He meant well enough even then. He had never pretended to love her. He
accepted her adoration, petted and teased her in return, worked off his
occasional ill humors on her, was indeed conscious sometimes that he was
behaving extremely well in keeping things as they were.
But by the middle of January he began to grow uneasy. The atmosphere at
Marion's was bad; there was a knowledge of life plus an easy toleration
of certain human frailties that was as insidious as a slow fever. The
motto of live and let live prevailed. And Marion refused to run away
with him and marry him, or to let him go to his father.
In his office all day long there was Anna, so yielding, so surely his to
take if he wished. Already he knew that things there must either end or
go forward. Human emotions do not stand still; they either advance or go
back, and every impulse of his virile young body was urging him on.
He made at last an almost frenzied appeal to Marion to marry him at
once, but she refused flatly.
"I'm not going to ruin you," she said. "If you can't bring your people
round, we'll just have to wait."
"They'd be all right, once it is done."
"Not if I know your father! Oh, he'd be all right--in ten years or so.
But what about the next two or three? We'd have to live, wouldn't we?"
He lay awake most of the night thinking things over. Did she really care
for him, as Anna cared, for instance? She was always talking about their
having to live. If they couldn't manage on his salary for a while, then
it was because Marion did not care enough to try.
For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She
had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once,
speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his
manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next
day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly
did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with
her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.
"How do you get away with this to your father?" he asked her once.
"Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're
working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or
swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at
Gus's."