Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 121, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 May 1913 — WAS SHY OF WOMEN [ARTICLE]

WAS SHY OF WOMEN

So He Unsuccessfully Cut a Wide Swath Around Girls. By LOUISE OLNEY. Like other humans, Jerry McFesland longed for adventure. Like them he looked afar and net near for Its coming, forgetting that it comes oftenest clad as love, frequently as business, seldom in distant places. At thirty he had come by the prosaic paths of a country rearing, school, a boy’s pranks and dreams, a business course, loss of his parents, and a bookkeeper’s job with Stanley & Stanley, to a small silent partnership in the firm—and a healthy theory that a married man was as good as dead. Upstanding, merry, noticeable by reason of his height his Irish blue eyes and dark hair, courteous, pleasant, he was still as shy of women as a pheasant of guns. He had seen three good friends lost in the maw of marriage. Kennedy was become a money-machine for an extravagant ■wife; Harrison talked baby-talk and discussed breakfast foods and betrayed no interest in manly sports. Considine was tied to a pretty, ailing, jealous plaything of a woman. So McFarland deliberately cut a wide swath around girls. Here enters Mary Fetterling. Now a man avoids a great danger more carefully than a small one. Wherefore McFarland instinctively sidestepped the elder Stanley’s new secretary, a tall, quiet, dark girl with a wide comprehensive gaze and a disconcertingly amused look in her deep eyes. She never paid the slightest attention to McFarland, but he avoided her. He overdid the matter. Which is where his downfall begins. One vile, windy March morning it chanced that McFarland entered breezily, found her alone in the office, and was fairly fleeing past her with an aloof “Good morning,” when he received, with a shock, the first end of his yet unrecognized adventure. “Mr. McFarland,” said the girl’s even, rich voice, “please come here a moment” Wondering, he stepped back and facdd her across her desk. Anger lit her face to great beauty. “Mr. McFarland, I want you to understand that it is unnecessary and a little Insulting for you to avoid me as you do. It is too patent. I assure you that Ido not like you in the least. I have no designs upon you. I wouldn’t —marry you for worlds. You are cold and self-centered and not —generous enough to take a risk with a woman for the sake of possible—great happiness. You couldn’t —love if yqu wanted to —it isn’t in you.” The young man caught his breath at this low-spoken, astonishing tirade, but the girl went on unmercifully. “Is this all!” he asked gravely. She shook her head. “Not quite. I care so little what you think of me that I dare speak like this! Your avoidance brings unpleasant comment on me here. Mr. Stanley remarked yesterday that you seemed to think I might eat you; Mr. Rogers and Miss Mason wondered how you managed to cut such a wide circle around me. I overheard. They laid a —bet that you would never even go down the same elevator with me —and that finally I would succeed in—landing you,’ was was their word.” “You—mistake my attitude,” he said, but she interrupted. “Excuse me—your attitude is nothing to me. All I ask is that you treat me no worse than the rest of the office fixtures. You don’t swerve three yards around a chair. Yet the chair is less indifferent to you than I am. I am not a menace—you needn’t flee from me —visibly. It makes it—embarrassing for me." Her sweet voice made her words seem unreal, but she finished by swinging her machine into place and sitting down to work just as Miss Mason entered with a knowing glance at the two. All day Mary Fettering felt watobed, and McFarland was coldly, furiously uncomfortable. How dared she speak so? And —was she right. He knew she was.

Things happened right along after that. First, McFarland had night sessions of reckoning with his own thoughts. Was he selfish, was he incapable of—loving—well, not Mary Fettering, of course, but any woman? His mind went over her hot attack, remembering the fire in her deep eyes, the tremble of her lip, the bite of her cwords. What a virago of a wife she would make so other fellow! And yet—! He laughed in his lonely roonf*one night as March was raging Its lion-like way out into April to think of her courage in berating him. He should have reproved her. She had the best of him. Now he wanted to 'lock at her and dared not. When he did, he no longer found the little amused gleam in her eyes. He thought her pale.• Once he deliberately waited and went down to the street with her, he addressed commonplace remarks to her —always her that made him fear to face her alone —she might drive him away. One shining April morning Stanley, Sr,, made trouble. Old eyes are unseeing. He called McFarland to the Inner office and talked over a big deal. The young man’s clear head took it in perfectly and added strength to the scheme. His elder, with delight, shifted the matter to younger shoulders. “Now," he finished, "you know the dozen firms we have to get, McFarland. You have a captivating style— In letters. Get busy. I’ll sign them I In the morning. Call Miss Fettering

in and dictates! have .Cv to a board meeting. What’s up?” “Can I have Miss Mason ’instead?* Stanley stared and then laughed. “Miss Mason?” His look made the young man angry. “Boy, it you must, choose someone who'ls class. She isn’t quality. Miss Fettering, joking aside, must take these letters. They are important and she has a long head —and a short tongue —” Fettering thought he knew something about her tongue. “What ails, you, McFarland? Your face is black —" “You are mistaken,” McFarland said coldly. “Any stenographer will do. It was simply that Miss Fettering dislikes me extremely, and —” The older man laughed amusedly, incredulously. “Clever girl,” he commented while McFarland’s wrath mounted high. “Clever girl and afreet, but dislikes and business don’t go together. She can take her evenings to hate you in. Now about those letters?”—He went out with some details of Instruction on his lips. “Miss Fettering,” he said, parsing her, “please go directly ’to my office and take some dictation from McFarland. Get them out, if you can, today so I can sign them in the morning. They are important,” he added confidentially. Without a word the girl took her book and marched in to face McFarland. Her eye met his coolly, and she sat down and poised her pen waiting for him to begin. Something about her maddened and embarrassed him, he set his teeth with a desire to shake her, .make her cry. He would have liked to see her cry. With a wish to be cruel he began dictation at a speed that would have swamped a less rapid stenographer. He kept her a good two hours of hard labor, reading back, erasing, altering, till his letters suited him. Finally he was so cross that he begged pardon and received a cool little bow. But he had the satisfaction of seeing her grow pale, and watching a line deepen between her level brows. He noted the fine symmetry of her cheek and chin, the heavy hair, the trim, elegant figure. She, at any rate, was certainly' “class.” And he noted bitterly that when he was through her exit had the air of a triumphal escape. She always got the best of him. He was going to call her back and berate her as she had him, but he didn’t —she wouldn’t care. In that nioment he knew that he wanted her to care. His misery was conscious. No torture lasts always. It fades, or dies, or changes into another form —or into bliss and peace. The end of things came suddenly as they had begun. One late Sunday morning in April when the sun was hot after a quick rain, and the buds were bursting green, McFarland flung into a car and betook himself to the ends of the earth in an effort to get away from himself. A strange heat and weakness was upon him. He kept thinking that presently his senses would return, that he would free himself from this obsession about a girl who despised him. Now he proposed to walk it off in the solitude of a little wood where a small stream purred its way among stones. There was scant khade as yet, but birds thrilled about, and the willows leaned over-the brook wrapped in a tender green mist as delicate as smoke. It seemed strange to McFarland that no one else had cared to come to so pretty a place. What if he had asked her to come with him? The daring thought overwhelmed him. Why not have done so? She might have come. Even kindness from her would have helped his self-respect. She needn’t love him but she might have been kind. He longed for kindness from her.

Just there Jerry McFarland met his adventure. Coming sharply around a high little hill and some great trees he walked almost into a tall, whiteclad young girl leaning her dark head on her arm against a gray trunk. She started in terror. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” he cried, and stood looking down at Mary Fetterling. Tears rolled down her clear cheeks, and her hands hung helplessly at her side. She made no effort to hide the tears, or to flee, or to send him away. A great wave of rose-color swept her face and neck, but somehow she could not take her gaze from his eyes and what she read there. Then he did the most foolish, sweetest thing that he could have done. He took her two willing hands in his, and bent his head over them. /‘Oh, Mary! oh, Mary!” he breathed. “Oh Mary! If you could only—care." She gave a queer little sob of a sound in her throat. "If I could —only—help caring,” she said. “Maty!” he said again. “Yes,” she answered. “Yes —yed!” The tone of her voice satisfied even him Just then. (Copyright, I#l3, by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.) _