The Common Law

He drew a deep, unconscious breath.

"I suppose so. Different people express love differently. There's no use in asking you to be different—"

She said, piteously: "I'm trying. Don't you see I'm trying? Give me time, Louis! Make allowances. You can't utterly change people in a few hours."

He gazed at her intently for a moment.

"You mean that you are trying to be fair to—her?"

"I—if you call it that;—yes! But a family can not adapt itself, instantaneously, to such a cataclysm as threatens—I mean—I mean—oh, Louis! Try to understand us and sympathise a little with us!"

His arms closed around her shoulders:

"Little sister, we both have the family temper—and beneath it, the family instinct for cohesion. If we are also selfish it is not individual but family selfishness. It is the family which has always said to the world, 'Noli me tangere!' while we, individually, are really inclined to be kinder, more sympathetic, more curious about the neighbours outside our gate. Let it be so now. Once inside the family, what can harm Valerie?"

"Dearest, dearest brother," she murmured, "you talk like a foolish man. Women understand better. And if it is a part of your program that this girl is to be accepted by an old-fashioned society, now almost obsolete, but in which this family is merely a single superannuated unit, that program can never be carried out."

"I think you are mistaken," he said.

"I know I am not. It is inevitable that if you marry this girl she will be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers call New York Society—in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted, over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any responsibility for a stranger without credentials,—it would not be possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the word. Because she is too well known; her beauty is celebrated; she has become famous. Her only chance there—or with us—would have been in her absolute anonymity. Then lies might have done the rest. But lying is now useless in regard to her."

"Perfectly," he said. "She would not permit it."

In his vacant gaze there was something changed—a fixedness born of a slow and hopeless enlightenment.

"If that is the case, there is no chance," he said thoughtfully. "I had not considered that aspect."

"I had."

He shook his head slightly, gazing through the window at the starry lustre overhead.

"I wouldn't care," he said, "if she would only marry me. If she'd do that I'd never bother anybody—nor embarrass the family—"

"Louis!"

"I mean make any social demands on you…. And, as for the world—" He slowly shook his head again: "We could make our own friends and our own way—if she would only consent to do it. But she never will."

"Do you mean to say she will not marry you if you ask her?" began Lily incredulously.

"Absolutely."

"Why?"

"For your sakes—yours, and mother's, and father's—and for mine."

There was a long silence, then Lily said unsteadily:

"There—there seems to be a certain—nobility—about her…. It is a pity—a tragedy—that she is what she is!"

"It is a tragedy that the world is what it is," he said. "Good night."

* * * * *

His father sent for him in the morning; Louis found him reading the Tribune in his room and sipping a bowl of hot milk and toast.

"What have you been saying to your mother?" he asked, looking up through his gold-rimmed spectacles and munching toast.

"Has she not told you, father?"

"Yes, she has…. I think you had better make a trip around the world."

"That would not alter matters."

"I differ with you," observed his father, leisurely employing his napkin.

"There is no use considering it," said his son patiently.

"Then what do you propose to do?"

"There is nothing to do."

"By that somewhat indefinite expression I suppose that you intend to pursue a waiting policy?"

"A waiting policy?" His son laughed, mirthlessly. "What am I to wait for? If you all were kind to Valerie West she might, perhaps, consent to marry me. But it seems that even our own family circle has not sufficient authority to protect her from our friends' neglect and humiliation….

"She warned me that it would be so, long ago. I did not believe it; I could not comprehend it. But, somehow, Lily has made me believe it. And so have you. I guess it must be true. And if that's all I have to offer my wife, it's not enough to compensate her for her loss of freedom and happiness and self-respect among those who really care for her."

"Do you give me to understand that you renounce all intentions of marrying this girl?" asked his father, breaking more toast into his bowl of milk.

"Yes," said his son, listlessly.

"Thank God!" said his father; "come here, my son."

They shook hands; the son's lifeless arm fell to his side and he stood looking at the floor in silence. The father took a spoonful of hot milk with satisfaction, and, after the younger man had left the room, he resumed his newspaper. He was particularly interested in the "Sunshine Column," which dispensed sweetness and light under a poetic caption too beautiful to be true in a coldly humorous world.

* * * * *

That afternoon Gordon Collis said abruptly to Neville:

"You look like the devil, Louis."

"Do I?"

"You certainly do." And, in a lower voice: "I guess I've heard what's the matter. Don't worry. It's a thing about which nobody ever ought to give anybody any advice—so I'll give you some. Marry whoever you damn please. It'll be all the same after that oak I planted this morning is half grown."

"Gordon," he said, surprised, "I didn't suppose you were liberal."

"Liberal! Why, man alive! Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode—and not be liberal? Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I'm up against the blind laws that made the law-makers?—laws that made life itself before Christ lived to conform to them?… I married where I loved. It chanced that my marriage with your sister didn't clash with the sanctified order of things in Manhattan town. But if your sister had been the maid who dresses her, and I had loved her, I'd have married her all the same and have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation exactly as I go about 'em now…. I wonder how much the Almighty was thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated? Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus. If you love each other—Noli pugnare duobus. … And I'm going into the woods to look for ginseng. Want to come?"