A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells

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      I.

      The day had been very oppressive, and at half past five in the afternoon, the heat had scarcely abated, to the perception of Mr. Joshua Harkness, as he walked heavily up the Park Street mall in Boston Common. When he came opposite the Brewer Fountain, with its Four Seasons of severe drouth, he stopped short, and stared at the bronze group with its insufficient dribble, as if he had never seen it before. Then he felt infirmly about the ground with his stick, stepped aside, and sank tremulously into one of the seats at the edge of the path. The bench was already partly occupied by a young man and a young woman; the young man had his arm thrown along the back of the seat behind the young woman; their heads were each tilted toward the other, and they were making love almost as frankly in that public place as they might in the seclusion of a crowded railway train.

      They both glanced at the intruder, and exchanged smiles, apparently of pity for his indecency, and then went on with their love-making, while Mr. Harkness, unconscious of his offence, stared eagerly out over the Common, and from time to time made gestures or signals with his stick in that direction. It was that one day of the week when people are not shouted at by a multitude of surly signboards to keep off the grass, and the turf was everywhere dotted with lolling and lounging groups. Perhaps to compensate for the absence of the signboards (which would reappear overnight like a growth of disagreeable fungi), there was an unusual number of policemen sauntering about, and it was one of these whom Mr. Harkness was trying to attract with his cane. If any saw him, none heeded, and he had to wait till a policeman came down the mall in front of him. This could not have been so long a time as it seemed to Mr. Harkness, who was breathing thickly, and now and then pressing his hand against his forehead, like one who tries to stay a reeling brain.

      "Please call a carriage," he panted, as the officer whom he had thrust in the side with his cane stopped and looked down at him ; and then as the man seemed to hesitate, he added: "My name is Harkness; I live at 9 Beacon Steps. I wish to go home at once; I've been taken faint."

      Beacon Steps is not Beacon Street, but it is of like blameless social tradition, and the name, together with a certain air of moneyed respectability in Mr. Harkness, had its effect with the policeman.

      "Sick?" he asked. "Well, you are pale. You just hold on, a minute. Heh, there! heh !" he shouted to a passing hackman, who promptly stopped, turned his horses, and drew up beside the curb next the Common. "Now you take my arm, Mr. Harkness, and I'll help you to the carriage." He raised the gentleman to his benumbed feet, and got him away through the gathering crowd; when he was gone, the crowd continued to hang about the place where he had been sitting in such numbers, that the young man first took his arm down from the back of the seat, and the young woman tilted her head away from his, and then they both, with vexed and impatient looks, rose and walked away, seeking some other spot for the renewal of their courtship.

      The policeman had not been able to refrain from driving home with Mr. Harkness, whom he patronized with a sort of municipal kindness, on the way; and for whom, when he had got him in-doors, and comfortably stretched upon a lounge in the library, he wanted to go and call the doctor. But Mr. Harkness refused, saying that he had had these attacks before, and would soon be all right. He thanked the officer by name, after asking him for it, and the officer went away, leaving Mr. Harkness to the care of the cook who, in that midsummer time, seemed to have sole charge of the house and its master. The policeman flipped the dust from the breast and collar of his coat, in walking back to his beat, with the right feeling of a man who would like to be better prepared if summoned a second time to befriend a gentleman of Mr. Harkness's standing, and to meet in coming out of his house a young lady of such beauty and elegance as he had just encountered. This young lady, as he closed the door behind him, had run up the СКАЧАТЬ