"It is true," he replied kindly. "There are any number of reasons for
my declining it, but I cannot make them public. Is that all?"
"Yes, sir; thank you;" and I backed away.
"Are you a reporter?" asked the girl, as I was about to pass by her.
"Yes, I am."
"Do you draw pictures?"
"No, I do not."
"Do you write novels?"
"No," with a nervous laugh.
There is nothing like the process of interrogation to make one person
lose interest in another.
"Oh; I thought perhaps you did," she said, and turned her back to me.
I passed through the darkened halls of the house and into the street.
I never expected to see her again, but it was otherwise ordained. We
came together three years later at Block Island. She was eighteen now,
gathering the rosy flowers of her first season. She remembered the
incident in the garden, and we laughed over it. A few dances, two or
three evenings on the verandas, watching the sea, moon-lit, as it
sprawled among the rocks below us, and the even tenor of my way ceased
to be. I appreciated how far she was above me; so I worshipped her
silently and from afar. I told her my ambitions, confidences so
welcome to feminine ears, and she rewarded me with a small exchange.
She, too, was an orphan, and lived with her uncle, a rich banker, who,
as a diversion, consented to represent his country at foreign courts.
Her given name was Phyllis. I had seen the name a thousand times in
print; the poets had idealised it, and the novelists had embalmed it in
tender phrases. It was the first time I had ever met a woman by the
name of Phyllis. It appealed to my poetic instinct. Perhaps that was
the cause of it all. And then, she was very beautiful. In the autumn
of that year we became great friends; and through her influence I began
to see beyond the portals of the mansions of the rich. Matthew Prior's
Chloes and Sir John Suckling's Euphelias lost their charms. Henceforth
my muse's name became Phyllis. I took her to the opera when I didn't
know where I was going to breakfast on the morrow. I sent her roses
and went without tobacco, a privation of which woman knows nothing.
Often I was plunged into despair at my distressed circumstances. Money
to her meant something to spend; to me it meant something to get. Her
income bothered her because she could not spend it; my income was
mortgaged a week in advance, and did not bother me at all. This was
the barrier at my lips. But her woman's intuition must have told her
that she was a part and parcel of my existence.