Immediately after breakfast Lita had geometry, and then a study period.
During this she received a message that Miss Barton wished to speak to
her. Such a message was not necessarily alarming; as chairman of the
self-government committee she was consulted on many school problems. It
was known that Miss Barton relied more on her judgment than on that of
the senior president. Still, with a poor classroom record for the past
week, and that unlicensed hour and a half on the infirmary steps, Lita
did feel a trifle nervous; not that she could care very much about such
minor matters. And then there was Matthew and the flivver----
The head mistress was sitting at her desk in her study, with its
latticed windows and the etchings of English cathedrals on the walls.
Her head was slightly on one side, which meant, according to school
lore, that she was going to be particularly airy. She was.
"Oh, well, come, my dear Lita," she said. "This is really going rather
far--a bit thick, as our little English friend would say."
"But what is it, Miss Barton?" Lita breathed, with all the pearly
innocence of young guilt.
"Oh, dear, dear!" said Miss Barton. "So we have nothing on our
conscience!"
"I have a great many things," said Lita quietly. She knew just how to
talk to her chief--if that would do any good.
"One asks oneself whether girls are worth educating at all if this is
the way the more intelligent ones expend their time and energy." And
Miss Barton handed Lita the crumpled but familiar letter to Valentine.
"I've had a sharp note from your father this morning, and I must say
I don't blame him--really I don't. The grammar would be a sufficient
humiliation to any school, even if the letter were addressed to your
grandmother. And I may tell you that five different photographs of
Mr. Valentine have been discovered hidden about your room--most
ingeniously, it is true, but quite against our rules. Really, it's
a question whether the school can keep on if this sort of thing is
general."
Lita listened in what appeared to be the most respectful silence. Her
relief was intense. Also she was trying to remember what Miss Barton
said word for word so as to repeat it to Aurelia, to whom, after all,
it justly belonged. Aurelia did a wonderful imitation of the head
mistress, and could make use of every phrase; she was always on the
lookout for material.
Lita was dismissed with a warning that she was to be kept in bounds
until the holidays, and all her mail, outgoing and incoming, would be
watched. This was rather serious, as Dacer had distinctly intimated
that he intended to write. Still, a way could probably be found-- She
would speak to Aurelia about it.
She did not see Aurelia until the late afternoon. Dacer, as she
expected, had gone; but he had left a message for her, Aurelia said--a
very particular message.
With what extraordinary rapidity does the human imagination function!
Between the time Aurelia announced the fact that a message existed
and the giving of the message, Lita had time to envisage half a dozen
possibilities, from the announcement of his immediate return to an
offer of marriage.
The message was this: "He said to tell you that he had no idea you were
so fond of the stage, or he would have behaved very differently. Do you
understand what that means?--for I don't."
It meant, of course, that Miss Barton had told him about Valentine;
had possibly even shown him the letter. It was just the sort of thing
that she might do. Lita could almost hear her describing the comic
complications of a head mistress' life: "This note, for instance,
discovered in the pocket of one of my best girls; not even English;
that hurts us most."
Why did Aurelia do such silly things--write such silly letters? Then,
her sense of justice reasserting itself, she admitted it was not her
friend's fault that the authorship of the letter had been mistaken. She
was conscious of a physical nausea at the idea that Dacer was going
about in the belief that she, Lita Hazlitt, had written thus to another
man.
In the first few minutes she sketched an explanatory letter to him, and
then remembered that her mail--in and out--was watched. That wouldn't
do. In fact, there was nothing to do but to wait for two interminable
weeks to pass and bring the Friday of the Easter holiday. Once in the
same town with him, she could make him listen to her. There was nothing
agreeable in life except the recollection of a large hand on hers, and
even that memory was beginning to take on mortality.
She had not even the attentions of her parents to console her--not that
forty thousand parents would have made up to her for the estrangement
of Dacer. Her mother wrote conscientiously, but coldly. If she had seen
her mother Lita would have told her everything, but the next Sunday was
Mr. Hazlitt's official visiting day.
He came, but he came in a somewhat disciplinary mood. He gave Lita a
long talk on how men felt when women forced attentions upon them. Lita
did not dare take the risk of telling him; she had so little control
over him that he might possibly tell the whole story to Miss Barton and
involve Aurelia. At the same time she did not want him to find it out
for himself by a futile visit to Valentine. Before he left she asked
him point-blank if he contemplated such a step.
"Of course not," he answered.
And at almost that exact moment Freebody was ushering Valentine into
Mrs. Hazlitt's library. For Mrs. Hazlitt was not a woman to let
the grass grow under her feet, where her maternal obligations were
concerned. The more she thought the matter over the more obvious it
became that one or the other of Lita's parents must see Valentine and
let him know that, however silly and forthputting the child had been,
she was not without conventional protection. Of course, this was her
father's duty; but since men as fathers were complete failures, all the
disagreeable tasks of parenthood devolved inevitably on mothers. After
Dacer had put her on the train the Sunday before, she had gone home and
taken the powder he gave her and slept through a long night; and when
she waked the next morning she had seen her duty clearly--to interview
Valentine herself. It was a duty which implied a reproof to her former
husband.
She looked for Valentine's name in the telephone book, but of course
he was not there. Then she called up the theater where he was acting,
and they refused to give her his address, but said a letter directed
to the theater would reach him. Mrs. Hazlitt was in no mood to brook
the mail's delays, and telegraphed him that it was necessary that she
should see him for a few minutes at any time or place convenient to
him, and signed her name with a comfortable conviction that all New
York knew just who Alita Hazlitt was.
Now Valentine, like most people busy with a successful career, was
utterly uninterested in conventional social life; he hardly ever opened
his mail, rarely answered telegrams; and if, by mistake, he did make a
social engagement, he always told his secretary to call the people up
and break it. In the ordinary course of events Mrs. Hazlitt's telegram
would have been opened in his dressing room, and would have lain about
for a day or two until Valentine thought of saying to someone who
might know, "Who is this woman--Alita Hazlitt?" And then it would have
dropped on the floor, and would eventually have been swept up and put
in the theater ash can.
But, as it happened, Valentine had always cherished a wish to play
the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet before he was too old to wear
a round-necked doublet; and a charitable institution, of which Mrs.
Hazlitt was a most negligent trustee, had made a suggestion that
Valentine should help them out in a benefit they were about to give. So
Valentine, remembering her name on the letterhead of the institution,
jumped at the conclusion that she had been selected to clinch the
arrangement.
And so not more than three or four days went by before he answered her
telegram by calling her up on the telephone, and it was arranged that
he was to come and see her on Sunday at five.
She felt nervous as the time approached. She kept saying to herself
that she had no idea how to deal with people like this. So awkward for
a woman alone; but she was alone--utterly alone. She had become rather
tearful by the time Valentine was announced. She waited a moment to
compose herself and became even more unnerved in the process.
When she went down she found him standing by one of the bookcases,
reading. She saw with a distinct pang that he was a handsomer man off
the stage than on, with his fine hawklike profile and irrepressibly
thick, furrowed light hair. He slid a book back into place as she
entered, with the soft gesture of a book lover.
"I see you have a first edition of Trivia," he said. "I envy you."
Mrs. Hazlitt, who had thought up a greeting which was now rendered
utterly impossible, was obliged to make a quick mental bound. She had
never opened her edition of Gay, which she had inherited from her
grandfather, and had never suspected it of being a first.