CHAPTER XI

It was not often that Wilmer remained long awake after retiring to her room. Her days came to a calm and untroubled close with the first approach of drowsiness. The problems which claimed her attention were either of that minor daylight character familiar to all housekeepers or else of so purely an academic nature--being largely those offered by the younger British novelists--that they were as easily laid aside at night as her walking boots.

But this evening, instead of hurrying into bed after blowing out her light, she slipped on a dainty negligee and sat by the open window. She enjoyed the feel of the fresh night breeze on her white forehead and warm face. The moon had already lost one section of its brilliant circumference, but enough was left to bathe in a translucent glow the encircling hills which shut in the sleeping valley covered now with a silver veil. A cluster of chestnut-oaks stood below her window slightly to the left of the porch. Fleeting bits of light sifted through the luxuriant foliage like drops of silver rain. The scene before her eyes was both clear and vague; many bits easily recognizable, but the rest complicated with full-bodied shadows. She knew every inch of it, and yet it was veiled in mystery. Knowing there was nothing to fear, still she would have been afraid to walk abroad alone. She would not trust her intelligence to keep in leash her imagination. And yet if her intellect could not do that for her, it was serving her ill.

It was--in other ways. Reason should have told her she was making too much of the incident of the afternoon. To treat that seriously was to make too much of Allston himself. And this was dangerous. It destroyed perspective and cloaked the man in mystery--as the night light did the familiar acres and trees before her. This left her the prey to all sorts of illusions--to all sorts of unwarranted timidities. It took her back to childhood and virginal ignorance. This, after her reading had turned the searchlight upon one shadow after another revealing the stark truth.

The stark truth was sometimes unpleasant; sometimes tediously innocuous. Never was it romantic. Most men, it seems, were the slaves of fleeting passions; most women, their victims. This ended sometimes in tragedy; sometimes in comedy; sometimes in nothing at all. The greatest tragedy to her was when it ended in nothing at all. She had an orderly mind and liked to reach definite conclusions. She found vagueness depressing.

Yet that appeared to be the spirit of the day. No one knew anything with certainty whether of politics or religion or human nature. She herself had clung persistently to most of the doctrines of her father in politics and religion, and found them adequate. But she could not accept his trusting confidence in the inherent honesty of men, except those of his generation. The world was simpler in his day.

She had liked Allston from the start and been willing to accept him, up to a certain point, at his face value. She never expected to go beyond that point. As long as she viewed him merely objectively, she found him distinctly entertaining and a decided addition to her list of friends. Considering the circumstances of his introduction to the household, she was warranted in believing that here their relations would end. It was on this theory she had allowed herself so much freedom with him.

Now this was all changed. He had thrust himself upon her attention in another fashion. When he seized her hand, the act, in itself, was trivial enough, as he had argued. But what it connoted was not trivial. And the effect it produced on her was not trivial. The blood which rushed to her face was not in protest at his boldness, even though for self-protection she had been obliged to make him think so. In reality it was a startling confession of weakness in herself. Had she been coldly indifferent or even righteously indignant, she could have forgotten the incident. But she could not forget the surge of a far different emotion that had swept through her.

She had handled herself well considering the strength and unexpectedness of this attack. The carefully erected barriers of years had been swept away. She had found herself standing, self-dependent, facing this man in the grip of a passion so primitive it shocked her. She had been thrilled by the clasp of his strong fingers. For a few dizzy seconds she was merely some captured thing glad of her capture. Had she obeyed her desires, she would not have struggled at all--would neither have withdrawn her hand nor chided him.

Wilmer faced the truth mercilessly. She made no attempt to equivocate or to excuse herself, though even here in the privacy of her room her cheeks flamed scarlet once again. She had been governed by instincts as primitive as anything she might expect of Roxie and she knew it. To be sure, she had conquered them. In the space of half a dozen frantic heartbeats she had mastered herself. But this did not blot out those other few seconds.

And now to explain it--and she must explain it to maintain her self-respect--she was driven to the use of the word love; the word she prided herself on being able to regard with almost cynical scorn. It was not like this that she had expected love to come, if ever it did come into her life. If she was not yet twenty-five, she was no longer seventeen. She was supposed to be sufficiently well disciplined to analyze even this passion intelligently. If not, all her reading and thought were to little purpose. The first appeal of a lover to her should be through intellect and character, not through the emotions.

It was some consolation to be able to admit that she could offer no criticism of Allston’s character as far as it had been revealed to her. As for his intellect, if it was not as acutely active as her ideal called for, it was by no means negative. She might have been satisfied with it--if only it mattered. But it did not.

She had not this afternoon, and she did not now, care a picayune about his intellect. It was the beat of his pulse against her hand which had swayed her. It was the feel of being in his possession that had taken away her breath. It was the magic of his eyes seeking her eyes with an insistence almost brutal which had swept her off her feet.

It was all those things which at this moment brought into her eyes something of the mystery which the moon brought to the familiar picture at which in awe she now gazed from her window. Her lips parted and she pronounced his name--using quite unconsciously, because it expressed a tenderness her mood demanded, a nickname she associated with a brother who had died very young.

“Ned,” she repeated to herself.

The sound of the whispered name brought the man into such vivid being that it was as though he stood beside her. She shrank away from the window. She stared about the room in fear lest her boldness had actually materialized him. Hurriedly she threw off her negligee and running to the bed hid herself beneath the sheets.