Gouverneur Morris

“ Oh, I've fallen out of love lots of times—then with John, and maybe I'll fail you. You must know that I'm not any good. But even if I'm not, I do love you. Oh, I do."
"Do you?"
"And I trust you so. There's nobody so kind and thoughtful and strong."
It is pleasant for an unkind, thoughtless weak man to be told such untruths by the woman he loves. And for a few moments I imagined I had the qualities that she had wished upon me, nay, loved upon me. ”

“ Of the sorrow that was gnawing at John Fulton's heart I saw no sign. He was alert, hospitable, humorous often, and toward Lucy his manner was wonderfully considerate and gentle. If I had guessed at anything, it would have been that the wife was in trouble and not the husband. He could not sit still for long at a time, but he did not in the least suggest a man who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His activity and sudden shiftings from place to place and from topic to topic were rather those of a man who superabounds in physical and mental energy. ”

“ For once, with complete fervor, I wished that I had never been born. And if I was to get back any glimmerings of self-respect, I must act like a man. Upon what grounds did I found the hope that Fulton would not soon find out about Lucy and me? Why, on the grounds of moral cowardice, of course. I dreaded to face any drastic, final issue. There was no other reason. Well, if I was to prove to myself that I was not a moral coward, Fulton must be told and the issue faced, and Fulton himself must be out-faced. It was not enough to love and be loved in secret. That way lies stealing and cheating. ”

“ I must go to Paris, I thought, then surely the inspiration of helpfulness would come. But I could not very well go to Paris until the year of probation was up. If Lucy still cared—well, it would be easy enough for me to care. I knew now that her physical presence was sufficient to make me care—at any given moment. "Oh," I thought, "I can't lose. Either I'll go to Paris and be useful, or I'll begin a new life with the girl I love who loves me." ”

“ My father loved people, and my mother got to love them for his sake. For my part, until very recently, I have always hated to be alone. Flint is a gloomy solitary, but when he meets with Steel there are sparks.
I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people can only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in the perfection of strokes, but it is far more amusing to face somebody across a net and play lawn tennis. ”

“ You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"
And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was telling the truth.
But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system, so that only death can wholly cure him. ”

“ It's bad enough to love you, but to despise you too! Oh, don't worry. I won't tell. I've been bought, I've lived."
I remained for a long time, alone, under the cedar tree. I was horribly ashamed and troubled, not because I had kissed her, but because I had had the impulse to kiss her again, because I realized at last that it takes more than a romantic love affair to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Because for a moment I saw myself as Hilda saw me—because for a moment I was able to judge Lucy and me, as others would judge us. ”

“ How could he with Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment, indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with all the love and yearning accumulated at compound interest during absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. ”

“ He had hoped at first that Lucy's failure of affection was but a temporary aberration. But at last he must have come to despair of any change in her feelings for him, at least under existing conditions. Indeed their relations were going from bad to worse. A man loved and beloved falls into habits of passion for which there is no cure but death or old age. Yet a man would readily believe that separation might affect him like an opiate, and it must have been in this belief that Fulton determined to accompany Harry Colemain on a trip to Palm Beach. ”

“ As he danced the old dances, so he dances the new, to greater perfection than any man in New York. He is gorgeously built, and has a carriage of the head, an eye and a smile, and a way with him that can shake a man from the water wagon or a woman from her virtue. He smokes like a factory, and drinks like a fish, yet at a moment's notice he is ready for some great feat of endurance—such as playing through the racket championship, or swimming from Newport to Narragansett Pier. ”

“ Once a spoiled child, always a spoiled child. In the scheme of things I would not at first give their proper place to those awful barriers which society has set up between a man and another man's wife. We loved each other with might and main, and our only happiness could be in passing over those barriers and belonging to each other. John Fulton and his children were but vague pale shadows across the sunshine. ”

“ But, of course, that was only romantic nonsense."
"Yes, that was nonsense," said Fulton. "It would have made my position altogether too ridiculous. Did it occur to you to be great friends, and not see each other?"
"John," exclaimed Lucy, "you don't understand."
"I don't understand the importance which lovers attach to love? Well, perhaps not. Drunkards hate to cure themselves of drink; smokers of smoke; lovers of love. Yet all these appetites can be cured, often to the immense benefit of the sufferers and of everybody concerned. And so you thought you could lead two lives at once, Lucy?" ”

“ She was a wonderful little mother to her kids, and the most faithful, loving, valiant wife that ever belonged to a man full of cares and worries."
"I know all this, John," I said; "I could wish that you had been unhappy together."
"I wish to make several things clear," he said. "According to all civil and moral law, I am an absolutely undivorceable man. There is only one ground for divorce in this state. To clear the decks for you and Lucy, I should have to smirch myself and take a black eye."
"But the people who count always understand these things." ”

“ Most at ease with the great, I might, during the dearth of great men, have aspired to be an ambassador. I'd have married young, and have given all the tenderness which various women have roused in me, to one woman. And there would have been children, and stability, and a home constantly invaded by proud and happy grandparents. Or if these fine things had not been in my reach, at least I might have shaken the dust of futile places from my feet, and closed my ears to the voices of futile people. ”

“ If I thought that Lucy would be melancholy during her husband's absence I was mistaken. It was almost as if she had no husband. She was like some radiant schoolgirl home for the holidays. But I am pretty sure that Fulton missed her during every waking moment. He wrote to her at least twice a day and sent her many telegrams.
"He knows what a shocking memory I have," she explained; "and he's afraid that I'll forget him unless constantly reminded. Wouldn't it be funny if people only existed for us when they were actually present? Some time I think I'm a little like that about people. ”

“ To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself, to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other man! ”

“ More insistent than the roar of the surf, I hear the humming of great angry mosquitoes, and I try to figure out what I should do if I came down with appendicitis and no surgeon within a thousand miles.
Lucy chose her thoughts as she would have selected neckties, choosing the pretty ones, tossing the ugly ones aside and never thinking of them again, or, for that matter, of the bill for the pretty neckties that would be sent to her husband. Only very great matters, such as love and death, could have occupied her mind against her will. ”

“ She had heard that the Fultons—of all the people in this world whom it might have been!—were being abandoned by their waitress, and already by a brisk use of the telephone my mother had secured the place for Hilda.
It's a wonder that Hilda did not burst out laughing or screaming when she heard into whose service she was to go. I don't think she hated Lucy—yet. But for a woman who loved a man to take a place with the woman the man loved must have struck her as the most grotesque of propositions. ”

“ I had simply, without deliberation, forgotten Lucy for half an hour, and been making agreeable personal plans for the year of probation.
"Good Lord," I thought; "has living without her, already begun to be easier?"
It had. I began to take pleasure in seeing my friends; to look forward to the Newport season, to the international tennis, to the golf championship at Ekwanok, to the thousand and one things that make for the happiness of a butterfly's summer. ”

“ Her best friend never thought that she would ever settle to any one man. She was the most outrageous little flirt you ever saw. No, not outrageous, because each time she thought she was really in love herself. It was one boy after another, all crazy about her, and she about them. Then it was one man after another. What Lucy doesn't know about moonlight and verandas, and the sad sounds of the sea at night, isn't worth knowing. But all the time, from the time she was fifteen, there was John Fulton in the background. ”

“ Suppose it could be proved to us that there was no Great Design, and no Great Designer, that the world was the result of some blind, happy-go-lucky creative force, what would we think of the world then, poor thing? A poor woman with nothing to live for walks the streets that she may live; a rich woman with much to live for dies slowly and in great torture, of cancer. ”

“ I had not at this time had any great experience with the passion of jealousy. But a man who reads the newspapers, or has done his turn at jury duty in Criminal Sessions, cannot be ignorant of the desperate acts to which now and again it drives men and women.
Hilda, according to the slight knowledge I had of her character, was gentle and patient; she would be treated by Lucy as all Lucy's servants were, with the greatest tact and friendliness, and still the mere fact of her presence in that house filled me with forebodings. ”

“ But it was pretty bitter hearing about Lucy, and the baby. At least I had kept faith longer than she had. I wondered if she once more loved her husband. Did I hope so? Yes, of course, in the same way that you express conventional horror when you hear of the latest famine in China.
Well, for better for worse, I was a free man again. Free—if it is free to be tormented by remorse, to feel cheap, futile, a waster—a thing of no account to anyone. If this is freedom it isn't good to be free. No man is happy who comes and goes as he pleases. ”

“ Often at dawn, if the tide was right, and you happened to be awake, you might see Mr. Fulton descend the wet lawn in wrapper and bare feet for the swim that seemed to make up to him for his sleepless nights. You knew that he was in trouble by the way that he took to the water. It's always a little shivery at dawn, but he never hesitated. His wrapper was coming off by the time he reached the float—it was too far off to mind watching him—and into the water he'd go, head first, as quick as he could get in. ”

“ I am sure that Lucy did not give many thoughts to poor John Fulton, worrying his head off in far New York. She had the greatest power upon her own thoughts of any woman or man I ever knew. And always she chose agreeable and even delightful things to think about. When I try to make castles in the air I get worrying about details, such as neighbors and plumbing. Sometimes I have felt that it would be agreeable to run away from everyone and everything, and live on some South Sea beach in an undershirt and an old pair of trousers. ”

“ I cannot imagine thirteen-year-old Fulton in love with fifteen-year-old Nell or Nancy, but I was frequently in love with both at the same time, or so fancied myself, and, almost consciously, as it seems, he was conserving his powers of loving for the one great passion of his life, when he should give all that a man may have in him of purity and faith and purpose. ”