The Restless Sex

"Why not?"

"Because I shall do no more tagging after you."

"What?"

"No. And when you return I mean that you shall come and ask my permission to prowl with me… And if I find you interesting enough I'll let you. Otherwise, I shall prowl by myself or with some other man."

He was laughing, and her face, also, wore a bright and slightly malicious smile.

"You don't believe that's possible, do you, Jim? – a total reversal of our rôles? You think little sister will tag gratefully after you always, don't you? Wouldn't it astonish you if little sister grew up into a desirable and ornamental woman of independent proclivities and tastes, and with a mind and a will of her own? And, to enjoy her company, you'd have to seek her and prove yourself sufficiently interesting; and that you would have to respect her freedom and individuality as you would any man's!"

"I think, little sister," he said, laughing, "that you've absorbed a vast deal of modern nonsense at Vassar; that you're as pretty as a peach; and that you'll not turn into a maid errant, but will become an ornament to your sex and to society, and that you'll marry in due time and do yourself proud."

"In children, you mean? Numerically?"

"Quantitatively and qualitatively. Also, you'll do yourself proud in the matronly example you'll set to all women of this great Republic."

"That's what you think, is it?"

"I know it."

She smiled:

"Watch the women of my generation, Jim – when you can spare a few moments of your valuable time from writing masterpieces of fiction."

"I certainly shall. I'll study 'em. They're material for me. They are funny, you know."

"They are, indeed," she said, her grey eyes full of malice, "funnier than you dream of! You are going to see a generation that will endure no man-devised restrictions, submit to no tyrannical trammels, endure no masculine nonsense. You'll see this new species of woman coming faster and faster, thicker and thicker, each one knowing her own mind or intent on knowing it. You'll see them animated by a thousand new interests, pursuing a thousand new vocations, scornful of masculine criticism, impervious to admonition, regardless of what men think and say and do about it.

"That's what you'll see, Jim, a restless sex destroying their last barriers; a world of women contemptuous of men's opinions, convinced of their own rights, going after whatever they want, and doing it in their own way.

"If they wish to marry and bother with children they'll pick out a healthy man and do it; if not, they won't. Love plays a very, very small part in a man's life. Love, sentiment, domesticity, and the nursery were once supposed to make up a woman's entire existence. Now the time is coming very swiftly when love will play no more of a rôle in a woman's life than it does in a man's. She'll have her fling, first, if she chooses, just as freely as he does. And some day, if she finds it worth the inconvenience, she'll marry and take a year or two off and raise a few babies. Otherwise, decidedly not!"

"These are fine sentiments!" he exclaimed, laughing, yet not too genuinely amused. "I'm not sure that I'd better go and leave you here with that exceedingly pretty little head of yours stuffed and seething with this sort of propaganda!"

"You might as well. The whole world is beginning to seethe with it. After all, what does it mean except equality of the sexes? Hands off – that's all it means."

"Are you a suffragette, Steve?" he inquired, smilingly.

"Oh, Jim, that's old stuff! Everybody is. All that is merely a matter of time, now. What interests us is our realization of our own individual independence. Why, I can't tell you what a delightful knowledge it is to understand that we can do jolly well what we please and not care a snap of our fingers for masculine opinion!"

"That's a fine creed," he remarked. "What a charming bunch you must be training with at Vassar! I think I'll get off this steamer and remain here for a little scientific observation of your development and conduct."

"No use," she said gaily. "I've promised to learn to be a hospital nurse. After that, perhaps, if you return, you'll find me really worth observing."

"Is that a threat, Steve?" he asked, not too sincerely amused, yet still taking her and her chatter with a lightness and amiable condescension entirely masculine.

"A threat?"

"Yes. Do you mean that when I return I shall find my little sister a handful?"

"A handful? For whose hand? Jim, dear, you are old-fashioned. Girls aren't on or in anybody's hands any more after they're of age. Do you think you'll be responsible for me? Dear child, we'll be comrades or nothing at all to each other. You really must grow up, little brother, before you come back, or I'm afraid – much as I love you – I might find you just a little bit prosy – "

The call for all ashore silenced her. She stood confronting Cleland with high colour and pretty, excited grey eyes, for a moment more, then the gay defiance faded in her face and her attitude grew less resolute.

"Oh, Jim!" she said under her breath, " – I adore you – " And melted into his embrace.

As he held her in his arms, for a moment the instinct to repel her and disengage himself came over him swiftly. A troubled idea that her lips were very soft – that he scarcely knew this girl whose supple figure he held embraced, left him mute, confused.

"Dear Jim," she whimpered, "I love you dearly. I shall miss you dreadfully. I'll always be your own little sister Steve, and you can come back and bully me and I'll tag after you and adore you. Oh, Jim – Jim – my own brother – my own – my own– !"

It was a bright, sunny, windy May day. He could still distinguish her in her black gown on the crowded pier which was all a-flutter with brilliant gowns and white handkerchiefs.

After the distant pier had become only a square of colour like a flower-bed, he still stood on the hurricane deck of the huge liner looking back at where he had last seen her. The fragrance of her still clung to him – seemed to have been inhaled somehow and to have subtly permeated him – something of the warm, fresh, pliant youth of her – unspoiled, utterly unawakened to anything more delicate or complex than the frank, vigorous passion of her affection.

Yet, as her breathless, tearful lips had clung to his, so the perfume of the embrace clung to him still, leaving him perplexed, vaguely disturbed, yet intensely conscious of new emotion, unfamiliar in his experience with this girl who yesterday had been what she always had been to him – a growing child to be affectionately looked after and chivalrously cherished and endured.

"I couldn't be in love with Steve," he said to himself incredulously. The thought amazed and exasperated him. "I'm a fine sort of man," he thought bitterly, "if I can't kiss Steve as innocently as she kisses me. There's something wrong with me. I must be a sort of dog – or crazy – "

He went below.

Stephanie went back in the car, alone. She staunched her tears with her black-edged handkerchief until they ceased to fill the wonderful grey eyes.

Later, detaching the limousine hand-mirror, she inspected her countenance, patted her chestnut-tinted hair, smoothed out her mourning veil, and then, in order, lay back in the corner of the car and gave herself up to passionate memory of this boy whom she had adored from the first moment she ever laid eyes on him.

Two years' absence? She tried to figure to herself what that meant, but could not compass it. It seemed like a century of penance to be endured, to be lived through somehow.

She wanted him dreadfully already. She had no pride left, no purpose, no threats. She just wanted to tag after him – knowing perfectly well that there could be no real equality of comradeship where youth and inexperience fettered her. She didn't care; she wanted him.

No deeper sentiment, nothing less healthy and frank than her youthful adoration for him, disturbed her sorrow. The consanguinity might have been actual as far as her affections had ever been concerned with him.

That she had, at various intervals, made of him a romantic figure, altered nothing. Stainlessly her heart enshrined him; he was her ideal, hers; her brother, her idol, her paladin – the incarnation of all that was desirable and admirable in a boy, a youth, a young man. Never in all her life had any youth interested her otherwise – save, perhaps, once – that time she had met Oswald Grismer after many years, and had danced with him – and was conscious of his admiration. That was the only time in her life when her attitude toward any man had been not quite clear – not entirety definable. She wrote many pages to Cleland that night. And cried herself to sleep.

The next day her aunt came up from Bayport. And, a week later, she went away to Bayport with Miss Quest to begin what seemed to her an endless penance of two years' hospital training.

The uniform was pink with white cuffs, apron, and cap. She never forgot the first blood that soiled it – from a double mastoid operation on a little waif of twelve who had never been able to count more than six. She held sponges, horrified, crushing back the terror that widened her grey eyes, steeling herself to look, summoning every atom of strength and resolution and nerve to see her through.

They found her lying across the corridor in a dead faint.

CHAPTER XV

The usual happened to James Cleland; for the first two months in Paris he was intensely lonely. Life in an English-speaking pension near the Place de l'Etoile turned out to be very drab and eventless after he returned to his rooms, fatigued from sight-seeing and exploration. The vast silver-grey city seemed to him cold, monotonously impressive and oppressive; he was not in sympathy with it, being totally unaccustomed to the splendour of a municipal ensemble with all its beauty of reticence and good taste. The vast vistas, the subdued loveliness of detail, the stately tranquillity of this capital, he did not understand after the sham, the ignorance, the noisy vulgarity of his native municipality.

Here were new standards; the grey immensity of the splendid capital gave him, at first, an impression of something flat and almost featureless under the horizon-wide sweep of sky. There were no sky-scrapers. With exquisite discretion, Notre Dame dominated the east, the silvery majesty of the Pantheon the south; in the west the golden bubble of the Invalides burned; the frail tracery of the Eiffel Tower soared from the city's centre.

And for the first two months he was an alien here, depressed, silenced, not comprehending, oblivious of the subtle atmosphere of civil friendliness possessing the throngs which flowed by him on either hand, unaware that he stood upon the kindly hearthstone of the world itself, where the hospitable warmth never grew colder, where the generous glow was for all.

He went to lectures at the Sorbonne; he attended a class in philology in the Rue des Ecoles; he studied in the quiet alcoves of the great Library of Ste. Genevieve; he paced the sonorous marble pavements of the Louvre. And the austere statues seemed to chill him to the soul.