Part 49 (2/2)

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

Forbes had been recruiting strength to tell her that he released her; but she antic.i.p.ated him by jilting him first--and in sporting terms. He stared at her, but he could not see the tears raining down in her heart.

He heard her, but was deaf to the immense regret in the little words she added:

”You're pretty poor, aren't you?”

His very forehead was drenched with red shame at such comment from her.

She could see how she had hurt his pride, and she put on the solemnity he expected her to wear.

”Oh, don't misunderstand me, Harvey, I implore you! I love you all the more for being just your glorious self. You've paid me the greatest honor I ever had--or shall have. You asked me to be your wife, and you are willing to divide up your pitiful little income with me. You'd give it all to me. You'd run into debt till you smothered. But it wouldn't work out. Mother was right: 'People can do without love easier than without money.'”

”Not people with hearts like yours,” he ventured at last to put in as a feeble objection.

”Oh, I'm afraid of this heart of mine,” she answered. ”If it had any sense it wouldn't have fallen in love with you--you of all men. I knew you weren't really terribly rich, but I didn't think you were so pitifully, cruelly poor.”

The epithet reiterated stung him like a whip in the face. He protested impatiently:

”I'm not really poor. Army officers have many ways of saving expenses. I might not give you princely luxuries, Persis, but I'd make your life happy.”

His resistance gave her something to fight, and her resentment at fate welcomed it.

”Me happy at an army post? With nothing but poker for you and gossip for me? No, thank you!”

She caught a twitch of anger in his brows, and she grew harsher:

”Look here! Would you give up your career for me?”

”A woman can't ask a man to give up his career,” he answered; and she retorted with the spirit of her time:

”Then why should she give up hers for him?”

He looked an old-fas.h.i.+oned surprise. ”And have you a career?”

”Of course I have. Every woman has; and nowadays a woman has got to look out for herself and her future, or she'll get left at the post.”

”And what career have you?” he asked, amazed.

”Marriage. It's the average woman's main business in life, Harvey. If she fails in that she fails in everything.”

”Then you think the poor have no right to marry?”

”Oh no, I'm not such a fool as that. There are people with simple tastes who can be happy on nothing a year--sweet domestic women who love to manage and cook and sweep and mend and sew. There are lots of unhappy rich women who would be thoroughly contented if they were the wives of laboring-men. But that doesn't happen to be my type. I can't help it. I grow positively sick at the sight of a needle. Even fancy st.i.tching hurts my eyes. And I can't help that. There are lots of poor women who are making their homes h.e.l.ls because they have no money. They'd be angels if they didn't have to economize. Some people, rich and poor, take a sensuous delight in watching a bank account grow, and they get more thrill out of saving a penny than out of getting something more beautiful for it.

”But I'm not one of those. I'm a squanderer by nature. I hate to be denied things. I loathe counting the cost of things. I can't endure to see some one else wearing better things than I've got on. I want to throttle a woman who has a later hat than mine. Oh, I may be a bad one, Harvey, but it isn't my fault. I am what I was born to be. I've got to marry money, Harvey. I've just got to.”

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