Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

“ Oh, Anita”—he caught her hands and drew her toward him—“think what life might be if it wasn't for our accursed poverty. If we'd only had just a little between us. 'Each life's unfulfilled, you see, and both hang patchy and scrappy.' If we'd only had the courage to face things hand in hand, we'd have gotten along somehow, and we surely would have 'sighed deep, laughed free, starved, feasted, despaired, been happy.' But we didn't have the courage, did we? We wouldn't believe in our dreams. That's the worst of life: she won't let you.” ”

“ And when I heard his step on the stair, all at once I understood. It doesn't lie outside in vistas of mystery and beauty. It is deep in our hearts, the eternal romance, which is life, which is love. Good-by, Eugene. ”

“ You don't know what it means to have things in your heart that you can't express—to have beautiful things in your soul that vanish when you try to express them, so that you have to give piano and dancing lessons in order to live. You are just a business man. That's all you've ever cared for, that and success. And you've always won. You do not know what it's like to lose.”
“Anita, how long have you felt this way?”—his voice was crisp, restrained. ”

“ She snatched up a fan and slid away over the polished floor. “Play,” she commanded, tossing him a banjo, which he caught deftly and strummed with accustomed fingers, while she floated about the room like a thistle-down, and made sudden provocative pauses, with fan held high above her head, then swayed like a flower in the wind and took quick, running, little steps, and stamped her heels upon the floor and bent languorously backward. At last, with a final curtsy, she stopped, her hand on her heart, her face as pink as the roses on her walls. ”

“ And life always running on oiled wheels. Everything done in a stately, solemn, well-ordered fashion. Nothing joyous, haphazard, no ingenious makeshifts, no delirious ups and downs, no more gambling on the unexpected, no more gipsyings—just one dead, monotonous level of comfort and luxury. ”

“ Are you not free, Eugene?”
“Tove, no! Even as you have your millionaire, so I have my widow. She is a little older, a little grayer, a little stouter than I; but she is still charming, and always a very rich woman.”
Anita's laughter—laughter with an edge on it—rang through the room. “Eugene, now I see. You couldn't be true to anything, to the things you really believed in—to your dreams, to art, or to me. That was why you couldn't believe that I could be true.”
“Of course I couldn't, star-eyed Anita,” he returned cynically; “are you not a woman?” ”

“ You've never smelled Southern jasmine before, and your dull, uncultivated senses can't appreciate it. And don't dare to speak in that way of my chafing-dish. Haven't I made you goodies in it? Haven't I? Haven't I?”
He refused to be cajoled. “It's a horrible way to live,” he grumbled. He had picked up one of the frail, dainty candle-shades and was turning it over absently in his hands; and now he cast it impatiently aside. “It accounts for that thin line in your cheek and the slenderness of your wrists,” taking possession of them. “Just wait till we're married. ”

“ She stood smiling at “Young Lochinvar,” her cheeks as pink as her gown, her eyes sparkling. “You haven't forgotten to quote poetry, have you? Well, we'll have one of those old Spanish dances we used to do down on the plantation, and you shall drink a cup of wine, that is, if you stop glaring at me as if you'd never seen me before.” ”