The Fighting Chance

Then she had become intelligent again, with a little laughter, a little malice, a becoming tint of hesitation and confusion; all the sense, all the arts, all the friendly sweetness of a woman thorough in training, schooled in self-possession, clear enough to be audacious and perverse without danger to herself, to the man, or to the main chance.

Standing there alone in his lighted room, he wondered whether, had her trained and inbred policy been less precise, less worldly, she might have responded to such a man as he. Perfectly conscious that he had been capable of loving her; aware, too, that his experience had left him on that borderland only through his cool refusal to cross it and face a hopeless battle already lost, he leisurely and mentally took the measure of his own state of mind, and found all well, all intact; found himself still master of his affections, and probably clear-minded enough to remain so under the circumstances.

To such a man as he, impulse to love, capacity to love, did not mean instant capsizing with a flop into sentimental tempests, where swamped, ardent and callow youth raises a hysterically selfish clamour for reciprocity or death. His nature partly, partly his character, accounted for this balance; and, in part, a rather wide experience with women of various degrees counted more.

So, by instinct and experience, normally temperate, only what was abnormal and inherited might work a mischief in this man. His listlessness, his easy acquiescence, were but consequent upon the self-knowledge of self-control. But mastery of the master-vice required something different; he was sick of a sickness; and because, in this sickness, will, mind, and body are tainted too, reason and logic lack clarity; and, to the signals of danger his reply had always been either overconfident or weak--and it had been always the same reply: "Not yet. There is time." And now, this last week, it had come upon him that the time was now; the skirmish was already on; and it had alarmed him suddenly to find that the skirmish was already a battle, and a rough one.

As he stood there he heard voices on the stairs. People had already begun to retire, because late cards and point-shooting at dawn do not agree. And a point-shooting picnic in snugly elaborate blinds was popular with women--or was supposed to be.

He could distinguish by their voices, by their laughter and step, the people who were mounting the stairway and lingering for gossip or passing through the various corridors to court the sleep denied him; he heard Mortimer's heavy tread and the soft shuffling step of Major Belwether as they left the elevator; and the patter of his hostess's satin slippers, and her gay "good night" on the stairs.