An Officer and a Lady Read Online Free Page B

hour. Then I went to the office again to get the order signed.
    Just as I got ready to leave old man Marshall came in, looking worried. As he caught sight of me his face brightened up.
    “Keeler,” he said, “you’re just the man I want. When do you leave?”
    “Twelve fifteen for New York,” said I, “and as fast as I can go.”
    “Couldn’t be better,” said he. “Come in here a minute.”
    Now I’m always willing and anxious to oblige a customer, of course. So when I followed him into his private office I walked eager and pleasant. Then he explained to me that his wife’s niece was going down to New York to visit a cousin, and she was very innocent and timid and had never been there before, and would I act as escort?
    I don’t know exactly how to describe my sensations when he finished. What good had it done me to spend most of my time in dark alleys and bum hotels? What good had it done me to throw away the advantages and perquisites of twelve years’ hard work and experience? What good had it done me to fill up with Henry Van Dyke and the Ladies’ Home Companion? What good had it done me if at the very end I was to have a young, timid innocent niece set right down in the same seat with me for a two hour-trip down the Hudson?
    All of which isn’t as foolish as it sounds. I know my weakness. Like Lord Darlington, I can resist everything except temptation.
    I felt that I had just one chance. There are nieces and nieces. As I packed my sample case I kept hoping that she would prove to be a second, or even a run of the mill.
    She wasn’t. She was the kind that comes in a case by itself, packed in cotton and invoiced separately. As I shook hands with her on the station platform I took a wild and despairing grip on my Lord Tennyson vow. Then I realized that I was gripping her hand even harder, and I dropped it and went over to the baggage room to read over the last letter from my wife. I got back just in time to help her on the train and shake hands with old man Marshall.
    We hadn’t gone a mile before she asked me to lay her coat up on the rack, and thanked me in that way that says: “I’m so glad you were here to do that for me.” Then I reversed the seat in front, and she put one foot up on it—the one next the window. It was only about half covered by a low, small, dainty pump, and the ankle and its surroundings were composed entirely of curves. She turned clear around in the seat and sat facing me. Her hair was a kind of reddish brown—different from any I’d ever seen—and it kept trying to crawl out from under her hat. Her eyes, big and brown, had a tender, friendly look that seemed willing to admit anything, and her mouth—
    Then I went to the other end of the car for a drink of water.
    The incidents of that two-hour ride are still sort of hazy in my memory. Of course for any ordinary man it would have been simple and easy, but all the time I had a remembrance of my previous record, my promises to my wife, and a perfume that blew over from the niece’s hair whirling around before me in a sort of Donnybrook Fair. I was afraid even to be polite, and I guess she had begun to think I was the original and only genuine clam. Then—this was about at Tarrytown—after trying hard for thirty minutes, I managed to say something about my wife.
    “Are you married ?” said she, like that.
    I nodded. She looked at me interested for a minute, and then said:
    “Poor man!”
    “I don’t agree with your sentiment,” said I with some heat. “I’m the luckiest man in the world. The true state of happiness is—”
    “Freedom.” She shook her head again and laughed. “That’s why I intend to hold on to it as long as I can.”
    Than I thanked God I’d told her I was married. If I hadn’t, I never would have been able to pass by such a challenge as that. Even as it was I felt an awful longing to make her take it back. No man who thinks anything of his sex or has any self-respect can allow a woman to