Joy’s decision for steadfast endeavour, having once been made, did not
waver. In the days that followed she began to feel a calm content;
content that she had never known before. All the restlessness, the fits
of uneasiness and depression that had been hers, had vanished in the
light of a concrete objective; Pa’s talk had miraculously swept away the
cobwebs in her brain. There was always the dull ache of Grant’s
continued silence; but as the days wore on, it became more and more
negative.
Pa sent her home for two weeks’ rest before she started in on the
program he had mapped out for her, and fourteen days spent in the little
town made her the more eager to begin work. Her father, after his first
welcome and expression of delight at her progress, was as preoccupied as
ever, the surprise incident upon Joy’s exposition of why she must return
to Boston and start a more extensive (and expensive) course of study,
jolting him only temporarily. After all, he knew that other girls went
away to school, and he knew that his wife would have desired this for
Joy.
Joy no longer felt guilty over his misunderstanding her place of
residence. She had paid the penalty of deceit in hardening experience;
more than the penalty in losing Grant. From now on, she was proceeding
with her eyes opened. That she was to continue living with Jerry did not
mean what her advent to the apartment had meant; it meant that the
apartment was now the best background for her labours, with a piano hers
to practice upon at all hours, and a ménage that was run to suit three
girls instead of thirty, as was the case at the Annex.
The little town was preoccupied. The girls, after their first effusion
of greeting, were as preoccupied as ever in trying to bring the rotation
of the three or four boys in town their way. Joy was different, anyway,
now that she was doing that singing stuff. She wouldn’t sing popular
songs, and that highbrow stuff was awfully boring. She wouldn’t go to
the movies, or bring her sewing over and gossip, so what _could_ one do
with her?
Tom was working for the summer at the Foxhollow Corners bank, of which
his father was president and he in turn expected to be some day, as he
informed Joy in the first three minutes of his first call. He had
another year at college, and in his conversation strayed collegewards.
“Remember Jack Barnett, Joy? Well, he’s married. Pulled it off the other
day, I guess—just got the cards. They used to say he was engaged to
some home-town specimen that he never dared to take to any of the house
parties, and this looks as if there was some truth in it.”
Joy made no comment. Tom babbled on of college affairs. He was the type
of youth who took it for granted that the girl whom he was favouring
with his company would be enthralled with every detail of happenings
that touched upon him. With this genus, the girl’s only requisite is
silence that bespeaks the listening ear. Joy made no remarks until the
end of his call, then she said casually: “Did you ever know Jim Dalton
well in college?”
“Oh, not very. He ran with a different crowd.” It was a familiar college
tone; not insulting; merely relegating Jim to the oblivion where he
belonged.
“I’ve seen him several times—he’s working in Boston.”
“Oh, he’s all right—I guess his friends like him well enough.”
More praising with faint damns! But Joy did not absorb the mandate of
the busy college man, as she would have last spring. She laughed amiably
as she sped Tom on his way. She was still laughing as she came into the
hall and passed her father, who was coming in from his evening smoke.
“What are you laughing at, my dear?” Mr. Nelson inquired, pausing for a
moment although he had an excellent book of the vintage of ’61 awaiting
him in the library.
“Myself, mostly!” she replied, and went on into the music room, walking
slowly over the tacked-down carpet to her beloved grand piano. How
standards of college changed after college, and how futilely provincial
were they who still saw life through those standards! Jim Dalton was far
from the nonentity class in which she had placed him last spring. If
only Grant had been like Jim——
Her fingers found the accompaniment of little bells, chiming from far
away—and she was murmuring the words—
“My only love is always near
In country or in town——”
She broke off with a little sob, and her hands stayed without motion on
the soundless keys. “The Unrealized Ideal!” And so it was.
“Lightly I speed while hope is high
And youth beguiles the race
I follow—follow still—but I
Shall never see his face.”
“_Grant!_” she cried, then shivered as the sound travelled around the
room, through the tidies and antimacassars, over to the what-not and
glass candlesticks, and back again to her.
How could it all have been so dear—how could she have been so
tremblingly ecstatic? How could it all be ended—leaving everything as
flat and grey as the beach after the sun had been wet-blanketed by the
sea mist, on that day of centuries?——But after the sun had gone—the
moon had come up. She raised her head and started playing again; and
this time it was an old Italian air over which she had been working.
The little town had no place for her; it was preoccupied. And so she
came back at the end of two weeks, ready to plunge into work, actually
longing for the feverish round of the apartment to swirl about her while
she worked. _While she worked._
Pa found her a French woman and Italian professor for instructors, and
he himself taught her the elements of music. “I don’t always like to
bother with this myself,” he said, “but I want you to get it right—see
the poetry and fascination of it—not have it dinned into you in a
cut-and-dried way that only makes you aware of the toilsome mathematics
of the thing.”
She threw herself into her study with an intense concentration that left
her no energy for anything else—that left her almost no time to listen
to the telephone and door bell, and watch the mail . . . for she still
was in that vague expectancy. Surely he would not be forever gone,
without a word save the fitful telephoning during her illness. She
watched Jerry’s gaiety and wondered if beneath, Jerry also was hiding
expectancy—if she still hoped that any day she might hear some
word. . . . She could see Jerry reverting to the newsie in grey sweater
and bloomers, kicking “The Idylls of the King” about the room. Jerry was
not to be blamed. “The Idylls” were long out of date; and where was
there a Perfect Knight?
Late one afternoon, Jerry burst in upon her while she was indulging in a
little light reading: “How to Listen to an Orchestra.”
“Joy, if you study any more you’ll get eye-trouble, and whoever heard of
a singer getting away with wearing glasses? We’ve absolutely got to have
another girl to-night—it’ll do you good to get out! How can you stand
this perpetual-motion-of-the-brain!”
Joy laughed. “Sorry, Jerry, but I couldn’t. Don’t tempt me.”
“Well—you really ought to get out—it isn’t because we’ve _got_ to have
another girl that I wanted you. As it happens, there’s another
available. Félicie Durant is back in town.”
Joy had heard Jerry and Sarah speak of Félicie Durant once or twice, and
the name had left an impression, being about the only girl’s name they
had ever taken the breath to mention.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jerry; “you nail on your lid right now and
we’ll wiggle over to Félicie’s. You’ve got to have some exercise, and
there’s much more chance of my getting Félicie to go to-night by a
personal interview than if I popped the project over the phone. Come
on!”
Jerry was wearing a rumpled lavender linen dress of simple lines. She
watched with an amused eye, as Joy changed into dark things for street
wear.
“You certainly are getting Bostonian,” she jeered. “It’s balmy out if it
_is_ fall, and I for one am not going to stifle if other people are
sporting advance-model velvet lids!” And crushing a saucy yellow straw
down over her eyes without bothering to pat her hair into position on
either side, an indispensable rite with most girls in the major
operation of putting on a hat, she dragged Joy forth before Joy could
add a veil and white kid gloves to her costume.
“This is no afternoon-tea call,” she said, hailing a Brighton-bound
street car. “Félicie’s not that kind of a girl—not that she’s my kind,
either, except the way that girl swallows excitement down whole would do
credit to even my digestion.”
“What is she like?” Joy asked, as they joined the circle of
strap-hanging women that crowded the street car full of doggedly sitting
men.
“She’s a jellyfish,” replied Jerry, treading on the toes of the man in
front of her who spread his newspaper as a defensive sheath between him
and the women before him. “She’s got the spine and determination of a
jellyfish. Lives out here with her old great-aunt or something——But
wait till you see her.”
They disembarked over in Brighton where rows of apartment houses
duplicated themselves, and rang the bell at one of faded yellow brick.
The door swung open, and Joy followed Jerry to the right on the first
floor, where an open door awaited them.
“I’m in the kitchen,” cried a voice whose echoes carried hauntingly
silver. “Come on down!”
A first glimpse of Félicie Durant was unforgettable. Large brown velvet
eyes trimmed with elaborate fringes of lashes that curled up at the end,
giving her face a look of starry oblivion to mundane matters; a face
whose daintily regular features were brought out by a skin as smooth as
the surface of a pearl, with a cobwebby maze of ringlets dark as her
eyes, drifting around and away from her temples. All this Joy saw in one
delighted instant. Then the lips, scarlet and full almost to pouting,
parted in a smile of welcome, and Félicie waved a soapy hand at the two
girls.
“Don’t come too near me—I’m washing the dog!”
Sure enough. There was the kitchen tub—and a little shivering white
thing being drowned in suds. It was hard to connect Félicie with washing
a dog, however little and white he might be.
“Good for you, old girl,” said Jerry. “Those poodles look like dirty
dish-rags if they’re not put into Lux twice a day. Félicie, this is Joy
Nelson, and you can see she did you the justice of dressing for a nice
formal call.”
“Wait till I rinse him out and then I’ll shake hands,” Félicie panted.
Sharing her breathlessness, the two watched while she first rinsed, then
wrung out the animated mop, and put it down on the floor with an order
to “go to it.” The mop whisked itself out of sight.
“He runs all around and rolls in all the rugs and gets dry all by
himself,” she explained proudly.
“Is that hard on the rugs, or isn’t it? I just asked,” said Jerry.
The fringes flustered; the dark eyes drooped. “Why, I—I never—thought
of that!” Félicie admitted. “But”—she brightened—“this is a furnished
apartment, mostly, and the rugs are the old landlord’s. So it’s quite
all right after all!”
“Does ‘the old landlord’ know you keep a dog?”
“Well—but you would hardly call Fizz a dog, now, would you?” she
triumphed. “Come on in my room while I put on some clothes. She pulled
off and carefully hung up the kitchen apron which had been protecting
her somewhat gossamer attire from the wear and tear attendant on canine
ablutions, and ran before them to a speckless white boudoir that had the
air of not having quite recovered from its last cleaning. In spite of
Félicie’s activities, that was also the way the kitchen had looked.
Jerry’s apartment always appeared to be waiting for its next cleaning.
“I have a new picture of Greg,” said Félicie, disappearing into a
closet. “There on the dressing table.”
A large photograph of a man with sleek, dark hair parted in the middle
and watered back; a face whose good looking conformity could have been
singled out as “a college type” —framed in ivory which carried out the
scheme of the dressing table’s dainty appurtenances.
“It’s good,” said Jerry. “Still in love with him?”
A muffled but none the less sure-fire assent came from the closet. She
evidently was the kind of girl who dressed in the closet if there were
other girls in the room.
“Then why the devil won’t you marry him?” Jerry exploded, slamming the
picture down with a force that made the ivory manicure set start
shimmying. She turned to Joy. “Félicie’s in love with Greg; he’s crazy
as a fool about her; and she won’t even get engaged, much less marry
him!”
“Now, Jerry, you know perfectly well you wouldn’t either,” said Félicie,
and again her voice trailed silver, as she came out of the closet.
“Oh, you pretty—pretty—_Thing_!” thought Joy. A white gown of foaming
lace swirled about her, from which the darkness of her eyes and hair and
the redness of her lips gleamed. Her figure now was unexpectedly rounded
and full, proportioned so beautifully that the breath-taking entirely of
the vision inspired Joy to classic simile. As she buttoned herself into
her dress, she looked as Venus rising from the foam would have done well
to look.
“I’m twenty years old,” Félicie was continuing; “and for a girl at my
age to marry would be _sacrifice_, _human sacrifice_. If girls marry
nowadays at twenty, they’re either afraid they’ve got their only chance,
or they haven’t the cash to hold out, or they’re just plain fools. And
you know, Jerry, I’m not any one of those.”
“Go on,” said Jerry. “Joy’ll be interested to hear your theories.”
Félicie appealed to Joy. “Don’t you think so, too?”
Her loveliness stirred none of the animosity in Joy that pretty women
too often arouse in one another. Joy smiled back at her. “Don’t you
think each case is different?”
“Well, take mine. I care more for Greg than anyone. But think if I
should marry him now! Why—I’m only twenty. I’ve got at least four good
years before me of fun and excitement, the best years of my life and
looks, and why should I devote them to being domestic? After I’m
married, I can never have the kind of a good time I have now. I may be
fonder of Greg than anyone—but I’m fond of other men, too! I like the
excitement of each new man, more than—more than——”
“More than marrying Greg,” Jerry supplied.
She nodded in relief. “Yes, that’s it, and the way I look at it is, it’s
better to get it all out of my system before I marry than after, don’t
you think so?”
“You never will that way.” Jerry spoke curtly. “Haven’t you read that
appetite grows on what feeds it?” She lit a cigarette. Félicie’s eyes
roved to her fine lace curtains in resignation before she went on.
“It isn’t as if I weren’t sure that Greg will stick for several years at
least. Why, he never looks at another girl. And it isn’t as if I were
the sort of girl who would expect to go right on adding up men after I
marry. No, when I marry I in going to have a home and children, and I’m
not going to marry until I’m ready for them.”
“It sounds reasonable,” said Joy, fascinated.
“And when I marry I want to live neatly,” said Félicie, with a
comfortable glance around the glistening room. “And _neatly_ to me means
_enough money_. Greg isn’t making enough for that yet—and while I live
here with auntie I have enough. I wish, Jerry, you wouldn’t always pick
on me about him.”
“I hate to see a waste of good material,” Jerry murmured.
“That’s what it would be, if I married,” she retorted, her voice again
carrying high lights. “A girl stands to lose _everything_ by an early
marriage—her looks, her youth, and her _fun_! Can you imagine me with
the yowl of a baby for my only excitement? It’s not a bit like you to
take this stand!”
Joy stole a look at Jerry, but her face was wreathed in smoke as she
answered in lazy tones: “Well, come off the platform, old dear. I was
only heaving a couple of sobs for Greg—that boy has a few brains that
weren’t put in cold storage at Yale. Of course, _I’m_ glad you’re still
on my side of the wall. Came around to make you shove aside anything
you’ve started going for to-night and tack yourself on to a dizzy
party.”
“I have a date for to-night, but he’s not a new man,” she ruminated. “Is
it a good party?”
“I said, dizzy! A bunch of Williams men—they’ve cornered the world’s
best jazz-fiends to beat a nasty measure—down at Croft Inn. Private
party—we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. There are one or two
other girls coming, some subdebs from Boston who are going to climb the
waterspout or something, but they told me to get another girl. Like the
noise of it?”
“I should say so! I was only going in town to dance with him alone. Give
me a crowd every time! What’ll you wear?”
“Evening dress stuff, they say, which means the girls will and the men
won’t.” She threw her cigarette stub at the wastebasket, and after a few
waverings which Félicie watched tensely, it went in. “Well—we’ve got to
go along. We’ll be around for you to-night, some time. Be ready!”
“Good-bye, Miss Durant,” said Joy, taking a last comprehensive look at
the massed loveliness before her. She half wished that she were going
that night. To see it drawn up in battle array!
“We must have a movie date some time,” Félicie smiled, but her smile was
changed to a shriek as she followed them down the hall. “You didn’t
close the door, and he got out! Oh, _Fizz_!”
She captured him in the lower entry and held him carefully away from the
lace of her dress, his red tongue dangling, his little eyes peering
pinkly from beneath his drying bangs, as she again speeded them on their
way.
“Well, what did you think of the human jellyfish?” Jerry asked, as they
made for their regular “taxi,” a Subway prepayment car.
“Jerry—I think she’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. But I don’t in
the least get why she’s like a jellyfish.”
“Listen. If you’ve ever seen the animal, you know it’s flabby and yet
you can’t pull it apart. That’s what she is.”
“I don’t know. Her arguments were pretty good; they’ve started me
thinking.”
“Well, all I’ve got to say is this: I never saw anyone fill the flowing
bowl—and drink it and have it left. And I don’t think she can pull it
off any more than anyone else.”
Joy was a little more weary of work than she cared to admit, and found a
welcome diversion in watching Jerry and Sarah prepare for the evening.
Even the familiar spectacle of Sarah whitewashing her neck, back,
shoulders and arms with liquid powder, was amusing. When they left,
wrapping about themselves with conscious sumptuousness new evening
cloaks that Jerry had recently evolved, she could not circumvent a sigh.
After all—she was going from one extreme to the other.
She went to the piano and started playing the score of Faust, as Pa was
now working her through the rôle of Marguerite. “Old fashioned, but it
will teach you much,” he had said. It was all within her increased
powers of vocalisation except the trill in the Jewel Song. When she sang
and played exultantly through the score, she felt lifted to a zenith of
mauve heights which trembled in ecstasy of tone—until her next lesson.
She played now, supporting an even lusciousness of tone—
“Je voudrais bien savoir quel était ce jeune homme
Si c’est un grand’seigneur, et comment il se nomme.”
The piano under her hands transmuted itself into a great orchestra; the
walls of the room widened to the huge stage of the Metropolitan; and
she, Marguerite, was standing with clasped hands savouring the wonder of
love at first sight. She was glad that she was more slender than most of
the vocalists who could essay the rôle; and no wig would be needed to
cover her own golden hair.
The sharp ringing of the door bell cut in upon her dream, and stage and
great orchestra vanished together with Marguerite-who-needed-no-wig. She
went to the door with a feeling of irritation. Who——
A tall, brown figure, somewhat leaner and older looking. Eyes that were
clear——
“_Grant!_” she cried.
With no more thought than a snowflake takes to melt, she was in his
arms, and their lips met in a kiss that stopped and sighed, then began
again.
“We’d better close the door,” said Grant. In the little pause while he
preserved appearances by shutting them in the apartment, she put herself
away from him, a little breathless, her hair slipping down about her
shoulders.
“_What made me do that?_” she trembled; he was turning to her again, and
she drew away farther and kept the distance between them while leaving
the hall.
“Joy——” The living room gained, he had come up to her again and was
stroking her hair. “I’ve thought everything all out—oh, I’ve thought of
nothing else—and everything’s clear in my mind now. Darling—I want you
to marry me just as soon as you can.”
She stared up at him without meaning, her brain a tumult of horror about
which revolved the question: “_What made me do that?_”
“I’ve thought it all out—and now I know—I was a fool to judge you by
anything but my own love. I—want you, Joy.”
She jerked her head, and his caressing fingers tore her hair. “Go away,
Grant, go and sit down far away from me—so we can talk this
out—impartially!”
“Impartially! What’s there to talk out—impartially? Joy—I don’t know
what I was thinking of, that night. To even question you—after what we
had been, to each other——It’s all come clear to me, in these weeks of
being without you.”
“Let me hope for your sake—that it won’t take as long for you to get
other facts in life clear to you—as it did, this!”
“I called you up before—and they said you were ill. Of course I knew
that just meant you wouldn’t see me. So I waited—and took a chance on
coming unannounced.”
“I _was_—ill. I would have seen you—I waited for you, after I was
better——”
“Joy! You were really ill? Why didn’t you send for me?”
“Why would I have had to? Others—came without being sent for.”
With a hissing intake of breath she drew away from him again, putting
the table between them.
“Why, Joy, what’s the matter, dear? You’re acting as if I were a wild
beast.”
She moved to the piano and sat on the bench before it. “No, Grant—I’m
merely—protecting myself against myself. When I saw you so
suddenly—after I thought I’d never see you again;—sit down there a
minute—I’ve got to get all this straight.”
He obeyed with a frown. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither—did—I. But now I do! Now I do!” She threw back her head, and
looked at him impersonally. “Grant, you’ve come back too late. I’ve
learned to do without you.”
He made an impatient motion as if to brush her words away. “Do you
expect me to believe that—after what happened a minute ago?”
“That—is what helped me to see! I don’t think—I ever was really in
love with you. It was infatuation—blind infatuation—or else—how could
I have done—what I did just now! I haven’t missed you—except when I
was idle; and when girls are idle they always have to be in love, or
missing someone, or moping because they haven’t got anybody to
miss—that’s the way girls seem to be made!”
“You only missed me—when you were idle,” he repeated as if it were the
statement of a theorem he could not prove.
“Yes, and then I missed only _you_! I didn’t miss your spirit, your soul
to mingle with my own—and so you see, I didn’t have the real, true
longing for you!”
“Then you _did_ long for me!” He had left his seat and come to her; but
she held up wavering hands.
“Passion—dressed up! I wonder how many people know it from love—before
it is too late!”
“Joy, you’re morbid. It doesn’t do to analyze things so. You’ve been
brooding here all evening over your old music; no wonder you see in such
a light. When you marry me, everything will straighten out, and you
won’t get yourself all wrought up over the piano all the time.”
“I see what you mean—and that’s another thing. If I married you now, I
would have to give up my music.”
“Oh, not entirely, of course. You would always have it as a lovely gift,
to take up now and then—but not as a god to slave before and give
everything to——I’ve watched you, Joy, and that’s the way you are. I
wouldn’t respect a man much, who let his wife peg on at the thing in a
professional way, when he could take care of her himself.”
Joy laughed, almost stonily. “Apart from the fact that I don’t love
you—I’m not ready to marry _anyone_ yet. Since I’ve last—seen you,
I’ve made my decision. And I’m only standing on the threshold of my
work! And I never—never could be happy to give it up now—even if I was
in love——A girl waits for the man she loves to establish himself in
his line of work, waits until he has gotten to the place where her
partnership is possible. But judging by you, a man wouldn’t wait for
me—wouldn’t wait until I got my head above water, and then let me carry
on my work after marriage, as he carries on his.”
“Women who advance such arguments are liable to forget that their
business after marriage should be quite different from before,” he said
in a low tone.
She looked at him with unembarrassed eyes. “Supposing I recognised that.
Supposing I said, I will be Domesticity itself after I am married. But I
still require you to wait several years for me—as I must attain the
perfection for which I am aiming, or my soul will always yearn after it,
and I will never be content? What then?”
He did not speak. She turned and played a few chords on the piano. “I’m
nineteen years old—nearly twenty. Say you wait three years and a half
for me—until I’m twenty-three. Would you do that?”
“Joy, you’re talking perfect rot. To wait over three years—to waste the
best years of our life we might be having together——”
“Stop a minute. I will be only twenty-three then. You will be only
twenty-five. That is an age at which most young people nowadays think
themselves lucky to start—and so would you if you didn’t have your own
little inherited income through no effort of your own. Only three years
and a half, Grant! Would you do it?”
“You know perfectly well you’re asking too much for any man. Be
reasonable, Joy. What has gotten into you to make you talk like this? It
seems to me that after I have fought out my problem, and come to you
like this, there might be a little something expected of you.”
She smiled, faintly amused. “Since you had decided, you thought there
was no more to it—but you see, Grant, all that time I was going through
experiences and thoughts—that have made me see that as far as I’m
concerned—_there’s no more to it_.” She rose, her gesture spelling
dismissal. “So you wouldn’t wait—three years and a half, or whatever it
might be. I think that shows, Grant, that your love was about the same
as mine.”
Mesmerized by the finality of her tone, he started to the door, but
stopped halfway. “Am I to believe—that you are always going to take
this stand—be this way?”
“Please do believe it. I am not drunk with music—I shall always take
this stand with you—because, you see, I don’t really love you, and I
suppose that—makes all the difference!”
He gained the door, and stood looking back. She was regarding him with
parted lips, cheeks darkly flushed, a little pulse beating in her
temple, her hair blanketing her shoulders in folds of gold. “And
please,” she articulated in a thin thread of sound—“please forget
me—very quickly!”
“Forget you——” The words escaped him in a sort of wonder. They stood
motionless, eyes fixed upon one another, and into the faces of each
there stole an impatient bewilderment. They had leaped to the peaks of
poetry and youth’s dreams for a few lambent hours, and now the peaks
were far away again. Veiled in the clouds of awakened scepticism and
analysis, the peaks were higher than before, and their aspect had
forever changed.
A tremor passed in the air between them. Knifing across it came the stab
of the doorbell—anticlimax of everyday routine cutting the wheels of
drama from under. Few can stand the swift descent. Joy hesitated, then
came forward. Grant hastily captured his hat, which had rolled to the
hall floor some time ago, and stood brushing off the dust of which there
was a disgraceful amount.
As the door swung open both fell back in different reactions. Jim Dalton
stood on the threshold.
“Good evening, Miss Nelson,” he smiled. “I——” His glance travelled
past her to Grant.
“This seems to be Miss Nelson’s evening at home,” Grant said evenly.
“Good-bye, Joy.”
She watched him signal for the elevator, still brushing the dust from
his hat. Grant would probably be a masculine replica of his mother when
he was her age——
Jim did not speak until the elevator had sunk from sight. “I
was—passing by—and saw the sixth story light on—so I took the chance
of interrupting a party.”
“There was no party, as you see,” Joy answered. Her resentment against
this man had long since died—had died with her regard for Grant—and
instead she felt something she told herself was not quite positive
enough to be pleasure. “Do come in; I think it was very nice of you to
take this chance. You see,” she continued as she led the way to the
living room for the second time in that half hour, “you see. I have had
no chance—to thank you for anything.”
“I hate to be thanked,” he said quickly. “There’s no more futile feeling
than teetering on one’s toes through anything like that—it makes one
feel like such a fool—and then simpering, ‘Oh, please don’t mention
it!’ Oh, please, Miss Nelson, don’t make me say that!”
He was talking away from the subject, and she made no further attempt to
express her gratitude; words on anything touching that night came with
difficulty. He was not looking at her with such persistency that she
remembered that her hair was still flowing down her back, scattering
hairpins hither and yon. She anchored her arms to her sides against the
involuntary hands-flying-to-hair-motion. That would spell a
self-conscious guilt. No, she would leave it that way, and he would
think she was wearing it unconfined because she had just washed it, or
thought it was good for it, or _something_.
“I am going to say something very frank now,” he began, transferring his
gaze to her. This time her hands almost did fly to her hair. _Was he
going to speak of it?_ He continued: “I want to tell you that I know you
don’t like me, and never have, and this dropping-in to-night is going to
be my positively last appearance. To tell the truth—I wasn’t just
passing here at all; I came out on purpose. I had to see you again—to
see if you were really all right now—I haven’t seen you since your
convalescence, you know. But now that I have—and you’re looking better
than I’ve ever seen you—I’m not going to bother you any more by popping
around.”
Joy laughed, which rather spoilt the effect of his speech. “You talk as
though you were in the habit of shadowing me!”
“Well—once or twice I did take that upon myself—and I know what you
must have thought of my officiousness. I didn’t have the right, which I
have now assumed really does belong to someone.”
“You mean—Grant? Oh, no.” She brushed the subject aside. “I never
disliked you, Jim; I just hadn’t made room for you in my mind.”
She did not realize that the change in his face was partly due to the
fact that she had called him by his first name; she was so accustomed to
slipping into colloquial terms on short acquaintance, since she had been
with Jerry.
“You mean—that you have ‘made room for me in your mind’—now?”
“Why—yes. I didn’t know it, but I have. The reason I didn’t know
it—was probably because I never think of you as a man. I think of you
as a friend—who once was a friend indeed to me.”
He did not speak for a short space.
“There are very few girls whom I should care to have as friends. Most
girls simply can’t achieve the atmosphere, the uncoloured give-and-take
of friendship,—but I have always felt that you would be different.”
“Don’t put it all on the girl!” Joy laughed. “There are men with whom it
is just as impossible to establish an—an uncoloured atmosphere.”
“Maybe they have been led to think that’s the only atmosphere that can
exist between a man and a girl, by their experience with girls.”
“I wonder why it is,” she mused, “that sooner or later the blame always
comes back to us.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you defend your sex; girls so often think it’s a
good line to be witty about girls. When ever I hear a girl say she
doesn’t like other girls, I look for something wrong with her.”
“You’re _always_ lecturing!” she cried. “Ever since I first met you,
you’ve lectured about something!”
He laughed. “I certainly take a long way around saying that I would like
you as a friend!”
“I said the same thing myself, a long while ago; so let’s stop arguing
about friendship between man and woman, and be it!”
Their minds were not on their argument. Joy was thinking how rushed, or
distracted, “or something,” she must have always been, not to notice
before how good looking he was. But of course he wasn’t tall, and tall
men were “her type.” “He’s a blond, and I’m a blonde,” she told herself.
“We’re not the ‘opposites that attract,’ but we can be good friends,
just the same.”
If he could have read her thoughts, he would have used them as further
proof for his argument; but since one of Joy’s greatest assets was the
power of preserving a sweet, listening attitude no matter what went on
beneath, he was kept busy, thinking up general subjects to discuss with
this anomaly among the girls, one who did not take the initiative in
conversation.
When he rose to go, they felt as if they were very old friends already,
having matched opinions, likes and dislikes for nearly an hour.
“Remember, this isn’t your last appearance,” said Joy.
“Remember!——You’re musical, aren’t you? You told me at that dance that
you were studying music here in town. Well—what do you say we take in
some concerts together? And the Symphony—that’ll be fun if only to
watch the audience. Would you care?”
“I’m awfully afraid I shan’t know enough to appreciate the Symphony,”
she hesitated. “But I know it would be a good thing for me, and I’ll go
with you if you’ll promise not to know too much about it.”
“If you could see me! I go—and sit through it—and sometimes I feel
like jumping out of my seat—but most of the time I’m vaguely bored.
We’ll go together, and maybe combined we can get what we should out of
it.”
After he had gone, she went back and sang through the score of
Marguerite as if she had had no interruption a little over an hour and a
half ago. A little over an hour and a half—had so short a time passed
since she had seen Grant, had decided so much, had let so much go out of
her life? She could not evoke even a shiver over the blotting out of
that vista of her dreams, nothing but a little impatient frown. Things
had no right to get so dead, after having been so alive.
Lovely girl, that Félicie Durant; even if Jerry did call her a
jellyfish. Her arguments were clear—to marry now when she had four good
years before her which marriage could not replace——Her voice hesitated
on a measure. It sounded almost like her argument with Grant—three
years and a half from her life at this time, which marriage could not
replace——
“Oh, but that’s different,” and her voice caught up with the piano
accompaniment and spun heart-satisfying melody—
“Je ris—de me voir
Si belle—en ce miroir——”