REUBEN’S first impulse, when he found himself alone in the little shop with his former pupil, was to say good-by and get out as soon as he could. To the best of his recollection, he had never before been in a store consecrated entirely to the fashions and finery of the opposite sex, and he was oppressed by a sense of being an intruder upon an exclusively feminine domain. The young girl, too, whom he had been thinking of all this while as an unfortunate child whom he must watch over and be good to, stood revealed before him as a self-controlled and sophisticated woman, only a few years younger than himself in actual age, and much wiser than himself in the matters of head-gear and textures and colors which belonged to this place. He could have talked freely to her in his law-office, with his familiar accessories of papers and books about him. A background of bonnets was disconcerting.
“How beautiful she is!” were Jessica’s first words, and they pleasurably startled the lawyer from his embarrassed revery.
“She is, indeed,” he answered, and somehow found himself hoping that the conversation would cling to this subject a good while. “I had never met her before, as you saw, but of course I have known her by sight a long time.”
“I don’t think I ever saw her before to-day,” said Jessica. “How wonderful it seems that she should have come, and then that you came, too, and that you both should like the plan, and take it up so, and make a success of it right at the start.”
Reuben smiled. “In your eagerness to keep up with the procession I fear you are getting ahead of the band,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite call it a success, at present. But, no doubt, it’s a great thing to have her enlisted in it. I’m glad she likes you; her friendship will make all the difference in the world to you, here in Thessaly.”
The girl did not immediately answer, and Tracy, looking at her as she walked across to the showcase, was surprised to catch the glisten of tears on her eyelashes. He had no idea what to say, but waited in pained puzzlement for her to speak.
“‘Friendship’ is not quite the word,” she said at last, looking up at him and smiling with mournful softness through her tears. “I shall be glad if she likes me—as you say, it will be a great thing if she helps me—but we shall hardly be ‘friends,’ you know. She would never call it that. Oh, no! oh, no!”
Her voice trembled audibly over these last words, and she began hurriedly to re-arrange some of the articles in the showcase, with the obvious design of masking her emotion.
“You can do yourself no greater harm than by exaggerating that kind of notion, my girl,” said Reuben Tracy, in his old gravely kind voice. “You would put thoughts into her head that way which she had never dreamt of otherwise; that is, if she weren’t a good and sensible person. Why, she is a woman like yourself—”
“Oh, no, no! Not like me!”
Tracy was infinitely touched by the pathos of this deprecating wail, but he went on as if he had not heard it: “A woman like yourself, with a heart turned in mercy and charity toward other women who are not so strong to help themselves. Why on earth should you vex your soul with fears that she will be unkind to you, when she showed you as plain as the noonday sun her desire to be kind? You mustn’t yield to such fancies.”
“Kind, yes! But you don’t understand—you can’t understand. I shouldn’t have spoken as I did. It was a mere question of a word, anyway.”
Jessica smiled again, to show that, though the tears were still there, the grief behind them was to be regarded as gone, and added, “Yes, she was kindness itself.”
“She is very rich in her own right, I believe, and if her interest in your project is genuine—that is, of the kind that lasts—you will hardly need any other assistance. Of course you must allow for the chance of her dropping the idea as suddenly as she picked it up. Rich women—rich people generally, for that matter—are often flighty about such things. ‘Put not your trust in princes,’ serves as a warning about millionnaires as well as monarchs. The rest of us are forced to be more or less continuous in what we think and do. We have to keep at the things we’ve started, because a waste of time would be serious to us. We have to keep the friends and associates we’ve got, because others are not to be had for the asking. But these favored people are more free—their time doesn’t matter, and they can find new sets of friends ready made whenever they weary of the others. Still, let us hope she will be steadfast. She has a strong face, at all events.”
The girl had listened to this substantial dissertation with more or less comprehension, but with unbounded respect. Anything that Reuben Tracy said she felt must be good. Besides, his conclusion jumped with her hopes.
“I’m not afraid of her losing interest in the thing itself,” she answered. “What worries me is—or, no—” She stopped herself with a smile, and made haste to add, “I forgot. I mustn’t be worried. But who is our Miss Minster? Does she own the ironworks? Tell me about her.”
“She owns a share of the works, I think. I don’t know how big a share, or, in fact, much else about her. I’ve heard my partner, Horace Boyce, talk lately a good deal—”
Tracy did not finish his sentence, for Jessica had sunk suddenly into the chair behind the case, and was staring at him over the glass-bound row of bonnets with wide-open, startled eyes.
“Your partner! Yours, did you say? That man?”
Her tone and manner very much surprised Reuben. “Why, yes, he’s my partner,” he said, slowly and in wonderment. “Didn’t you know that? We’ve been together since December.”
She shook her head, and murmured something hastily about having been very busy, and being cooped up on a back street.
This did not explain her agitation, which more and more puzzled Reuben as he thought upon it. He stood looking down upon her where she sat, and noted that her face, though it was turned away from him now, was both pale and excited.
“Do you know him?” he asked finally.
She shook her head again, and the lawyer fancied she was biting her lips. He did not know well what else to say, and was speculating whether it would not be best to say nothing, when all at once she burst forth vehemently.
“I won’t lie to you!” she exclaimed. “I did know him, very much to my cost. And, oh! don’t you trust him! Don’t you trust him, I say! He’s not fit to be with you. Oh, my God!—don’t I know Horace Boyce!”
Reuben stood silent, still looking down gravely into the girl’s flashing eyes. What she had said annoyed and disturbed him, but what he thought chiefly about was how to avoid bringing on an explanation which must wound and humiliate her feelings. It was clear enough what she meant, and he compassionately hoped she would not feel it necessary to add anything. Above all things he felt that he wanted to spare her pain.
“I understand,” he said at last, as the frankest way out of the dilemma. “Don’t say any more.” He pondered for a minute or so upon the propriety of not saying anything more himself, and then with decision offered her his hand across the showcase, and held hers in his expansive clasp with what he took to be fatherly sympathy, as he said:
“I must go now. Good-by. And I shall hear from you soon about the project?” He smiled to reassure her, and added, still holding her hand, “Now, don’t you let worry come inside these doors at all. You have made a famous start, and everything will go well, believe me.”
Then he went out, and the shrill clamor of the bell hung to jangle when the door was opened woke Jessica from her day-dream, just as the sunbeams had begun to drive away the night.
She rose with a start, and walked to the door to follow his retiring figure through the glass. She stood there, lost in another revery—vague, languorous, half-bright, half-hideous—until the door from the back room was opened, and Samantha’s sharp voice fell on the silence of the little shop.
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