Woman Prepares - Man Proposes

by Anne O'Hagan

Woman Prepares—Man Proposes

By Anne O’Hagan

SHE looked at herself with critical, unillusioned morning eyes and turned from the mirror with lips down-curved in deep discouragement.

“And I thought I looked so well last night,” she bemoaned herself softly. “Vain imbecile! I’m a pasty-faced, drab, uninteresting creature with as much intelligent animation as a flour dumpling. I look thirty-five if I look a day.”

Her lack-luster eyes, having relentlessly spied out her own imperfections, now took note of the shortcomings of her surroundings. It requires a supernal genius to make a combination bedchamber and living-room attractive before the chambermaid’s morning rounds, but Theodosia was in no mood to make allowances. She stared at the ashes on the hearth; the grate was rusty, the andirons dull. She stared at the Kelim rug and the pillows piled in the corner, waiting the moment when the cot bed should become again a luxurious divan—and she shuddered.

“It’s a hideous way to live,” she declared with a vehemence that almost brought the color into her pale cheeks. “Squalid! An honest tenement would be better.”

The pale green frock she had worn last night, stretched upon a hanger and swinging from the chandelier with a horrible suggestiveness of suicide or a second-hand clothing shop, occupied the middle foreground of her picture. She snatched it down vindictively.

“Awful color!” she declared. “Poor, cheap rag! It needs a Hebe to wear green, and I—I—dared to wear it!” She tried to laugh the mirthless laugh of the stage, but a sound more like a sob was lost in the slamming of the closet door upon the offending garment.

She pulled the curtains wide at her windows, but only the thick, gray haze of an unseasonably warm, cheerless winter day struck against the glass panes.

“Air? It’s a greasy steam from all the million gloomy, cheap restaurants in the city,” she declared.

The dull roar and rumble that is the city’s breath was punctuated this morning by the constant shrill of sirens from the boats plying the fog-shrouded rivers and bay. She put her hands against her ears to shut out the sound.

“And I have to bear this all my life,” she told herself. “Only it will be worse as I grow older. All my life—dinginess and ugliness, poverty and makeshifts, loneliness, labor—and never any love, never any love.”

Having thus reached the core of her misery, she sat down in front of the desolate hearth and stared at the ashes. For once she was not even subconsciously aware of the symbolism of the situation.

“I tried and I failed,” she told herself. “It was indecent to try. Every Puritan of my ancestors would rise in his grave to denounce a descendant who would deliberately try to make a man propose to her, who would fling herself at a man’s head. But I did it. I tried—and he didn’t propose. That’s the most disgraceful thing of all. And yet he wanted to marry me five years ago when I wasn’t half as worth while as I am now. Vain, ambitious little fool! With as much idea of the relative values of things as that doll there.” She looked with marked disfavor at the Japanese doll on the table, whose red dress was a dinner menu. She roused herself from her reveries long enough to throw the toy among the ashes.

“I don’t want anything to remind me of last night,” she observed. Then she went forlornly back to her contemplation of her own state.

“What on earth was it I wanted then, I wonder? Surely I expected to marry some time—I was a perfectly normal girl at twenty-two. And there he was”—her face broke into April tenderness—“kind and gay and modest and manly. And adoring me—for he did, he did! Did I imagine there were going to be dozens like that, I wonder? For that wouldn’t do for Theodosia, Theodosia who was going to run the gamut of human experiences outside love and matrimony before settling down to those humdrum matters! That was it. Freedom had gone to my head. I was maudlin with it.” She paused and balanced the poker thoughtfully in her outstretched hand.

“Well, and now he comes back from his bridge-laying and road-making down there in Bogota—it was when he got that appointment that he asked me, fool that I was, to marry him! And I’ve learned my lesson. I know that the vast range of human experience I anticipated narrows down to a fairly constant anxiety about the rent, a gloomy foreboding about old age, a heavy loneliness, and a lot of noisy, unsatisfactory companionships. Oh, I’ve learned my lesson. And I’ve learned that I missed him like mad! Why, when I heard he was coming home my heart gave such a leap as it never gave before in all its silly life. And I made up my mind to try, in every possible way, to get him back, since no wise woman had managed to get him meanwhile. Oh, I did my prettiest tricks for the gentleman! I wore my best clothes all the time, on the chance of meeting him. I wore my best air when we did meet. I dread to count what I’ve squandered on the masseuse and the manicure in these last two months. And it can never be calculated how much—vital force, I think they call it—I’ve spent in being charming in his presence. Result—Harry Mason covers my glove with idiotic kisses, and he barely notices me. Last night even, when I’d bought the green dress on purpose! I begged Araminta to put me next to him at table. ‘Why, I didn’t know you particularly liked John Hazelton,’ she said—the purblind woman—‘he isn’t interested in any of the things the rest of us are.’ How I hate studio dinners! I wish I knew people who had real houses. I’d almost live in—Newark—for a real house. And I was as brilliant and as charming as I could be. And if Harry Mason hadn’t been on my right to laugh at my jokes with that great stupid roar of his, they would have made about as much impression as the snowflake on the river!”

Nora, entering in red-armed energy with mops and dusters and all the paraphernalia of cleanliness, cried with ready, Celtic sympathy:

“Sure, Miss More, dear, ye’re lukin’ bad the marnin’. Wouldn’t ye be feelin’ yersilf?”

“Oh, I’m well enough, Nora, thank you,” replied Theodosia drearily.

“It’s a nasthy day—enough to mek a body down in the mouth. But sure ye, wid yer beaux an’ yer frien’s an’ yer flowers an’ yer fine doin’s can’t know what it is to be sad nor sorry, miss. Will ye be afther kapin’ these roses anny longer?”

“No, throw them away.” Theodosia blushed a little to recall that she had sent the flowers to herself with the card of one of her old callers on the afternoon John Hazelton had come to tea. But he hadn’t seemed particularly excited over the evidence of her popularity—and he hadn’t mentioned coming again.

“I’ll be clanin’ yer silver things to-day,” called Nora from the dressing-table. “I’d hev done it last week only thim Hinckleys movin’ in an’ all——”

“It’s all right, Nora.”

“A bit of the polisher’d do yer andirons no harm.”

“No,” agreed Theodosia listlessly. She had approached the closet and was staring at her wardrobe.

“Oh, what difference does it make what I wear?” she demanded in sudden impatience, to Nora’s bewilderment. She drew on a raincoat, awkward and ancient in cut and greeny-gray in color—a thing that enveloped her shapelessly and accentuated all the pallor and the shadows of her face. She pinned a soft, half-formless round hat on her dark hair, and finding her oldest gloves and an elderly umbrella, she marched down-stairs and out into the foggy, oozy streets.

“Air?” she said scornfully again. “Stew! Broth of the fiend’s own making.” And pleased with this happy fancy she went on to her work, which, that day, was instructing the young ladies in Miss Greyerson’s exclusive school in certain details of water-color painting.

It was between four and five of the dismal afternoon that she found herself walking down Fifth Avenue. She was grimly, defiantly conscious that her appearance fitted her rather for Seventh, but it assorted with her dreary mood to flaunt the outward and visible signs of failure in the face of the world. She had acquired two bundles on her peregrinations and these she carried conspicuously, albeit forlornly. A shoe lace, unfastened and flapping in the mud of the crossings and the slime of the sidewalks, gave the final touch of dinginess, of shabbiness to her make-up. She was aware of it, but she scarcely cared. She recognized it as the hall-mark that vouched for the genuineness of her misery.

From the rise of the Murray Hill region she was staring down the street to the spot where, out of the thick mist, the great prow of the Flatiron Building was dimly bulked. She had no eyes for the passers-by.

“Theodosia!” cried one of them in evident surprise and somewhat dubious gladness. Theodosia’s gray eyes, recalled from the gloom of the farther vista, met John Hazelton’s blue ones. Awkwardly she dropped a parcel. The color flooded her face. The feminine heart within her cried: “Oh, to be caught in this plight—by him, by him!”

Meantime John was picking up the bundle, oblivious of the mud.

“Your shoe’s untied,” he observed. “Put it up on that step there, please, and I’ll fasten it.”

“It’s so muddy,” objected Theodosia. John laughed.

“Mud won’t be fatal. And you might trip on the string. Theodosia, are you one of those foolish women who wear low shoes all the winter?” The inquiry was sternly made after the tying of Theodosia’s laces had acquainted him with the intimacies of her footgear.

“I—I don’t know. I dressed quickly this morning,” mumbled Theodosia aloud. To herself she was wailing: “You look like the office scrubwoman!”

John turned back and was walking downtown with her. He was moved to deliver a pedantic, masculine lecture on the care of the health.

“Perhaps you’re right,” agreed Theodosia meekly. She could not think of any verbal rocket to fire in answer to his mere commonsense. Besides, she liked the sound of his voice so that she scarcely wanted to interrupt him.

“Of course, I’m right,” answered John. Then he marked that she shivered a little. He was a modest youth and it did not occur to him that the passer-by who jostled him against her was responsible for that shiver.

“See here, Theo,” he said, falling into the nomenclature of five years before, “you’re cold. Your lips are blue. Are you warmly enough dressed? Have you anything on under that thin coat—a—a jersey or anything? Of course not! Well, madam, you’re coming in here to have some tea and then we’re going to take you home in a cab.” He was for dragging her into a hotel whose portals were guarded by the most imposing of blue liveries.

“Mercy, no!” cried Theodosia with returning vigor. “I’m—I’m not fit——”

“Fit? Nonsense!” Mr. Hazelton marched her past the blue images of elegant respectability. Theodosia’s muddy shoes clattered obediently across the hall and into the big, quiet, mellowly lighted dining-room.

“Just as I suspected,” said John severely as he helped her out of her wrap. “You ought to wear something under it. That’s a cotton shirt-waist.”

“And a second-day one, and a bargain-sale one at that!” Theodosia’s despairing recollection told her. Aloud she murmured something about dressing in a hurry. Then her murmurs fell away and she sat and stared at the ends of her interlaced fingers. It was no proper use, she knew, to make of the heaven-sent minutes; she ought to be training the artillery of her charms upon him. But the consciousness of failures past foredoomed her to failure to-day. She simply couldn’t make the futile effort. If all her weapons, her pretty clothes and her pretty wit, had failed to remind him that he was once in love with her, was it likely that this scrubwoman effect could achieve that result? What was the use?

Meantime John stared at her with a certain shy pleasure. He noted her pale cheeks, her down-curved lips, the deeply shadowed, tired eyes, the weariness and listlessness of her bearing.

“Theodosia,” he said after the scrutiny, “I almost believe that, after all, you need to be looked after as much as you did five years ago.” His voice was a little uneven with—was it a hope?—and he bent toward her. Theodosia leaned limply back in her chair, and her wide eyes turned to him with rather piteous inquiry.

“I do, upon my word.” He gained in emphasis. “Whenever I’ve seen you before, you’ve been so—so complete, so efficient—oh, I don’t know. All polished and finished and sparkling, cared for and admired and courted. But to-day——”

“Johnny,” cried Theodosia, lapsing into the inappropriate diminutive of long before, “Johnny, if you mean, if you mean——”

“That I want to be the one to take care of you? I do, exactly, Theodosia. I never stopped.”

“Well, for Heaven’s sake, say it,” cried Theodosia with the most unjust impatience. “Oh, if you knew how I’ve worked to hear you say it!”

“Beg pardon, sir, the tea.” The waiter, placing the tea equipage, sundered two shamelessly clasped hands and interposed muffins between two shamelessly clinging pairs of eyes.

“Why can’t the lower classes do their love-makin’ somewhere besides in restaurants?” he demanded later with ponderous indignation of his confrère at the next table. Then more curiously: “What’s he sayin’ to her now?”

“He’s only tellin’ her to drink her tea while it’s hot—if you call that love-makin’,” replied the other, carefully adjusting the knives at the table back of Theodosia’s.