"You've told me that before," he murmured. "Please calm down." An ecstatic light slowly left her.
"Oh yes. Sense," she whispered. "Well, the sense of it is for you to become a symbol of their holiness. Be a leader. Isn't that it. But the private bank crusade has fizzled. I've read the papers closely and outside of the two attacks on the private bankers last week, there've been no great gestures of righteousness. If they'd hamstrung a few hundred private bankers, cut off their heads and burned down their houses, I'd advise you to stick. That's sense isn't it?"
Basine, listening to the uncomfortable distortions of his sister, made up his mind. He translated her vicious suggestions into the less inconveniencing idea.... "The biggest part of the work in the fight against the banks has been done already, Doris. And the rest anybody can do."
"Yes," she smiled, "if you're going to be of service to the public you must be careful to devote yourself to worthwhile reforms. You always had a clearer way of putting things, George."
She despised him. He could feel it now. He looked at her and wondered again. She was beautiful. A complete change had come over her since he'd come in. She seemed warm with emotion, alive, human. But she smiled in an offensive way. He preferred her viciousness. That was impersonal--something queer in her head. This other was a condescension that angered him. He sat thinking; she was playing with him. It would be better if he never saw her.
"How is Henrietta?" she asked.
The question had long ago became an invitation to confession. He avoided her eyes.
"Fanny and Aubrey were over," he answered.
She interrupted. "Please don't talk about them."
"Oh, nothing in particular," he hastened. "Henrietta is the same as ever."
Doris laughed.
"An ideal wife for a future public hero," she exclaimed. Basine frowned.
"I'd rather you didn't make a joke about such things, Doris."
"I'm not joking. But to be a great leader a man must have only one love--the love of being a great leader."
"That's wrong," Basine blurted out. "A woman can help a man forward if he loves her and she's clever and loves him."
"She can't," Doris said softly. "Because she doesn't want to. If she loves him, she doesn't want him to be great. She may inspire him but just as soon as she sees his inspiration takes him away from her, she turns around and tries to ruin him. So she can have him to herself."
Basine listened impatiently. This was a child prattling. Doris was laughing. He looked at her questioningly. Her laughter continued and grew harsh.
"You fool," she sighed, controlling herself. "Oh you fool."
Basine shook his head. He was serious. There were hidden facts in his mind. He knew something about what a woman might do to help a man forward. These facts seemed to him allies--secret allies, as he contradicted his sister.
"I insist you're wrong," he said. He was determined to prove her wrong.
But she went on, ignoring his intensity.
"Your wife is ideal, George. Colorless, stupid. Dead. Without desires or egoism. An ideal wife for a man of ambition. The kind that will let you alone."
"Nonsense. You're utterly wrong," he cried. He must prove to her how utterly wrong she was. There was Ruth.
"Men owe most of their success to the impulse the right woman can give them. Henrietta's all right. But she's so damn dead. She's interested in nothing. Just a child with a child's mind and outlook. And she gets more so every year. Good God, if I had somebody with life in her. Keen and ... who loved me. So that I wanted to be great in her eyes. It would be easier. Somebody ... like you, Doris."
He paused, confused. "I mean," he added, "your type. The intellectual and female combined."
He had long ago told her of his courtship, of the curious way he had tricked himself into matrimony and she had always laughed at his unhappiness and said this--only a fool tricked himself as he had done.
Nevertheless his marriage was ideal.
"Men instinctively pick out what they need," she would say. "And a man like you needs a nonentity like Henrietta. You wait and see. Your happiness isn't coming from emotion inside but from emotion outside--the noise of praise the public will someday give you."
But there were facts now hidden in his head to disprove this. He started as Doris announced casually,
"Ruth Davis may drop in this afternoon."
They finished their tea. A knock on the door frightened him. The girl!
No. Doris called, "Come in," and Levine entered. Basine nodded to him.
"I'll have to be going," he said as Levine sat down. He disliked the man. Doris nodded. She appeared to have lost interest in him and, her tea finished, she was sitting back in her chair with her eyes half shut and her hands listless in her lap. Levine was talking quietly.... "You look tired, Doris. Like to go hear Lindstrum lecture tonight? No? Very well. I just dropped in to see if you would. Come on."
"No," she frowned at him.
"I'm sorry."
"Why?"
"I think it would be better for you to...."
Her eyes shut him off. They were blazing.
"Please," she cried. Then with a sigh she turned toward the window.
Basine stood up. He pretended a leisureliness, opening a few books and staring with apparent interest at passages in them. Levine and his sister were a strange pair. Doris queer and moody and going into impossible tantrums. And this man with brown negro eyes and a loose-lipped mouth that reeked with sarcasms. There were secrets between them. Nothing wrong, but secrets. He remembered the girl was coming and grew frightened.
"Well, good-bye," he said aloud. "And calm down, Doris."
He waited uncomfortably for her to say something. But she was silent. He looked at his watch and exclaimed in a surprised, matter-of-fact voice, "Oh my! It's almost four. Good-bye. I must run."
He hurried away as if some logical necessity were spurring him on. The make-believe had been unnecessary for Doris had paid no attention to the manner of his departure.
Outside he paused and looked up and down the street. He felt relieved.
He had left in time. Crossing from an opposite corner was Ruth Davis. He would pretend he hadn't seen her and walk on in an opposite direction.
He knew she was watching him as she approached. He was frightened. A sense of suffocation. He desired to run away.
She was young. Her eyes had a way of remaining in his thought. When he talked to people, her eyes came before him and looked at him. They asked questions.
The last time he had sat with her in his sister's studio he had gone away with a feeling of panic. He was used to women. Invariably he disliked them. They seemed to him variants of his wife. They reminded him of Henrietta and he was able to say to himself, "They look attractive and mysterious. But underneath, they're all alike."
He meant they were all like Henrietta. In this way his distaste for his wife had kept him faithful to her because his imagination balked at the idea of embracing another Henrietta.
But Ruth Davis after he had met her a few times, always in his sister's presence, had impressed him differently. Perhaps it was because he had always seen her with his sister. In many ways she reminded him of Doris.
She was dark like Doris and had many of her mannerisms.
He had not thought of her as a variant of Henrietta. Rather as a variant of Doris. He had never tested his immunity to her by imagining an embrace. When he talked to her he grew eager to impress her. He wanted her to understand him, not quite as Doris understood him. She was cynical but not in the way Doris was. Her mind was kindlier.
Because he felt frightened now at her approach and a desire to run away without speaking to her, he held himself to the spot. He would get the better of this thing, he told himself quickly, by facing whatever it was and fighting it down. He would overcome the curious effect she had on him by confronting her. In this way, a very high-minded way, he persuaded himself to wait for her and to talk to her. Which was what he wanted to do above everything else.