Kate Trimble Sharber

“ Yet you must not get the impression from this that Guilford was a bad sort! Why, no woman could ride in an elevator with him for half a minute without realizing that he was the flower-of-chivalry sort of man! He always had a little way of standing back from a woman, as if she were too sacred to be approached, and in her presence he had a habit of holding his hat clasped firmly against the buttons of his coat. You can forgive a good deal in a man if he keeps his hat off all the time he's talking to you!
"'Shocked?'" I repeated.
"Your mother always plans for your happiness, Grace." ”

“ Outside the limousine was breathing softly.
I don't remember what we talked about going in to town, or whether we talked at all or not; but when the machine slowed up at the Herald building 210 and Maitland Tait helped me out, there was the same light shining from his eyes that shone there the night before—the light that made the glint of the silver oars on Cleopatra's Nile barge turn pale—and the radiance half blinded me.
"Grace, you don't want me to say anything to-night—I can see that," he said. "And you are right—if you are still bound to that other man! ”

“ If there is ever a season when a woman's system is predisposed toward the malady known as sex love, it is when some man is magnanimous about another man. And Guilford's manner at that instant was magnanimous—and I already had fifty-seven other varieties of affection for him! I decided then, in the twinkling of my fan chain, which I was agitating rather mercilessly, that if Guilford were the kind of a man I could love, he'd be the very man I should adore. ”

“ Why don't you come away? You are a man first, an artist afterward—and it is the man that I love!
"And, Jim, do you know how much I love you? Do you know how your face leads me on?—It is your face I must have now, darling. Portrait of the Artist, by Himself, is a title I have often smiled over, wondering how a man could be induced to paint his own features, but now I know! It is always because some woman has so clamorously demanded it—a woman who loved him! ”

“ She scrambled about for a book on a table near at hand—and I began to see daylight.
"Oh, a player-piano, and an electric coupé—all in one day! I see! My fairy godmother—who was old Aunt Patricia, and she looked exactly like one—has turned the pumpkin into a gold coach! You two plotters have been putting your heads together to have me get rich quick and gracefully!"
"We understand that this stroke of fortune is going to make a great change in your life, Grace," Guilford said gravely. He was always grave—and old. ”

“ Just because he's old, and drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather I made a habit of 88 keeping fresh flowers in his gray Rookwood vase. This spot of color, together with the occasional twinkle from his eyes, made the only break in the dusty newspapery monotony of the room. He looked up from his desk, and his face brightened as he saw my holiday attire.
"Well, Grace?"
He started up, big and shaggy—and wistful—like a St. Bernard. I like old men to look like St. Bernards—and young ones to look like greyhounds. ”

“ I ran the whole gamut of her emotions—'twixt love and duty—and I came out of it feeling that—well, certainly I felt that a conservatory is a room where eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves!
"Is everybody crazy to-night?" I whispered to Guilford, as we paused for a moment before the dancing commenced just outside one of the downy, silky reception rooms—quite apart from the noisy ballroom farther back—and I saw two people inside. The girl was seated before the piano, and was singing softly, while the man stood at her side, listening with a rapt expression. ”

“ I had never before in my life heard of his wishing to speak to Delia Ramage, but she was the nearest one to him, so he veered across to her side, while I was left alone with the new arrival. This is called heaping coals of fire.
"I was glad to see you—a moment ago," Maitland Tait said in that low intimate tone which is usually begotten only by daily or hourly thought. Take two people who have not seen each other for a week, nor thought of each other, and when they meet they will shrill out spontaneous, falsetto tones—but not so with two people whose spirits have communed five minutes before. ”

“ I did want that player-piano tremendously—although I had about as much use for an electric coupé, under my present conditions in life, as I had for a perambulator.
"Grace, you're—indelicate!" mother said, her voice trembling. "Guilford's a man!"
"A man's a man—especially a Kentuckian!" I answered. "You're not shocked at my mention of colts and—and things, are you, Guilford?"
My betrothed sat down and lifted from the bridge of his nose that badge of civilization—a pair of rimless glasses. ”

“ You believe in a "dual personality"? Well, they're mine! They quarrel within me! They dispute! They pull and wrangle and seesaw in as many different directions as a party of Cook tourists in Cairo—coming into the council-chamber of my conscience to decide everything I do, from the selection of a black-dotted veil to the emancipation of the sex—while I sit by as helpless as a bound-and-gagged spiritual medium.
"They're not going to affect her future," mother said, but a little gasp of fear showed that if she'd been a Roman Catholic she would be crossing herself. ”

“ There you are kept too busy to think—but here I can do nothing else!—Or perhaps I am quite wrong, and it is not a matter of London and Lancashire, after all, but the more primal one of your being a man, and my being a woman! Do I love the more? I wonder? And yet, I don't think that I care much! I am willing to love more abjectly than any woman ever loved before—if you care for me just a little in return. ”

“ Then—in that instant—I knew what life was going to mean to me. And I felt as if I had the great joy of the world—hugged close—in a circle of radiance—like the Madonna della Sedia!
"I can be good—a very good woman—if I have your face before me," I told him.
After a while he smiled, then took my hand and drew me to a shadowy corner of the room. ”

“ The rest of the fabrication was cut short and drowned out by the shriek of a trolley-car, grinding noisily round a curve of the track at that instant. 126 It was the five-o'clock car, and I had grown to watch for its shriek as fearfully as ever Cinderella listened for the stroke of twelve from the castle clock. For me there was never a garden party without its trolley-car back to the city—its hateful, five-o'clock car—its hurried, businesslike, hungry summons—while ice in tea glasses tinkled to the echo. ”

“ I have spent all the days of my life hating aristocracy."
"Oh, my feeling for him is not caused by his aristocracy," I made haste to explain. "And indeed, the Christies were very commonplace people until he elevated them into the ranks of fame. He was not only an artist of note, but he was a very strong man. It is this part of his history that I revere, and when I was a very young girl I 'adopted' him—from all the rest of my ancestors—to be the one I'd care for and feel a pride in." ”

“ Guilford, under the impulse induced by a white tissue gown and big red roses, had suffered an unusual heart-action already and had spent half an hour whispering 171 things in my ear which made me feel embarrassed and ashamed. The only thing which can possibly make a lifelong engagement endurable is the brotherly attitude assumed by the lover in his late teens. ”

“ My desk was really in the wildest disorder. The tin top of the mucilage bottle had disappeared, the bottle had been overturned, its contents had been lavished upon the devoted head of a militant suffragette, and she was pinioned tightly to my blotting-pad.
"The elevator to Success is not running—take the stairs," grinned a framed motto above the desk.
"You take a—back seat!" I said, jumping up and turning the thing to the wall. "What do I care about success, if it's the sort of thing connected with typewriters, offices, copy paper and a pot of paste? I'm—I'm des-qua-mat-ing!" ”

“ Tait, sir," after a fashion that no American-trained servant, white, black, or almond-eyed, ever said. Evidently the car had come down from Pittsburgh and the chauffeur had made a longer journey. Together, however, they spelled perfection—and luxury. Still, strange to say, the notion of this man's possible wealth did not get on my throat and suffocate me, as the notion of Guilford's did. I felt that the man himself really cared very little about it all. The idea of his being a man who could do hard tasks patiently did not fade in the glamour of this damask and tortoise-shell. ”

“ I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm—the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident—and the big, big virility of you!
"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist? ”

“ I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know—from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy. ”

“ This piece of sarcasm came from old great-great-aunt, Patricia Christie, who never took sides with anybody in family disputes, because she hated them one and all alike. She rose from her chair now and hobbled on her stick into the midst of the battle-field.
"Let me see! Let me see!"
"She's remarkably like Uncle Lancelot, aunty," Cousin Pollie declared with a superior air of finality.
"She's a thousand times more like my father than I, myself, am," poor little mother avowed stanchly. ”

“ And every year at spring-time, Romeo is patted on the back condescendingly by thousands of youths—so susceptible that they'd fall in love with anything whose skirt and waist met in the back. 169
The night of the Kendalls' dance I knew what Cleopatra's cosmic consciousness resembled—exactly. I knew it from the moment she glanced away from the glint of her silver oars of the wonderful Nile barge (because the glint of Antony's dark eyes was so much more compelling) to the hour she recklessly unwrapped the basket of figs in her death chamber! ”

“ Walker said?"
"Probably so. The Seven Oaks gardens are very lovely in June."
At the mention of gardens his eyes wandered, with what I fancied was a tinge of homesickness, toward the colorful flowering spaces beyond the box hedges. There were acres and acres of typical English gardens back there; and the odor of the sweet old-fashioned shrubs came in on gentle heat waves from the open area. He looked as if he would like to be back there in those English-looking gardens—with all the people gone. ”

“ Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future—how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness—you will know that mine is no light nor passing attachment. ”

“ My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.
"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.—The head-line was weak and isolated—while 27 the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede track!
But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's desk—certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! ”

“ Have you ever thought that the reason we can so fully sympathize with certain great people of history, and not with others, is because we are occasionally granted a glimpse of the emotion our favorites enjoyed—or endured? ”

“ Can't you just imagine now that he was afraid of what people might say—or do?" asked the major encouragingly. "It was absolutely unprecedented in the annals of history—such 121 a quick, rash and sudden decision. If England and Scotland were going to be eternally bickering over their flags, they should have one flag! They should be united! They should—"
"The Union Jack!" whispered the deep voice close at my side, while the grave dark eyes lighted, as—as they should have lighted, or I'd never have forgiven him. ”

“ The sporting editor looked solicitous.
"And now, if I were you, to keep from wearing myself out with talking, I'd get on the car and ride out to Glendale Park," he advised.
But I shook my head.
"I can't."
"You really owe it to yourself," he insisted. "You are showing symptoms of a strange excitement to-day. You look as if you were talking to keep from doing something more annoying—if such a thing were possible."
"I'm not going to weep—either from excitement or the effects of your rudeness," I returned, then wheeling around and facing my desk again I let my dual personality take up its song. ”