Robert Chambers - The Streets of Ascalon

"I am in love with you; that is the trouble, Mrs. Leeds. And I really have no business to say so until I amount to something."

"You have no business to say so anyway after one single evening's acquaintance!" she retorted hotly.

"Oh, that! If love were a matter of time and convention – like five o'clock tea! – but it isn't, you know. It isn't the brevity of our acquaintance that worries me; it's what I am – and what you are – and – and the long, long road I have to travel before I am worth your lightest consideration – I never was in love before. Forgive my crudeness. I'm only conscious of the – hopelessness of it all."

Breathless, confused, incredulous, she sat there staring at him – listening to and watching this tall, quiet, cool young fellow who was telling her such incomprehensible things in a manner that began to fascinate her. With an effort she collected herself, shook off the almost eerie interest that was already beginning to obsess her, and stood up, flushed but composed.

"Shall we not say any more about it?" she said quietly. "Because there is nothing more to say, Mr. Quarren – except – thank you for – for feeling so amiably toward me – for believing me more than I really am… And I would like to have your friendship still, if I may – "

"You have it."

"Even yet?"

"Why not?.. It's selfish of me to say it – but I wish you – could have saved me," he said almost carelessly.

"From what, Mr. Quarren? I really do not understand you."

"From being what I am – the sort of man you first divined me to be."

"What do you mean by 'saving' you?" she asked, coldly.

"I don't know! – giving me a glimmer of hope I suppose – something to strive for."

"One saves one's self," she said.

He turned an altered face toward her: and she looked at him intently.

"I guess you are right," he said with a short laugh. "If there is anything worth saving, one saves one's self."

"I think that is true," she said… "And – if my friendship – if you really care for it – "

He met her gaze:

"I honestly don't know. I've been carried off my feet by you, completely. A man, under such conditions, doesn't know anything – not even enough to hold his tongue – as you may have noticed. I am in love with you. As I am to-day, my love for you would do you no good – I don't know whether yours would do me any good – or your friendship, either. It ought to if I amounted to anything; but I don't – and I don't know."

"I wish you would not speak so bitterly – please – "

"All right. It wasn't bitterness; it was just whine. … I'll go, now. You will comprehend, after you think it over, that there is at least nothing of impertinence in my loving you – only a blind unreason – a deadly fear lest the other man in me, suddenly revealed, vanish before I could understand him. Because when I saw you, life's meaning broke out suddenly – like a star – and that's another stale simile. But one has to climb very far before one can touch even the nearest of the stars… So forgive my one lucid interval… I shall probably never have another… May I take you to your carriage?"

"Mrs. Lannis is calling for me."

"Then – I will take my leave – and the tatters of my reputation – any song can buy it, now – "

"Mr. Quarren!"

"Yes?"

"I don't want you to go – like this. I want you to go away knowing in your heart that you have been very – nice – agreeable – to a young girl who hasn't perhaps had as much experience as you think – "

"Thank God," he said, smiling.

"I want you to like me, always," she said. "Will you?"

"I promise," he replied so blithely that for a moment his light irony deceived her. Then something in his eyes left her silent, concerned, unresponsive – only her heart seemed to repeat persistently in childish reiteration, the endless question, Why? Why? Why? And she heard it but found no answer where love was not, and had never been.

"I – am sorry," she said in a low voice. "I – I try to understand you – but I don't seem to… I am so very sorry that you – care for me."

He took her gloved hand, and she let him.

"I guess I'm nothing but a harlequin after all," he said, "and they're legitimate objects for pity. Good-bye, Mrs. Leeds. You've been very patient and sweet with a blithering lunatic… I've committed only another harlequinade of a brand-new sort. But the fall from that balcony would have been less destructive."

She looked at him out of her gray eyes.

"One thing," she said, with a tremulous smile, "you may be certain that I am not going to forget you very easily."

"Another thing," he said, "I shall never forget you as long as I live; and – you have my violets, I see. Are they to follow the gardenia?"

"Only when their time comes," she said, trying to laugh.

So he wished her a happy trip and sojourn in the South, and went away into the city – downtown, by the way to drop into an office chair in an empty office and listen to the click of a typewriter in the outer room, and sit there hour after hour with his chin in his hand staring at nothing out of the clear blue eyes of a boy.

And she went away to her luncheon at the Province Club with Susanne Lannis who wished her to meet some of the governors – very grand ladies – upon whose good will depended Strelsa's election to the most aristocratic, comfortable, wisely managed, and thriftiest of all metropolitan clubs.

After luncheon she, with Mrs. Lannis and Chrysos Lacy – a pretty red-haired edition of her brother – went to see "Sumurun."

And after they had tea at the redoubtable Mrs. Sprowl's, where there were more footmen than guests, more magnificence than comfort, and more wickedness in the gossip than lemon in the tea or Irish in the more popular high-ball.

The old lady, fat, pink, enormous, looked about her out of her little glittering green eyes with a pleased conviction that everybody on earth was mortally afraid of her. And everybody, who happened to be anybody in New York, was exactly that – with a few eccentric exceptions like her nephew, Karl Westguard, and half a dozen heavily upholstered matrons whose social altitude left them nothing to be afraid of except lack of deference and death.

Mrs. Sprowl had a fat, wheezy, and misleading laugh; and it took time for Strelsa to understand that there was anything really venomous in the old lady; but the gossip there that afternoon, and the wheezy delight in driving a last nail into the coffin of some moribund reputation, made plain to her why her hostess was held in such respectful terror.

The talk finally swerved from Molly Wycherly's ball to the Irish Legation, and Mrs. Sprowl leaned toward Strelsa, and panted behind her fan:

"A perfect scandal, child. The suppers those young men give there! Orgies, I understand! No pretty actress in town is kept sighing long for invitations. Even" – she whispered the name of a lovely and respectable prima-donna with a perfectly good husband and progeny – and nodded so violently that it set her coughing.

"Oh," cried Strelsa, distressed, "surely you have been misinformed!"

"Not in the least," wheezed the old lady. "She is no better than the rest of 'em! And I sent for my nephew Karl, and I brought him up roundly. 'Karl!' said I, 'what the devil do you mean! Do you want that husband of hers dragging you all into court?' And, do you know, my dear, he appeared perfectly astounded – said it wasn't so – just as you said a moment ago. But I can put two and two together, yet; I'm not too old and witless to do that! And I warrant you I gave him a tongue trouncing which he won't forget. … Probably he retailed it to that O'Hara man, and to young Quarren, too. If he did it won't hurt 'em, either."