PAGE 3
"Who Is Sylvia?"
by
“But this is a different and much more particular thing,” she insisted with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. “I have a sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a list of questions and you will answer them fully, won’t you? Then I shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the Drewitt affair. When do you start?”
“To-morrow morning. I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then,” doggedly, “then I’m coming home to be married. I came in to tell you.”
“And if I don’t quite believe you?”
“I shall postpone the ceremony. Shall we say indefinitely, some time in the summer?”
“Not even then. Never, I think. That troublesome girl is beginning–she feels that she ought to tell you–“
“That there is another ‘another’?”
“Yes, I fear so.”
“Who will be in town for the next three months?”
“Again, I fear so.”
“Then that’s all right,” said the optimistic Jimmie. “There never was a man–save one, oh, lady mine–who could, for three months, avoid boring you. When he holds forth upon every subject under the sun and stars you will think longingly of me and of the endless variety of my one topic, ‘I’m going to marry you.'”
“But if he should make it his?”
“I defy him to do it. There is no guise in which he could clothe the idea which would not remind you instantly of me. If he should be poetical: well, so was I when we were twenty-one. If he should give you gifts of great price: well, so did I in those Halcyon days when I had an allowance from my Governor and toiled not. If his is an outdoor wooing, you will inevitably remember that I taught you to ride, to skate, to drive, and to play golf. If he should attack you musically, you will be surprised at the number of operas we’ve heard together and of duets we’ve sung together. And so, in the words of my friend, fellow-sufferer, and name-sake, Mr. Yellowplush, ‘You’ll still remember Jeames.'”
“That’s nonsense!” cried Miss Knowles. “I’ve tried to be fond of you–I am fond of you and accustomed to you. The fatal point is that I am accustomed to you. You say you never bore me. Well, you don’t. And that other men do. Well, you’re right. But people don’t marry people simply because they don’t bore each other.”
“Your meaning is clearer than your words and much more correct. This really essential consideration is, alas, frequently not considered.”
“People should marry,” said Miss Knowles with a sort of consecrated earnestness–the most deadly of all the practiced phases of her coquetry–“for love. Now, I’m not in love with you. If I were, the very idea of your going away would make me miserable. And do I seem miserable? Am I lovelorn? Look at me carefully and tell the truth.”
Jimmie obeyed, and the contemplation of his hostess seemed to depress him.
“No,” he agreed gloomily, “you seem to bear up. No one, looking at your face, could guess that your heart was in–was in–” Jimmie halted, vainly searching for the poetical word. Miss Knowles supplied it.
“In torn and bleeding fragments,” she supplemented. “No, Jimmie, I’m sorry. You’ve laid siege to it in every known way, and yet there’s not a feather out of it.”
“There are two ways,” Jimmie pondered audibly, “in which I have not wooed you. One is a la cave dweller. I might knock you on the head with a knobby club and drag you to my lair. But since my lair is some blocks away, and since those blocks are studded with the interested public and the uninterested police, the cave dweller’s method will not serve. There remains one other. I stand before you, so; I take your hand, so; I may even have to kiss it, so. And I say: ‘Dear one, I want you. Every hour of my life I want you. I want you to take care of, to work for, to be proud of. I want you to let me teach you what life means. I want you for my dearest friend, for my everlasting sweetheart, for my wife.’ And when I’ve said it, I kiss your hand, so; gently, once again, and wait for your answer.”