Though December had come, Sunday was like an April day before whose
sunlight the night-mists of scruples and morbid fears were scattered and
dispersed. And Janet, as she fared forth from the Fillmore Street flat,
felt resurging in her the divine recklessness that is the very sap of
life. The future, save of the immediate hours to come, lost its power
over her. The blue and white beauty of the sky proclaimed all things
possible for the strong; and the air was vibrant with the sweet music of
bells, calling her to happiness. She was going to meet happiness, to meet
love--to meet Ditmar! The trolley which she took in Faber Street, though
lagging in its mission, seemed an agent of that happiness as it left the
city behind it and wound along the heights beside the tarvia roadway
above the river, bright glimpses of which she caught through the openings
in the woods. And when she looked out of the window on her right she
beheld on a little forested rise a succession of tiny "camps" built by
residents of Hampton whose modest incomes could not afford more elaborate
summer places; camps of all descriptions and colours, with queer names
that made her smile: "The Cranny," "The Nook," "Snug Harbour," "Buena
Vista,"--of course,--which she thought pretty, though she did not know
its meaning; and another, in German, equally perplexing, "Klein aber
Mein." Though the windows of these places were now boarded up, though the
mosquito netting still clung rather dismally to the porches, they were
mutely suggestive of contentment and domestic joy.
Scarcely had she alighted from the car at the rendezvous he had
mentioned, beside the now deserted boathouse where in the warm weather
the members of the Hampton Rowing Club disported themselves, when she saw
an automobile approaching--and recognized it as the gay "roadster" Ditmar
had exhibited to her that summer afternoon by the canal; and immediately
Ditmar himself, bringing it to a stop and leaping from it, stood before
her in the sunlight, radiating, as it seemed, more sunlight still. With
his clipped, blond moustache and his straw-coloured hair--as yet but
slightly grey at the temples--he looked a veritable conquering berserker
in his huge coat of golden fur. Never had he appeared to better
advantage.
"I was waiting for you," he said, "I saw you in the car." Turning to the
automobile, he stripped the tissue paper from a cluster of dark red roses
with the priceless long stems of which Lise used to rave when she worked
in the flower store. And he held the flowers against her suit her new
suit she had worn for this meeting.
"Oh," she cried, taking a deep, intoxicating breath of their fragrance.
"You brought these--for me?"
"From Boston--my beauty!"
"But I can't wear all of them!"
"Why not?" he demanded. "Haven't you a pin?"
She produced one, attaching them with a gesture that seemed habitual,
though the thought of their value-revealing in some degree her own worth
in his eyes-unnerved her. She was warmly conscious of his gaze. Then he
turned, and opening a compartment at the back of the car drew from it a
bright tweed motor coat warmly lined.
"Oh, no!" she protested, drawing back. "I'll--I'll be warm enough." But
laughingly, triumphantly, he seized her and thrust her arms in the
sleeves, his fingers pressing against her. Overcome by shyness, she drew
away from him.
"I made a pretty good guess at the size--didn't I, Janet?" he cried,
delightedly surveying her. "I couldn't forget it!" His glance grew more
concentrated, warmer, penetrating.
"You mustn't look at me like that!" she pleaded with lowered eyes.
"Why not--you're mine--aren't you? You're mine, now."
"I don't know. There are lots of things I want to talk about," she
replied, but her protest sounded feeble, unconvincing, even to herself.
He fairly lifted her into the automobile--it was a caress, only tempered
by the semi-publicity of the place. He was giving her no time to think
--but she did not want to, think. Starting the engine, he got in and
leaned toward her.
"Not here!" she exclaimed.
"All right--I'll wait," he agreed, tucking the robe about her deftly,
solicitously, and she sank back against the seat, surrendering herself to
the luxury, the wonder of being cherished, the caressing and sheltering
warmth she felt of security and love, the sense of emancipation from
discontent and sordidness and struggle. For a moment she closed her eyes,
but opened them again to behold the transformed image of herself
reflected in the windshield to confirm the illusion--if indeed it were
one! The tweed coat seemed startlingly white in the sunlight, and the
woman she saw, yet recognized as herself, was one of the fortunately
placed of the earth with power and beauty at her command! And she could
no longer imagine herself as the same person who the night before had
stood in front of the house in Warren Street. The car was speeding over
the smooth surface of the boulevard; the swift motion, which seemed to
her like that of flying, the sparkling air, the brightness of the day,
the pressure of Ditmar's shoulder against hers, thrilled her. She
marvelled at his sure command over the machine, that responded like a
live thing to his touch. On the wide, straight stretches it went at a mad
pace that took her breath, and again, in turning a corner or passing
another car, it slowed down, purring in meek obedience. Once she gasped:
"Not so fast! I can't stand it."
He laughed and obeyed her. They glided between river and sky across the
delicate fabric of a bridge which but a moment before she had seen in the
distance. Running through the little village on the farther bank, they
left the river.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Oh, for a little spin," he answered indulgently, turning into a side
road that wound through the woods and suddenly stopping. "Janet, we've
got this day--this whole day to ourselves." He seized and drew her to
him, and she yielded dizzily, repaying the passion of his kiss, forgetful
of past and future while he held her, whispering brokenly endearing
phrases.
"You'll ruin my roses," she protested breathlessly, at last, when it
seemed that she could no longer bear this embrace, nor the pressure of
his lips. "There! you see you're crushing them!" She undid them, and
buttoning the coat, held them to her face. Their odour made her faint:
her eyes were clouded.
"Listen, Claude!" she said at last,--it was the first time she had called
him so--getting free. "You must be sensible! some one might come along."
"I'll never get enough of you!" he said. "I can't believe it yet." And
added irrelevantly: "Pin the roses outside."
She shook her head. Something in her protested against this too public
advertisement of their love.
"I'd rather hold them," she answered. "Let's go on." He started the car
again. "Listen, I want to talk to you, seriously. I've been thinking."
"Don't I know you've been thinking!" he told her exuberantly. "If I could
only find out what's always going on in that little head of yours! If you
keep on thinking you'll dry up, like a New England school-marm. And now
do you know what you are? One of those dusky red roses just ready to
bloom. Some day I'll buy enough to smother you in 'em."
"Listen!" she repeated, making a great effort to calm herself, to regain
something of that frame of mind in which their love had assumed the
proportions of folly and madness, to summon up the scruples which, before
she had left home that morning, she had resolved to lay before him, which
she knew would return when she could be alone again. "I have to think
--you won't," she exclaimed, with a fleeting smile.
"Well, what is it?" he assented. "You might as well get it off now."
And it took all her strength to say: "I don't see how I can marry you.
I've told you the reasons. You're rich, and you have friends who wouldn't
understand--and your children--they wouldn't understand. I--I'm nothing,
I know it isn't right, I know you wouldn't be happy. I've never lived--in
the kind of house you live in and known the kind of people you know, I
shouldn't know what to do."
He took his eyes off the road and glanced down at her curiously. His
smile was self-confident, exultant.
"Now do you feel better--you little Puritan?" he said.
And perforce she smiled in return, a pucker appearing between her
eyebrows.
"I mean it," she said. "I came out to tell you so. I know--it just isn't
possible."
"I'd marry you to-day if I could get a license," he declared. "Why,
you're worth any woman in America, I don't care who she is, or how much
money she has."
In spite of herself she was absurdly pleased.
"Now that is over, we won't discuss it again, do you understand? I've got
you," he said, "and I mean to hold on to you."
She sighed. He was driving slowly now along the sandy road, and with his
hand on hers she simply could not think. The spell of his nearness, of
his touch, which all nature that morning conspired to deepen, was too
powerful to be broken, and something was calling to her, "Take this day,
take this day," drowning out the other voice demanding an accounting. She
was living--what did it all matter? She yielded herself to the witchery
of the hour, the sheer delight of forthfaring into the unknown.
They turned away from the river, crossing the hills of a rolling country
now open, now wooded, passing white farmhouses and red barns, and
ancient, weather-beaten dwellings with hipped roofs and "lean-tos" which
had been there in colonial days when the road was a bridle-path. Cows and
horses stood gazing at them from warm paddocks, where the rich, black mud
glistened, melted by the sun; chickens scratched and clucked in the
barnyards or flew frantically across the road, sometimes within an ace of
destruction. Janet flinched, but Ditmar would laugh, gleefully, boyishly.
"We nearly got that one!" he would exclaim. And then he had to assure her
that he wouldn't run over them.
"I haven't run over one yet,--have I?" he would demand.
"No, but you will, it's only luck."
"Luck!" he cried derisively. "Skill! I wish I had a dollar for every one
I got when I was learning to drive. There was a farmer over here in
Chester--" and he proceeded to relate how he had had to pay for two
turkeys. "He got my number, the old hayseed, he was laying for me, and
the next time I went back that way he held me up for five dollars. I can
remember the time when a man in a motor was an easy mark for every reuben
in the county. They got rich on us."
She responded to his mood, which was wholly irresponsible, exuberant, and
they laughed together like children, every little incident assuming an
aspect irresistibly humorous. Once he stopped to ask an old man standing
in his dooryard how far it was to Kingsbury.
"Wal, mebbe it's two mile, they mostly call it two," said the patriarch,
after due reflection, gathering his beard in his band. "Mebbe it's more."
His upper lip was blue, shaven, prehensile.
"What did you ask him for, when you know?" said Janet, mirthfully, when
they had gone on, and Ditmar was imitating him. Ditmar's reply was to
wink at her. Presently they saw another figure on the road.
"Let's see what he'll say," Ditmar proposed. This man was young, the
colour of mahogany, with glistening black hair and glistening black eyes
that regarded the too palpable joyousness of their holiday humour in mute
surprise.
"I no know--stranger," he said.
"No speaka Portugueso?" inquired Ditmar, gravely.
"The country is getting filthy with foreigners," he observed, when he had
started the car. "I went down to Plymouth last summer to see the old
rock, and by George, it seemed as if there wasn't anybody could speak
American on the whole cape. All the Portuguese islands are dumped there
--cranberry pickers, you know."
"I didn't know that," said Janet.
"Sure thing!" he exclaimed. "And when I got there, what do you think?
there was hardly enough of the old stone left to stand on, and that had a
fence around it like an exhibit in an exposition. It had all been chipped
away by souvenir hunters."
She gazed at him incredulously.
"You don't believe me! I'll take you down there sometime. And another
thing, the rock's high and dry--up on the land. I said to Charlie Crane,
who was with me, that it must have been a peach of a jump for old Miles
Standish and Priscilla what's her name."
"How I'd love to see the ocean again!" Janet exclaimed.
"Why, I'll take you--as often as you like," he promised. "We'll go out on
it in summer, up to Maine, or down to the Cape."
Her enchantment was now so great that nothing seemed impossible.
"And we'll go down to Plymouth, too, some Sunday soon, if this weather
keeps up. If we start early enough we can get there for lunch, easy.
We'll see the rock. I guess some of your ancestors must have come over
with that Mayflower outfit--first cabin, eh? You look like it."
Janet laughed. "It's a joke on them, if they did. I wonder what they'd
think of Hampton, if they could see it now. I counted up once, just to
tease father--he's the seventh generation from Ebenezer Bumpus, who came
to Dolton. Well, I proved to him he might have one hundred and twenty-six
other ancestors besides Ebenezer and his wife."
"That must have jarred him some," was Ditmar's comment. "Great old man,
your father. I've talked to him--he's a regular historical society all by
himself. Well, there must be something in it, this family business. Now,
you can tell he comes from fine old American stock-he looks it."
Janet flushed. "A lot of good it does!" she exclaimed.
"I don't know," said Ditmar. "It's something to fall back on--a good
deal. And he hasn't got any of that nonsense in his head about labour
unions--he's a straight American. And you look the part," he added. "You
remind me--I never thought of it until now--you remind me of a picture of
Priscilla I saw once in a book of poems Longfellow's, you know. I'm not
much on literature, but I remember that, and I remember thinking she
could have me. Funny isn't it, that you should have come along? But
you've got more ginger than the woman in that picture. I'm the only man
that ever guessed it isn't that so?" he asked jealously.
"You're wonderful!" retorted Janet, daringly.
"You just bet I am, or I couldn't have landed you," he asserted. "You're
chock full of ginger, but it's been all corked up. You're so prim-so
Priscilla." He was immensely pleased with the adjective he had coined,
repeating it. "It's a great combination. When I think of it, I want to
shake you, to squeeze you until you scream."
"Then please don't think of it," she said.
"That's easy!" he exclaimed, mockingly.
At a quarter to one they entered a sleepy village reminiscent of a New
England of other days. The long street, deeply shaded in summer, was
bordered by decorous homes, some of which had stood there for a century
and a half; others were of the Mansard period. The high school, of
strawberry-coloured brick, had been the pride and glory of the Kingsbury
of the '70s: there were many churches, some graceful and some hideous. At
the end of the street they came upon a common, surrounded by stone posts
and a railing, with a monument in the middle of it, and facing the common
on the north side was a rambling edifice with many white gables, in front
of which, from an iron arm on a post, swung a quaint sign, "Kingsbury
Tavern." In revolutionary and coaching days the place bad been a famous
inn; and now, thanks to the enterprise of a man who had foreseen the
possibilities of an era of automobiles, it had become even more famous. A
score of these modern vehicles were drawn up before it under the bare,
ancient elms; there was a scene of animation on the long porch, where
guests strolled up and down or sat in groups in the rocking-chairs which
the mild weather had brought forth again. Ditmar drew up in line with the
other motors, and stopped.
"Well, here we are!" he exclaimed, as he pulled off his gauntlets. "I
guess I could get along with something to eat. How about you? They treat
you as well here as any place I know of in New England."
He assumed their lunching together at a public place as a matter of
course to which there could not possibly be an objection, springing out
of the car, removing the laprobe from her knees, and helping her to
alight. She laid the roses on the seat.
"Aren't you going to bring them along?" he demanded.
"I'd rather not," she said. "Don't you think they'll be safe here?"
"Oh, I guess so," he replied. She was always surprising him; but her
solicitation concerning them was a balm, and he found all such
instinctive acts refreshing.
"Afraid of putting up too much of a front, are you?" he asked smilingly.
"I'd rather leave them here," she replied. As she walked beside Ditmar to
the door she was excited, unwontedly self-conscious, painfully aware of
inspection by the groups on the porch. She had seen such people as these
hurrying in automobiles through the ugliness of Faber Street in Hampton
toward just such delectable spots as this village of Kingsbury--people
of that world of freedom and privilege from which she was excluded;
Ditmar's world. He was at home here. But she? The delusion that she
somehow had been miraculously snatched up into it was marred by their
glances. What were they thinking of her? Her face was hot as she passed
them and entered the hall, where more people were gathered. But Ditmar's
complacency, his ease and self-confidence, his manner of owning the
place, as it were, somewhat reassured her. He went up to the desk, behind
which, stood a burly, red-complexioned man who greeted him effusively,
yet with the air of respect accorded the powerful.
"Hullo, Eddie," said Ditmar. "You've got a good crowd here to-day. Any
room for me?"
"Sure, Mr. Ditmar, we can always make room for you. Well, I haven't laid
eyes on you for a dog's age. Only last Sunday Mr. Crane was here, and I
was asking him where you'd been keeping yourself."
"Why, I've been busy, Eddie. I've landed the biggest order ever heard of
in Hampton. Some of us have to work, you know; all you've got to do is to
loaf around this place and smoke cigars and rake in the money."
The proprietor of the Kingsbury Tavern smiled indulgently at this
persiflage.
"Let me present you to Miss Bumpus," said Ditmar. "This is my friend,
Eddie Hale," he added, for Janet's benefit. "And when you've eaten his
dinner you'll believe me when I say he's got all the other hotel men
beaten a mile."
Janet smiled and flushed. She had been aware of Mr. Hale's discreet
glance.
"Pleased to meet you, Miss Bumpus," he said, with a somewhat elaborate
bow.
"Eddie," said Ditmar, "have you got a nice little table for us?"
"It's a pity I didn't know you was coming, but I'll do my best," declared
Mr. Hale, opening the door in the counter.
"Oh, I guess you can fix us all right, if you want to, Eddie."
"Mr. Ditmar's a great josher," Mr. Hale told Janet confidentially as he
escorted them into the dining-room. And Ditmar, gazing around over the
heads of the diners, spied in an alcove by a window a little table with
tilted chairs.
"That one'll do," he said.
"I'm sorry, but it's engaged," apologized Mr. Hale.
"Forget it, Eddie--tell 'em they're late," said Ditmar, making his way
toward it.
The proprietor pulled out Janet's chair.
"Say," he remarked, "it's no wonder you get along in business."
"Well, this is cosy, isn't it?" said Ditmar to Janet when they were
alone. He handed her the menu, and snapped his fingers for a waitress.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming to this place?" she asked.
"I wanted to surprise you. Don't you like it?"
"Yes," she replied. "Only--"
"Only, what?"
"I wish you wouldn't look at me like that--here."
"All right. I'll try to be good until we get into the car again. You
watch me! I'll behave as if we'd been married ten years."
He snapped his fingers again, and the waitress hurried up to take their
orders.
"Kingsbury's still dry, I guess," he said to the girl, who smiled
sympathetically, somewhat ruefully. When she had gone he began to talk to
Janet about the folly, in general, of prohibition, the fuse oil
distributed on the sly. "I'll bet I could go out and find half a dozen
rum shops within a mile of here!" he declared.
Janet did not doubt it. Ditmar's aplomb, his faculty of getting what he
wanted, had amused and distracted her. She was growing calmer, able to
scrutinize, at first covertly and then more boldly the people at the
other tables, only to discover that she and Ditmar were not the objects
of the universal curiosity she had feared. Once in a while, indeed, she
encountered and then avoided the glance of some man, felt the admiration
in it, was thrilled a little, and her sense of exhilaration returned as
she regained her poise. She must be nice looking--more than that--in her
new suit. On entering the tavern she had taken off the tweed coat, which
Ditmar had carried and laid on a chair. This new and amazing adventure
began to go to her head like wine....
When luncheon was over they sat in a sunny corner of the porch while
Ditmar smoked his cigar. His digestion was good, his spirits high, his
love-making--on account of the public nature of the place--surreptitious
yet fervent. The glamour to which Janet had yielded herself was on
occasions slightly troubled by some new and enigmatic element to be
detected in his voice and glances suggestive of intentions vaguely
disquieting. At last she said:
"Oughtn't we to be going home?"
"Home!" he ridiculed the notion. "I'm going to take you to the prettiest
road you ever saw--around by French's Lower Falls. I only wish it was
summer."
"I must be home before dark," she told him. "You see, the family don't
know where I am. I haven't said anything to them about--about this."
"That's right," he said, after a moment's hesitation:
"I didn't think you would. There's plenty of time for that--after things
get settled a little--isn't there?"
She thought his look a little odd, but the impression passed as they
walked to the motor. He insisted now on her pinning the roses on the
tweed coat, and she humoured him. The winter sun had already begun to
drop, and with the levelling rays the bare hillsides, yellow and brown in
the higher light, were suffused with pink; little by little, as the sun
fell lower, imperceptible clouds whitened the blue cambric of the sky,
distant copses were stained lilac. And Janet, as she gazed, wondered at a
world that held at once so much beauty, so much joy and sorrow,--such
strange sorrow as began to invade her now, not personal, but cosmic. At
times it seemed almost to suffocate her; she drew in deep breaths of air:
it was the essence of all things--of the man by her side, of herself, of
the beauty so poignantly revealed to her.
Gradually Ditmar became conscious of this detachment, this new evidence
of an extraordinary faculty of escaping him that seemed unimpaired.
Constantly he tried by leaning closer to her, by reaching out his hand,
to reassure himself that she was at least physically present. And though
she did not resent these tokens, submitting passively, he grew perplexed
and troubled; his optimistic atheism concerning things unseen was
actually shaken by the impression she conveyed of beholding realities
hidden from him. Shadows had begun to gather in the forest, filmy mists
to creep over the waters. He asked if she were cold, and she shook her
head and sighed as one coming out of a trance, smiling at him.
"It's been a wonderful day!" she said.
"The greatest ever!" he agreed. And his ardour, mounting again, swept
away the unwonted mood of tenderness and awe she had inspired in him,
made him bold to suggest the plan which had been the subject of an
ecstatic contemplation.
"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "we'll take a little run down to
Boston and have dinner together. We'll be there in an hour, and back by
ten o'clock."
"To Boston!" she repeated. "Now?"
"Why not?" he said, stopping the car. "Here's the road--it's a boulevard
all the way."
It was not so much the proposal as the passion in his voice, in his
touch, the passion to which she felt herself responding that filled her
with apprehension and dismay, and yet aroused her pride and anger.
"I told you I had to be home," she said.
"I'll have you home by ten o'clock; I promise. We're going to be married,
Janet," he whispered.
"Oh, if you meant to marry me you wouldn't ask me to do this!" she cried.
"I want to go back to Hampton. If you won't take me, I'll walk."
She had drawn away from him, and her hand was on the door. He seized her
arm.
"For God's sake, don't take it that way!" he cried, in genuine alarm.
"All I meant was--that we'd have a nice little dinner. I couldn't bear to
leave you, it'll be a whole week before we get another day. Do you
suppose I'd--I'd do anything to insult you, Janet?"
With her fingers still tightened over the door-catch she turned and
looked at him.
"I don't know," she said slowly. "Sometimes I think you would. Why
shouldn't you? Why should you marry me? Why shouldn't you try to do with
me what you've done with other women? I don't know anything about the
world, about life. I'm nobody. Why shouldn't you?"
"Because you're not like the other women--that's why. I love you--won't
you believe it?" He was beside himself with anxiety. "Listen--I'll take
you home if you want to go. You don't know how it hurts me to have you
think such things!"
"Well, then, take me home," she said. It was but gradually that she
became pacified. A struggle was going on within her between these doubts
of him he had stirred up again and other feelings aroused by his
pleadings. Night fell, and when they reached the Silliston road the
lights of Hampton shone below them in the darkness.
"You'd better let me out here," she said. "You can't drive me home."
He brought the car to a halt beside one of the small wooden shelters
built for the convenience of passengers.
"You forgive me--you understand, Janet?" he asked.
"Sometimes I don't know what to think," she said, and suddenly clung to
him. "I--I forgive you. I oughtn't to suspect such things, but I'm like
that. I'm horrid and I can't help it." She began to unbutton the coat he
had bought for her.
"Aren't you going to take it?" he said. "It's yours."
"And what do you suppose my family would say if I told them Mr. Ditmar
had given it to me?"
"Come on, I'll drive you home, I'll tell them I gave it to you, that
we're going to be married," he announced recklessly.
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed in consternation. "You couldn't. You said so
yourself--that you didn't want, any one to know, now. I'll get on the
trolley."
"And the roses?" he asked.
She pressed them to her face, and chose one. "I'll take this," she said,
laying the rest on the seat....
He waited until he saw her safely on the trolley car, and then drove
slowly homeward in a state of amazement. He had been on the verge of
announcing himself to the family in Fillmore Street as her prospective
husband! He tried to imagine what that household was like; and again he
found himself wondering why she had not consented to his proposal. And
the ever-recurring question presented itself--was he prepared to go that
length? He didn't know. She was beyond him, he had no clew to her, she
was to him as mysterious as a symphony. Certain strains of her moved him
intensely--the rest was beyond his grasp.... At supper, while his
children talked and laughed boisterously, he sat silent, restless, and in
spite of their presence the house seemed appallingly empty.
When Janet returned home she ran to her bedroom, and taking from the
wardrobe the tissue paper that had come with her new dress, and which she
had carefully folded, she wrapped the rose in it, and put it away in the
back of a drawer. Thus smothered, its fragrance stifled, it seemed
emblematic, somehow, of the clandestine nature of her love....
The weeks that immediately followed were strange ones. All the elements
of life that previously had been realities, trivial yet fundamental, her
work, her home, her intercourse with the family, became fantastic. There
was the mill to which she went every day: she recognized it, yet it was
not the same mill, nor was Fillmore Street the Fillmore Street of old.
Nor did the new and feverish existence over whose borderland she had been
transported seem real, save in certain hours she spent in Ditmar's
company, when he made her forget--hers being a temperament to feel the
weight of an unnatural secrecy. She was aware, for instance, that her
mother and even her father thought her conduct odd, were anxious as to
her absences on certain nights and on Sundays. She offered no
explanation. It was impossible. She understood that the reason why they
refrained from questioning her was due to a faith in her integrity as
well as to a respect for her as a breadwinner who lead earned a right to
independence. And while her suspicion of Hannah's anxiety troubled her,
on the occasions when she thought of it, Lise's attitude disturbed her
even more. From Lise she had been prepared for suspicion, arraignment,
ridicule. What a vindication if it were disclosed that she, Janet, had a
lover--and that lover Ditmar! But Lise said nothing. She was remote,
self-absorbed. Hannah spoke about it on the evenings Janet stayed at
home.
She would not consent to meet Ditmar every evening. Yet, as the days
succeeded one another, Janet was often astonished by the fact that their
love remained apparently unsuspected by Mr. Price and Caldwell and others
in the office. They must have noticed, on some occasions, the manner in
which Ditmar looked at her; and in business hours she had continually to
caution him, to keep him in check. Again, on the evening excursions to
which she consented, though they were careful to meet in unfrequented
spots, someone might easily have recognized him; and she did not like to
ponder over the number of young women in the other offices who knew her
by sight. These reflections weighed upon her, particularly when she
seemed conscious of curious glances. But what caused her the most concern
was the constantly recurring pressure to which Ditmar himself subjected
her, and which, as time went on, she found increasingly difficult to
resist. He tried to take her by storm, and when this method failed,
resorted to pleadings and supplications even harder to deny because of
the innate feminine pity she felt for him. To recount these affairs would
be a mere repetition of identical occurrences. On their second Sunday
excursion he had actually driven her, despite her opposition, several
miles on the Boston road; and her resistance only served to inflame him
the more. It seemed, afterwards, as she sat unnerved, a miracle that she
had stopped him. Then came reproaches: she would not trust him; they
could not be married at once; she must understand that!--an argument so
repugnant as to cause her to shake with sobs of inarticulate anger. After
this he would grow bewildered, then repentant, then contrite. In
contrition--had he known it--he was nearest to victory.
As has been said, she did not intellectualize her reasons, but the core
of her resistance was the very essence of an individuality having its
roots in a self-respecting and self-controlling inheritance--an element
wanting in her sister Lise. It must have been largely the thought of
Lise, the spectacle of Lise--often perhaps unconsciously present that
dominated her conduct; yet reinforcing such an ancestral sentiment was
another, environmental and more complicated, the result in our modern
atmosphere of an undefined feminism apt to reveal itself in many
undesirable ways, but which in reality is a logical projection of the
American tradition of liberty. To submit was not only to lose her
liberty, to become a dependent, but also and inevitably, she thought, to
lose Ditmar's love....
No experience, however, is emotionally continuous, nor was their intimacy
by any means wholly on this plane of conflict. There were hours when,
Ditmar's passion leaving spent itself, they achieved comradeship, in the
office and out of it; revelations for Janet when he talked of himself,
relating the little incidents she found most illuminating. And thus by
degrees she was able to build up a new and truer estimate of him. For
example, she began to perceive that his life outside of his interest in
the mills, instead of being the romance of privileged joys she had once
imagined, had been almost as empty as her own, without either unity or
direction. Her perception was none the less keen because definite terms
were wanting for its expression. The idea of him that first had
captivated her was that of an energized and focussed character
controlling with a sure hand the fortunes of a great organization; of a
power in the city and state, of a being who, in his leisure moments,
dwelt in a delectable realm from which she was excluded. She was still
acutely conscious of his force, but what she now felt was its lack of
direction--save for the portion that drove the Chippering Mills. The rest
of it, like the river, flowed away on the line of least resistance to the
sea.
As was quite natural, this gradual discovery of what he was--or of what
he wasn't--this truer estimate, this partial disillusionment, merely
served to deepen and intensify the feeling he had aroused in her; to
heighten, likewise, the sense of her own value by confirming a belief in
her possession of certain qualities, of a kind of fibre he needed in a
helpmate. She dwelt with a woman's fascination upon the prospect of
exercising a creative influence--even while she acknowledged the fearful
possibility of his power in unguarded moments to overwhelm and destroy
her. Here was another incentive to resist the gusts of his passion. She
could guide and develop him by helping and improving herself. Hope and
ambition throbbed within her, she felt a contempt for his wife, for the
women who had been her predecessors. He had not spoken of these, save
once or twice by implication, but with what may seem a surprising
leniency she regarded them as consequences of a life lacking in content.
If only she could keep her head, she might supply that content, and bring
him happiness! The thought of his children troubled her most, but she was
quick to perceive that he got nothing from them; and even though it were
partly his own fault, she was inclined to lay the heavier blame on the
woman who had been their mother. The triviality, the emptiness of his
existence outside of the walls of the mill made her heart beat with pure
pity. For she could understand it.
One of the many, and often humorous, incidents that served to bring about
this realization of a former aimlessness happened on their second Sunday
excursion. This time he had not chosen the Kingsbury Tavern, but another
automobilists' haunt, an enlightening indication of established habits
involving a wide choice of resorts. While he was paying for luncheon and
chatting with the proprietor, Ditmar snatched from the change he had
flung down on the counter a five dollar gold coin.
"Now how in thunder did that get into my right-hand pocket? I always keep
it in my vest," he exclaimed; and the matter continued to disturb him
after they were in the automobile. "It's my lucky piece. I guess I was so
excited at the prospect of seeing you when I dressed this morning I put
it into my change. Just see what you do to me!"
"Does it bring you luck?" she inquired smilingly.
"How about you! I call you the biggest piece of luck I ever had."
"You'd better not be too sure," she warned him.
"Oh, I'm not worrying. I has that piece in my pocket the day I went down
to see old Stephen Chippering, when he made me agent, and I've kept it
ever since. And I'll tell you a funny thing--it's enough to make any man
believe in luck. Do you remember that day last summer I was tinkering
with the car by the canal and you came along?"
"The day you pretended to be tinkering," she corrected him.
He laughed. "So you were on to me?" he said. "You're a foxy one!"
"Anyone could see you were only pretending. It made me angry, when I
thought of it afterwards."
"I just had to do it--I wanted to talk to you. But listen to what I'm
going to tell you! It's a miracle, all right,--happening just at that
time--that very morning. I was coming back to Boston from New York on the
midnight, and when the train ran into Back Bay and I was putting on my
trousers the piece rolled out among the bed clothes. I didn't know I'd
lost it until I sat down in the Parker House to eat my breakfast, and I
suddenly felt in my pocket. It made me sick to think it was gone. Well, I
started to telephone the Pullman office, and then I made up my mind I'd
take a taxi and go down to the South Station myself, and just as I got
out of the cab there was the nigger porter, all dressed up in his glad
rags, coming out of the station! I knew him, I'd been on his car lots of
times. `Say, George,' I said, `I didn't forget you this morning, did I?'
"`No, suh,' said George, 'you done give me a quarter.'
"`I guess you're mistaken, George,' says I, and I fished out a ten dollar
bill. You ought to have seen that nigger's eyes."
"`What's this for, Mister Ditmar?' says he.
"`For that lucky gold piece you found in lower seven,' I told him. `We'll
trade.'
"'Was you in lower seven?--so you was!' says George. Well, he had it all
right--you bet he had it. Now wasn't that queer? The very day you and I
began to know each other!"
"Wonderful!" Janet agreed. "Why don't you put it on your watch chain?"
"Well, I've thought of that," he replied, with the air of having
considered all sides of the matter. "But I've got that charm of the
secret order I belong to--that's on my chain. I guess I'll keep it in my
vest pocket."
"I didn't know you were so superstitious," she mocked.
"Pretty nearly everybody's superstitious," he declared. And she thought
of Lise.
"I'm not. I believe if things are going to happen well, they're going to
happen. Nothing can prevent it."
"By thunder" he exclaimed, struck by her remark. "You are like that
You're different from any person I ever knew...."
From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar. He spoke of a
large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago,
where he intended to take her. In the future he would never travel alone.
And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National
Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was. He gloried in her
innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his
cosmopolitanism. In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he
imagined, but her eyes shone. She had never even been in a sleeping car!
For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these
vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental
trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one's disposal.
"Neither of them would do me any good," she complained.
"You could go to the manicure," he said.
There had been in Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal
moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high,
festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as
Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a
special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the
company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers,
collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as
the French say, in terms of their "little" names. He dwelt on the
magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an
inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to
"the seeing of Chicago" as would bear repetition. No women belonged to
this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.
Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the
cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities. And
the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified
picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United
States had been chosen. In her innocence she had believed the voters to
perform this function. Ditmar laughed.
"Do you suppose we're going to let the mob run this country?" he
inquired. "Once in a while we can't get away with it as we'd like, we
have to take the best we can."
Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove
and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.
Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.
It was Ditmar's boast that if nobody else could get a room in a crowded
New York hotel, he could always obtain one. And she was fain to concede
--she who had never known privilege--a certain intoxicating quality to
this eminence. If you could get the power, and refused to take it, the
more fool you! A topsy-turvy world, in which the stupid toiled day by
day, week by week, exhausting their energies and craving joy, while
others adroitly carried off the prize; and virtue had apparently as
little to do with the matter as fair hair or a club foot. If Janet had
ever read Darwin, she would have recognized in her lover a creature
rather wonderfully adapted to his environment; and what puzzled her,
perhaps, was the riddle that presents itself to many better informed than
herself--the utter absence in this environment of the sign of any being
who might be called God. Her perplexities--for she did have them--took
the form of an instinctive sense of inadequacy, of persistently recurring
though inarticulate convictions of the existence of elements not included
in Ditmar's categories--of things that money could not buy; of things,
too, alas! that poverty was as powerless to grasp. Stored within her,
sometimes rising to the level of consciousness, was that experience at
Silliston in the May weather when she had had a glimpse--just a glimpse!
of a garden where strange and precious flowers were in bloom. On the
other hand, this mysterious perception by her of things unseen and
hitherto unguessed, of rays of delight in the spectrum of values to which
his senses were unattuned, was for Ditmar the supreme essence of her
fascination. At moments he was at once bewildered and inebriated by the
rare delicacy of fabric of the woman whom he had somehow stumbled upon
and possessed.
Then there were the hours when they worked together in the office. Here
she beheld Ditmar at his best. It cannot be said that his infatuation for
her was ever absent from his consciousness: he knew she was there beside
him, he betrayed it continually. But here she was in the presence of what
had been and what remained his ideal, the Chippering Mill; here he
acquired unity. All his energies were bent toward the successful
execution of the Bradlaugh order, which had to be completed on the first
of February. And as day after day went by her realization of the
magnitude of the task he had undertaken became keener. Excitement was in
the air. Ditmar seemed somehow to have managed to infuse not only Orcutt,
the superintendent, but the foremen and second hands and even the workers
with a common spirit of pride and loyalty, of interest, of determination
to carry off this matter triumphantly. The mill seemed fairly to hum with
effort. Janet's increasing knowledge of its organization and processes
only served to heighten her admiration for the confidence Ditmar had
shown from the beginning. It was superb. And now, as the probability of
the successful execution of the task tended more and more toward
certainty, he sometimes gave vent to his boyish, exuberant spirits.
"I told Holster, I told all those croakers I'd do it, and by thunder I
will do it, with three days' margin, too! I'll get the last shipment off
on the twenty-eighth of January. Why, even George Chippering was afraid I
couldn't handle it. If the old man was alive he wouldn't have had cold
feet." Then Ditmar added, half jocularly, half seriously, looking down on
her as she sat with her note-book, waiting for him to go on with his
dictation: "I guess you've had your share in it, too. You've been a
wonder, the way you've caught on and taken things off my shoulders. If
Orcutt died I believe you could step right into his shoes."
"I'm sure I could step into his shoes," she replied. "Only I hope he
won't die."
"I hope he won't, either," said Ditmar. "And as for you--"
"Never mind me, now," she said.
He bent over her.
"Janet, you're the greatest girl in the world."
Yes, she was happiest when she felt she was helping him, it gave her
confidence that she could do more, lead him into paths beyond which they
might explore together. She was useful. Sometimes, however, he seemed to
her oversanguine; though he had worked hard, his success had come too
easily, had been too uniform. His temper was quick, the prospect of
opposition often made him overbearing, yet on occasions he listened with
surprising patience to his subordinates when they ventured to differ from
his opinions. At other times Janet had seen him overrule them ruthlessly;
humiliate them. There were days when things went wrong, when there were
delays, complications, more matters to attend to than usual. On one such
day, after the dinner hour, Mr. Orcutt entered the office. His long, lean
face wore a certain expression Janet had come to know, an expression that
always irritated Ditmar--the conscientious superintendent having the
unfortunate faculty of exaggerating annoyances by his very bearing.
Ditmar stopped in the midst of dictating a peculiarly difficult letter,
and looked up sharply.
"Well," he asked, "what's the trouble now?"
Orcutt seemed incapable of reading storm signals. When anything happened,
he had the air of declaring, "I told you so."
"You may remember I spoke to you once or twice, Mr. Ditmar, of the talk
over the fifty-four hour law that goes into effect in January."
"Yes, what of it?" Ditmar cut in. "The notices have been posted, as the
law requires."
"The hands have been grumbling, there are trouble makers among them. A
delegation came to me this noon and wanted to know whether we intended to
cut the pay to correspond to the shorter working hours."
"Of course it's going to be cut," said Ditmar. "What do they suppose?
That we're going to pay 'em for work they don't do? The hands not paid by
the piece are paid practically by the hour, not by the day. And there's
got to be some limit to this thing. If these damned demagogues in the
legislature keep on cutting down the hours of women and children every
three years or so--and we can't run the mill without the women and
children--we might as well shut down right now. Three years ago, when
they made it fifty-six hours, we were fools to keep up the pay. I said so
then, at the conference, but they wouldn't listen to me. They listened
this time. Holster and one or two others croaked, but we shut 'em up. No,
they won't get any more pay, not a damned cent."
Orcutt had listened patiently, lugubriously.
"I told them that."
"What did they say?"
"They said they thought there'd be a strike."
"Pooh! Strike!" exclaimed Ditmar with contemptuous violence. "Do you
believe that? You're always borrowing trouble, you are. They may have a
strike at one mill, the Clarendon. I hope they do, I hope Holster gets it
in the neck--he don't know how to run a mill anyway. We won't have any
strike, our people understand when they're well off, they've got all the
work they can do, they're sending fortunes back to the old country or
piling them up in the banks. It's all bluff."
"There was a meeting of the English branch of the I. W. W. last night. A
committee was appointed," said Orcutt, who as usual took a gloomy
satisfaction in the prospect of disaster.
"The I. W. W.! My God, Orcutt, don't you know enough not to come in here
wasting my time talking about the I. W. W.? Those anarchists haven't got
any organization. Can't you get that through your head?"
"All right," replied Orcutt, and marched off. Janet felt rather sorry for
him, though she had to admit that his manner was exasperating. But
Ditmar's anger, instead of cooling, increased: it all seemed directed
against the unfortunate superintendent.
"Would you believe that a man who's been in this mill twenty-five years
could be such a fool?" he demanded. "The I. W. W.! Why not the Ku Klux?
He must think I haven't anything to do but chin. I don't know why I keep
him here, sometimes I think he'll drive me crazy."
His eyes seemed to have grown small and red, as was always the case when
his temper got the better of him. Janet did not reply, but sat with her
pencil poised over her book.
"Let's see, where was I?" he asked. "I can't finish that letter now. Go
out and do the others."
Mundane experience, like a badly mixed cake, has a tendency to run in
streaks, and on the day following the incident related above Janet's
heart was heavy. Ditmar betrayed an increased shortness of temper and
preoccupation; and the consciousness that her love had lent her a
clairvoyant power to trace the source of his humours though these were
often hidden from or unacknowledged by himself--was in this instance
small consolation. She saw clearly enough that the apprehensions
expressed by Mr. Orcutt, whom he had since denounced as an idiotic old
woman, had made an impression, aroused in him the ever-abiding concern
for the mill which was his life's passion and which had been but
temporarily displaced by his infatuation with her. That other passion was
paramount. What was she beside it? Would he hesitate for a moment to
sacrifice her if it came to a choice between them? The tempestuousness of
these thoughts, when they took possession of her, hinting as they did of
possibilities in her nature hitherto unguessed and unrevealed, astonished
and frightened her; she sought to thrust them away, to reassure herself
that his concern for the successful delivery of the Bradlaugh order was
natural. During the morning, in the intervals between interviews with the
superintendents, he was self-absorbed, and she found herself
inconsistently resenting the absence of those expressions of
endearment--the glances and stolen caresses--for indulgence in which she
had hitherto rebuked him: and though pride came to her rescue, fuel was
added to her feeling by the fact that he did not seem to notice her
coolness. Since he failed to appear after lunch, she knew he must be
investigating the suspicions Orcutt had voiced; but at six o'clock, when
he had not returned, she closed up her desk and left the office. An odour
of cheap perfume pervading the corridor made her aware of the presence of
Miss Lottie Myers.
"Oh, it's you!" said that young woman, looking up from the landing of the
stairs. "I might have known it you never make a get-away until after six,
do you?"
"Oh, sometimes," said Janet.
"I stayed as a special favour to-night," Miss Myers declared. "But I'm
not so stuck on my job that I can't tear myself away from it."
"I don't suppose you are," said Janet.
For a moment Miss Myers looked as if she was about to be still more
impudent, but her eye met Janet's, and wavered. They crossed the bridge
in silence. "Well, ta-ta," she said. "If you like it, it's up to you.
Five o'clock for mine,"--and walked away, up the canal, swinging her hips
defiantly. And Janet, gazing after her, grew hot with indignation and
apprehension. Her relations with Ditmar were suspected, after all, made
the subject of the kind of comment indulged in, sotto voce, by Lottie
Myers and her friends at the luncheon hour. She felt a mad, primitive
desire to run after the girl, to spring upon and strangle her and compel
her to speak what was in her mind and then retract it; and the motor
impulse, inhibited, caused a sensation of sickness, of unhappiness and
degradation as she turned her steps slowly homeward. Was it a
misinterpretation, after all--what Lottie Myers had implied and feared to
say?...
In Fillmore Street supper was over, and Lise, her face contorted, her
body strained, was standing in front of the bureau "doing" her hair, her
glance now seeking the mirror, now falling again to consult a model in
one of those periodicals of froth and fashion that cause such numberless
heart burnings in every quarter of our democracy, and which are filled
with photographs of "prominent" persons at race meetings, horse shows,
and resorts, and with actresses, dancers,--and mannequins. Janet's eyes
fell on the open page to perceive that the coiffure her sister so
painfully imitated was worn by a young woman with an insolent, vapid face
and hard eyes, whose knees were crossed, revealing considerably more than
an ankle. The picture was labelled, "A dance at Palm Beach--A flashlight
of Mrs. 'Trudy' Gascoigne-Schell,"--one of those mysterious, hybrid names
which, in connection with the thoughts of New York and the visible rakish
image of the lady herself, cause involuntary shudders down the spine of
the reflecting American provincial. Some such responsive quiver, akin to
disgust, Janet herself experienced.
"It's the very last scream," Lise was saying. "And say, if I owned a ball
dress like that I'd be somebody's Lulu all right! Can I have the pleasure
of the next maxixe, Miss Bumpus?" With deft and rapid fingers she lead
parted her hair far on the right side and pulled it down over the left
eyebrow, twisted it over her ear and tightly around her head, inserting
here and there a hairpin, seizing the hand mirror with the cracked back,
and holding it up behind her. Finally, when the operation was finished to
her satisfaction she exclaimed, evidently to the paragon in the picture,
"I get you!" Whereupon, from the wardrobe, she produced a hat. "You sure
had my number when you guessed the feathers on that other would get
draggled," she observed in high good humour, generously ignoring their
former unpleasantness on the subject. When she had pinned it on she bent
mockingly over her sister, who sat on the bed. "How d'you like my new
toque? Peekaboo! That's the way the guys rubberneck to see if you're good
lookin'."
Lise was exalted, feverish, apparently possessed by some high secret; her
eyes shone, and when she crossed the room she whistled bars of ragtime
and executed mincing steps of the maxixe. Fumbling in the upper drawer
for a pair of white gloves (also new), she knocked off the corner of the
bureau her velvet bag; it opened as it struck the floor, and out of it
rolled a lilac vanity case and a yellow coin. Casting a suspicious,
lightning glance at Janet, she snatched up the vanity case and covered
the coin with her foot.
"Lock the doors!" she cried, with an hysteric giggle. Then removing her
foot she picked up the coin surreptitiously. To her amazement her sister
made no comment, did not seem to have taken in the significance of the
episode. Lise had expected a tempest of indignant, searching questions, a
"third degree," as she would have put it. She snapped the bag together,
drew on her gloves, and, when she was ready to leave, with characteristic
audacity crossed the room, taking her sister's face between her hands and
kissing her.
"Tell me your troubles, sweetheart!" she said--and did not wait to hear
them.
Janet was incapable of speech--nor could she have brought herself to ask
Lise whether or not the money had been earned at the Bagatelle, and
remained miraculously unspent. It was possible, but highly incredible.
And then, the vanity case and the new hat were to be accounted for! The
sight of the gold piece, indeed, had suddenly revived in Janet the queer
feeling of faintness, almost of nausea she had experienced after parting
with Lottie Myers. And by some untoward association she was reminded of a
conversation she had had with Ditmar on the Saturday afternoon following
their first Sunday excursion, when, on opening her pay envelope, she had
found twenty dollars.
"Are you sure I'm worth it?" she had demanded--and he had been quite
sure. He had added that she was worth more, much more, but that he could
not give her as yet, without the risk of comment, a sum commensurate with
the value of her services.... But now she asked herself again, was she
worth it? or was it merely--part of her price? Going to the wardrobe and
opening a drawer at the bottom she searched among her clothes until she
discovered the piece of tissue paper in which she had wrapped the rose
rescued from the cluster he had given her. The petals were dry, yet they
gave forth, still, a faint, reminiscent fragrance as she pressed them to
her face. Janet wept....
The following morning as she was kneeling in a corner of the room by the
letter files, one of which she had placed on the floor, she recognized
his step in the outer office, heard him pause to joke with young
Caldwell, and needed not the visual proof--when after a moment he halted
on the threshold--of the fact that his usual, buoyant spirits were
restored. He held a cigar in his hand, and in his eyes was the eager look
with which she had become familiar, which indeed she had learned to
anticipate as they swept the room in search of her. And when they fell on
her he closed the door and came forward impetuously. But her exclamation
caused him to halt in bewilderment.
"Don't touch me!" she said.
And he stammered out, as he stood over her:--"What's the matter?"
"Everything. You don't love me--I was a fool to believe you did."
"Don't love you!" he repeated. "My God, what's the trouble now? What have
I done?"
"Oh, it's nothing you've done, it's what you haven't done, it's what you
can't do. You don't really care for me--all you care for is this mill
--when anything happens here you don't know I'm alive."
He stared at her, and then an expression of comprehension, of intense
desire grew in his eyes; and his laugh, as he flung his cigar out of the
open window and bent down to seize her, was almost brutal. She fought
him, she tried to hurt him, and suddenly, convulsively pressed herself to
him.
"You little tigress!" he said, as he held her. "You were jealous--were
you--jealous of the mill?" And he laughed again. "I'd like to see you
with something really to be jealous about. So you love me like that, do
you?"
She could feel his heart beating against her.
"I won't be neglected," she told him tensely. "I want all of you--if I
can't have all of you, I don't want any. Do you understand?"
"Do I understand? Well, I guess I do."
"You didn't yesterday," she reproached him, somewhat dazed by the
swiftness of her submission, and feeling still the traces of a lingering
resentment. She had not intended to surrender. "You forgot all about me,
you didn't know I was here, much less that I was hurt. Oh, I was hurt!
And you--I can tell at once when anything's wrong with you--I know
without your saying it."
He was amazed, he might indeed have been troubled and even alarmed by
this passion he had aroused had his own passion not been at the flood.
And as he wiped away her tears with his handkerchief he could scarcely
believe his senses that this was the woman whose resistance had demanded
all his force to overcome. Indeed, although he recognized the symptoms
she betrayed as feminine, as having been registered--though feebly
compared to this! by incidents in his past, precisely his difficulty
seemed to be in identifying this complex and galvanic being as a woman,
not as something almost fearful in her significance, outside the bounds
of experience....
Presently she ceased to tremble, and he drew her to the window. The day
was as mild as autumn, the winter sun like honey in its mellowness; a
soft haze blurred the outline of the upper bridge.
"Only two more days until Sunday," he whispered, caressingly,
exultantly....