he began, "was so unlike your manner when you came home from our walk, and your manner at dinner so unlike either, that I was puzzled. I am not a subtle person like some of your friends." He half smiled. "I don't care for riddles. ”

“ The ruddy color faded a little from his face, and suddenly the firmness of his jaw became his most prominent facial characteristic. His gray eyes studied her. Then with a slight gesture of accepting her manner, he sauntered across the drawing-room to Mrs. Apthorpe. Susan felt chidden and ashamed. Like a child who is conscious of having misbehaved, she exerted herself at dinner to efface the impression of her wilfulness. But Willitson did not lose the air of a man who merely defers explanation and punishment to a fitting season. ”

“ He laughed at her witticisms, watched her changeful face by the evening together, condoned her ignorance of practical affairs—Willitson himself was rather phenomenal in objective knowledge,—humored her caprices after the indulgent manner of the strong, not the ingratiating manner of the weak.
"He's too nice to be spoiled," Susan told herself as she did up her hair one evening, after she had been off for a splendid, swinging, stinging walk with him through the wind and the driving mist. She was trying to explain to herself why she had held her hand from flirtation with him. ”

“ And Susan lay at the library window, looking idly down the billowy, blossoming slope to the broad road, where now and then the flash of varnish or the gleam of metal proclaimed the passing of equipages. Faintly she enjoyed the tender colors of the hillside. She still dwelt in the nebulous region where pain and joy are no more real than those are real men and women who pass and repass in a mirror at the end of a great hall. ”

“ So she came quite back to life and its cruelty of loneliness. She never even said to herself that she had loved Arthur Willitson, and that in the loss of him, the loss of life with him, she had tasted what was for her the supreme bitterness. She was done with telling herself what her emotions were, done with cherishing them, with defying them, with all forms of playing with them. ”

“ A good wife could scarcely feel more shame at the stirring of a vagrant emotion than Susan at the approach of a fresh passion in herself. Her long infatuation for Hardaker was, in her mind, redeemed from folly, ennobled, set among heroic sentiments, by its endurance, its subsistence upon pure imagination. ”

“ That young Willitson had soon attached himself rather conspicuously to Susan's train was a matter commented upon by her relatives with the cheerful frankness common to families. Some of them averred that he was a boy, little likely to stir a real ardor in a woman who had so long played with fire. Some said that it would be a shame if she trifled with him after her custom, despoiling him of the morning freshness of his emotions merely to feed an insatiable vanity. Willis Apthorpe expounded a more hopeful theory to his wife. ”

“ When he had once more withdrawn, Susan stole a half-frightened glance at Willitson. Her cruelty had spent itself, after the feminine fashion, in one blow.
"I—I am very sorry," she whispered.
"You are not at all to blame," he told her courteously. "You must not reproach yourself in the least." ”

“ If once you can make a girl connect a man with gruel and porous plasters, she's safe enough."
While the astute Mrs. Willis reasoned thus, Susan lay in the darkness, her soft mouth pressed against her forearm on the pillow. He had kissed it when she had extended her hand for a friendly good-night. His kiss against her cool, firm flesh was not warmer than that of her own lips caressing what his touch had made so rapturously dear.
She knew, even while she summoned before her closed eyes the look which had burned in his, that her cousin's wife had told her the truth about Hardaker. ”

“ I'd rather be the woman who loves him hopelessly, never seeing him, forgotten by him, than the best-loved wife in all the world."
"That is all romantic nonsense, Susan," replied Willitson. "To cherish passionately what can have no fruition is morbid, hysterical, false. ”

“ Willis was emphatic rather than argumentative.
"But really—"
"But really," interrupted her husband conclusively, "the whole trouble with Susan is that she hasn't met men. Now young Willitson's a man though he's only a boy. He's going to love like a man and win his woman like a man, and marry and go out and do a man's work in the world. He isn't going to sit around turning phrases about his emotions. And that's the kind of man Susan needs and wants and is waiting for—you'll see." ”

“ In his creed, an artist's only excuse for marriage was the increase of his leisure or opportunity for work.
During her deliberate yielding to the intoxication of her dream, Susan had nursed the delusion that she discounted the pain of awakening by anticipating it. ”

“ Arthur was dead, dead in the great glory of life, dead—ah, the misery of it!—because she had not granted such a little, trivial wish one sunny, blustery day—she knew it. That knowledge was the core of existence to her. Yet, constantly, men walked with his tread, bent their heads as he had done, sprang, ran—simulated all his vigorous, supple motions. ”

“ Never the man close beside her, never the one who brushed her skirts on the sidewalk, but always the one just turning the far corner, just alighting from the next carriage, the next car, just closing the door of his house behind him. ”

“ But from the time when the child first perceived that the world had not been constructed for her—a fact which orphaned children recognize many years before their fellows—she had made a little world of her own, in which she ruled, a kind and lovely young princess. ”

“ She continued to occupy herself in a manner befitting a semidependent young woman of many social gifts but no remunerative talents. She fitted herself with graceful adaptability into several households, being in turn the glittering lure or the effective background for her hostess—here an excellent listener, there a humorous talker ”

“ IT is difficult for even the most subtly agile of moralists to append the quod erat demonstrandum to this record of the final solution of Susan Apthorpe's emotional complexities. Twist the tale as one will, there is no point at which he can say: "Here was the great mistake ”

“ It was almost thin-lipped, aristocratic, its native austerity converted into something which in repose resembled cruelty, as is often the way when a man of predominant intellect is deliberately a pleasure-seeker.
No one of the group assembled at Cedarholm, the Willis Apthorpe suburban place, expected Hardaker to be seriously interested in Susan, for whom the Willis Apthorpes were dutifully providing that season. When it became evident that the young woman held his attention for more than the evening or two for which the least fascinating of Susan's sex might hope to hold it, Mrs. ”