Anne O'Hagan

“ Torringford was less reserved with Martha than with most women. He could remember when her uncomfortable cleverness at the younger dancing class had made her almost as dreaded a partner as his seriousness and awkwardness had made him. He could remember even further back to the days when she, a very tiny, straight figure upon her horse at her father's country place, and he, a scarcely more imposing one upon his, had ridden under the eye of one groom. As far as ease with his fellow-beings was possible to him, he was at ease with Martha. ”

“ Watching the firelight play fantastically through the dusk on the big, plain furniture, which achieved, at some expense, a rustic simplicity, he wondered a little about Ray. The husband whom Evangeline had chosen—he must be a wonderfully fine fellow. There was in her, Torringford knew, an unswerving surety of taste—to put the matter on no higher plane. Ah, there was in her the fine, divining quality of limpid, lovely womanhood! Ray must be a remarkable man, of stalwart virtues, of signal charm. ”

“ Are you still afraid of opening an old wound by seeing her?"
"It isn't exactly that," answered Torringford, painstakingly accurate. "The old feeling was pretty well starved out, I think, before I came back. But I'm afraid of a new one. The man—he is a coarse brute, isn't he? And when I think of her, subjected to his vulgarities all these years, hurt every hour by his stupidities, jarred by his ill-breeding, disgusted by his lack of common honor—when I think of what she has been through, Martha, I am afraid to see her. I am afraid of pitying her too much." ”

“ He saw it deepen with joy in his admiration, like a gem palpitating in a concentrated light.
"You've grown a flatterer," she said, shaking her head reprovingly. "I'm an old woman—and I'm growing atrociously fat."
"You should see her gym bills, Torringford," said Ray, laughing. "She gets weighed once a week and takes her waist measure—how often, Eve? Oh, the madam isn't going to develop any embonpoint, not if she knows herself." Evangeline's half-chiding, half-amused laugh chimed silverly with her husband's appreciation of his own wit. ”

“ And for ten years now her fineness had been outraged, her intellect insulted, by these cheap arguments for dishonesty, for indifference as ignoble as dishonesty! How the man must have lacerated her, what a crucifixion life with him must have been! A hot wave of pity engulfed him; a love stronger than that of the young man threatened him. That had been youth's desire to possess itself of beauty, to win sympathy for its aspirations, sweet companionship for its loneliness in the great loneliness of the new-found universe. ”

“ I don't want her to guess that her husband is willing to play upon my respect for my own love—is willing to use me, her old lover, for his own cheap purposes. In short, Martha, I don't think I could bear the sight of her humiliation. God knows, I'm not much of a man to enchain a woman's fancy, but I know how to cherish and to reverence her—and he doesn't. ”

“ That Ray's cynical, vulgar materialism was no worse than that of half a million men did not make Torringford more tolerant. The other half million, at any rate, had not been guilty of the blasphemy of leading their gross lives in Evangeline's presence.
He fell to picturing her as she would be after the years that had turned her from lovely girlhood into womanhood. The wonderful oval of her face that had seemed as much a message of truth, a hymn of praise, as any poem, would be marred by suffering ”

“ There is no one like you—no one." He pressed her fingers gratefully, absent-mindedly. "Don't go," she went on earnestly. "Don't go. Don't see her. No matter how much they urge you—don't! "
That very evening, walking through the glittering, noisy dusk toward his rooms, indefinably touched by the recollection of the affectionate anxiety of his old friend's voice, he was overtaken by Arthur Ray. Eagerly the man who had been the means of saving his life congratulated himself upon the chance meeting; he was just thinking of Torringford; had Torringford any engagement that evening? ”

“ When Evangeline, with a charm that robbed the process of all coquetry, and indeed established her more firmly than ever in his thoughts as the incomparably exquisite among women, had broken their engagement that she might marry Arthur Ray, Torringford had taken the blow standing. ”

“ For a woman whose mouth was permanently tilted in a smile at least half mocking, and whose eyes proclaimed a sad, ineradicable belief in the futility of most things, Martha was amazingly and most inconsistently bound up in schemes of social amelioration. ”

“ But if I don't buy out the Legislature, some other fellow will. The blessed public will be exactly in the same position—granting, I mean, for the sake of the argument, that you're right in your premises. As a matter of fact you are a long way off. The franchise that the road wants will be a clear public benefit. Just let me explain to you—" and his voice boomed endlessly on.
Listening, Torringford remembered the rapt shining of Evangeline's eyes when he had been used, in the happy days of his engagement, to disclose to her all the plans of his young idealism. ”

“ And here was a loud-mouthed braggart, of dull though noisy wit, a man whose own successes, commercial, social, even amorous, were his constant themes, a man frankly indifferent to the large aspects of life and duty.
"It may be all right for you, Torringford," he proclaimed on one occasion when Torringford had inadvertently criticised some lobbying in which Ray proved interested, "it may be all right for you to go in for all this civic righteousness. ”

“ The instinctive fastidiousness which ran so incongruously side by side with his conscientious democracy had never again been satisfied in any woman.
"I wish," he frowned in his bed, "that some poor devil whom a check would make rich had picked me up. Oh, well! America's a big country—I dare say I needn't rub elbows with the Rays too constantly even if I do have to see them once or twice." ”

“ Your father, or your grandfather, or some other good old duck, who didn't give a tinker's dam for the public weal, made your living for you and you can afford to be as squeamish as you please. But we fellows that had to get out and hustle for our butter and jam and all the extras, we simply can't afford it. You say that what I'm doing for the D. C. & C. up there in Albany is an attempt to sell out the public to a corrupt corporation by means of a corrupt assembly. ”