第47章

"There are certain things,"maintained Perry,stoutly,"that gentlemen won't do.""Gentlemen!"exclaimed Ralph,stretching his slim six feet two:We were sitting in the Boyne Club."It's ungentlemanly to kill,or burn a town or sink a ship,but we keep armies and navies for the purpose.For a man with a good mind,Perry,you show a surprising inability to think things,out to a logical conclusion.What the deuce is competition,when you come down to it?Christianity?Not by a long shot!If our nations are slaughtering men and starving populations in other countries,--are carried on,in fact,for the sake of business,if our churches are filled with business men and our sky pilots pray for the government,you can't expect heathen individuals like me to do business on a Christian basis,--if there is such a thing.You can make rules for croquet,but not for a game that is based on the natural law of the survival of the fittest.

The darned fools in the legislatures try it occasionally,but we all know it's a sop to the `common people.'Ask Hughie here if there ever was a law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn't get 'round'?Why,you've got competition even among the churches.Yours,where I believe you teach in the Sunday school,would go bankrupt if it proclaimed real Christianity.And you'll go bankrupt if you practise it,Perry,my boy.Some early,wide-awake,competitive,red-blooded bird will relieve you of the Boyne Street car line."It was one of this same new and "fittest"species who had already relieved poor Mr.McAlery Willett of his fortune.Mr.Willett was a trusting soul who had never known how to take care of himself or his money,people said,and now that he had lost it they blamed him.Some had been saved enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house,with careful economy.It was Nancy who managed the economy,who accomplished remarkable things with a sum they would have deemed poverty in former days.Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge.Reverses did not subdue Mr.Willett's spirits,and the fascination modern "business"had for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes it had caused him.He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building,where he appeared every morning about half-past ten to occupy himself with heaven knows what short cuts to wealth,with prospectuses of companies in Mexico or Central America or some other distant place:once,I remember,it was a tea,company in which he tried to interest his friends,to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass Orange Pekoe.In the afternoon between three and four he would turn up at the Boyne Club,as well groomed,as spruce as ever,generally with a flower in his buttonhole.He never forgot that he was a gentleman,and he had a gentleman's notions of the fitness of things,and it was against his principles to use,a gentleman's club for the furtherance of his various enterprises.

"Drop into my office some day,Dickinson,"he would say."I think I've got something there that might interest you!"He reminded me,when I met him,that he had always predicted I would get along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn.The decline of the family fortunes seemed to have had as little effect upon her as upon her father,although their characters differed sharply.Something of that spontaneity,of that love of life and joy in it she had possessed in youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett,but these qualities had disappeared in her long before the coming of financial reverses.She was nearing thirty,and in spite of her beauty and the rarer distinction that can best be described as breeding,she had never married.Men admired her,but from a distance;she kept them at arm's length,they said:strangers who visited the city invariably picked her out of an assembly and asked who she was;one man from New York who came to visit Ralph and who had been madly in love with her,she had amazed many people by refusing,spurning all he might have given her.This incident seemed a refutation of the charge that she was calculating.As might have been foretold,she had the social gift in a remarkable degree,and in spite of the limitations of her purse the knack of dressing better than other women,though at that time the organization of our social life still remained comparatively simple,the custom of luxurious and expensive entertainment not having yet set in.

The more I reflect upon those days,the more surprising does it seem that I was not in love with her.It may be that I was,unconsciously,for she troubled my thoughts occasionally,and she represented all the qualities I admired in her sex.The situation that had existed at the time of our first and only quarrel had been reversed,I was on the highroad to the worldly success I had then resolved upon,Nancy was poor,and for that reason,perhaps,prouder than ever.If she was inaccessible to others,she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible to me--the more so because some of the superficial relics of our intimacy remained,or rather had been restored.Her very manner of camaraderie seemed paradoxically to increase the distance between us.It piqued me.Had she given me the least encouragement,I am sure I should have responded;and I remember that I used occasionally to speculate as to whether she still cared for me,and took this method of hiding her real feelings.

Yet,on the whole,I felt a certain complacency about it all;I knew that suffering was disagreeable,I had learned how to avoid it,and I may have had,deep within me,a feeling that I might marry her after all.

Meanwhile my life was full,and gave promise of becoming even fuller,more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.