The Fighting Chance | Page 9

secret--what it does to those who do. … Some escape;
but only by dying ashore before it gets them. That is the way some of
us reach Heaven; we die too quick for the Enemy to catch us.”
He was laughing when she said: “It is not a fight with the sea; it is the
battle of Life itself you mean.”
“Yes, in a way, the battle of Life.”
“Oh, you are morbid then. Is there anybody ever born who has not a
fight on his hands?”
“No; only I have known men tired out, unfairly, before life had
declared war on them.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“Oh, something about fair play--what our popular idol summarises as a
‘square deal’.” He laughed again, easily, his face clearing.
“Nobody worth a square deal ever laments because he hasn’t had it,”
she said.
“I dare say that’s true, too,” he admitted listlessly.
“Mr. Siward, exactly what did you mean?”
“I was thinking of men I knew; for example a man who through
generations has inherited every impulse and desire that he should not
harbour--a man with intellect enough to be aware of it, with decency
enough to desire decency. … What chance has he with the storms
which have been brewing for him even before he opened his eyes on
earth? Is that a square deal?”

The troubled concentration of her face was reflected now in his own;
the wind came whipping and flicking at them from league-wide tossing
wastes; the steady thunder of the sea accented the silence.
She said: “I suppose everybody has infinite capacity for decency or
mischief. I know that I have. And I fancy that this capacity always
remains, no matter how moral one’s life may be. ‘Watch and pray’ was
not addressed to the guilty alone, Mr. Siward.”
“Oh, yes, of course. As for the balanced capacity for good and evil,
how about the inherited desire for the latter?”
“Who is free from that, too? Do you suppose anybody really desires to
be good?”
“You mean most people are so afraid not to be, that virtue becomes a
habit?”
“Perhaps. It’s a plain business proposition anyway. It pays.”
“Celestial insurance?” he asked, laughing.
“I don’t know, Mr. Siward; do you?”
But he, turning to the sea, had become engrossed in his own thoughts
again; and again she was first curious, then impatient at the ease with
which he excluded her. She remembered, too, that the cart was waiting;
that she had scarcely time now to make the train.
She stood irresolute, inert, disinclined to bestir herself. An inborn
aptitude for drifting, which threatened to become a talent for indecision,
had always alternated in her with sudden impulsive conclusions; and
when her pride was involved, in decisions which sometimes scarcely
withstood the analysis of reason.
Physically healthy, mentally unawakened, sentimentally incredulous,
totally ignorant of any master passion, and conventionally drilled, her
beauty and sweet temper had carried her easily on the frothy crest of

her first season, over the eligible and ineligible alike, leaving her at
Lenox, a rather tired and breathless girl, in love with pleasure and the
world which treated her so well.
The death of her mother abroad had made little impression upon
her--her uncle, Major Belwether, having cared for her since her father’s
death when she was ten years old. So, although the scandal of her
mother’s self-exile had been in a measure condoned by a tardy
marriage to the man for whom she had left everything, her daughter had
grown up ignorant of any particular feeling for a mother she could
scarcely remember.
However, she wore black and went nowhere for the second winter,
during which time she learned a great deal concerning the
unconventional proclivities of the women of her race and family,
enough to impress her so seriously that on an exaggerated impulse she
had come to one of her characteristic decisions.
That decision was to break the unsavoury record at the first justifiable
opportunity. And the opportunity came in the shape of Quarrier. As
though wedlock were actually the sanctuary which an alarmed nation
pretends it to be!
Now, approaching the threshold of a third and last season, and having
put away her almost meaningless mourning, there had stolen into her
sense of security something irksome in the promise she had made to
give Quarrier a definite answer before winter.
Perhaps it had been the lack of interest in the people at Shotover,
perhaps a mental review of her ancestors’ capricious records--perhaps a
characteristic impulse that had directed a telegram to Quarrier after a
midnight confab with Grace Ferrall.
However it may have been, she had summoned him. And now he was
on his way to get his answer, the best whip, the most eagerly discussed,
and one of the