The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

shown a mild attention, but it seemed to her as if she took in for the
first time its real meaning. Whether it was the dawn, exhaustion, a
stimulating personality, love, or mere accident, the words now came to
her with all the beauty and truth of a religious conviction. They
seemed to shake her and make her over. She felt as if she could never
be sufficiently grateful to the person who had thus made all life fresh
and new to her.
“Ah,” she said, very gently, “that’s it. I see. You won’t believe me,
but I assure you from now on I mean to be entirely different.”
“Please, not too different.”
“Oh yes, yes, as different as possible. I’ve been so unhappy, and
unhappy about nothing definite—that’s the worst kind, only that I have
not liked the life I was leading.”
She glanced at him appealingly. She had tried to tell this simple story
to so many people, for she had many friends, and yet no one had ever
really understood. Some had told her she was spoiled, more, that there
was no use in trying to change her life because she would soon marry;
most of them had advised her to marry and find out what real trouble
was. Now, as she spoke she saw that this strange young man from the sea
not only understood her discontent, but thought it natural, almost
commonplace.
She poured it all out. “Only the worst thing,” she ended, “is that I’m
not really any good. There isn’t anything else that I know how to do.”
“I doubt that,” he answered, and she began to doubt it, too. “I’m sure
there are lots of things you could do if you put your mind on it. Did
you ever try to write?”
Now, indeed, she felt sure that he was gifted with powers more than
mortal—to have guessed this secret which no one else had ever
suspected. She colored deeply.
“Why, yes,” she answered, “I think I can—a little, only I’ve so little
education.”
“So little education?”
“Yes, I belong to the cultivated classes—three languages and nothing
solid.”
“Well, you know, three languages seem pretty solid to me,” said Ben,
who had wrestled very unsuccessfully with the French tongue. “You speak
three languages, and let me see, you know a good deal about painting
and poetry and jade and Chinese porcelains?”
She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Oh, of course everyone
knows about those things, but what good are they?”
They were a good deal of good to Ben. He pressed on toward his final
goal. “What is your attitude toward fairies?” he asked, and Miss Cox
would have heard in his tone a faint memory of his voice when he
engaged a new office-boy.
Her attitude toward fairies was perfectly satisfactory, and he showed
so much appreciation that she went on and told him her great secret in
full. She had once had something published and been paid money for
it—fifteen dollars—and probably never in her life had she spoken of any
sum with so much respect. It had been, well, a sort of a review of a