Beaton scarcely understood it himself,perhaps because he was not yet twenty-seven.He only knew that his will was somehow sick;that it spent itself in caprices,and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of the most vehement wish.But he was aware that his wishes grew less and less vehement;he began to have a fear that some time he might have none at all.It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was thoroughly distasteful to himself,he might make a beginning in the right direction;but when he tried this on a small scale,it failed,and it seemed stupid.Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed,he was sure;but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate;a man could not expiate his temperament,and his temperament was what Beaton decided to be at fault.He perceived that it went deeper than even fate would have gone;he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done with it,however terrible.His trouble was that he could not escape from himself;and,for the most part,he justified himself in refusing to try.
After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton,and experienced the relief it really gave him,he thought for a while that if it had fallen out otherwise,and she had put him in charge of her destiny,he might have been better able to manage his own.But as it was,he could only drift,and let all other things take their course.
It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward,to show her that he was equal to the event;but he did not go so often,and he went rather oftener to the Dryfooses;it was not easy to see Margaret Vance,except on the society terms.With much sneering and scorning,he fulfilled the duties to Mrs.Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her list;but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many words with her niece.Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many;the girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness;but latterly she wanted to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems that young people usually debate so personally.Son of the working-people as he was,Beaton had never cared anything about such matters;he did not know about them or wish to know;he was perhaps too near them.
Besides,there was an embarrassment,at least on her part,concerning the Dryfooses.She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them;but she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk.She had decided not to renew the effort she had made in the spring;because she could not do them good as fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work,and she would not try to befriend them socially;she had a horror of any such futile sentimentality.She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon,but she did not quite know how to do it;she could not be sure how much or how little he cared for them.Some tentative approaches which she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal interest that she knew less than before what to think;and she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother,whom it seemed she still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.
"He seems very different,"she ventured.
"Oh,quite,"said Beaton."He's the kind of person that you might suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life;he's a cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for.But he's awfully dull company,don't you think?I never can get anything out of him.""He's very much in earnest."
"Remorselessly.We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the office who runs us all,and it's shocking merely to see the contact of the tyro natures.When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive,that he has an eye to office,and is working up a political interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible.""I should think so,"said Miss Vance,with such lofty disapproval that Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
He could not help saying,in natural rebellion,"Well,the man of one idea is always a little ridiculous.""When his idea is right?"she demanded."A right idea can't be ridiculous.""Oh,I only said the man that held it was.He's flat;he has no relief,no projection."She seemed unable to answer,and he perceived that he had silenced her to his own,disadvantage.It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism.He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting,and said,in his solemn staccato:"I must go.
Good-bye!"and got instantly away from her,with an effect he had of having suddenly thought of something imperative.
He went up to Mrs.Horn for a moment's hail and farewell,and felt himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation with half a dozen other people.He fancied that at crises of this strange interview Mrs.Horn was about to become confidential with him,and confidential,of all things,about her niece.She ended by not having palpably been so.In fact,the concern in her mind would have been difficult to impart to a young man,and after several experiments Mrs.Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.
