Chapter 4

DANGER

It was what he had been afraid of on and off for seven years. The wonder was that it hadn't happened before. But, since it had not happened, he had got out of the way of expecting it. The fear of it used to dog him whenever he went to the theater or the opera or out to dine. There had been minutes in Fifth Avenue, or Bond Street, or the Rue de la Paix, as the case might be, when, at the sight of a feather or a scarf or something familiar in a way of walking, his heart and brain seemed to stop their function. He had known himself to stand stock-still, searching wildly for the easy, casual phrases he had prepared--for the purpose of carrying off such a meeting as this, if ever it occurred, only to find that he was mistaken--that it was some one else.

There had been two or three years like that, two or three years in which they had often been in the same city, perhaps under the same roof; but he had never so much as caught a glimpse of her. In the earlier months that had been a relief. He couldn't have seen her and kept his self-control. He could follow the routine of life only by a system he had invented--a system for shutting her out of his thought, that the sight of her would have wrecked.

Then had come another period in which he felt he could have committed infamies just to see her getting in or out of a carriage, or lunching in a restaurant, or buying something in a shop. There were whole seasons when he knew she was in New York from autumn to spring; and, though he haunted all the places where women who keep in the movement are likely to be found, he never saw her.

He knew he could have discovered her plans and followed her; but he wouldn't do that. Besides, he didn't want to meet her in such a way as to be obliged to speak to her. He wouldn't have known what to say, or by what name to call her. Such an encounter would have annoyed her and made him grotesque. It was more than he asked. He would have been satisfied with a glimpse of her gloved hand or her veiled face as she drove in the Park or the Avenue. But he never got it.

After he married, the fear of meeting her came back. It was fear as much for her sake as for his own. He began to understand that the embarrassment wouldn't be all on his side, nor the suffering. He picked that up from the children, as he had picked up so many things, piecing odds and ends of their speeches together. He saw them so rarely now that he attached the greater value to the hints they threw out. He never questioned them about her, but it was natural that they should take a wider range of comment in proportion as they grew older. So he learned that her dread of seeing him was as great as his own of seeing her. It was astonishing that in all those seven years the hazards of New York should not have thrown them together.

And now, at the moment when he might reasonably have felt safest, there she was! That is, she was on the steamer. For seven