The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
When the professor of anthropology returned to his rooms from the president's office, early the next day, he found Anne Appleby awaiting him. She was in his big brown leather reading chair, idly twirling her long gloves. On her black waist, just under her little pearlike chin, reposed a vivid cluster of Roman jonquils.
“Good morning, O King of Knowledge!” said Anne, with her meekest bow, folding her hands.
That was a mocking way of Anne's that always left Macraven more or less afraid of her. It had pleased him mightily, once, to think that Anne had adopted so many of his ideas as to the weaker sex that at his instigation she had eschewed barbaric jewelry and forsworn plumage in her headgear and expressed a horror of adorning herself in the primitive colors. That had been in the early and unsophisticated days of “Woman Retrogressive,” when his knowledge of the sex had been merely an empiric and an abstract one. In fact, he had been so carried away by that discipleship that he had rashly proposed marriage to the quite startled Anne, who had promptly refused him, on the ground, she said, that he was an agnostic and that she herself was too young to marry.
That had been six long years earlier in his career, and Anne had seemingly accepted single life with a strange and gentle placidity. Yet, during all that time, he had felt mysteriously apprehensive of this calm-eyed young lady who vacillated, in her relations with him, between that of a brusquely solicitous older sister and that of a mildly chastening young mother. He remembered only too well that it was a habit of Nature to chloroform her victims, as it were, before accomplishing the great cosmic processes, and he had always, since adopting the firm-fixed resolution that the celibate life was the only path through which he might reach his scholastic ends, fought fiercely and stubbornly against the subtly lethal influence that Anne seemed to shed around her.
He noticed, as he stepped to his study table, that one of his empty and neglected vases was filled with a heavy cluster of the same wonderful yellow flower that Anne herself was wearing. For some unfathomable reason a brick-red color slowly crept up to the young professor's high white temples as he sat looking at them.
“They were simply going to waste in my hothouse,” explained Anne, with a shrug. “And this room of yours is always so dowdy, you know!”
He looked at the flowers; then he looked at Anne; then he looked back at the flowers again.
“It's very good of you,” he said relentingly.
“It's rather good of you to take them,” answered Anne, with her preoccupied smile, looking about the walls to see if there were dust on his picture frames. “Why didn't you have that second window cut in your sleeping room?” she suddenly demanded.
“The building is not mine,” parried Macraven, almost irritably.
“But your lungs are your own,” said Anne mildly. Then she sighed. “There's one thing nice about a woman hater—he always tells you the truth, whether he means to or not.”
The professor of anthropology looked at Anne apprehensively. He sometimes found it hard to understand that enigmatic young lady, for all her appearance of brusque straightforwardness. He was about to speak; then he decided that silence was golden.
“You're going away,” said Anne, with conviction.
Anne's intuitions, at times, were startling.
“Yes, I want a rest,” said Macraven.
“I know it,” said Anne simply. She seemed to be struggling with a momentary temptation toward candor. “Couldn't I pack for you?” she demanded. Anne was the type of woman that takes an unreasonable and implacable delight in the exercise of the domestic attributes. She had even once insisted on sewing on buttons for the fellow in mathematics. “Why couldn't I pack for you?” she implored.
“You could do it only over Dodson's dead body, I'm afraid,” explained Macraven uneasily. He always felt afraid of Anne in that imploring mood. “Dodson is leaving me to-morrow.”
“Well, there's one thing I want you to do for me,” said Anne, suddenly sitting up straight and turning on him the soft artillery of her solemn smile.
“And that is?”
“I want you to be easy on Dickie Sewell.”
“If young Sewell has broken the rules of this college, he must suffer accordingly.”
“Yes, but supposing it's going to hurt somebody who is very near and dear to you,” persisted Anne.
“Good heavens, are you in love with young Sewell, too?” demanded Macraven.
“Thanks awfully,” said Anne, purring a little mockingly. “I never really knew you felt that way about me.” She grew suddenly sober, with an eloquent little outthrust of her upturned hands. “Instead of being merely just, be generous, this once!”
Macraven tried to explain to her the meaning and import of impersonal Duty.
“But I know he would be grateful,” said Anne, inconsequentially. “It would mean so much to him.”
The Dean of Amboro smiled a little wearily. It was an old cry, that; it always did mean so much to them, and they were all so ready to be grateful! So many times, year after year, they had come to him for help, and had pleaded their cause and passed out into the world, without so much as a word of gratitude. He did not resent it; he resented only the disillusionment it brought to his own breast.
“There's nothing I can do,” he said, a little wearily.
A fleeting look of pity crept into Anne's eyes, at the lines of fatigue on his face. That look in her eyes made him very guarded and watchful.
“That's all I ask, you see,” she cried, with another of her sudden changes of tone. “That's all that will be necessary—just to do nothing.” Then she added, softly: “I've attended to all the rest of the faculty.”
He would have laughed, had he been more at his ease. When he looked up again, she had risen and was standing above him with her hand outstretched.
“Good-by,” she said. “Have a good rest and a jolly time!”
And before he realized it, she had fluttered out, and the room was empty. As he sat there, deep in thought, with the tips of his long fingers held lightly together, he first tried to recall their talk, and then tried to reframe in his mind her face as she had looked down at him.
Anne Appleby was a woman of twenty-seven, unmarried, and of independent means. An open brow, not altogether untouched with its mysterious serenities, bore testimony to the full intellectual control of that emotional warmth which the rich, yet softly turned lips only too eloquently confessed. Yet this mouth was both tender and humorous. Her eyes were gray, large, and intelligent. Unscrupulous in her efforts toward the engagement of affection—since with that invincible ally she had long since learned she could best control people—she was still courageous enough to make enemies for the sake of a friend, or to shock friends for the sake of an enemy. There was a tradition in Amboro that either the field captain or the class president of each term for eleven years back had duly, but hopelessly proposed to her, and had, of course, been promptly, yet tenderly rejected.
Not that Anne was a coquette in the ordinary sense of that odious word. It had always seemed to be her sportsmanlike principle to kill only what was needed for camp; she would surrender to no impulse for slaughter for the mere sake of the killing. She was still young enough to talk with her contented victims as a sister might, and yet quite oldish enough to act toward them as a mother should—an elusive and unstable association that seldom tended toward peace of mind in the objects of her keenly impersonal solicitude. Yet Anne, at times, could be the soul of sobriety; she was reserved even to primness; her indiscretions were open ones, and usually due to a mingling of carelessly defiant impulse and a warm-hearted and ever-active domesticity. In fact, so wide were her relationships by blood and marriage, so ready were her sympathies, and so numerous the army of infants named after her—so went the Amboro tradition—that for seven years and more the passing away of some namesake or kindred had kept Anne Appleby in a state of continuous mourning—though there were those who held that it was all because she thought she looked her best in black.