"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."
"Oh," I said, "I've given it up. I'm not going."
As she had said that she would miss me, this answer ought to have given
my mother unmixed pleasure. It didn't seem to. She smiled upon me
with the greatest affection, and at the same time looked troubled.
"When you came into my room this morning your mind was definitely made
up. Has anything happened?"
"Only that I've changed my mind. Aiken is too nice to leave."
"I sometimes think," said my mother, "that the life you lead is
narrowing. At your age, how I should have jumped at the chance to see
California in spring! But I shan't ask you why you don't jump. I know
very well you'd not tell me."
"Must I have a reason? They say women don't have reasons for doing
things. Why should men?"
"A woman," said my mother, "does nothing without a reason. But often
she has to be ashamed of her reasons, and so she pretends she hasn't
any. Men are stronger. They don't have to give their reasons, and so
they don't pretend."
"Maybe," I said, "I'm fond of my family and don't want to be away from
them."
My mother blushed a little, and laughed.
"I shall pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given
up your trip. But I'm afraid it isn't your father and me that you've
suddenly grown so fond of."
"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other
day."
"Thrashed all what out?--Oh, I remember--your attentions to Lucy
Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"
"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the
attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."
"So it was," said my mother.
She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other
things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from
them.
It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the
California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the
change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such
an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.
Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to.
That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no
longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being
together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this:
that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her
confidant.
From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night,
everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression
that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an
undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I
hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my
dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth,
and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt, _after_ I had got my
collar on and tied my tie!
Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one
rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could
no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from
the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed
this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had
suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of
matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a
holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the
angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down
to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now
have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest
in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that
time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should
help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true
friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had
no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things
should have gone wrong with these two.
My father came in while I was still dressing.
"Hear you've given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think
that's wise? . . . Where do you keep your bell?"