Chains : $b lesser novels and storiesDreiser, Theodore
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Chains : $b lesser novels and stories
Dreiser, Theodore
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
“So arrayed, then, she would go forth, whenever she could contrive
it, to attend a theatre, a lecture, a moving picture, or to walk
the streets. And yet, strangely enough, and this was as curious a
phase of the case as any, she never appeared to wish to thrust her
personal charms, such as they were, on any one. On the contrary, as it
developed, there had generated in her the sudden hallucination that she
possessed so powerful and self-troubling a fascination for men that she
was in danger of bewildering them, enticing them against themselves
to their moral destruction, as well as bringing untold annoyance upon
herself. A single glance, one look at her lovely face, and presto!
they were enslaved. She needed but to walk, and lo! beauty—her beauty,
dazzling, searing, destroying—was implied by every motion, gesture. No
man, be he what he might, could withstand it. He turned, he stared,
he dreamed, he followed her and sought to force his attention on her.
Her father explained to me that when he met her on the street one day
he was shocked to the point of collapse. A daughter of his so dressed,
and on the street! With the assistance of the maiden sister a number
of modifications was at once brought about. All charge accounts were
cancelled. Dealers were informed that no purchases of hers would be
honored unless with the previous consent of her father. The worst of
her sartorial offenses were unobtrusively removed from her room and
burnt or given away, and plainer and more becoming things substituted.
“But now, suddenly, there developed a new and equally interesting stage
of the case. Debarred from dressing as she would, she began to imagine,
as these two discovered, that she was being followed and admired and
addressed and annoyed by men, and that at her very door. Eager and
dangerous admirers lurked about the place. As the maiden aunt once
informed me, having wormed her way into Marguerite’s confidence, she
had been told that men ‘were wild’ about her and that go where she
would, and conduct herself however modestly and inconspicuously, still
they were inflamed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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