Evidently a forlorn and foolish person--and doubtless thinking of him, two years the senior of Tetlow and far more serious, as an elderly person, in the same class with her father. "But you like biology?" he said.
The way to a cure was to make her talk on.
"I don't know anything about it," said she, looking as frivolous as a butterfly or a breeze-bobbed blossom.
"I listen to father, but it's all beyond me."
Yes--a light-weight. They could have nothing in common. She was a mere surface--a thrillingly beautiful surface, but not a full-fledged woman. So little did conversation with him interest her, she had taken advantage of the short pause to resume her work. No, she had not the faintest interest in him. It wasn't a trick of coquetry; it was genuine. He whom women had always bowed before was unable to arouse in her a spark of interest. She cared neither for what he had nor for what he was, in himself. This offended and wounded him. He struggled sulkily with his papers for half an hour. Then he fell to watching her again and----"You must not neglect to give me your address," he said. "Write it on a slip of paper after you finish.
I might forget it."
"Very well," she replied, but did not turn round.
"Why, do you think, did Tetlow come to see you?" he asked. He felt cheapened in his own eyes--he, the great man, the arrived man, the fiance of Josephine Burroughs, engaged in this halting and sneaking flirtation!
But he could not restrain himself.
She turned to answer. "Mr. Tetlow works very hard and has few friends. He had heard of my father and wanted to meet him--just like you."
"Naturally," murmured Norman, in confusion. "I thought--perhaps--he was interested in YOU."
She laughed outright--and he had an entrancing view of the clean rosy interior of her mouth. "In ME?
--Mr. Tetlow? Why, he's too serious and important for a girl like me."
"Then he bored you?"
"Oh, no. I like him. He is a good man--thoroughly good."
This pleased Norman immensely. It may be fine to be good, but to be called good--that is somehow a different matter. It removes a man at once from the jealousy-provoking class. "Good exactly describes him," said Norman. "He wouldn't harm a fly. In love he'd be ridiculous."
"Not with a woman of his own age and kind," protested she. "But I'm neglecting my work."
And she returned to it with a resolute manner that made him ashamed to interrupt again--especially after the unconscious savage rebukes she had administered.
He sat there fighting against the impulse to watch her --denouncing himself--appealing to pride, to shame, to prudence--to his love for Josephine--to the sense of decency that restrains a hunter from aiming at a harmless tame song bird. But all in vain. He concentrated upon her at last, stared miserably at her, filled with longing and dread and shame--and longing, and yet more longing.
When she finished and stood at the other side of the desk, waiting for him to pass upon her work, she must have thought he was in a profound abstraction.
He did not speak, made a slight motion with his hand to indicate that she was to go. Shut in alone, he buried his face in his arms. "What madness!" he groaned. "If I loved her, there'd be some excuse for me. But I don't. I couldn't. Yet I seem ready to ruin everything, merely to gratify a selfish whim--an insane whim."
On top of the papers she had left he saw a separate slip. He drew it toward him, spread it out before him.
Her address. An unknown street in Jersey City!
"I'll not go," he said aloud, pushing the slip away.
Go? Certainly not. He had never really meant to go.
He would, of course, keep his engagement with Josephine.
"And I'll not come down town until she has taken another job and has caught Tetlow. I'll stop this idiocy of trying to make an impression on a person not worth impressing. What weak vanity--to be piqued by this girl's lack of interest!"
Nevertheless--he at six o'clock telephoned to the Burroughs' house that he was detained down town. He sent away his motor, dined alone in the station restaurant in Jersey City. And at half past seven he set out in a cab in search of--what? He did not dare answer that interrogation.
