Who Cares [89]
individual stunts, as he called them, he gave no details and made no mention of the fact that he carried the D.S.O. and the Croix de Guerre in his bag. He had met the Hosacks at the American Embassy in London in 1913. He was rather sweet on Primrose.
The fact that Joan was still there was easily accounted for. She liked the place, and her other invitations were not interesting. Hosack didn't want her to go either, but of course that had nothing to do with it, and so far as Mrs. Hosack was concerned, let the bedroom be occupied by some one of her set and she was happy enough. Indeed, it saved her the brain fag of inviting some one else, "always difficult with so many large houses to fill and so few people to go round, my dear."
Harry Oldershaw was such a nice boy that he did just as he liked. If it suited him he could keep his room until the end of the season. The case of Gilbert Palgrave was entirely different. A privileged, spoiled person, who made no effort to be generally agreeable and play up, he was rather by way of falling into the same somewhat difficult category as a minor member of the British Royalty. His presence was an honor although his absence would have been a relief. He chose to prolong his visit indefinitely and there was an end of it.
Every day at Easthampton had, however, been a nightmare to Palgrave. Refusing to take him seriously, Joan had played with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Kind to him one minute she had snubbed him the next. The very instant that he had congratulated himself on making headway his hopes had been scattered to the four winds by some scathing remarks and her disappearance for hours with Harry Oldershaw. She had taken a mischievous delight in leading him on with winning smiles and charming and appealing ways only to burst out laughing at his blazing protestations of love and leave him inarticulate with anger and wounded vanity. "If you want me to love you, make me," she had said. "I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best." He had done his best. With a totally uncharacteristic humbleness, forgetting the whole record of his former easy conquests, and with this young slim thing so painfully in his blood that there were times when he had the greatest difficulty to retain his self-control, he had concentrated upon the challenge that she had flung at him and set himself to teach her how to love with all the thirsty eagerness of a man searching for water. People who had watched him in his too wealthy adolescence and afterwards buying his way through life and achieving triumphs on the strength of his, handsome face and unique position would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was it possible?
Everything is possible when a man is whirled off his feet by the Great Emotion. History reeks with the stories of men whose natures were changed, whose careers were blasted, whose honor and loyalty and common sense were sacrificed, whose pride and sense of the fitness of things were utterly and absolutely forgotten under the stress of the sex storm that hits us all and renders us fools or heroes, breaking or making as luck will have it and, in either case, bringing us to the common level of primevality for the love of a woman. Nature, however refined and cultivated the man, or rarified his atmosphere, sees to this. Herself feminine, she has no consideration for persons. To her a man is merely a man, a creature with the same heart and the same senses, working to the same end from the same beginning. Let him struggle and cry "Excelsior!" and fix his eyes upon the heights, let him devote himself to prayer or go grimly on his way with averted eyes, let him become cynic or misogynist, what's it matter? Sooner or later she lays hands
The fact that Joan was still there was easily accounted for. She liked the place, and her other invitations were not interesting. Hosack didn't want her to go either, but of course that had nothing to do with it, and so far as Mrs. Hosack was concerned, let the bedroom be occupied by some one of her set and she was happy enough. Indeed, it saved her the brain fag of inviting some one else, "always difficult with so many large houses to fill and so few people to go round, my dear."
Harry Oldershaw was such a nice boy that he did just as he liked. If it suited him he could keep his room until the end of the season. The case of Gilbert Palgrave was entirely different. A privileged, spoiled person, who made no effort to be generally agreeable and play up, he was rather by way of falling into the same somewhat difficult category as a minor member of the British Royalty. His presence was an honor although his absence would have been a relief. He chose to prolong his visit indefinitely and there was an end of it.
Every day at Easthampton had, however, been a nightmare to Palgrave. Refusing to take him seriously, Joan had played with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Kind to him one minute she had snubbed him the next. The very instant that he had congratulated himself on making headway his hopes had been scattered to the four winds by some scathing remarks and her disappearance for hours with Harry Oldershaw. She had taken a mischievous delight in leading him on with winning smiles and charming and appealing ways only to burst out laughing at his blazing protestations of love and leave him inarticulate with anger and wounded vanity. "If you want me to love you, make me," she had said. "I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best." He had done his best. With a totally uncharacteristic humbleness, forgetting the whole record of his former easy conquests, and with this young slim thing so painfully in his blood that there were times when he had the greatest difficulty to retain his self-control, he had concentrated upon the challenge that she had flung at him and set himself to teach her how to love with all the thirsty eagerness of a man searching for water. People who had watched him in his too wealthy adolescence and afterwards buying his way through life and achieving triumphs on the strength of his, handsome face and unique position would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was it possible?
Everything is possible when a man is whirled off his feet by the Great Emotion. History reeks with the stories of men whose natures were changed, whose careers were blasted, whose honor and loyalty and common sense were sacrificed, whose pride and sense of the fitness of things were utterly and absolutely forgotten under the stress of the sex storm that hits us all and renders us fools or heroes, breaking or making as luck will have it and, in either case, bringing us to the common level of primevality for the love of a woman. Nature, however refined and cultivated the man, or rarified his atmosphere, sees to this. Herself feminine, she has no consideration for persons. To her a man is merely a man, a creature with the same heart and the same senses, working to the same end from the same beginning. Let him struggle and cry "Excelsior!" and fix his eyes upon the heights, let him devote himself to prayer or go grimly on his way with averted eyes, let him become cynic or misogynist, what's it matter? Sooner or later she lays hands