Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

118 Photoplay Magazine to destroy a good man's work, and mine, out of spite like a spoiled child? Answer me this ! What has Tom Briscoe's work to do with my keeping my promise to Paul Temple?" "It has this to do with it." he retorted, savagely, "that it stands or falls on your stubbornness. I ask a chance to win you that any man has a right to ask of any woman, and you refuse to give it to me. I told you yesterday what to expect if you refused, and now you come here and try to beg off from that. God!" His face was livid with anger and outrage as sincere as her own, and his frame trembled as he went on. "You put everybody on earth before mc — Temple — Briscoe — yourself. You arrange things to suit them and then tell me to take the leavings and consider myself happy! Well, I won't do it, I tell you!" He paused an instant for breath. "But it's what I might have expected. I thought once that vou were different from other women, but you're not — you're just like all of them, asking everything and giving nothing ! Tom Briscoe mustn't be interfered with ; Paul Temple mustn't be hurt ; your conscience mustn't be disturbed : but what about me? I can get hurt, I can be made the goat for all this, but that's nothing ! Well, it is something, and I won't stand it, so help me God !" He stopped, weak and spent, and looked at her with haggard, blood-shot eyes in which hurt and a sense of wrong burned as fiercely as anger. She returned his look with one equally intense, and they faced each other as far apart in point of view and spirit as the poles, hopelessly at odds and dead-locked in a climax of bitterness and acrimony. Over both of them came the conviction that there was nothing more to say. that if they talked a thousand years neither could or would recede from his position, — that they had reached the breaking point. LIOLT turned away and once again walked to the window, this time trying to conceal the mad impulse seething in him to take by force what she would not give in what he considered justice. But now for once reason checked him. He saw that she could not be beaten by force, that it only increased her resistance. Intuition told him that to continue in the present direction would be to lose all, and that he must take some other tack. But what? He could not think or plan or reason. As defeat stared him in the face, his own anger suddenly departed like the ebbing glow of a stimulant and left him trembling with nervous exhaustion and reaction. He turned back to his chair and dropped into, it. He seemed beaten himself, broken in body and spirit. He buried his face in his hands for a moment. Then he sat up and looked at her, all the weariness and loneliness of human despair in his eyes. "Oh, let it go, let it go !" he said slowly and hopelessly. "What do these things matter? There's only one thing in the world for me, and that is that I love you. I don't care whether the sun rises or sets, or the world comes to an end, if you'll only love me as you can love me. Why all this fuss ! Why are we arguing here when we both know we were made for each other. when with one little word we can have such happiness as we've never dreamed of !" With the blind luck of one who has ceased to try, Holt had found the one key that would unlock her emotions. June sat. as he had stood by the window, spent in the reaction from the high point of their conflict, her heart bleeding, her whole being raw with the shock and pain of it. And now his despair and anguish roused all her swift and tender compassion, that root and stock of woman's nature, and his gentleness melted her within, so that a rain of tears bathed her heart at the futility and worthlessness of all struggle. "Why arc we arguing here, when with one little word we can have happiness?" she repeated to herself. "Oh. God. why? Happiness ... I want it. Oh. God, give me back happiness ! I can't struggle any longer . . ." Her eyes grew dim and her breath caught in a sob. He leaned forward and gently took her hands in his. She could not find the strength to withdraw them. "What's the good of living if we've got to make pain for ourselves all the time?" he said. "Isn't there enough misery without our wasting days and months and years making more? And if we can't be happy when we're young, good God. when can we be happy? Oh, June, June! haven't we wasted enough time on rights and wrongs, and things that don't matter? We have, we have! Oh, let's forget them all