II

Lita had developed a technic by which she slept through the rising gong

and for the next twenty-five minutes, allowing herself thus exactly

five minutes to get up, dress and reach the dining room. But the

morning after her friend's operation she woke with the gong, and five

minutes later was on her way to the infirmary, first tying her tie and

then smoothing down her hair as she went.

As she ran up the stairs of the infirmary, a voice--whose owner must

have recognized the almost inaudible patter of her feet--called to her

from the small dining room of the cottage. She put her face, flushed

with running, round the jamb of the door and saw Doctor Dacer seated

at breakfast. The nurse was toasting bread on an electric toaster,

and he was spreading a piece, just finished, with a thick crimson jam.

"Damson," Lita said to herself.

He looked at her.

"Youth's a great thing," he said.

"So the old are always saying," Lita answered. "But there's a catch in

it; they get back at you for being young."

"Does that mean you think I'm old?" Dacer asked patiently; and the

nurse with the white hair exclaimed to herself "Goodness!" as if to her

they both seemed about the same age.

Lita cocked her head on one side.

"Well," she said, "you are too old to be my equal--I mean contemporary.

I mean contemporary," she added as they both laughed. Dacer, with

a more complete answer, gave her the piece of toast he had been

preparing. It was delicious--cool and smooth and sweet on top, and hot

and buttery below. Lita consumed it in silence, and then with a deep

sigh as she sucked a drop of jam from her forefinger, she said, "How

noble that was! Sometimes I'm afraid I'm greedy."

"Of course you are," said Dacer, as if greed were a splendid quality.

"Sit down and have some coffee.... Have you been introduced to Miss

Waverley? She hates men."

"Goodness!" said Miss Waverley, glancing over her shoulder, as if it

were mildly amusing that a man should think he knew anything about how

she felt.

"Or is it only doctors?" Dacer went on.

"Men patients are worse," said Miss Waverley.

"Don't go away," said Dacer to Lita. "You are always going away."

"I came to see Aurelia."

"I know, but it's customary to discuss the case first with the

surgeon--in some detail too. Sit down."

But she would not do that; her first duty was to her friend. She knew

Aurelia would want to know that the photographs and the letter were

safe. She stayed by her bedside until it was time to leap downstairs

and run across the campus to the dining room, her appetite merely edged

by the toast and jam.

Monday was a busy day for Lita. Immediately after luncheon her

committee met and went over the reports of the monitors for the week;

and then there was basket ball for two hours, and then study. The

tennis courts were near the athletic field, and as Lita played with the

first team she could hear a deep voice booming out the score as Doctor

Dacer and Miss Jones played set after set. Miss Jones had been tennis

champion of her college the year before. Lita sent out a young scout

to bring her word how the games were going, and learned that Dacer was

winning. He must be pretty good, then--Jonesy was no slouch. She would

have taunted him in the evening, when she went to say good night to

Aurelia, if he had let himself be beaten by Jonesy.

Every Monday evening Miss Fraser, the English teacher, read aloud

to the senior members of her class. Miss Fraser was something of a

problem, because she was so much more a lover of literature than a

teacher. She inspired the girls with a fine enthusiasm for the best;

but in the process she often incited them to read gems of the language

which their parents considered unsuited to their youth. Shakspere she

read quite recklessly, sometimes forgetting to use the expurgated

edition. When Miss Barton suggested pleasantly that perhaps Antony and

Cleopatra was not quite the most appropriate of the plays, Miss Fraser

answered, "Don't they read worse in the newspapers in bad prose?"

At present she was conservatively engaged in reading Much Ado About

Nothing. No one could object to that, she said. She made it seem witty

and contemporary.

Lita slipped over to the infirmary between supper and the reading to

bid Aurelia good night. Dacer wasn't there. She stayed, talking a few

minutes with Aurelia, who was well enough to hear about the tramp and

the bedroom slippers and a little school gossip. Lita asked casually

where the doctor was, but no one seemed to know.

When a little later she entered Miss Fraser's study she found to her

surprise that he was there, settled in a corner. Miss Fraser explained

that Doctor Dacer was the son of an old friend of hers; he had been

kind enough to say that it would be a pleasure to him to stay and hear

the reading. She need not have felt under the necessity of apologizing

to the six or seven members of her class. They felt no objection to his

presence.

Lita was knitting a golf sweater for her father. She could do it at

school, but not at home, for her mother was so discouraging about it.

She had already objected to its color, shape and pattern; had felt sure

that Lita's father wouldn't appreciate the sentiment, and wouldn't wear

anything that did not come from a good shop. Probably after all Lita's

trouble he'd give it to his manservant. But Lita did not think he would.

The nice thing about knitting is that it leaves the eyes disengaged--at

least to an expert, and Lita was expert. She resolved that she would

not look at Dacer; and did not for the first half hour or so, for she

had a comfortable knowledge that he was looking at her. Then, just

once, their eyes met. It was while Miss Fraser was reading these lines:

_But nature never fram'd a woman's heart_

_Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice:_

_Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,_

_Misprising what they look on; and her wit_

_Values itself so highly, that to her_

_All matter else seems weak._

_She cannot love----_

Holding her glance, he seemed to nod his head as if to say that was a

perfect description of her. Could he mean that? Did he mean that? She

averted her eyes hastily, and when she looked back again he had folded

his arms and was staring off over everybody's head, very blank and

magnificent, unaware of the existence of little schoolgirls. Had she

offended him?

She decided that the next morning at the infirmary, while she was

eating his toast and jam, she would ask him a pointed question about

the character of Beatrice. She gave a good deal of time to framing the

question--wasted time, for when she reached the infirmary she found he

had gone--had taken a late train to New York the night before. Lita

remembered he had looked at his watch once or twice toward the end of

the reading.

"Yes," said the nurse cheerfully, "we're doing so well we don't need

him." It was the second nurse. Miss Waverley had gone with the doctor.

Lita's frightened eyes sought Aurelia's, who framed the words: "Back

Thursday."

She framed them as if two--almost three days were nothing. Lita, who

knew no more of the Einstein theory than the name, discovered that

time was relative; that Tuesday morning took what in old times she

would have considered several weeks in passing; and that each study

period--in the words of William James--lay down like a cow on the

doorstep and refused to get up and go on. The truth was that time had

never been time to Lita; it had been action. Now it was emptiness,

something to be filled; and yet she couldn't fill it; it was a

bottomless abyss. Worse still, she couldn't concentrate. She went to

the blackboard to do an original--a simple thing she would have tossed

off in a minute in old times--and couldn't think how to begin; she, the

best geometer in the class. This was serious, and it was queer. Lita

couldn't, as she said to Aurelia, get the hang of it. Time being her

problem--this sudden unexpected accumulation of time on her hands--she

might have been expected to spend it doing the practical, obvious

things that had to be done. Not at all. She was incapable of exertion.

She could not study; and even the letter to her father, saying the

Italian trip was impossible, was never written.

She had a letter from him Wednesday morning in which he assumed that

she had not been able to bring her mother to any conclusion. He said he

would call her up when she came to town on Friday. Perhaps she would

dine with him on Saturday, and do a play. Ordinarily this would have

seemed an agreeable prospect; but now, since it was farther away than

Thursday, it had no real existence.

Late Wednesday afternoon her unalterable decision not to discuss Doctor

Dacer with anyone broke down, and she told Aurelia the whole story.

It took an hour--their meeting, everything that he had said, done and

looked, and all that she had felt. She paid a great price, however,

for this enjoyment--and she did enjoy it--for afterward the whole

experience became more a narrative and less a vital memory.

Thursday morning was the worst of all. Thursday morning was simply

unbearable, until about noon, when she heard the whistle of the first

possible New York train. After that things went very well until about

five, when she had a moment to run over to see Aurelia and heard that

the doctor had not come--had decided not to come until the next day,

Friday.

As far as she was concerned, he might as well not have come at all. All

her joy in the anticipated meeting was dead; but this might possibly

have reawakened, except that on Friday she did not have a minute until

the three-o'clock train, which she was taking to New York. Of course,

she could develop a cold or some mysterious ailment which would keep

her at school over Sunday, even in the infirmary; but deceit was not

attractive to her; though, as she would have said herself, she was not

narrow-minded about it.

The girls of Elbridge Hall were not supposed to make the trip to New

York by themselves; but sometimes a prudent senior--and who is prudent

if not the chairman of the self-government committee?--might be put

on the train at Elbridge by a teacher and sent off alone, on the

telephoned promise of a parent to meet her on her arrival at the Grand

Central.

When, under the chaperonage of Jonesy, Lita stepped out of the school

flivver at the station she saw that Doctor Dacer was there before her.

He must have come up in a morning train, seen his patient and walked to

the station. Wild possibilities rose at once in the girl's mind. Could

he have known from Aurelia? Could he have arranged-- No, for he took

no interest in her arrival; hardly glanced in her direction. He was

smoking, and when the train came he got into the smoking car without so

much as glancing back to see where Jonesy was bestowing Lita.

The train, which was a slow one, was empty. Lita settled herself by a

window and opened her geometry. She said to herself:

"I simply will not sit and watch the door. If he means to come he'll

come, and my watching won't change things one way or the other."

She set her little jaw and turned to Monday's lesson: "To prove that

similar triangles are to each other as the squares of the medians drawn

to their homologous sides." The words conveyed absolutely nothing

to her. She read them three times. It wasn't that she couldn't do

the problem--she couldn't even think about it. She drew two similar

triangles. They seemed to sit side by side like a cat and a kitten. She

gave them whiskers and tails. Then, annoyed with herself, she produced

a ruler and constructed a neat figure. She tried reading the theorem

again, this time in a conversational tone, as if it were the beginning

of a story: "Similar triangles are to each other--"

The door opened, letting in the roar of the train and a disagreeable

smell of coal smoke.

"I will not look up," thought Lita; "I will not! I will not!" And

raising her eyes she saw that Dacer was there. She smiled not so much

in greeting as from pure joy.

He hadn't wasted much time. He took her books and bag from the seat

beside her and put them on the rack. Then he sat down and said, "Isn't

it dangerous to let such little girls travel by themselves?"

She found speech difficult between her heart's beating too fast and her

breath's coming too slow, but she did manage to say, "What does Effie

do?"

"Just what you do--she expects me to be on hand to look out for her."

"I didn't expect you."

"No? Can it be you are not such a clever girl as teacher always

thought?"

"I thought you were spending the night at Elbridge."

"So did I when I arrived, but my plans changed. I found that it would

be better for me to take the three-o'clock to town and go back on

Sunday afternoon, by the--what is the train that we take back on

Sunday?"

It was almost too serious for jests, and Lita said in a voice that just

didn't tremble that she took the 4:08.

Life is not often just right, not only in the present, but promising

in forty-eight hours to be just as good or better. Lita spent two

wonderful hours. First they talked about Aurelia--her courage, her

loneliness, her parents, divorce in general--and then Lita found

herself telling him the whole story of her own position in regard to

her parents. Even to Aurelia, with whom she talked so frankly, she

had never told the whole story--her own deep emotional reactions. She

found to her surprise that it was easier to tell a story of an intimate

nature to this stranger of an opposite sex than to her lifelong friend.

He understood so perfectly. He did not blame them; if he had she would

have felt called on to defend them; and he did not blame her; if he had

she would have been forced into attacking them. He just listened, and

seemed to think it was a normal and deeply interesting bit of life.

He interrupted her once to say, "But you must remember that they are

people as well as parents."

It seemed to her an inspired utterance. She did not always remember

that. She offered the excuse: "Yes, but I don't mind their being

divorced. Only why do they hate each other so?"

"How do you know they hate each other?"

Lita thought this was a queer thing to say after all that she had told

him--almost stupid. She explained again: They were always abusing each

other; nothing the other did was right; neither could bear her to speak

well of--

"They sound to me," said Dacer, "as if they were still fond of each

other." Then, as Lita just stared at him, he went on: "Didn't you know

that? The only people it's any fun to quarrel with are the people you

love."

"Oh, no."

"Well, I'm glad you haven't found it out as yet, but it's true."

"I never quarrel," said Lita.

"You will some day. I expect to quarrel a lot with my wife."

"I shall never quarrel with my husband."

"No? Well, perhaps I'm wrong then."

She was angry at herself for glancing up so quickly to see what he

could possibly mean by that except--he was looking at her gravely.

"Look here!" he said. "That's a mistake about Italy. You don't want to

go to Italy next summer."

She was aware of two contradictory impressions during the entire

journey--one that this was the most extraordinary and dramatic event,

and that no heroine in fiction had ever such an adventure; and the

other that it was absolutely inevitable, and that she was now for the

first time a normal member of the human species.

Nothing in the whole experience thrilled her more than the calm, almost

martial way in which he said as they were getting off the train at the

Grand Central, "Now we'll get a taxi."

She was obliged to explain to him that they couldn't; her mother would

be at the gate waiting for her--she always was.

Only this time she wasn't.

Meeting trains in the Grand Central, though it has not the phrenetic

difficulty of meeting trains in the Pennsylvania Station, where you

must watch two crowded stairways and a disgorging elevator in three

different directions, is not made too easy. To meet a train in the

Grand Central you must be in two widely separated spots at the same

time.

Mrs. Hazlitt, approaching the bulletin board through devious

subterranean routes, was caught in a stampede of those hurrying to

meet a belated Boston express; and when at last she wormed her way

to the front she saw that the impressive official with the glasses

well down on his nose and the extraordinary ability for making neat

figures had written down Track 12 for Lita's train. She turned liked

a hunted animal; and at the moment when Lita and Dacer were emerging

from the gate Mrs. Hazlitt was running from a point far to the west of

Vanderbilt Avenue to a track almost at Lexington. It was five o'clock,

and many heavier and more determined people were running for their

trains, so that she had a good many collisions and apologies before she

reached the gate where her daughter ought to have been.

The last passenger, carrying a bunch of flowers and a cardboard box

tied up with two different kinds of string, was just staggering through

on oddly shaped flat feet. Everyone else had disappeared. Mrs. Hazlitt

questioned the gateman. Had he seen a small young lady all alone who

seemed to be looking for someone? The gateman said that he could not

say he had, but would not care to say he had not. He possessed to

perfection the railroad man's art of not telling a passenger anything

he doesn't have to tell. His manner irritated Mrs. Hazlitt.

"I suppose you know," she said, "that you have horrible arrangements

for meeting trains."

"If some of us had our way we wouldn't have any arrangements at all,"

answered the gateman.

This shocked Mrs. Hazlitt; it seemed so autocratic. She opened her eyes

to their widest and felt she must argue the matter out with him.

"Do you mean," she asked, "that you would not let people meet trains?"

"I would not," said the gateman calmly, and having locked his gate he

went his way.

This had taken a few minutes, and by the time Mrs. Hazlitt had gone

back to the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance and found her car and driven

home, Lita was already in the library--alone.

One of the disadvantages experienced by people who express themselves

quickly is that while they are explaining how everything happened the

silent people of the world are making up their minds how much they will

tell. Mrs. Hazlitt was talking as she entered the room.

"I'm so sorry, my dear," she was saying. "Don't let's ever tell Miss

Barton. I wasn't really late--at least I would not have been if I had

not had to run miles and miles, knocking down commuters as I went. And

do you know what a gateman said to me, Lita, when I found I had missed

you? That people oughtn't to meet trains. I could have killed him. I

don't suppose you were frightened though. I suppose you took a taxi?"

"Yes," said Lita.

She had had every intention of telling her mother everything--well,

certainly that she had met Doctor Dacer on the train and that he had

been kind enough to see her home; but the words did not come instantly,

and as she paused, her mother rushed on to something else--clothes, and

what Lita wanted to see if they went to the theater the next day. The

moment for telling slipped away from her in the most unexpected way; it

was getting farther and farther; in fact it was nothing but a speck on

the horizon.

They had an amusing dinner together. One of the pleasantest features in

her parents' divorce was that Mrs. Hazlitt felt not the least restraint

about discussing the Hazlitt family.

"My dear," she would say, with her eyes dancing, "don't tell me you

never heard about why your Uncle Elbert was driven out of Portland."

Lita enjoyed these anecdotes extremely. Sometimes they contained

illuminating phrases: "Of course, your father and I preferred to be

alone." "Naturally I knew just how Jim--your father--felt about it,

but--"

When her mother was like this Lita was content that her father and

the whole world should remain outsiders. Her mother was a sufficient

companion.

When they were back in the library after dinner her father telephoned

to her. It was about Italy. She took up the receiver with a sinking

heart. Now she wished she had written to him. Her mother was holding

the paper as if she were reading it, but Lita knew that she couldn't

help hearing the faltering sentences she was murmuring into the

mouthpiece:

"Yes, Pat, I spoke to her, and I'm afraid we can't. I mean that, under

the circumstances--" She heard the paper rustling to the floor, and her

mother standing beside her whispered to her: "Don't be so timid; don't

say you're afraid."

Then both parents were talking to her at once, one over the wire and

one in her ear. Now, it is possible to listen while you talk yourself,

but it is not possible to listen to two people at once.

Her father was saying: "Of course, if you don't want to go say so, but

if you do, and will put the matter as I suggested--"

And her mother was whispering sibilantly, "You're giving the idea you

wish to go--so unjust to me. Say straight out you won't leave me."

It was one of those minutes that epitomized her life, and her nerves

were distinctly on edge as she hung up the receiver, to find that her

mother was only waiting for this, to go over the whole matter more at

length.

"There are times, my dear," she was saying, "when it is really

necessary to speak out, even at the risk of hurting a person's

feelings. I do hope you are not one of those weak natures who can never

tell a disagreeable truth. It will save your father future suffering if

you can make him understand once and for all he cannot come in between

us--not because I forbid it, but because you won't have it."

The evening never regained its gayety.

The next morning--Saturday--was devoted entirely to clothes, and Lita

now discovered a curious fact. She found she knew exactly how Dacer

liked her to dress. In their few interviews they had never mentioned

clothes, and yet she did not buy a hat or reject a model without a

sure conviction that she was following his taste. Heretofore her main

interest in the subject had been a desire to knock her schoolmates in

the eye.