The Oldest Flame by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page A

there in abundance, but somewhere along the way a door had
opened to the capacity for a deeper feeling, one likely to throw
all those very qualities into turmoil.
    “Rose,” she said thoughtfully. Mark nodded,
watching her as if hoping to gain some sort of encouragement from
her response.
    “I knew you were always good friends when you
were children, but I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”
    “Well, I do now,” said Mark. “I’m in love
with her—miserably in love with her, Mrs. Meade, but she doesn’t
care whether I’m alive or dead.”
    Mrs. Meade forbid herself to smile. She had
long since learned to balance her sense of humor with her
expression of sympathy, and Mark Lansbury was intensely in
earnest.
    “That seems rather unlikely,” she said. “Does
Rose know yet how you feel?”
    “She knows I’m in love with her. I’ve told
her so. But she doesn’t take me seriously. She thinks it’s just an
infatuation and I’ll get over it.” He swung round so his back was
against the trunk of the tree. “I used to think, at first, that
maybe…”
    A wistful look came over his face for a few
seconds, but then it vanished and his mouth set bitterly. He thrust
his hands deep in his pockets. “But she’s never been the same since
she met that Steven Emery. She’d believe anything he told her,
whether it was the truth or not.”
    Mrs. Meade had been introduced to Steven
Emery for the first time the evening before, and she understood the
complication to Mark’s problem.
    “Who is Mr. Emery exactly? I thought at first
that he was a friend of your father’s.”
    “No. The Greys met him somehow in Denver last
winter, and he’s been hanging around them ever since. Mr. Grey
introduced him to Dad when Dad was in the city on business. That’s
why he got included in the invitation when Mother asked the Greys
down here, I think. Dad’s trying to get him to invest in the new
railroad project he wants to put through, because Emery’s supposed
to have money. But I don’t think he’s biting. He’s too busy
entertaining Rose.”
    “Is that why he came down here, do you
think?” said Mrs. Meade.
    Mark gave a disheartened shrug. “I don’t know
whether he has any serious intentions, or if he’s just amusing
himself. He’s a lot older than her, you know. But I am serious. How can I make Rose see that?”
    “Have you tried poetry?” suggested the
practical Mrs. Meade.
    “I wrote a lot,” said Mark, “and then tore it
up. Rose would only laugh at it. But if it was Steven Emery or
someone else like him writing her sonnets, she’d think it grand.
It’s all a matter of perception—the way she sees me,” he added, as
if he felt it necessary to explain for Mrs. Meade’s benefit.
    Mrs. Meade did not entirely succeed in hiding
her smile this time, since she had spent a good portion of this
conversation trying to adjust her own perception of the parties in
question. The image that still came most vividly to her mind was
one she had seen from her window some years before, of an
eight-year-old Rose and eleven-year-old Mark constructing a river
and dam in the mud of a ditch below the railway embankment. But
that was before prosperity, in the form of railroads, had descended
upon both families—and girlhood upon Rose.
    “Nothing I can say will make any difference
to Rose,” Mark was saying. “My trouble is that there’s nothing I
can do . I’ve got no way of showing her what I’m made
of.”
    “No, there are few dragons to slay in our
everyday life,” said Mrs. Meade thoughtfully. “But do you know,
I’ve always thought the girls who would take a man on his
dragon-slaying merits rather short-sighted. There are plenty of men
who can rise to the occasion when something extraordinary happens,
but what about the little things—the common things? Those are what
will matter most in the rest of their life together.”
    “I don’t know,” said Mark. “I’ve always
thought the crisis shows the