There was something in his voice that struck through the wall of Helen’s personal suffering behind which she had shut herself for so long. She leaned toward him. She grasped one of his hands with both of hers.

“I’ll do my best to make you happy, too,” she said fervently.

Neither of them ever forgot their promise.

Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

ALTHOUGH CORNELIUS MORRISON was always aware he was not the perfect mate for Helen, and Helen observed her marriage with wide-open and seeing eyes, they both did much to enrich and beautify the life of the other. All happy marriages are not “made in heaven,” Helen discovered. Some are the result of wise human effort, and long steady adaptation.

Cornelius Morrison was thirty years older than Helen. He was never free from the fear that some day a younger man, a more appropriate comrade for his wife, might supplant him in her affections. If a younger man devoted an evening to Helen, if she seemed to respond to his attentions with interest and vivacity, a deep melancholy would take possession of Cornelius Morrison—unreasonable, perhaps, but uncontrollable and terribly painful.

Helen needed no explanations. With her intuition she saw as clearly as through a microscope into the reason for her husband’s occasional waves of depression. Not for anything in the world would she hurt him. She might not love him in the romantic way that she had loved Stephen. She knew that she didn’t; but there was something fine and untarnished to be preserved about their relations, beside which passing and personal pleasures were trivial and unimportant. She became as careful to spare her husband the secret ignominy of jealousy as to guard her children from groundless fears and premonitions. In spite of her youth, in spite of her natural impulses, she avoided all intimacies that might even indefinitely disturb Cornelius.

With gentle consideration, too, she abandoned all forms of pleasure that emphasized the difference in their ages and placed him at a disadvantage. Cornelius spoke no word of complaint on the several occasions when she danced half the night away on a ballroom floor while he waited for her in a smoky anteroom, but quietly, without comment, Helen gave up dancing after a little while. Cornelius liked to give dinners. Helen learned to like to give them. Cornelius liked to go to the opera. Helen learned to like to go to the opera. Cornelius liked to ride horseback. Helen learned to like to ride horseback. It was when Helen was riding horseback in Central Park one morning alone that she met Stephen Dallas.

2

WHEN STEPHEN HAD said, “Do you remember me?” Helen had replied with a little puzzled look, as if she wasn’t quite sure, “You’re Stephen Dallas, aren’t you?”

“You know I’m Stephen Dallas,” he exclaimed in the old sure way with her he used to have.