FullReads

Mrs. McChesney had wandered into the dining-room. She peered out of windows. She poked into butler’s pantry. She inspected wall-lights. And still T. A. Buck stared at his stick.

“It’s really robbery,” came Emma McChesney’s voice from the next room. “Only a New York agent could have the nerve to do it. I’ve a friend who lives in Chicago–Mary Cutting. You’ve heard me speak of her. Has a flat on the north side there, just next door to the lake. The rent is ridiculous; and–would you believe it?–the flat is equipped with bookcases, and gorgeous mantel shelves, and buffet, and bathroom fixtures, and china-closets, and hall-tree–“

Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly low-priced Chicago flat, thus:

“–and full-length mirrors, and wonderful folding table-shelf gimcracks in the kitchen, and–“

T. A. Buck did not look up. But, “Oh, Chicago!” he might have been heard to murmur, as only a New-Yorker can breathe those two words.

“Don’t ‘Oh, Chicago!’ like that,” mimicked Emma McChesney. “I’ve lain awake nights dreaming of a home I once saw there, with the lake in the back yard, and a couple of miles of veranda, and a darling vegetable- garden, and the whole place simply honeycombed with bathrooms, and sleeping-porches, and sun-parlors, and linen-closets, and–gracious, I wonder what’s keeping Jock!”

T. A. Buck wrenched his eyes from his stick. All previous remarks descriptive of his eyes under excitement paled at the glow which lighted them now. They glowed straight into Emma McChesney’s eyes and held them, startled.

“Emma,” said T. A. Buck quite calmly, “will you marry me? I want to give you all those things, beginning with the lake in the back yard and ending with the linen-closets and the sun-parlor.”

And Emma McChesney, standing there in the middle of the dining-room floor, stared long at T. A. Buck, standing there in the center of the living-room floor. And if any human face, in the space of seventeen seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm, and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy, Emma McChesney’s countenance might be said to have expressed all those emotions–and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came toward him.

“T. A.,” she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, “I’m thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left any woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. And now–“

There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck’s too feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.

“Now, Emma,” he repeated, “will you marry me?”

Emma McChesney’s eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain were they, so wide with unshed tears.

“As long as–he–lived,” she went on, “the thought of marriage was repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that seemed to waver and dance”–she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment– “‘McChesney–Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years. Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers’ chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh papers please copy!'”

T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently down.

“Emma,” he said, “will you marry me?”

“T. A., I don’t love you. Wait! Don’t say it! I’m thirty-nine, but I’m brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven’t convinced me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in business, that I’m not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as that. Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light- heartedest, and the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us are, beneath it all, the marryingest. Perhaps I’m making a mistake. Perhaps ten years from now I’ll be ready to call myself a fool for having let slip what the wise ones would call a ‘chance.’ But I don’t think so, T. A.”