“I would never have told you,” said Blanchard. “I would have gone on the
best way I could, without you; but now--”
Pem looked at him across the table. By the light of the gold-shaded
electric candle his thin face was almost incredibly fine. He looked, she
thought, a little inhuman, with his delicate features, his dark, glowing
eyes, and the silvery gleam of white on his temples. His tremendous
consideration for her, his squeamishness, had made his story such a long
one!
After all, she wasn’t a girl just out of school.
“I’ve seen more of life than he has,” she reflected; “and yet it has
taken him two hours to tell me that his wife is going to divorce him. I
suppose it’ll take another hour before he can tell me that he hopes I
can marry him when he’s free. I suppose it ought to take me a week to
answer him!”
She stifled a sigh. It was nonsense for him to try to shield his wife
from Pem, who had two months in which to observe her savage egotism.
Such a dilemma for his chivalrous soul--to make it clear to Pem that his
wife had no just cause for divorcing him, and yet to protect the woman
against the implication of cruel unreasonableness. All things
considered, he had done very well.
“A--a mutual agreement,”, he had called it. “I think you’d better not go
back,” he went on gently. “She’s very much upset. Her sister and her
mother are with her.”
Silence fell between them. The orchestra was playing in a gallery behind
them--a gay and delicate air. The rooms were filled with the sort of
people Pem liked about her, with light, laughing voices, faint perfumes,
and the smoke of cigarettes.
One of Blanchard’s hands was extended on the table--a slender hand,
beautifully tended. He was so fastidious in everything, so kind, so
honorable, so appealing in his masculine assumption of her ignorance and
helplessness. He wanted to take care of her and shelter her. He would
have been horrified at the thought of her living in a little flat on a
third mate’s pay. He would have turned pale at the sight of that poor,
poor little ring.
“You’re very quiet,” he said, a little anxiously. “I hope I haven’t--”
Pem looked up with a smile.
“No!” she thought, as if defying a voice that had not spoken. “It’s no
use! I’m not like that. I couldn’t stand it. I shall be happy with
Everett. It’s his kind of life that I want.” Aloud she said, in the
ladylike, noncommittal tone he expected of her: “I’d better be going
back to Nickie now.”
Blanchard took her back in a taxi, and all the way he talked of
impersonal matters--not a word of love. She knew he wouldn’t mention
that until he was free to do so honorably.
He left her at the door. She turned as she entered, and saw him standing
bareheaded in the street--a handsome and distinguished man, yet somehow
pitiful to her, with that touch of white at the temples.
The flat was empty when she got in. Nickie, of course, had gone to her
case. Arthur Caswell--she couldn’t imagine his destination.
On the kitchen table were the disorderly remains of a tea for two. The
sitting room, too, was very untidy, as Nickie always left it. Pem turned
on the electric light and began to set it in order. She emptied the ash
tray, full of the stubs of those horrible cheap cigarettes she had seen
Caswell smoking. She picked up the magazines that lay on the floor, and
straightened the chairs.
The piano was open, with music on the rack. She went to close it. The
lid slipped from her hand, and, falling, jarred the strings with a
queer, trembling discord. She could have imagined it the faint, distant
echo of a voice--a young voice.
MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
APRIL, 1924
Vol. LXXXI NUMBER 3