” Look at that sailboat,” said Grant Grey.
“Yes,” said Joy contentedly.
The two were sitting on the piazza of the Grey’s summer home, which
fronted the beach.
It had not been Grant who had finally called Joy up, but Betty, all
thrills and eagerness. She asked Joy to come down for the week-end—“and
Grant wants you to come, too!” she added, as if that settled it.
It had.
Sarah was frankly envious, Jerry rejoiced, at her invitation.
“You’ll get some rest,” said Jerry; “you never do here.”
“I wish _we_ could get away,” Sarah grumbled; “I get so sick of summer
in the city.”
“Why don’t you go somewhere for a few weeks?”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders, and knocked the ashes off her cigarette.
“No funds, as the banks tell me constantly. I have to stick around town
and do a little work once in awhile.”
“Work!”
Jerry laughed. “It’s time I took in washing on the side again. I am not
a young lady of independent means.”
Sarah gave forth a groan. “Oh, dear, Jerry, are you going to start
again?”
“Must, my lady, the situation spells must, if I am to continue to buy
our delicatessen breakfasts. At times, food seems scarcely worth while
to me.”
“It seems to me,” said Joy, “that we are pretty extravagant for people
having no visible income.”
“How?” demanded Sarah. “We hardly ever buy any meals except
breakfasts——”
“But look at the stuff we drink and pass around—so far as I can see,
keeping the cellarette filled is as expensive as running a free bar——”
“Little one,” Jerry drawled, “our cellarette is endowed. Some day when I
have a lot of time I’ll take you around to the wine closet and tell you
the names of who has contributed to which. To send a case of spirits to
a young lady was ever a delicate mark of attention. We had a wonderful
collection this spring, and before the first of July—don’t you remember
the cases and cases of supplies that were pouring in around then? We
have to go easy on those Prohibition allotments, though. The donors
collect on them every once in so often.”
Joy realized that she was learning something new every day. She
travelled down to the Grey’s in a rather sombre frame of mind. Her
father had returned home and she had just escaped his descending upon
her on the way by business necessity which had made him haste on through
and write her, wishing her to return as soon as she could. She had
written him that she was at a critical period in voice-placing and did
not want to leave her teacher just now, especially when she was so lucky
as to have him in Boston during the summer. It was true, she was going
through a critical period in voice placing. In spite of her irregular
hours, under Pa Graham’s magical touch and through the scales she
practised regularly, her voice was coming forth in a way that now
bewildered her, now filled her with an exultant sense of power. But the
moments of exultation were few and far between. It was baffling to let
loose one pure, golden note, and while yet tingling from the joy of it,
to follow it with half a dozen that were edgy, or swallowed, or had a
thread in them—there seemed to be no end to the variety of ways one
could defeat tone production. She had just achieved sufficient grasp in
the art of singing to know how little she knew, and instead of
discouraging her as it might have at first, she was lured on and
stimulated to further endeavour. She was right not to leave Pa,—but she
knew that was not the real reason she had signified her wish to remain
in Boston. Was it this boy—this boy whom she had seen only once? She
ought to know by this time how transient her fancies were. But this was
so different from her other affair. She knew more about men now.
Betty met her at the station in a little runabout, and had driven away
the flurry in Joy’s brain with her eager chatter. Grant had been
intending to come to the station, too, she informed her; but at the last
minute Mrs. Grey had found a number of things for him to do. Grant
humoured mother a lot. Betty didn’t believe in it; encourage mothers too
much, and they’ll expect everything of you.
It had been a shock to meet Mrs. Grey. She was the woman who surveyed
Joy so critically the night of the dance. A tall, large woman, with
independent demeanor, marcelled white hair and snapping eyes still
almost as blue as Grant’s. She was gracious, but far from cordial. Very
little appeared to escape the scrutiny of those eyes, and she made Joy
feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Joy remembered what Packy had said:
“Mother’s the Gorgon of the beach;” she decided that Packy had great
descriptive powers. Mrs. Grey inspired the “what-have-I-done-anyway”
feeling in one. Mr. Grey was only a shade more approachable. He seemed
to consider Joy Betty’s age, to be talked to as such at convenient
moments, and ignored as such most of the time.
Immediately upon arriving, Joy had had to dress for dinner, which was an
absurdly formal meal for a beach house, and then after dinner the whole
family had gone for a moonlight sail. She had no moment alone with
Grant, and both were silent most of the evening, acutely conscious of
each other’s presence, while Betty chattered and Mr. and Mrs. Grey
admired the light effects of the moon on the water, and spoke of art and
science and other impersonally interesting subjects to which none of the
three young people listened.
Betty came in while Joy was undressing, her eyes dancing with
excitement. “Joy—mother thinks Grant’s crazy about you—I heard her
tell father. Do you think so? It would be so screaming! He never gets
that way!”
“I think so? Why, Betty——”
“Well—can’t you always tell when a man’s crazy about you? I can!”
Joy laughed hysterically. “Maybe I haven’t had as much experience as
you, Betty,” she suggested.
After Betty had gone, something happened that terrified her. For no
concrete reason she burst into tears, and the more she cried, the more
hysterical she became at the thought that she was crying with no
apparent reason. Of course, she was very much excited. And her nerves
were pretty raw, and she had not had the usual “prescription” with which
to deaden them. But it couldn’t be because she had no recourse to
alcohol that she felt this way. That was the way only awful people got,
and after they had been drinking for years and years and years! She
finally fell into a tear-tinted slumber, from which she awoke barely in
time for breakfast.
And now she and Grant found themselves miraculously left alone. Betty
had gone to play tennis with some friends, and to Joy’s stupefaction,
Mr. and Mrs. Grey had motored up to town together. And so the two sat on
the piazza, still wrapped in an anticipatory silence.
They watched the sailboat out of sight, then Grant turned to her. “I
say—let’s get away from everything. Let’s take the roadster and some
lunch and go way off into the country—will you?”
There are few perfect days in life that stand out golden, untarnished,
with no flaws or worrisome little details to bar the way of loving
memory; but that Saturday was one for Joy. As they rode far into the
country, past orchards and immaculate white New England farmhouses, the
hours seemed to be resting motionless, while they talked aimlessly and
with long, happy silences, shyly sitting as near together as they dared.
Time, as well as everything else, had gone away and left them alone.
They ate beside a pebble-hindered brook, with tall trees gossiping above
them. There were not even mosquitoes to hum their way through the
rainbow haze in which the two were lingering. A large and elaborate
repast had been put up for them, but Joy could not eat. He, too, seemed
to find difficulty in raising any enthusiasm over the luncheon, and
looked at her instead. Finally they gravely repacked the almost
unimpaired repast, then looked at each other over the basket. Because
they were young and American, they laughed.
“It’s too hot to eat now,” said Grant, recovering hastily; “we’ll take
out the basket again later, when we get hungry.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Joy, with dancing eyes.
It was so peaceful by the brook; she had not realised how the hectic
life in the apartment had been wearing upon her. She closed her eyes
with a little shiver of ecstasy. “Let’s stay here a little while,” she
said. “It’s nice under the trees.”
“I was just going to suggest that,” said Grant. “We think the same in
almost everything, don’t we?”
How many millions of lovers have “thought the same”—lovers are
distanced in tastes, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, as the poles
are distanced one from the other!
“Yes,” said Joy dreamily. By now they had passed into the “you and I”
stage. They drifted into what they thought was a discussion of modern
education; but he was telling her about his years at Harvard. He had
just graduated; Packy’s class.
“But Packy and I never ran together much,” he said. “Packy is a
natural-born fusser; I’ve always been more or less of a woman-hater.”
“They say woman-haters are really the most romantic,” said Joy lightly.
“Well, they usually have the highest ideals; that’s what makes ’em
dislike most women. I had almost impossibly high ideals; so high that I
was getting afraid I’d never meet her.”
Silence. A twig fell from a tree, and the two started.
“I said,” said Grant, looking up at a patch of sky through the branches
while Joy plucked a blade of grass into tiny bits; “I said—I _was_
getting afraid I’d never meet her.”
A throbbing stillness in the woods; then Joy spoke breathlessly.
“So—was I,” she said.
A blue-jay shrieked discordantly from near by, and with a hitch, they
resumed more general subjects. Somehow, when one talks about ideals, one
always gets personal.
“Girls nowadays don’t encourage men to look up to them,” said Grant.
“There isn’t the respect there used to be—and the girls don’t seem to
miss it.”
“Some girls miss it,” said Joy; “but what can they do about it? If they
object, and try to bring back past conditions, they are labelled
old-fashioned, slow, stiff,—and let alone. Respect and what men
consider a good time can no longer be combined.”
“That’s the girls’ side, I suppose. But a man’s position is hard, too.
No man wants to fall in love with a girl who is unattractive to other
men. Probably you would call that sheep-like, but it’s something we
can’t help. And the popular girls nowadays, the girls that men run
after, are spoiled by that very quality that makes them popular. Betty
says I’m awfully stuffy—but most of them seem to me
hard—flippant—and—well, unreserved. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” said Joy, amazed at his putting into words the half-formed
thoughts that had been sifting through her brain ever since she had
begun to observe boys and girls together, which had been at an early
age, as with most small-town girls.
“It seems,” Grant went on, “it seems almost as if girls were trying to
break down every difference that exists between them and men—smoking
and drinking are only two examples——”
She winced. Vaguely conscious of her unrest, he turned to her with an
impulsive gesture. “The only reason I’m saying all this is because it’s
so wonderful to find a girl like _you_ nowadays——”
“Oh, I don’t think things are as bad as all that!” she said. He sensed
her withdrawal, and they left the Modern Girl to return to Modern
Education.
They started back when the sun began to gleam redly through the trees.
The way seemed shorter than coming, and they talked more, whirling
through a world of fiery golden sun. Before they had even thought of
opening the luncheon basket, they were back at the beach house where
Betty with an accusing face awaited them on the piazza.
“We’re back,” said Joy. The sun had gone, and everything seemed suddenly
grey and flat.
Betty came dashing down to them. “Do you call this nice, to go off and
leave me for a whole day?” she demanded, pouting. “Lucky mother and
father haven’t got back yet. And now you’ll have to hurry like
everything to get ready for the dance!”
They realized that she was in evening dress.
“Oh, yes, there’s a dance to-night,” said Grant intelligently.
“There usually is, Saturday nights at the club house,” Betty retorted
with fine sarcasm appreciated by no one but herself. “I’m not going to
wait for you two—here comes my man now and there’s a wonderful
orchestra!” She waved to her “man,” a gentleman about town, possibly all
of seventeen, who was boiling up the driveway in a racer, and ran off to
meet him.
Joy and Grant looked at each other. “I had forgotten all about the
dance,” said Grant.
“Let’s not go!” It was Joy who spoke impulsively. “I—I dance so much up
in town—and it’s so beautiful just here, by the sea——”
But the golden day had faded, the perfect moment passed. “We ought to
go,” Grant considered. “Mother would think Betty and I weren’t
entertaining you very well. Besides, there are some duty dances I’ve got
to work off, that mother’s been after me about for a long time.”
Joy bowed her head. What was this feeling of impending distress—it must
be only that the sun had set!
“We’ll get dressed,” said Grant, “and then we can decide whether it’s
too late to go or not.” He met her eyes with a twinkle in his. “I
dress—very slowly!”
“I’ve torn my evening gown—and it will take me a long time to mend it!”
Joy returned with a laugh, and they separated.
Joy dressed as slowly as she dared. Her head was aching—two days now
without her prescription. Was that why she felt so depressed? She had
brought the same blue evening dress, and when the work was over, even to
her anxious eyes she had never shone more gorgeously. The only question
was color. Her face was temporarily red from driving in the wind; but
she knew it wouldn’t stay, and it would leave her pale and dragged
looking, as she had been lately most of the time. Which was preferable;
to put on some rouge and run the risk of looking conspicuously painted
until the wind-burn died down, or to omit the rouge and face the
certainty of looking ghastly later?—She put on some rouge.
When she finally went down, about nine o’clock, Grant was on the piazza.
She stood in the doorway and looked at him, as he came towards her. Why
couldn’t all boys be like Grant—Grant, with reverence and purity
shining in those clear blue eyes——
“I was hoping you’d wear that dress,” he was saying. “It’s the one you
wore the first time I ever saw you——”
The first time already seemed impossible ages away.
“That’s why I wore it,” said Joy, in a matter-of-fact tone.
Neither kept the other in doubt by word or look. They looked now—and
then, because they were human, they went and ate a fairly good meal from
the lunch basket. Now there was no excuse for not starting to the
dance—but still they lingered.
“I never heard you sing, you know,” said Grant. “Can’t you sing after
eating—or will you sing to me before we go?”
They went into the music room, where Joy had already sounded out the
piano. “Singing right after a meal gives me an excuse for not doing it
well,” she smiled, but her fingers trembled as she played a few chords.
What if he shouldn’t like it? That would be something she could not
bear. Unconsciously music was already a part of herself. It would be so
hard to sing to him—the hardest singing she had ever done! “I’ll sing a
song called ‘The Unrealized Ideal,’” she said.
To most singers it is a handicap to play for themselves, but for Joy, to
whom playing was as natural and spontaneous as breathing, it was only an
added delight. She could almost hear her heart trembling as she
modulated into the song.
The accompaniment stole out—a sound as of little bells chiming from far
away—and then Joy’s voice, muted and shaky, but all the more poignant
for that reason——
“My only love is always near
In country or in town
It seems that he must feel, must hear
The rustle of my gown.
“I foot it after him, so young
My locks are tied in haste—
And one is o’er my shoulder flung
And hangs below my waist.
“He runs before me in the meads
And down the world-worn track
He leads me on—but as he leads
He never glances back.
“Yet still his voice is in my dreams
To witch me o’er and o’er
That wooing voice! Ah, me—it seems
Less near me than before.”
A pause—a little wistful interlude of tinkling notes in a minor key.
“Lightly I speed while hope is high
And youth beguiles the race
I follow—follow still—but I
Shall never see his face.”
Grant had risen and had come over to her, his eyes blazing.
“You have never sung that to Packy, have you? Joy——”
“No—I haven’t ever sung it to anybody.”
“Somehow—I couldn’t have borne it, if you had, Joy——”
A cool voice from the doorway smote in upon their throbbing hearts.
“Dear me! Have you two not gone to the dance yet?”
Mrs. Grey came forward into the room, her chill eyes dwelling first on
Grant, then upon Joy, lingering on her face where the mixed colours
strove for supremacy. “It was a great pity Mr. Grey and I were delayed
in town.” She turned to Joy. “So you’re a—singer! I rather thought
you—expressed yourself in some way.” Her eyes still rested with
emphasis upon Joy’s colour; it was almost as if she wished Grant to
follow her gaze and see what she saw. But Grant was not looking at Joy
with his mother’s eyes. “What are you going to do with your voice?”
Joy took a deep breath. “I am going to study for opera.” It was the
first time she had admitted it, even to herself. Once the statement was
out, she contemplated it with delight.
“Oh, indeed. A professional—with all that that entails.” The bleak
words fell between Joy and Grant; and although neither dreamed it then,
with the rose flush of the vanished day still upon them, they stayed
between them.
Almost without words, it was determined that they start at once for the
dance. Grant remarked that he and Joy would walk up the beach. A
snowbound glance from the blue eyes, and the two left the house, with
the understanding that they would meet Mr. and Mrs. Grey over there.
The tide had gone out, leaving long stretches of hard sand. The moon was
up, full and round, staring down upon them with friendly curiosity.
“I always used to wonder why people raved so about the moon,” said
Grant. A little farther on, and they were out of sight of the house, on
a lonely stretch of beach and sky. “Joy, when you sang, I felt—I can’t
explain how I felt. It’s wonderful, it’s—you.”
Somehow they came to a pause on the sands looking out on the moon’s
arclight reflection on the water.
“I—I once read some of Shelley—in college,” and Grant looked down at
her, suddenly scarlet——
“See the mountains kiss high heaven
And the wavelets kiss the sea
What is all this kissing worth
If thou kiss not me?”
Almost a gasp in the murmuring ocean air—and then their lips met,
brushing shyly, in a frightened thistledown of contact.
“Joy—I worship you.” His trembling whisper in her ear. “I love you—I
love you so! Joy——”
This time they clung together, half frightened at the passion that
surged to their lips.
And then a long interval without words—until they found themselves
sitting on the sand, she with her head on his shoulder, he stroking her
hair.
“You have the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen. Everything about you is the
most wonderful I’ve ever seen. Your eyes, your voice, your lips—”
Another interval. “Joy—I never knew what it was to feel like this.
You—you’re the only girl I’ve ever kissed.”
“I didn’t know a man existed, who could say that,” said Joy with a happy
laugh which died away on his next words.
“And I didn’t know there were girls like you—until I met you. For I am
the first with you—am I not?”
“I’ve been kissed before—once.”
An intake of breath. Then, before she could continue: “Don’t tell me
about it, Joy, dear—” a pause to accustom oneself to the unfamiliar
“dear”—“don’t tell me about it—I’d rather not hear any more. I’ll make
you forget him—just once isn’t much——”
After a month of whiles, they walked slowly up the beach. Their
conversation was incoherent, but adequate.
“The dance will be almost over—what does it matter to _us_—isn’t it
all strange and wonderful—your mother will think we were drowned——”
They came into the club house with unmistakably luminous faces. There is
something about young love that stands starkly revealed, and they were
as patent as if they had been hung with sandwich-man signs.
At times life seems to move in a quick succession of scenes until the
scenes begin to seem unreal, and one feels apart from the drama of
events, watching impersonally while life plays on with oneself. So Joy
felt, as she saw Packy at the far corner of the room, and so she watched
with impartial interest as he looked at them, first carelessly, then in
swift incredulity, then with a face that grew thunderous, as, hands in
pockets, he strode across to where they were about to join the dancers.
“Hello, Joy,” he said shortly. “Doesn’t take you a long time to change
running mates, does it?”
“My goodness, look at Packy, entirely surrounded by a frown,” she tossed
back at him—how easily Jerry’s line came to one’s lips.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, blocking their way as they
started again to join the dancers.
Joy remembered a saying of Jerry’s which seemed peculiarly pat at this
moment: “A girl never has the right amount of men. If she has few, it’s
boring; if she has many, they get in the way and cramp her style.” She
laughed. Packy was really a grotesque figure, with his glowering face
and childish remarks. “You make me feel like a dancing school, with all
this talk of changing partners,” she observed, and turned to Grant. She
was amazed at the transformation. Grant’s lips were drawn back over his
teeth, his eyes glittering.
“Would you mind stating what business it is of yours, who Joy goes to a
dance with?” he asked, in a voice as chill and cold as Mrs. Grey’s
herself; a voice with the ring of generations of Boston ancestors behind
it.
It was the end of the dance; and Joy now realized, in a sort of detached
horror, that they were becoming conspicuous. Grant and Packy were facing
each other in the same tense, bristly pose that dogs assume before a
pitched battle; faces were turning their way; she could see Mrs. Grey
rising, in impotent protest, across the room——
A voice assailed her memory. “Is it really you, Miss Nelson?” Standing
close at hand, his eyes upon their little group in grave attention, was
a good-looking boy of medium height, with blond, wavy hair that had been
plastered back in an attempt to make it look straight—At her look of
vague recognition, he stepped nearer, said to Grant and Packy in an
undertone: “Couldn’t you talk it over just as well out-doors?” then
smiled at Joy, and in a normal, bread-and-butter voice that seemed to
have the effect of suddenly bringing everything back to an everyday
basis, said: “You don’t remember me, do you? I met you at Prom this
spring—my name’s Dalton.”
“Mr. Dalton—of course!” she exclaimed. “I remember you very well—” she
stopped, and twinkled. The echo of his blunt lecture seemed for a moment
to hang in the air. She turned to introduce him to Grant and Packy; but
Packy had gone. The scene was over, and she relaxed.
“I’ll cut in later,” said Jim Dalton, and moved away. The music had
started again, the orchestra-leader announcing that this was “the last
dance.” In Grant’s arms she floated off to the strains of “I Love You
Truly.”
“Hope that fellow who said he’d cut in, will have sense enough not to do
it on the last dance,” he growled, clasping her almost fiercely to him.
“If that fellow hadn’t come up just then, I don’t know what might have
happened,” Joy suggested.
“Damn Packy! Forgive me, Joy; but don’t you think Packy rates a damn or
two? Of all the cake-eating parlour pythons——”
“Your mother was watching us. In fact, she still is. That was an awful
scene to make, Grant.”
“Scene! Asking him one question. It was nothing to what I wanted to do.
At that, though, he faded away pretty quick. Joy you dance like—like
nothing at all.”
“So do you!” she thrilled up at him; and they drifted rapturously past
Mrs. Grey, whose eyes, freshly iced, followed them everywhere.
Jim Dalton did not cut in until the very last encore. Grant relinquished
Joy, then went revengefully to cut in on Betty, who looked far from
delighted to be interrupted in the midst of “I Love You Truly” by a
_brother_.
“I want to thank you for coming up when you did,” Joy said.
“It was nothing; I wanted to see you. How have you been? You look——”
“I look—what?”
“It’s not easy to describe the change. I would hardly have known you if
I hadn’t overheard one of those two young men—ah—mentioning your
name.”
Joy’s lips twitched. “Do I look like ‘a typical model showing off some
undress creation’?” She was as surprised as he at the ease with which
she remembered his words. Certainly, being with Jerry sharpened one’s
wits.
“No. Of course not. You look older, for one thing—and——”
“And—what?”
“And as if—well, as if you were—unsettled in your mind—looking for
something you hadn’t found.”
“Everyone—always is looking for something they haven’t found—don’t you
think so?” she countered, watching Grant from the corner of her eye,
while her heart beat a painful tattoo of triumph against her side. She
had—found what she had always been looking for! Girlhood’s tentative
dream was victorious certainty.
“I haven’t asked you how you happened to be around these parts?”
She told him she was studying music in Boston, and living with Jerry.
This he received in a silence which became so long that she did not know
what thread he was taking up when he finally demanded:
“Did you mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“That you were living with Jerry. Were you serious?” Receiving an
affirmative answer, he fell back again into a silence which lasted until
Grant cut back at the end of the dance.
They rode home with Betty and her “man,” thus escaping Mrs. Grey, and
Joy and Betty went upstairs before Mr. and Mrs. Grey returned. Betty was
full of thrills. She confided to Joy that she “had found someone
harmonious, even to dancing, at last.” He was her escort of the evening,
and they were engaged.
“Engaged!” Joy exclaimed. “You, at your age—you don’t want to be
married at sixteen, do you?”
“Of course not!” Betty tossed her head. “My goodness, Joy, I’ve been
engaged three times already—being engaged and getting married have got
nothing to do with each other!”
Saying which, she departed, leaving Joy undecided whether to laugh or be
horrified. Decidedly, there was more to these naïve, sunburned kittens
than met the eye of the innocent bystander.
Sunday breakfast at the Greys’ was a late affair, and the table was not
fully assembled until eleven. Joy dreaded meeting Mrs. Grey’s scrutiny
again; she even shrank from seeing Grant, for in the morning sun she
blushed at the memory of things under the white heat of the moon, and
longed for another moon with no glaring day intervening; but finally she
could not longer postpone it. Mrs. Grey was presiding at the table,
immaculate and unruffled as ever, not a hair of her marcel straying from
its designated path. She enquired meticulously if Joy had slept well,
then talked past Joy on one side and Grant and Betty on the other, to
Mr. Grey at the head. Joy and Grant met each other’s eyes for one
glowing moment, then devoted their attention to their plates. After all,
it was the first real meal they had had since yesterday morning.
Conversation flitted its way about as noncommittally as a
feather-duster, ignoring the vital corners. It was Mr. Grey who grew
expansive after his soft-boiled eggs and toast.
“In my day,” he remarked with a chuckle, “we didn’t choose a club-house
dance in which to pick a fight. We chose some vacant lot.”
“We weren’t fighting,” said Grant curtly.
Mrs. Grey allowed her sea blue eyes, cold and sparkling as salt water,
to rest on Joy for one pungent moment. The air tingled with omission.
She spoke finally, as she rose from the table: “We shall hope to hear
you sing later in the day, Miss Nelson.”
A stupid, hot Sunday, composed of working through the Sunday papers,
sitting on the piazza talking about weather probabilities, and keeping
maids perspiring to bring cooling drinks. Grant and Joy had no excuse to
slip away, with the events of the day before stalking in the minds if
not the words of the Greys, and the stubborn fact that Joy was nominally
Betty’s guest. Betty remarked that it was a pity church attendance had
gone out of style; it did fill in part of Sunday, anyway. She had
suggested golf, which Joy did not play, and tennis, which Joy had
expressed a willingness to watch; and everyone had unanimously declared
that it was too hot to go down on the beach in the blaze of the sun.
Motoring was voted down, since on Sunday “there was such a fearful
rabble in the road,” and the day groaned away in an agony of repressions
for Grant and Joy.
Towards evening, as it grew cooler, some callers arrived, and Betty
pointed out that now was the time for Joy to sing. So Joy sang—not the
“Unrealized Ideal” this time, but some little French songs which evoked
polite murmurs of appreciation from the guests who were of the type that
know nothing about music and care less, but know that it is the thing to
appreciate it. And then Betty, rolling her eyes in a manner she
considered romantic, requested “Last Night.”
The room with its conventional puppets of listeners faded away; Joy was
only conscious of one intent brown face. What if all day they had been
and still were hedged about by tiresome details; she could speak to him
if there were thousands listening. Oh, to make love with one’s voice:
“I think of you in the daytime
I dream of you by night
I wake and would you were here, love
And tears are blinding my sight.
I hear a low breath in the lime-tree
The wind is floating through
And oh, the night, my darling,
Is sighing, sighing for you, for you.”
Her emotion was mastering her, so that her voice came forth in bursts of
gorgeous tone or died away in a tremulous whisper; but it carried a
quality that made her listeners look uncomfortable, as conventional
people tend to do when they feel that their emotions are being aroused
in a public place.
She ended, and there was a small moment of recapitulation before the
polite murmurs started again. She left the piano and crossed to
Grant—veiled under the general chatter, it was the first moment they
had to speak to each other.
“I sang to you,” she said; and the Chinese masks which they had both
been assuming all day, made easier by the breath-taking weather and the
environment, fell away from them as they looked at each other.
“You must always sing to me, Joy—your singing’s you—and I can’t bear
to have anyone else even get a part of you.”
She smiled up at him, seeing only the worship of the idea. The callers
stayed to a “simple” Sunday supper of three courses and “on the sides,”
then left the Grey family to settle down to a repletely quiet Sunday
evening. Not so Betty; she announced that “Mr. Cortland” was coming to
take her riding, and Joy and Grant could come along too. Mrs. Grey made
a few quiet remarks about the ordinary people who rode Sunday evenings,
but “Mr. Cortland,” Betty’s newly-acquired fiancé, arrived about that
time, and the four set off without even a pretense of asking Mr. and
Mrs. Grey to accompany them. They went in “Mr. Cortland’s” racer, which
necessitated three-in-one seat and one-on-the-floor, always a piquant
combination.
“No use taking a larger car,” said the fiancé, in a
bored-man-of-the-world tone: “everyone would scrap as to who wouldn’t
drive, and I’d have to, and I can’t drive with one arm—I can only
stop.”
“Oh, Nick, you do tear off the worst line,” trilled Betty. “Come
on—take the Jerusalem road—of course we’ll go to Nantasket. I want to
ride in the roller-coasters!”
Grant turned and looked up at Betty. “You’re not going to Nantasket
to-night,” he said. “I suppose you want to ride the merry-go-round too,
and dance in the Palm Garden! Where do you get your lowbrow tastes?”
Betty played a tune on Nick’s shoulder. “Drive straight to the border,”
she told him in a sepulchral voice, then to Grant: “Stuffy old thing!
I’ve been cooped in all day till I could _scream_—, thank goodness, we
can forget it’s Sunday at Paragon Park!”
What was there about visiting an amusement park on Sunday to call forth
such dignity from Grant? It was almost like his mother might have
spoken—Joy anxiously intervened before the brother-and-sister
controversy became too distressing: “It’s Mr. Cortland’s car, so we
can’t help where they go;—but we can sit and wait for them.”
So they sat in the car outside Paragon Park, while Betty went in to try
her fiancé’s endurance on the roller-coaster and in eating pop-corn. The
time raced by as swiftly as their heart-beats; they had a whole day to
catch up with, Grant said. “Our whole lives, too, Grant,” Joy whispered
against his lips.
“To think that we never knew each other—before!”
“But—loving this way is much more beautiful! If we had known each other
always—love would have made no more impression than a—a candle lighted
in a room blazing with electricity. But what a difference—when the
candle is lit in the darkness!”
“Joy, how can you say such wonderful things? You say them
all—everything that I can only feel, you say—or sing! How can a girl
like you ever be satisfied with me?”
“Don’t, Grant—that’s blasphemy! Or something!”
“I can’t bear to think of you going away to-morrow. We’ve seen each
other so little. I’ll be coming up to Boston every day, though.”
“Every day!—Every single day? Could—could we honestly keep that up?”
“Silly girl. . . . Now you make me feel almost up to your level. Do you
realize how much we’ll have to see of each other before we dare spring
an engagement on my people?”
“Oh . . . I had forgotten all about . . . people and things,” she
mumbled and the exalted rhythm of her heart-beat sagged ever so little.
Mrs. Grey had such adequately discouraging eyes. . . .