A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells
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that seemed momently to deepen and soften. Her loveliness was saved from the insipidity of faultless lines by a little downward curve, a quirk, or call it dimple, at one corner of her mouth, which, especially in repose, gave it a touch of humorous feeling and formed its final charm: it seemed less a trait of face than of character. That fine positive grace, which is called style, and which is so eminently the gift of exquisite nerves, had not cost her too much; she was slim, but not fragile, and her very motionlessness suggested a vivid bird-like mobility; she stood, as if she had alighted upon the edge of the step. At the opening of the door behind her she turned alertly from the perusal of the policeman's retreating back, and sprang within.
"How d' do, Margaret?" She greeted the cook in a voice whose bright kindness seemed the translation of her girlish beauty into sound. "Surprised to see me?" She did not wait for the cook's answer, but put down her bag, and began pulling off her gloves, after shaking out her skirt, and giving that penetrating sidelong downward look at it, which women always give their drapery at moments of arrival or departure. She turned into the drawing-room from the hall, and went up to the long, old-fashioned mirror, and glanced at the face which it dimly showed her in the close-shuttered room. The face had apparently not changed since she last saw it in that mirror, and one might have fancied that the young lady was somehow surprised at this.
"May I ask why policemen are coming and going in and out of our house, Margaret?" she demanded of the cook's image, which, further down in the mirror, hesitated at the doorway.
"He come home with your father, Miss Helen," answered the cook, and as Helen turned around and stared at her in the flesh, she continued: "He had one of his faint turns in the Common. He's laying down in the library now, Miss Helen."
"O, poor papa !" wailed the young lady, who knew that in spite of the cook's pronoun, it could not be the policeman who was then reposing from faintness in the library. She whirled away from the mirror, and swooped through the doorway into the hall, and back into the room where her father lay. "The heat has been too much for him," she moaned, in mixed self-reproach and compassion, as she flew; and she dropped upon her knees beside him, and fondly caressed his grey head, and cooed and lamented over him, with the irreverent tenderness he liked her to use with him. "Poor old fellow," she murmured. "It's too bad! You're working yourself to death, and I'm going to stay with you now, and put a stop to your being brought home by policemen. Why, you ought to be ashamed, breaking down in this way, as soon as my back is turned! Has Margaret done everything for you? Wouldn't you like a little light?" She started briskly to her feet, flung up the long window, and raising and lowering the shade to get the right level for her father's eyes, stood silhouetted against the green space without : a grass plot between high brick walls, on one of which clambered a grape-vine, and on the other a wisteria, while a bed of bright-leafed plants gave its color in the center of the yard. "There!" she said, with a glance at this succinct landscape. "That's the prettiest bit of nature I've seen since I left Boston." She came back and sat down on a low chair beside her father, who smiled fondly upon her, and took one of her hands to hold, while she pushed back his hair with the other.
"Are you awfully glad to see me?"
"Awfully," said Mr. Harkness, falling in with her mood, and brightening with the light and her presence. "What brought you so suddenly?"
"Oh, that's a long story. Are you feeling better, now?"
"Yes. I was merely faint. I shall be all right by morning. I've been a little worn out."
"Was it like the last time?" asked Helen.
"Yes," said her father.
"A little more like?"
"I don't think it was more severe," said Mr. Harkness, thoughtfully.
"What had you been doing? Honor bright, now: was it accounts?"
"Yes, it was accounts, my dear."
"The same old wretches?"
"The same, old ones ; some new ones, too. They're in hopeless confusion," sighed Mr. Harkness, who seemed to age and sadden with the thought.
"Well, now, I'll tell you what, papa," said Helen, sternly: "I want you to leave all accounts, old and new, quite alone till the cold weather comes. Will you promise?"
Harkness smiled, as wearily as he had sighed. He knew that she was burlesquing somewhat her ignorance of affairs; and yet it was not much burlesqued, after all; for her life, like that of other American girls of prosperous parentage, had been almost as much set apart from the hard realities of bread-winning as the life of a princess, as entirely dedicated to society, to the studies that refine, and the accomplishments that grace society. The question of money had hardly entered into it. Since she was a little child, and used to climb upon her father's knee, and ask him, in order to fix his status in her fairy tales, whether he was rich or poor, she might be said never to have fairly thought of that matter. Of course, she understood that she was not so rich as some girls, but she had never found that the difference was against her in society; she could not help perceiving that in regard to certain of them it was in her favor, and that she might have patronized them if she had liked, and that they were glad of her friendship on any terms. Her father's great losses had come when she was too young to see the difference that they made in his way of living; ever since she could remember they had kept to the same scale of simple ease in the house where she was born, and she had known no wish that there had not been money enough to gratify. Pleasures of every kind had always come to her as freely and with as little wonder on her part as if they had been, like her youth, her bounding health, her beauty, the direct gift of heaven. She knew that the money came from her father's business, but she had never really asked herself how it was earned. It is doubtful if she could have told what his business was; it was the India trade, whatever that was, and of late years he had seemed to be more worried by it than he used to be, and she had vaguely taken this ill, as an ungrateful return on the part of business. Once he had gone so far as to tell her that he had been hurt by the Great Fire somewhat. But the money for all her needs and luxuries (she was not extravagant, and really did not spend much upon herself) had come as before, and walking through the burnt district, and seeing how handsomely it had been rebuilt, she had a comforting sense that its losses had all been repaired.
"You look a little flushed and excited, my dear," said her father, in evasion of the commands laid upon him, and he touched her fair cheek . He was very fond of her beauty and of her style; in the earlier days of her young ladyhood, he used to go about with her a great deal, and was angry when he thought she did not get all the notice she ought, and a little jealous when she did.
"Yes, I am flushed and excited, papa," she owned, throwing herself back in the low chair she had pulled up to his sofa, and beginning to pluck nervously at those little tufts of silk that roughened the cobwebby fabric of the grey summer stuff she wore. "Don't you think," she asked, lifting her downcast eyes, "that coming home and finding you in this state is enough to make me look flushed and excited?"
"Not quite," said her father quietly. "It's not a new thing."
Helen gave a sort of lamentable laugh. "I know I was humbugging, and I 'm as selfish as I can be, to think more of myself even now than I do of you. But, oh papa! I'm so unhappy!" She looked at him through a mist that gathered and fell in silent drops from her eyes without clearing them, so that she did not see him carry the hand she had abandoned to his heart, and check a gasp. " I suppose we all have our accounts, one way or other, and they get confused like yours. Mine with— with—a certain person, had got so mixed up that there was nothing for it but just to throw them away."
"Do you mean that you have broken with him finally, Helen?" asked her father gravely.
"I don't know whether you call it finally," said Helen, "but I told him it was no use—not just in those words—and that he ought to forget me; and I was afraid I wasn't equal to it; and that I couldn't see my way to it clearly; and unless I could see my way clearly, I oughtn't to go on any longer. I wrote to him last week, and I thought—I thought that perhaps he wouldn't answer it; perhaps he would come over to Rye Beach—he could easily have run over from Portsmouth—to see me—about it. But he didn't—he didn't—he—wrote a very short letter—. Oh, I didn't see how he could write such a letter; I tried