David Harum. Edward Noyes Westcott
what comes to her by the will of others."
"And yet," said John, "I fancy that there has seldom been a great career in which some woman's help or influence was not a factor."
"Even granting that," she replied, "the career was the man's, after all, and the fame and visible reward. A man will sometimes say, 'I owe all my success to my wife, or my mother, or sister,' but he never really believes it, nor, in fact, does any one else. It is his success, after all, and the influence of the woman is but a circumstance, real and powerful though it may be. I am not sure," she added, "that woman's influence, so called, isn't rather an overrated thing. Women like to feel that they have it, and men, in matters which they hold lightly, flatter them by yielding, but I am doubtful if a man ever arrives at or abandons a settled course or conviction through the influence of a woman, however exerted."
"I think you are wrong," said John, "and I feel sure of so much as this: that a man might often be or do for a woman's sake that which he would not for its sake or his own."
"That is quite another thing," she said. "There is in it no question of influence; it is one of impulse and motive."
"I have told you to-night," said John, "that what you said to me had influenced me greatly."
"Pardon me," she replied, "you employed a figure which exactly defined your condition. You said I supplied the drop which caused the solution to crystallize—that is, to elaborate your illustration, that it was already at the point of saturation with your own convictions and intentions."
"I said also," he urged, "that you had set the time for me. Is the idea unpleasant to you?" he asked after a moment, while he watched her face. She did not at once reply, but presently she turned to him with slightly heightened color and said, ignoring his question:
"Would you rather think that you had done what you thought right because you so thought, or because some one else wished to have you? Or, I should say, would you rather think that the right suggestion was another's than your own?"
He laughed a little, and said evasively: "You ought to be a lawyer, Miss Blake. I should hate to have you cross-examine me unless I were very sure of my evidence."
She gave a little shrug of her shoulders in reply as she turned and resumed her embroidery. They talked for a while longer, but of other things, the discussion of woman's influence having been dropped by mutual consent.
After John's departure she suspended operations on the doily, and sat for a while gazing reflectively into the fire. She was a person as frank with herself as with others, and with as little vanity as was compatible with being human, which is to say that, though she was not without it, it was of the sort which could be gratified but not flattered—in fact, the sort which flattery wounds rather than pleases. But despite her apparent skepticism she had not been displeased by John's assertion that she had influenced him in his course. She had expressed herself truly, believing that he would have done as he had without her intervention; but she thought that he was sincere, and it was pleasant to her to have him think as he did.
Considering the surroundings and conditions under which she had lived, she had had her share of the acquaintance and attentions of agreeable men, but none of them had ever got with her beyond the stage of mere friendliness. There had never been one whose coming she had particularly looked forward to, or whose going she had deplored. She had thought of marriage as something she might come to, but she had promised herself that it should be on such conditions as were, she was aware, quite improbable of ever being fulfilled. She would not care for a man because he was clever and distinguished, but she felt that he must be those things, and to have, besides, those qualities of character and person which should attract her. She had known a good many men who were clever and to some extent distinguished, but none who had attracted her personally. John Lenox did not strike her as being particularly clever, and he certainly was not distinguished, nor, she thought, ever very likely to be; but she had had a pleasure in being with him which she had never experienced in the society of any other man, and underneath some boyish ways she divined a strength and steadfastness which could be relied upon at need. And she admitted to herself that during the ten days since her return, though she had unsparingly snubbed her sister's wonderings why he did not call, she had speculated a good deal upon the subject herself, with a sort of resentful feeling against both herself and him that she should care—
Her face flushed as she recalled the momentary pressure of his hand upon hers on that last night on deck. She rang for the servant, and went up to her room.
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