The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells

know everything about me before—before—I wouldn’t have come, you’ll believe me, if I hadn’t had the doctor’s assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity—Good Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in the midst of it I’ve allowed myself to—Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don’t you know that?”

      Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.

      “I’m not only sick—so sick that I sha’n’t be able to do any work for a year at least—but I’m poor, so poor that I can’t afford to be sick.”

      She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, “I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

      “What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.

      “Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”

      “No, you’re only one, and there’s none like you! I could never see any one else while I looked at you!” he cried, only half aware of his poetry, and meaning what he said very literally.

      But she took only the poetry. “I shouldn’t wish you to,” she said, and she laughed.

      He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, or that you don’t. It doesn’t seem as if I could get to the end of my unworthiness, which isn’t voluntary. It seems altogether too base. I can’t let you say what you do, if you mean it, till you know that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You saved me from the fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that without you I shall—Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor—If I could always tell some one—if I could tell you when these things were obsessing me—haunting me—they would cease—”

      Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. “Then, I am a prescription!” She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a passion; but is any woman worth having, ever solely a passion?

      “Don’t!” Alford implored, rising too. “Don’t, in mercy, take it that way! It’s only that I wish you to know everything that’s in me; to know how utterly helpless and worthless I am. You needn’t have a pang in throwing such a thing away.”

      She put out her hand to him, but at arm’s-length. “I sha’n’t throw you away—at least, not to-night. I want to think.” It was a way of saying she wished him to go, and he had no desire to stay. He asked if he might come again, and she said, “Oh yes.”

      “To-morrow?”

      “Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was it young Doctor Enderby?”

      They had rather a sad, dry parting; and when her door closed upon him he felt that it had shut him out forever. His shame and his defeat were so great that he did not think of his eidolons, and they did not come to trouble him. He woke in the morning, asking himself, bitterly, if he were cured already. His humiliation was such that he closed his eyes to the light, and wished he might never again open them to it.

      The question that Mrs. Yarrow had to ask Dr. Enderby was not the question he had instantly forecast for her when she put aside her veil in his office and told him who she was. She did not seem anxious to be assured of Alford’s mental condition, or as to any risks in marrying him. Her inquiry was much more psychological; it was almost impersonal, and yet Dr. Enderby thought she looked as if she had been crying.

      She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it was almost a speculation.

      “Women,” she said, a little hoarsely, “have no right, I suppose, to expect the ideal in life. The best they can do seems to be to make the real look like it.”

      Dr. Enderby reflected. “Well, yes. But I don’t know that I ever put it to myself in just those terms.”

      Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: “You’ve known Mr. Alford a long time.”

      “We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard.”

      “He is very sincere,” she added, as if this were relevant.

      “He’s a man who likes to have a little worse than the worst known about him. One might say he was excessively sincere.” Enderby divined that Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was willing to help him out if he could.

      Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. “I don’t know,” she said, “why it wouldn’t be ideal—as much ideal as anything—to give one’s self absolutely to—to—a duty—or not duty, exactly; I don’t mean that. Especially,” she added, showing a light through the mist, “if one wanted to do it.”

      Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he owed it to her to be serious.

      “If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way—if they did not constantly do it—there would be no marriages for love.”

      “Do you think so?” she asked, with a shaking voice. “But men—men are ideal, too.”

      “Not as women are—except now and then some fool like Alford.” Now, indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford from his heart, so delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. Yarrow laughed too before he was done, and cried a little, and when she rose to leave she could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning away, and so flung it from behind her with a gesture that Enderby thought pretty.

      At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.

      “And did she let Alford come to see her again?” Rulledge, at once romantic and literal, demanded.

      “Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They are—I believe he’s pursuing his archaeological studies there—living in Athens.”

      “Together?” Minver smoothly inquired.

      At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would have incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after a moment’s daze, Rulledge exclaimed: “Jove! I forgot to ask him whether it’s stopped Alford’s illusions!”