Miss Dounay

“ Miss Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After the first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the affectionate, doting husband. ”

“ Never had Rollie seen so many manifestations of her feline restlessness, or her wiry endurance. When other women had sunk exhausted to sleep upon a cushion in a corner, or upon the shoulders of an escort who obligingly supported the fair head with his own weary body, Miss Dounay sat bolt and desperate, staring at the myriad shoreward lights as if they held some secret her wilful eyes would yet bore out of them. ”

“ Giving up hope of finding the minister in the bank upon his return, he addressed both his thoughts and his fears to the subject of Miss Dounay and her diamonds. The prospective interview with this passionate, self-willed, and no doubt wildly excited woman loomed before him oppressively, and the nearer it drew, the more ominous it seemed. A man going unarmed to return a stolen cub to a tigress in a jungle lair would be going upon a mission of peace and safety compared to his. He feared that in her passionate vehemence she would never permit him to get the full truth before her. ”

“ John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her feet, saw her lip curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully at the leading juvenile man who, with grimacing intent to tease, had made the remark to the ingenue as both passed near.
"Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer, and turned again to Hampstead, speaking sharply. "Very bad! You must be in your running stride when my weight falls on you. We must practice." ”

“ Several of Miss Dounay's guests were well known to Hampstead personally, and the readiness with which they dragged him within attested to the clergyman's wide popularity among quite different sorts of very much worth-while persons, for, as a matter of fact, Miss Dounay's guests were rather representative. The group included an editor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, a prominent merchant, a capitalist or two, and other persons, either of achievement or position, to the number of some eight or ten. ”

“ Without waiting to be announced, he went up and knocked at the door of Miss Dounay's apartment. It was opened a mere crack to reveal a nose and a bit of an eyebrow. This facial fragment belonged to Julie, and with it she managed to convey an expression at once forbidding and inquisitorial.
"Oh, la la!" she exclaimed, after her survey. "It is the handsome man. Come in," and the door swung wide. "Madame will be glad to see you. Perhaps you bring the diamonds." ”

“ On Wednesday night Miss Dounay made good her word. When the little prayer-meeting audience emerged from the chapel room of All People's, it gazed wonderingly at a huge black shape on wheels that rested at the curb with two giant, fiery eyes staring into the night.
The old sexton, looking down from the open doorway, saw his pastor shut into this luxurious equipage with two strange women, for Marien was properly accompanied by Julie, and nodded his head with emphatic approval.
"Some errand of mercy," he mumbled with fervency. "Brother Hampstead is the most helpful man in the world." ”

“ All you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I come to you, and after that to hold me poised while you bound off the stage. Can you do it?"
With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss Dounay completed the proposed manœuvre of her lower limbs, and John found himself with the long, exquisitely moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his arms, while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.
"Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from his shoulder.
"You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly provoked at himself. ”

“ I will renounce my own ambition, abandon the stage, cancel my engagements, give up that for which I have bartered everything a woman has to give but one thing. I have kept that one thing for you alone. The name of Marien Dounay shall disappear. I will be Alice Higgins again. I will be not an artist but a wife. ”

“ And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?"
This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and humiliation.
Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near, her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself. But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this was all logical and psychological. ”

“ Marien Dounay had made woman mean more to him than woman had ever meant before. But here in the upturned, trusting face of Bessie, with its sparkle in the eyes and its sunny witchery in the dimples, there was something infinitely richer and more satisfying than experience or imagination had been able to suggest. ”

“ Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision than a woman, at once so beautiful and so adorable that big, sincere, open-eyed John Hampstead worshipped her where she stood—worshipped her and loved her—as a man should love an angel. ”

“ In this atmosphere John Hampstead arose, and when one hand swept back the yellow mass of hair, a kind of glory appeared upon his brow. Once an actor, once a man of ambition, he was now consecrated to the service of humanity.
But he had not surrendered his love for Bessie Mitchell, and Marien Dounay was still in the world, mounting higher and higher toward the goal she had imperiously set for herself. ”

“ He was ashamed of himself, heartily. Bessie, the good, the pure, the noble! Why, he could not think of her at all in the terms in which he thought of Marien Dounay. His instinct for Marien had been to possess. For Bessie it was to revere, to worship—and yet—and yet—he wanted her now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had felt for Marien.
Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie. He felt unworthy. He could not see himself taking her hand, touching her lips, declaring his love to her now. ”

“ Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he accepted it as the demonstrated truth.
As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart ”

“ Hampstead's gaze watched the receding figure, and a poignant regret for her smote in upon him in the midst of all his joy.
Desperately, with that enormous resolution of which she was capable, Marien Dounay was stepping undemonstratively out of his life. But as she went, he knew that the verdict pronounced upon him by the court was one now pronounced upon her. All through life she would be held to answer for the love she had slain for the sake of her ambition. ”

“ Out of all this thinking gradually emerged one solid, unshifting fact. This was the character of John Hampstead. He, Rollo Burbeck, might be a shriveling, paltering coward; Marien Dounay might be only a beautiful fiend; but John Hampstead was a strong, unwavering man. John Hampstead would stand firm!
Buoying his soul on this idea, Rollie dropped off to feverish slumber. But the sleeper awoke suddenly with one question hooking at his vitals. Was any man physically equal to such a strain? Was John Hampstead still standing firm like the huge human bulwark he had begun to seem? ”

“ Ah, what letters he would write, letters that would not only keep her love alive but fan it, while he punished himself for his insane disloyalty.
Disloyalty! Yes, that was the very word. He knew as he reflected that he had been disloyal ever to yield to the spell of Marien Dounay. He had been disloyal to Bessie, to his ideals, and to himself.
He turned to where a few days before he had pinned his old Los Angeles motto on the wall of his Oakland room: "Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success." ”

“ Both the resentment and the inference the Elder stored up carefully against a day which he felt that he could see advancing, while the minister, too intent upon his work to scan the horizon for a cloud, hurried away upon another of his errands to the riff-raff.
With this fanatic ardor of personal service now highly developed, it was inevitable that the appeal in the eyes of Marien Dounay should act like a challenge upon the chivalrous nature of John Hampstead. ”

“ For me rather! To fear," she exclaimed with a happily apologetic little laugh, "that you might fall in love with Marien Dounay!"
But the laugh ended in a choke of surprise, when Bessie felt the body of the big man shiver like a tree in a blast.
"Why? Why? What is the matter, John?" she asked in helpless bewilderment, for the odd face with a profile like a mountain had taken on a look of pain, and while she questioned him, he put her from him and with a low groan sank down upon the bench. ”

“ She was decked as if for an evening party in a dress of gold and spangles, as conspicuous for an excess of materials in the train as for an utter absence of them about the arms and shoulders, which, on this occasion, even the blaze of diamonds did not redeem from a look of nakedness to the eyes of the minister,—a mental reaction which any student of psychology will recognize as ample evidence that John Hampstead, man, had passed entirely beyond the power of Marien Dounay, woman. ”

“ I, of course, understood very little of it, but Dounia explained to me that, though he is not a man of great education, he is clever and seems to be good-natured. You know your sister's character, Rodya. She is a resolute, sensible, patient and generous girl, but she has a passionate heart, as I know very well. Of course, there is no great love either on his side, or on hers, but Dounia is a clever girl and has the heart of an angel, and will make it her duty to make her husband happy who on his side will make her happiness his care. ”

“ They were taken, under guard of several soldiers, to the stream where the General had met the Queen. The Lady of Fashion and the Poet were waiting for them and the Teenie Weenie soldiers gave three mighty cheers when they saw their friends. The prisoners were exchanged and the Lady of Fashion and the Poet were taken to the Teenie Weenie camp, where they were given a royal welcome.
The Lady of Fashion was so happy to be again among her friends that she did a very ladylike thing—she cried. The nurses cried and several of the men were seen to blow their tiny noses and blink their eyes. ”

“ There is, however, in the translation more than a trace of the enthusiasm with which Dunois speaks of the deeds of the heroic maiden. Dunois, Bastard of Orleans as he is always called, bore the following titles, as recited by the chronicler: 'l'illustrieuse prince Jean Comte de Dunois et de Longueville, lieutenant-général de notre seigneur le roi.' He was fifty-one years old in the month of February, 1456. His deposition extends over the entire period of the life of Joan of Arc between the time of her arrival before Orleans and the period of the King's coronation. ”

“ The resources of tact and good taste are well-nigh infinite, and to them is added a capacity for administration and affairs which makes the French gentleman respect his wife's judgment, and places the French shopkeeper at the mercy of his spouse. In whatever walk of life these young provincial girls are destined to tread, they will have no afflicting doubts as to the limits of their usefulness. They will probably never even pause to ask themselves what men would do without them, nor to point a lesson vaingloriously from the curious fact that Douai gave Gayant a wife. ”

“ Joan rode between Dunois and the archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France. The air resounded with the Te Deum sung with all their hearts by clergy and crowd. “In God’s name,” said Joan to Dunois, “here is a good people and a devout; when I die, I should much like it to be in these parts.” “Joan,” inquired Dunois, “know you when you will die and in what place?” “I know not,” said she, “for I am at the will of God.” Then she added, “I have accomplished that which my Lord commanded me, to raise the siege of Orleans and have the gentle king crowned. ”

“ I took it out back of camp, got some tools and cut a couple of holes for my arms to go through and another hole to see through—”
“Yes, and spoiled a perfectly good thimble,” put in the General.
“Jinks!” exclaimed the Dunce, “I never thought of that.”
“Of course you didn’t,” answered the General sternly. “You have a habit of doing your thinking afterwards, and that is a mighty bad habit.”
“Quite right! Quite right!” cried a field mouse, who had been hanging around the camp for a few days. “Quite right, I says. There’s always a time to think. ”

“ Henriette said to Dunoisse, as the great waves of melody broke over them:
“You said that night in the boudoir that you would not take advice from me as a sister. But I am your sister!—nothing but your sister! Let us make a compact upon that?”
Dunoisse agreed, without enthusiasm. She thanked him in a velvety whisper. Presently she said:
“If all men were as noble as you, this world would be a happy place for women. How wonderful to have met a nature such as yours! Another man would have kissed me—that night when I made my terrible confession. ”