III Calling a Man a Pig
“And yet,” mused Ravant, “I make you cry!”
There was an unwonted softness in his voice.
“I’m sorry I’m such a brute—I am a good deal of a brute—ain’t I?”
When she did not answer he shouted at her suddenly:
“Ain’t I?”
“Yes,” said the frightened nurse.
“And I’m a pig, too. That’s what the doctor called me the other day when he left, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I heard him. And he’s right, too—though not so bully as you, at saying it.”
“The doctor is mistaken,” braved the girl. “I wouldn’t say it.”
Ravant gasped and sat up in bed.
“What?”
The girl repeated, without fear, what she had said.
And nothing had ever cowed Ravant as that did. It made him stop and think. It seemed as if he had never thought before—so primitive were his processes.
“I’ll just live up to that girl’s estimate of me—and fool her. I really thought I was a pig. Heavens!” He laughed with himself as if he were some one else. “It didn’t even offend me! But I’m glad I’m not a pig—to her—and I’ll stop being a brute. Especially to women. What was it mother used to say?”
Finally he remembered it:
“Always be gentle to all women. For some of them are mothers, and all of them are daughters of mothers.”
He said to himself that he had better write that out in a plain hand and paste it in his hat. Then he said he would go the hat one better—he would write it out and paste it in his head.
And I think he did this in some fashion. For he often remembered it. And at this time it was hard for him to remember things.
“Please!” she begged of him one day with her hands out to his, meaning that he should intermit his ceaseless watching of her. “I feel like the insect under the microscope.” She ended with that brief, halfway laugh.
“I won’t,” said Ravant. “It helps me. And that is what you are paid for doing.”
“Yes,” said the girl, at once relapsing into her shell. “That is what I am paid for!”
“The only thing you need to be a real beauty is a smile. Can’t you get further than halfway? Try it. You won’t break anything. Smile for the drunken pig one of those smiles that won’t come off.”
“Have you ever smiled?” retorted the girl.
“I grin all day,” answered Ravant.
“Yes—you grin.”
Ravant caught the subtlety and was both amazed at his nurse and shocked at himself. He remembered that it was very long since his face had known the smile of gentleness.
“Let’s learn the art together,” he laughed. “By the Lord, you are good for me!”
“Then I must admit that you are also good for me.”
“Smile!” commanded Ravant.
“I cannot,” laughed the girl.
Ravant laughed, and knew how splendid and strange this was to him.
“If you would do that more often, it would be good for you,” said Ravant again.
“And you would be—good!”
“Yes—” agreed the invalid, “if you would smile so for me—”
“Oh, I meant your own smile!” cried the blushing nurse.
Ravant looked upon this blush until it had much the effect that looking upon the wine when it is red used to have upon him.
“Here!” he cried.
The girl came toward him. He caught her face between his hands and rounded it there.
“I have taken all the lines away. You have no business to have them.”
“My life—” said the girl, simply. “Those lines are its history. They belong there.”
“Then can you read my history in mine?” asked the man.
“Yes.”
“Do they say that I am a brute?”
“Yes.”
“Plainly?”
“Quite plainly.”
“My God! Why did not some one tell me that secret before? We go about thinking our faces conceal the very things they shout aloud!”
He looked again at her face.
“Yes, yours speaks of sorrow—”
A silence then—
“What was it?”
“Others said what you have just said. That I was ugly. A woman has nothing—is nothing—without beauty. That is her one source of power.”
Ravant laughed incredulously.
“Women like me,” added the nurse.