Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. "It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists." He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.

"Yes," Minver said, facing about toward me. "How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you're always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?"

"No, I can't," I admitted. "I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why."

"No, you couldn't, my dear fellow," the painter retorted. "It's part of your swindler to a.s.sume that you _do_ know why. You ought to find out."

Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: "The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with."

"Acton ought to go round and collect human doc.u.ments bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their pa.s.sion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don't you do it, Acton?"

I returned, as seriously as could have been expected: "Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don't like to talk of such things."

"They're ashamed," Minver declared. "The lovers don't either of them, in a given ease, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man."

Minver's point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other's pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.

"Oh, merely this," I said. "I don't think they're so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say?"

"Very much what you said. It's astonishing how people forget the vital things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generation knows nothing of it."

"That appears to let Acton out," Minver said. "But how do _you_ know what you were saying, Wanhope?"

"I've ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn't inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed." Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: "Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them."

"Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood--" Rulledge began, but Minver's laugh arrested him.

"Nothing so concrete, I'm afraid," Wanhope gently returned. "I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. There's something pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at."

"They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love," Minver said. "Especially when they're not in earnest about it."

"Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women," Wanhope admitted. "But I don't mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her."

"Do you suppose she always knows it first?" Rulledge asked.

"You may be sure," Minver answered for Wanhope, "that if she didn't know it, _he_ never would." Then Wanhope answered for himself:

"I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through s.p.a.ce towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal."

"And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?" I suggested.

"Yes," Wanhope admitted after a thoughtful reluctance.

"Even when she is half aware of having invited it?"

"If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won't mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful s.p.a.ce, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can't be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence."

"Oh, I'm not sure about that, professor," Minver put in. "Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you."

"It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life," Wanhope resumed. "I don't believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to be."

"Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?" I invited him.

"I'm not sure of that. No man's part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing," the psychologist added with one of his deep breaths, "is so complex as a simple nature."

"Well," Minver contended, "Braybridge is plain, if his case isn't."

"Plain? Is he plain?" Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

"My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!"

"I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man--the fascination of his being grizzled, and slovenly, and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circ.u.mstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop.

He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don't vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess's end of the party, and was watching for a chance to--"

Wanhope cast about for the word, and Winver supplied it: "Pull out."

"Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him."

"I don't understand," Rulledge said.

"When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late, the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it's rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?"

We others looked at each other. Minver said: "I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists.

There was a jam of people; but this girl--I've understood it was she--looked as much alone as if there were n.o.body else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda."

"And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe," I said. "Good selling name."

"Don't reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name."

"Go on, Wanhope," Rulledge puffed impatiently. "Though I don't see how there could be another soul in the universe as const.i.tutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women."

"In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman," Wanhope returned.

"Or a bold one," Minver suggested.

"No; the response must be in kind, to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn't be afraid."

"Oh! _That's_ the way you get out of it!"

"Well?" Rulledge urged.

"I'm afraid," Wanhope modestly confessed, "that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn't able to be very definite, except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn't think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear of Braybridge's going. She said she hadn't heard of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn't give Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin thought it was odd that Braybridge didn't insist; and he made a long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each other's charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs.

Welkin knew from the letters that pa.s.sed through her hands, and--Well, their engagement has come out, and--" Wanhope paused with an air that was at first indefinite, and then definitive.

"You don't mean," Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, "that that's all you know about it?"

"Yes, that's all I know," Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised himself at the fact.

"Well!"