Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into the evening air, and looking down into the thinly foliaged tops of the public garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars trooped by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that screamed as if with pain at the touch of their trolleys, and kindling now and again a soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates that connected the crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as much pleasure out of the planets as pain out of the screams, and he was in an after-dinner languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a step, which he thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairs-landing. A knock at his door followed the sound of the approaching steps. He lifted himself, and called out, inhospitably, "Come in!" and, as he expected, Jeff Durgin came in. Westover's meetings with him had been an increasing discomfort since his return from Lion's Head. The uneasiness which he commonly felt at the first moment of encounter with him yielded less and less to the influence of Jeff's cynical bonhomie, and it returned in force as soon as they parted.
It was rather dim in the place, except for the light thrown up into it from the turmoil of lights outside, but he could see that there was nothing of the smiling mockery on Jeff's face which habitually expressed his inner hardihood. It was a frowning mockery.
"Hello!" said Westover, "Hello!" answered Jeff. "Any commands for Lion's Head?""What do you mean?"
"I'm going up there to-morrow. I've got to see Cynthia, and tell her what I've been doing."Westover waited a moment before he asked: "Do you want me to ask what you've been doing?""I shouldn't mind it."
The painter paused again. "I don't know that I care to ask. Is it any good?""No!" shouted Jeff. "It's the worst thing yet, I guess you'll think.
I couldn't have believed it myself, if I hadn't been through it.
I shouldn't have supposed I was such a fool. I don't care for the girl;I never did."
"Cynthia?"
"Cynthia? No! Miss Lynde. Oh, try to take it in!" Jeff cried, with a laugh at the daze in Westover's face. "You must have known about the flirtation; if you haven't, you're the only one." His vanity in the fact betrayed itself in his voice. "It came to a crisis last week, and we tried to make each other believe that we were in earnest. But there won't be any real love lost."Westover did not speak. He could not make out whether he was surprised or whether he was shocked, and it seemed to him that he was neither surprised nor shocked. He wondered whether he had really expected something of the kind, sooner or later, or whether he was not always so apprehensive of some deviltry in Durgin that nothing he did could quite take him unawares. At last he said: "I suppose it's true--even though you say it. It's probably the only truth in you.""That's something like," said Jeff, as if the contempt gave him a sort of pleasure; and his heavy face lighted up and then darkened again.
"Well," said Westover, "what are we going to do? You've come to tell me.""I'm going to break with her. I don't care for her--that!" He snapped his fingers. "I told her I cared because she provoked me to. It happened because she wanted it to and led up to it.""Ah!" said Westover. "You put it on her!" But he waited for Durgin's justification with a dread that he should find something in it.
"Pshaw! What's the use? It's been a game from the beginning, and a question which should ruin. I won. She meant to throw me over, if the time came for her, but it came for me first, and it's only a question now which shall break first; we've both been near it once or twice already.
I don't mean she shall get the start of me."
Westover had a glimpse of the innate enmity of the ***es in this game;of its presence in passion that was lived and of its prevalence in passion that was played. But the fate of neither gambler concerned him;he was impatient of his interest in what Jeff now went on to tell him, without scruple concerning her, or palliation of himself. He scarcely realized that he was listening, but afterward he remembered it all, with a little pity for Bessie and none for Jeff, but with more shame for her, too. Love seems more sacredly confided to women than to men; it is and must be a higher and finer as well as a holier thing with them; their blame for its betrayal must always be the heavier. He had sometimes suspected Bessie's willingness to amuse herself with Jeff, as with any other man who would let her play with him; and he would not have relied upon anything in him to defeat her purpose, if it had been anything so serious as a purpose.
At the end of Durgin's story he merely asked: "And what are you going to do about Cynthia?""I am going to tell her," said Jeff. "That's what I am going up there for."Westover rose, but Jeff remained sitting where he had put himself astride of a chair, with his face over the back. The painter walked slowly up and down before him in the capricious play of the street light. He turned a little sick, and he stopped a moment at the window for a breath of air.
"Well?" asked Jeff.
