Part 7 (1/2)
”Then you acknowledge it?”
”Freely.”
Pauline looked about for a rock of the right height, and finding one, seated herself, and began to draw off her gloves. ”Some time--in some other existence--will you come and tell me how it has paid you, please?
You are so preternaturally intelligent, and you have such a will of your own, that you cannot have fallen into it from stupidity, as so many do.”
Her gloves off, she began to tighten the braids of her hair, loosened by the gallop.
”It pays as it goes; it makes one forget for a moment the hideous tiresomeness of existence. But you put your question off to some other life; you have no intention, then, of redeeming me in this?”
”I shouldn't succeed. In the first place, I have no influence--”
”You know I am your slave,” said Ash; his voice suddenly deepened.
”And how much of a slave shall you be to the next pretty peasant girl you meet?” Mrs. Graham demanded, turning towards him, both hands still occupied with her hair.
”I don't deny that. But it has nothing to do with the subject.”
”In one way I know it has not,” she answered, after she had fastened the last braid in its place with a long gold pin.
”How right I was to like you! You understand of yourself the thing that so few women can ever be brought to comprehend. Well, if you acknowledge that it makes no difference--I mean about the peasant girls--we're just where we were; I am your slave, yet you have no desire to reclaim me. I believe you like me better as I am,” he added, abruptly.
”Do you want me to tell you that you are impertinent?” demanded Pauline, with her lovely smile, that always contradicted in its sweetness any apparent rebuke expressed by her words. ”Do I know what you are in reality, or care to know? I know what you seem, and what you seem is admirable, perfect, for these rides of ours, the most enchanting rides I have ever had.”
”And the rides are to be the end of it? You wouldn't care for me elsewhere?”
”Ah!” said Pauline, rising and drawing on her gloves, ”you wouldn't care for _me_. In Paris I am altogether another person; I am not at all as you see me here. In Paris you would call me a doll. Come, don't dissect the happy present; enjoy it as I do. 'He only is rich who owns the day,'
and we own this--for our ride.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”'YOU KNOW I AM YOUR SLAVE'”]
”'I hear the hoofs upon the hill; I hear them fainter, fainter still,'”
she sang in her clear voice. ”The idea of that old Virginia song coming to me here!”
”This talk about reclaiming and reforming is all bosh,” remarked Ash, leaning back against a high fragment of rock, with his hands in his pockets. ”I am what I am because I choose to be, that's all. The usual successes of American life, what are they? I no longer care a rap about them, because I've had them, or at least have seen them within my reach.
I came up from nothing; I got an education--no matter now how I got it; I studied law. In ten years I had won such a position in my profession (my branch of it--I was never an office lawyer) that everything lay open before me. It was only a question of a certain number of years. Not only was this generally prophesied, but I knew it myself. But by that time I had found out the unutterable stupidity of people and their pursuits; I couldn't help despising them. I had made enough to make my mother comfortable, and there came over me a horror of a plodding life. I said to myself, 'What is the use of it?' Of pleasure there was no question.
But I could go back to that plodding life to-morrow if I chose. Don't you believe it, Pauline?”
”Yes.”
”Yet you don't say--try?”
”Try, by all means.”
”At a safe distance from you!”
”Yes, at a safe distance from me,” Pauline answered. ”I should do you no good; I am not enough in earnest. I am never in earnest long about anything. I am changeable, too--you have no idea how changeable. There has been no opportunity to show you.”