The Fighting Chance

"I am mistress of my emotions," said Sylvia, flushing.

"Then suppress them," retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, "before they begin to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen. No disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental restlessness--the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if that poison is in you, it's well for you to know it."

"It is in me," said Sylvia, staring at the fire.

"Then you know what to do for it."

"No, I don't."

"Well, I do," said Grace decisively; "and the sooner you marry Howard and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you'll be. That's where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you'd make it lively for us all."

"It is true," said Sylvia deliberately, "that I could not be treacherous to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what constitutes treachery to myself."

"Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill," observed Grace tartly.

"But it doesn't seem to," mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals. "That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what I feel for him."

"What do you feel?"

"I was in love with him. You knew it."

"You liked him," insisted Grace patiently.

"No--loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way, but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a young girl can't love--doesn't know how. But I do love, though it is true that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me. The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything. Then--I don't know--somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake … Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here"--she laid her fingers on her throat--"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence--all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?"

For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil, looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become responsible for the patient.

"If you marry him," said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, "your life will become a hell."