CHAPTER V

THE LOVERS

ELLEN’S determination to take a day off from her work to enjoy the novelty of the new sensation of love at first sight proved a dangerous precedent.

The morning after Manning’s visit her mind refused to budge. She resolutely sat down at her desk, laid out her notes, sharpened three pencils and wrote the title to her article. Nothing followed. That is to say nothing that had any value for the columns of _The New Era Magazine_. What actually followed was the endless scribbling of Manning’s name. She wrote it in a smooth, flowing girlish hand as if addressing imaginary envelopes. She printed it out in pencilled type in secret correspondence. She wrote it with all sorts of prefixes--Mr. Ralph Manning, the Hon. Ralph Manning. She lingered over this one for quite a while and wondered if she would like him to enter politics. His Southern training gave him a leaning to political life. He was an orator. She had caught this from his modest account of the winning of the little gold oratory medal that dangled from his watch chain. He was a Democrat, too,--all Southern boys who came to New York were--except a few from the mountains. This would be an enormous advantage. New York City was overwhelmingly Democratic. His culture and genius for leadership would land him at the top. He might become the Governor.

She laughed at her silly enthusiasm, and the laugh died slowly into a frown.

“No! That wouldn’t do at all!” she muttered.

“A politician is a slave to convention. He dare not call his soul his own--no, decidedly not!”

She sprang to her feet with a gesture of disgust, threw down her pencil and sought a book to stimulate her mind to creative work again. Every book that stared at her from the shelves of her well-chosen library provoked an argument with Manning. They were all radical pleas for the new world in which she moved. The old-fashioned protests she had thrown away as fast as she read them. Her faith in woman had become a religion. In the fervor of her devotion she refused to harbor heresies. Any man or woman who opposed the emancipation of woman was a heretic, and their ravings in print or from the public platform were not only insults to the truth--they were crimes. She had made it a rule never to poison her soul with their venomous attacks.

Every title she read was an indictment of Manning’s old-fashioned creed. Somehow this morning she resented her own radical narrow-mindedness. There were two sides to every question, of course. She must give him credit for sincerity in his views.

“Heavens, what are his views?” she breathed suddenly.

For the life of her she couldn’t recall a single sentence of antagonism to her feminist philosophy. Why had she taken it for granted that he would oppose her?

The question startled.

She repeated it with fearless searching. There could be no doubt to the answer if she were honest enough to confess it. She was honest. She would confess it. The revelation had come from the depths of her woman’s intuitions--her instinctive perception of the mind and purpose of her mate.

The thought infuriated her. Why, in Heaven’s name, should she instinctively long for and deliberately plan to win a man who was the contradiction in creed, training, and character of everything she stood for in life?

Was it merely the old trick of nature bringing into union two people who were opposites? Or was her heart-surrender at sight to this mere man a proof of the futility of her philosophy of the economic, spiritual and physical independence of woman?

She rejected with scorn the idea of such proof. She determined to put the powers of her own personality to the test. She wanted this man. She would win him. She would beat down all opposition--no matter what the source. She would overwhelm his masculine mind with the obsession of her love. She would bring him a suppliant to her feet. She would hesitate at nothing to accomplish this complete triumph.

With him the old-fashioned way was the way to win. Of course, he would be shocked and hopelessly frightened at any other way.

She determined to drop serious literary work for a month. Fortunately, she had more than a month’s work ready for the press. Her tremendous energies had far outrun the requirements of the magazine for the past year. Much of her surplus writing had been seized by the popular magazines. They had paid the top prices and she was particularly proud of this achievement; made, not because she had curried favor with the mob, but precisely because she had defied their opinions and trampled their most sacred traditions.

She would merely drop this extra work and fill her columns in _The New Era_. This would give her a month of absolute freedom--freedom to live to her finger tips--freedom to explore the soul of a man and find its inmost secrets.

She devoted the day to the careful planning of the long weeks of voluptuous idleness she would spend basking in the presence of her chosen victim. That he would fall before the assault she would make was not to be doubted. He had given too many signs of human weakness the night before. There was the barest hesitation when confronted by her creed of independence. The deliberate plan to devote a month of precious time to the old-fashioned task of ensnaring a man was undignified in a new woman, to say the least.

But the end justified the means. The test--the final moral and spiritual test of her action--lay in its purpose. If she planned to force the burden of her keep on the unsuspecting victim it was immoral by all the standards of the new ethics. If her purpose was purely one of self-development, with no intention of either selling herself into slavery or forcing him into slavery, her conscience would be clear.

Her conscience was clear. She was following a beautiful and natural impulse--the impulse of a hungry heart in search of its mate. She would live this glorious hour to its last moment of joy.

She threw every scruple to the winds and gave herself to the task of winning the man she had chosen. No art of the dressmaker, the shoemaker, the milliner, the hairdresser was neglected.

At her suggestion he formed the habit of consulting her daily about his work. Her experience of five years in writing for the metropolitan journals made her advice invaluable. He was quick to recognize this and grateful for the honor of her assistance. These regular daily visits were made in the early morning and usually lasted but an hour--an hour of real work for two artistic minds.

His first article had been printed in full and featured with illustrations for the Sunday edition. It had made a sensation both among the radical leaders of the feminist movement and among the big newspaper men as well. It had been written with the true genius of the born reporter of events. A philosophy of life ran through its witty sentences, but the play of humor took the sting from his personal opinions and made both sides to the controversy laugh.

His ambition now was to win a permanent place on the staff of the paper, with a good annual salary attached, to a chance to move up as he should prove his worth.

Their morning conference over, he devoted the day to the hardest kind of work and gave each evening to Ellen West. He was not an observant man about a woman’s dress. He knew nothing of materials or the art of their making. He was very sensitive to their effects.

A joyous week had passed before he noticed the extraordinary care with which Ellen was dressing. It never occurred to him that he had caused it. To his mind it was merely the proof of her perfection as a woman. He was particularly pleased because it was proof positive that beneath all her talk of woman’s declaration of independence was the soul of a beautiful and sensitive girl hungry for love. However deep might be her convictions of women’s right to everything man might have fenced off and claimed as his own, he thanked God that she was not one of the feminine fools bent on making a man of herself.

Now that he had noticed the perfection of her dress and the exquisite charm with which her whole being seemed doubly charged because of it, he began to take courage. Drawn to her irresistibly from the moment of introduction, he had at first regarded her as a sort of goddess destined to dwell in the clouds above his head. For the first days of their intimacy he had not dared to think of her as a possible sweetheart. He had drifted in the resistless current which her interest in him had created, content if she smiled.

The new light of purpose began to grow in his gaze. She was quick to note it and quick to respond to its challenge.

She looked into his honest eyes with daring frankness. At first he had lowered his own as if afraid he had gone too far in some word or gesture. He began to return her deep penetrating gaze with a daring that made her lower her eyes in spite of her philosophy of independence.

At the end of four magic weeks he rapped the brass knocker on her door one morning with unusual violence. The maid was slow answering the call. He rapped again with greater violence.

He heard Ellen’s voice in sleepy tones:

“Don’t break it down, please, dear boy; Dora’s on a vacation!”

He heard her hand fumbling at the chain bolt and spoke as if for himself.

“I just can’t wait, Ellen!”

He put his hand over his mouth. He wondered if she had heard his daring familiarity.

The door suddenly opened and she stepped back to allow him to enter. To his amazement she was dressed in a pale pink negligee, her expressive eyes drooping still with the languor of sleep.

Never had her tall figure seemed so lissom, the lines of her body so clear and strong and the touch of her footstep so light.

“I beg your pardon,” he stammered, “for coming at this unearthly hour.”

“Come in,” she said softly.

“But I just had to see you and tell you first,” he rushed on, unmindful of her invitation.

“Come in!” she commanded.

He blushed, and went on excitedly.

“I can’t--I’ve just a minute to tell you that the big thing’s happened.”

“You’ve won your position?”

“Landed on both feet--the boss just called me in and told me my salary was fifty dollars a week and the job mine as long as I liked it.”

“They’ll give you more than that,” she smiled.

“You can bet they will; but the thing is that I’ve landed! I’m part now of the machine whose throb stirs the world.”

She caught the contagion of his enthusiasm and flushed with responsive joy as she extended her bare arm from the folds of the disturbing pink robe.

“I congratulate you.”

“I owe so much of it to you,” he cried.

“Nonsense; you deserve much more and it will come.”

He pressed her hand with unusual firmness.

“I must hurry to the office now; may I come a little earlier than usual to-night?”

“Certainly. I’m dying to know all about it.”

He pressed her hand again and bounded down the stairs.

Ellen closed the door, slowly walked back into her bedroom and looked into the mirror, her arms high above her shoulders in a lazy effort to readjust the mass of waving brown hair about to fall. She had hastily thrown it into an immense coil and fixed it with two pins before opening the door.

She smiled at the charming reflection in the mirror.

“I’m afraid I frightened the poor boy!” she murmured.

She lifted her figure with a slow graceful movement, conscious to her finger-tips of her power to charm the eye of man and lure his senses into submission to her will.

Her white teeth glowed in the dim light and her mirror flashed back the triumphant smile. The crisis had come. She knew it instinctively from the moment he had made his announcement. He had an income of $2,500 a year and the certainty of an increase in due season. He could marry on that. She read him as an open book. He rushed to tell her first because he had told her of his hopes and dreams. But the thing that gave spring to his step and brought him to her door at the unearthly hour of his call, the thing that pounded the knocker on her door until it rang like an alarm of fire, was the possibility of telling her of his love in the good old-fashioned way.

If there had been any doubt of this in the tone of his voice, the haste of his call or the process of her analysis of his mind, there could be no doubt about it after the last look he gave her before hurrying away. There was no mistaking that look.

Now that the crisis in their lives had come it was a pretty serious affair. Sure as she felt of her powers over his physical senses, there was the steel fiber in his character to be reckoned with.

He would ask her to marry him. He would do this to-night. She felt it with increasing dread and yet she wished it with increasing intensity.

“What a fool a woman is after all!” she exclaimed. “We _haven’t_ evolved a soul of our own--God knows it’s true!”

Not for a moment had she weakened on the fundamental test of her creed. She couldn’t figure out how he would take it when she refused to marry him.

He would beg and plead and cajole and repeat himself, of course. Men always had done this--they always would. But would he take refusal as final and quit?

The thought was sickening. For the first time she began to dimly realize the tragic possibilities of the situation into which she had allowed herself to drift.

The one thing that was now clear beyond the shadow of all doubt was that she was hopelessly in love. The passion that held her was the first great emotion she had ever experienced. It was sweeping all life before it.

She set her mouth firmly.

“In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood there’s no such word as fail!”

She took the pile of waving brown hair until it fell a mantle of tenderness about her finely rounded shoulders.

“Well, Mr. Armand Richelieu, I’m going to show your spirit that in the lexicon of youth which fate reserved for a bright womanhood there’s no such word as fail!”

She spent the day in lazy, joyous brooding over the coming evening. She amused herself picturing his possible attitudes when he came to the crucial moment of his declaration and the proposal which she knew would follow in the same breath.

He wouldn’t fall on his knees--that was certain. There was a deep vein of the romantic in his nature--and, confound it all--she admired him for it in spite of her ridicule of chivalry! But he was also endowed with a reasonable amount of common sense. She relied on this to save him in the end.

The day was warm, but not sultry--a typical, bright July day in New York, with cooling breezes sweeping the city from the sea. She planned the evening carefully and selected the exact spot for the big love-scene. It should be on the roof, with the stars looking down, and the soft splash of the tiny fountain for a musical accompaniment.

Again she wondered just what he would say--and again the foolish fear gripped her that she might lose him in the maze of her new theories of life.