To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; to tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to marry Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life - this was Harvey.A plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of.But -He came that night to see Sarah Lee.There was nothing unusual about that.He came every night.But he came that night full of determination.That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far.He had no idea that his picture was romantic.He would have demanded it back had he so much as suspected it.He wore his hair in a pompadour because of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick.He was very humble about himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her.
Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him.The one electric lamp was lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of reflected light.There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a white fur rug.In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals.The Encyc1opaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by the fire.It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home.He had of course never seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom.
Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him.When he had taken off his ulster and his overshoes - he had been raised by women - and came in, she was standing by the fire.
"Raining," he said."It's getting colder.May be snow before morning."Then he stopped.Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat.She had so much the look of being poised for flight.Even in her quietest moments there was that about her - a sort of repressed eagerness, a look of seeing things far away.Aunt Harriet said that there were times when she had a "flighty" look.
And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his arms out.
"Sara Lee!" he said."Don't look like that!" "Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically.
"I don't know," he muttered."You - sometimes you look as though -" Then he put his arms round her."I love you," he said."I'll be good to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek against hers.
"If you'll only marry me, dear."
A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has stopped thinking.With his arms about her Harvey could only feel.He was trembling.As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures f1ashed through her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic.One was of Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby.The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield and crying "Mother!"Two sorts of maternity - one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other vicarious, of all the world.
"Don't you love me - that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers."I don't know.""You don't know!"
It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing at the blur of light which was the phonograph.Sara Lee, glancing up, saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair that marked him all man, and virile man.
She slipped her hand into his.
"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the complete surrender of a child.
He was outrageously happy.He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his simple plans.Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion he missed nothing in her attitude.Into her silence and passivity he read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers.
To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's devotion was something mote, as much more as was necessary.For in Sara Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, small differences and a home.Of passion, that passion which later she was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, she hadnever even dreamed.
Great days were before Sara Lee.She sat by the fire and knitted, and behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, unsuspected, the mise en scene.
