During the following weeks Ramon worked even less than was his custom. He
also neglected his trips to the mountains and most of his other
amusements. They seemed to have lost their interest for him. But he was a
regular attendant upon the weekly dances which were held at the country
club, and to which he had never gone before.
The country club was a recent acquisition of the town, backed by a number
of local business men. It consisted of a picturesque little frame lodge
far out upon the _mesa_, and a nine-hole golf course, made of sand and
haunted by lizards and rattlesnakes. It had become a centre of local
society, although there was a more exclusive organization known as the
Forty Club, which gave a formal ball once a month. Ramon had never been
invited to join the Forty Club, but the political importance of his family
had procured him a membership in the country club and it served his
present purpose very well, for he found Julia Roth there every Saturday
night. This fact was the sole reason for his going. His dances with her
were now the one thing in life to which he looked forward with pleasure,
and his highest hope was that he might be alone with her.
In this he was disappointed for a long time because Julia was the belle of
the town. Her dainty, provocative presence seemed always to be the centre
of the gathering. Women envied her and studied her frocks, which were
easily the most stylish in town. Men flocked about her and guffawed at her
elfin stabs of humour. Her program was always crowded with names, and when
she went for a stroll between dances she was generally accompanied by at
least three men of whom Ramon was often one. And while the others made her
laugh at their jokes or thrilled her with accounts of their adventures, he
was always silent and worried—an utter bore, he thought.
This girl was a new experience to him. With the egotism of twenty-four, he
had regarded himself as a finished man of the world, especially with
regard to women. They had always liked him. He was good to look at and his
silent, self-possessed manner touched the feminine imagination. He had had
his share of the amorous adventures that come to most men, and his
attitude toward women had changed from the hesitancy of adolesence to the
purposeful, confident and somewhat selfish attitude of the male accustomed
to easy conquest.
This girl, by a smile and touch of her hand, seemed to have changed him.
She filled him with a mighty yearning. He desired her, and yet there was a
puzzling element in his feeling that seemed to transcend desire. And he
was utterly without his usual confidence and purpose. He had reason enough
to doubt his success, but aside from that she loomed in his imagination as
something high and unattainable. He had no plan. His strength seemed to
have oozed out of him. He pursued her persistently enough—in fact too
persistently—but he did it because he could not help it.
The longer he followed in her wake, the more marked his weakness became.
When he approached her to claim a dance he was often aware of a faint
tremble in his knees, and was embarrassed by the fact that the palms of
his hands were sweating. He felt that he was a fool and swore at himself.
And he was wholly unable to believe that he was making any impression upon
her. True, she was quite willing to flirt with him. She looked up at him
with an arch, almost enquiring glance when he came to claim her for a
dance, but he seldom found much to say at such times, being too wholly
absorbed in the sacred occupation of dancing with her. And it seemed to
him that she flirted with every one else, too. This did not in the least
mitigate his devotion, but it made him acutely uncomfortable to watch her
dance with other men, and especially with Conny Masters.
Masters was the son of a man who had made a moderate fortune in the
tin-plate business. He had come West with his mother who had a weak
throat, had fallen in love with the country, and scandalized his family by
resolutely refusing to go back to Indiana and tin cans. He spent most of
his time riding about the country, equipped with a note book and a camera,
studying the Mexicans and Indians, and taking pictures of the scenery. He
said that he was going to make a literary career, but the net product of
his effort for two years had been a few sonnets of lofty tone but vague
meaning, and a great many photographs, mostly of sunsets.
Conny was not a definite success as a writer, but he was unquestionably a
gifted talker, and he knew the country better than did most of the
natives. He made real to Julia the romance which she craved to find in the
West. And her watchful and suspicious family seemed to tolerate if not to
welcome him. Ramon knew that he went to the Roth’s regularly. He began to
feel something like hatred for Conny whom he had formerly liked.
This feeling was deepened by the fact that Conny seemed to be specially
bent on defeating Ramon’s ambition to be alone with the girl. If no one
else joined them at the end of a dance, Conny was almost sure to do so,
and to occupy the intermission with one of his ever-ready monologues,
while Ramon sat silent and angry, wondering what Julia saw to admire in
this windy fool, and occasionally daring to wonder whether she really saw
anything in him after all.
But a sufficiently devoted lover is seldom wholly without a reward. There
came an evening when Ramon found himself alone with her. And he was aware
with a thrill that she had evaded not only Conny, but two other men. Her
smile was friendly and encouraging, too, and yet he could not find
anything to say which in the least expressed his feelings.
“Are you going to stay in this country long?” he began. The question
sounded supremely casual, but it meant a great deal to him. He was haunted
by a fear that she would depart suddenly, and he would never see her
again. She smiled and looked away for a moment before replying, as though
perhaps this was not exactly what she had expected him to say.
“I don’t know. Gordon wants mother and me to go back East this fall, but I
don’t want to go and mother doesn’t want to leave Gordon alone.… We
haven’t decided. Maybe I won’t go till next year.”
“I suppose you’ll go to college won’t you?”
“No; I wanted to go to Vassar and then study art, but mother says college
spoils a girl for society. She thinks the way the Vassar girls walk is
perfectly dreadful. I offered to go right on walking the same way, but she
said anyway college makes girls so frightfully broad-minded.…”
Ramon laughed.
“What will you do then?”
“I’ll come out.”
“Out of what?”
“Make my d�but, don’t you know?”
“O, yes.”
“In New York. I have an aunt there. She knows all the best people, mother
says.”
“What happens after you come out?”
“You get married if anybody will have you. If not, you sort of fade away
and finally go into uplift work about your fourth season.”
“But of course, you’ll get married. I bet you’ll marry a millionaire.”
“I don’t know. Mother wants me to marry a broker. She says the big
financial houses in New York are conducted by the very best people. But
Gordon thinks I ought to marry a professional man—a doctor or something.
He thinks brokers are vulgar. He says money isn’t everything.”
“What do you think?”
“I haven’t a thought to my name. All my thinking has been done for me
since infancy. I don’t know what I want, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t
get it if I did.… Come on. They’ve been dancing for ten minutes. If we
stay here any longer it’ll be a scandal.”
She rose and started for the hall. He suddenly realized that his
long-sought opportunity was slipping away from him. He caught her by the
hand.
“Don’t go, please. I want to tell you something.”
She met his hand with a fair grip, and pulled him after her with a laugh.
“Some other time,” she promised.