Part 30 (1/2)
”But don't you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you like--”
”But I couldn't. Then you would no longer be _you_. And I like you so well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head.”
Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was in danger. ”Not of falling in love with some other man,” she thought, ”for that's impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I'd accept and that would lead on and on--where?”
She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away to Was.h.i.+ngton to a.s.sist the party leaders in putting through a difficult tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He expected to be gone a week; but week after week pa.s.sed and he was still at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation, interest.
After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs.
Provost's next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her own age. Something in his expression--perhaps the amused way in which he studied the faces of the others--attracted her to him. She glanced over at his card. It read ”Mr. Shenstone.”
”It doesn't add much to your information, does it?” he smiled, as he caught her glance rising from the card.
”Nothing,” she confessed candidly. ”I never heard of you before.”
”And yet I've been splas.h.i.+ng about, trying to attract attention to myself, for twelve years.”
”Perhaps not in this particular pond.”
”No, that is true.”
”I was wondering what you do--lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man or what.
”And what did you conclude?”
”I concluded that you did nothing.”
”You are right. But I try--I paint.”
”Portraits?”
”Yes.”
”That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you'll get no customers if you paint them as you see them.”
”I only see what they see when they look in the mirror.”
”Yes, but you see it impartial--or rather, I should say, cynically.”
”Thank you.”
”For what?”
”For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with the women.”
”Are you a 'devil with the women'?”
”Not I--not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you--I am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so discontented?”
”Because I have nothing to occupy my mind.”
”No children?”