The Fighting Chance

"That's immoral."

"Kemp, I'm not. She'd be mad not to marry him; but I don't know what I'd do to a man like that, if I were his wife. And you know what a terrific capacity for mischief there is in Sylvia. Some day she's going to love somebody. And it isn't likely to be Howard. And, oh, Kemp! I do grow so tired of that sort of thing. Do you suppose anybody will ever make decency a fashion?"

"You're doing your best," said Ferrall, laughing at his wife's pretty, boyish face turned back toward him over her shoulder; "you're presenting your cousin and his millions to a girl who can dress the part--"

"Don't, Kemp! I don't know why I meddled! … I wish I hadn't--"

"I do. You can't let Howard alone! You're perfectly possessed to plague him when he's with you, and now you've arranged for another woman to keep it up for the rest of his lifetime. What does Sylvia want with a man who possesses the instincts and intellect of a coachman? She is asked everywhere, she has her own money. Why not let her alone? Or is it too late?"

"You mean let her make a fool of herself with Stephen Siward? That is where she is drifting."

"Do you think--"

"Yes, I do. She has a perfect genius for selecting the wrong man; and she's already sorry for this one. I'm sorry for Stephen, too; but it's safe for me to be."

"She might make something of him."

"You know perfectly well no woman ever did make anything of a doomed man. He'd kill her--I mean it, Kemp! He would literally kill her with grief. She isn't like Leila Mortimer; she isn't like most girls of her sort. You men think her a rather stunning, highly tempered, unreasonable young girl, with a reserve of sufficiently trained intelligence to marry the best our market offers--and close her eyes;--a thoroughbred with the caprices of one, but also with the grafted instinct for proper mating."

"Well, that's all right, isn't it?" asked Ferrall. "That's the way I size her up. Isn't it correct?"

"Yes, in a way. She has all the expensive training of the thoroughbred--and all the ignorance, too. She is cold-blooded because wholesome; a trifle sceptical because so absolutely unawakened. She never experienced a deep emotion. Impulses have intoxicated her once or twice--as when she asked my opinion about running off with Cavendish, and that boy and girl escapade with Rivington; nothing at all except high mettle, the innocent daring lurking in all thoroughbreds, and a great deal of very red blood racing through that superb young body. But," Ferrall reined in to listen, "but if ever a man awakens her--I don't care who he is--you'll see a girl you never knew, a brand-new creature emerge with the last rags and laces of conventionality dropping from her; a woman, Kemp, heiress to every generous impulse, every emotion, every vice, every virtue of all that brilliant race of hers."