Dangerous Days

He meant well enough even then. He had never pretended to love her. He

accepted her adoration, petted and teased her in return, worked off his

occasional ill humors on her, was indeed conscious sometimes that he was

behaving extremely well in keeping things as they were.

But by the middle of January he began to grow uneasy. The atmosphere at

Marion's was bad; there was a knowledge of life plus an easy toleration

of certain human frailties that was as insidious as a slow fever. The

motto of live and let live prevailed. And Marion refused to run away

with him and marry him, or to let him go to his father.

In his office all day long there was Anna, so yielding, so surely his to

take if he wished. Already he knew that things there must either end or

go forward. Human emotions do not stand still; they either advance or go

back, and every impulse of his virile young body was urging him on.

He made at last an almost frenzied appeal to Marion to marry him at

once, but she refused flatly.

"I'm not going to ruin you," she said. "If you can't bring your people

round, we'll just have to wait."

"They'd be all right, once it is done."

"Not if I know your father! Oh, he'd be all right--in ten years or so.

But what about the next two or three? We'd have to live, wouldn't we?"

He lay awake most of the night thinking things over. Did she really care

for him, as Anna cared, for instance? She was always talking about their

having to live. If they couldn't manage on his salary for a while, then

it was because Marion did not care enough to try.

For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She

had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once,

speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his

manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next

day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly

did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with

her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.

"How do you get away with this to your father?" he asked her once.

"Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're

working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or

swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at

Gus's."