"I did that at school, my dear." Mrs. Palgrave spoke lightly, but it
was plain to see that there was something on her mind. "Don't go out to
supper with Howard Cannon. Come back with me. I want to talk to you.
Will you?"
Joan had recently danced in Cannon's huge studio-apartment and been
oppressed by its Gulliveresque atmosphere, and she had just come from
the Fifth Avenue house of the Hosack family, where a characteristically
dignified dinner had got on her nerves. Gilbert, she knew, was engaged
to play roulette at the club, and none of her other new men friends was
available for dancing. She hadn't seen anything of Martin for several
days. She could easily oblige Alice under the circumstances.
So she said: "Yes, of course I will--just to prove how very little you
really know about me."
"Thank you," said Alice. "I'll say that I have a headache and that
you're coming home with me. Don't be talked out of it."
A puzzled expression came into Joan's eyes, and she turned her shoulder
to Palgrave, who was giving her his most amorous glances. "It doesn't
matter," she said, "but I notice that you are all beginning to treat me
like a sort of moral weathercock. I wonder why?" She gave no more
thought to the matter which just for the most fleeting moment had
rather piqued her, but sat drinking in the music of Mascagni's immortal
opera entirely ignoring the fact that Palgrave's face was within an
inch of her shoulder and that Alan Hosack, on her other side, was
whispering heavy compliments.
Alice sat back and looked anxiously from the face of the girl who had
been her closest friend at school to that of the man to whom she had
given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married a
year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made
up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed
girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage
she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant
people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and
drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the
novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with
flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money
and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human
nature. Perhaps a little to her disappointment, she had soon discovered
how grotesque and ignorant this play-and-book idea was. She had
returned from her honeymoon in November of the first year of the war
and had been astonished to find that nearly all the well-known women
whose names, in the public imagination, were associated with decadence
and irresponsibility, were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross
work and allied war charities; that the majority of the men who were
popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked
as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes
newly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves
together as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an
immense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and
England. Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names
of New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard
of later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance
workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly away
from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work in
Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not as
full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.
There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and the
Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them throwing
themselves against any bright light like all silly moths. And there
were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic atmosphere of
those fashionable finishing schools which no sane country should
permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, she
believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack
of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised
by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets.
They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and
ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to
their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its little
group of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even
the war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her
particularly sane way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was
proud to know that the majority of the people who formed American
society were fine and sound and generous, and kept as much as possible
out of the way of those others whose one object in life was to outrage
the conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing
her husband and her friend about together night after night that she
found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her
optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot of
clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.
It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise and
utterly refused to be turned by the pleadings and blandishments of
Cannon and Hosack. They drove together to Palgrave's elaborate house, a
faithful replica of one of the famous Paris mansions in the Avenue
Wagram and sat down to a little supper in Alice's boudoir.
They made a curious picture, these two children, one just over twenty,
the other under nineteen; and as they sat in that lofty room hung with
French tapestries and furnished with the spindle-legged gilt chairs and
tables of Louis XIV, they might have been playing, with all the gravity
and imitative genius of little girls in a nursery, at being grown up.
While the servants moved discreetly about, Joan kept up a rattle of
impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuan
furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice,
throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divine
right to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about the
d'Oylys--that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a glass of
champagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayed
an excellent appetite, mounted a cigarette into a long thin
mother-of-pearl holder, lighted it and sank with a sigh into the room's
one comfortable chair.
"Gilbert gave me a cigarette holder like that," said Alice.
"Yes? I think this comes from him," said Joan. "A thoughtful person!"
That Joan was not quite sure from whom she received it annoyed Alice
far more than if she had boasted of it as one of Gilbert's numerous
gifts. She needed no screwing up now to say what she had rather timidly
brought this cool young slip of a thing there to discuss.
"Will you tell me about yourself and Gilbert?" she asked quietly. There
was no need for Joan to act complete composure. She felt it. "What is
there to tell, my dear?"
"I hope there isn't anything--I mean anything that matters. But perhaps
you don't know that people have begun to talk about you, and I think
you owe it to me to be perfectly frank."
Even then it didn't occur to Joan that there was anything serious in
the business. "I'll be as frank as the front page of The Times--'All
the news that's fit to print,'" she said. "What do you want to know?"
Alice proved her courage. She drew up a chair, bent forward and came
straight to the point. "Be honest with me, Joan, even if you have to
hurt me. Gilbert is very handsome, and women throw themselves at him. I
did, I suppose; but having won him and being still in my first year of
marriage, I'm naturally jealous when he lets himself be drawn off by
them. The women who have tried to take Gilbert away from me I didn't
know, and they owed me no friendship. But you're different, and I can't
believe that you--"
Joan broke in with a peal of laughter. "Can't you? Why not? I haven't
got wings on my shoulders. Isn't everything fair in love and war?"
Alice drew back. She had many times been called prim and old-fashioned,
especially at school, by Joan and others when men were talked about,
and the glittering life that lay beyond the walls. Sophistication, to
put it mildly, had been the order of the day in that temporary home of
the young idea. But this calm declaration of disloyalty took her color
away, and her breath. Here was honesty with a vengeance!
"Joan!" she cried. "Joan!" And she put up her hand as though to ward
off an unbelievable thought.
In an instant Joan was on her feet with her arms around the shoulders
of the best friend she had, whose face had gone as white as stone. "Oh,
my dear," she said, "I'm sorry. Forgive me. I didn't mean that in the
least, not in the very least. It was only one of my cheap flippancies,
said just to amuse myself and shock you. Don't you believe me?"
Tears came to Alice. She had had at least one utterly sleepless night
and several days of mental anguish. She was one of the women who love
too well. She confessed to these things, brokenly, and it came as a
kind of shock to Joan to find some one taking things seriously and
allowing herself to suffer.
"Why, Alice," she said, "Gilbert means nothing to me. He's a dear old
thing; he's awfully nice to look at; he sums things up in a way that
makes me laugh; and he dances like a streak. But as to flirting with
him or anything of that sort--why, my dear, he looks on me as a little
boob from the country, and in my eyes he's simply a man who carries a
latchkey to amusement and can give me a good time. That's true. I swear
it."
It was true, and Alice realized it, with immense relief. She dried her
eyes and held Joan away from her at arm's length and looked at her
young, frank, intrepid face with puzzled admiration. It didn't go with
her determined trifling. "I shall always believe what you tell me,
Joan," she said. "You've taken a bigger load than you imagine off my
heart--which is Gilbert's. And now sit down again and be comfortable
and let's do what we used to do at school at night and talk about
ourselves. We've both changed since those days, haven't we?"
"Have we? I don't think I have." Joan took another cigarette and went
back to her chair. Her small round shoulders looked very white against
the black of a velvet cushion. If there was nothing boyish or
unfeminine about her, there was certainly an indefinable appearance of
being untouched, unawakened. She was the same girl who had been found
by Martin that afternoon clean-cut against the sky--the determined
individualist.
Alice sat in front of her on a low stool with her hands clasped round a
knee. "What a queer mixture you are of--of town and country, Joany.
You're like a piece of honeysuckle playing at being an orchid."
"That's because I'm a kid," said Joan. "The horrible hour will come
when I shall be an orchid and try and palm myself off as honeysuckle,
never fear."
"Don't you think marriage has changed you a little?" asked Alice. "It
usually does. It changed me from an empty-headed little fool to a woman
with oh, such a tremendous desire to be worthy of it."
"Yes, but then you married for love."
"Didn't you, Joany?"
"I? Marry for love?" Joan waved her arm for joy at the idea.
Alice knew the story of the escape from old age. She also knew from the
way in which Martin looked at Joan why he had given her his name and
house. Here was her chance to get to the bottom of a constant puzzle.
"You may not have married for love," she said, "but of course you're
fond of Martin."
Joan considered the matter. It might be a good thing to go into it now
that there was an unexpected lull in the wild rush that she had made to
get into life. There had been something rather erratic about Martin's
comings and goings during the last week. She hadn't spoken to him since
the night at the Ritz.
"Yes, I am fond of him," she said. "That's the word. As fond as I might
be of a very nice, sound boy whom I'd known all my life."
"Is that all?"
Joan made a series of smoke rings and watched them curl into the air.
"Yes, that's all," she said.
Alice became even more interested and curious and puzzled. She held
very serious views about marriage. "And are you happy with him?"
"I don't know that I can be said to be happy with him," said Joan. "I'm
perfectly happy as things are."
"Tell me how they are." There was obviously something here that was far
from right.
Joan was amused at her friend's gravity. She had always been a
responsible little person with very definite and old-fashioned views.
"Well," she said, "it's a charming little story, really. I was the
maiden who had to be rescued from the ugly castle, and Martin was the
knight who performed the deed. And being a knight with a tremendous
sense of convention and a castle of his own full of well-trained
servants, it didn't seem to him that he could give me the run of his
house in the Paul and Virginia manner, which isn't being done now; and
so, like a little gentleman, he married me, or as I suppose you would
put it, went through the form of marriage. It's all part of the
adventure that we started one afternoon on the edge of the woods. I
call it the cool and common-sense romance of two very modern and
civilized people."
"I don't think there's any place in romance for such things as coolness
and common sense," said Alice warmly. "And as to there being two very
modern and civilized people in your adventure, as you call it, that I
doubt."
Joan's large brown eyes grew a little larger, and she looked at the
enthusiastic girl in front of her with more interest. "Do you?" she
asked. "Why?"
Alice got up. She was disturbed and worried. She had a great affection
for Joan, and that boy was indeed a knight. "I saw Martin walking away
from your house the night you dined with Gilbert at the Brevoort--I was
told about that!--and there was something in his eyes that wasn't the
least bit cool. Also I rode in the Park with him one morning a week
ago, and I thought he looked ill and haggard and--if you must
know--starved. No one would say that you aren't modern and
civilized,--and those are tame words,--but if Martin were to come in
now and make a clean breast of it, you'd be surprised to find how
little he is of either of those things, if I know anything about him."
"Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke,
"you know more about him than I do."
Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase that
stuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a genuine friend
in all that heartless town except herself, and a fine boy who needed
one, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate, and she thanked
God for it, was properly married, and she owed it to friendship to make
a try to put things right with these two.
"Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although I've
only had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully young, I
know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and grandmother, and the
reaction has made you wild and careless. But you're not a girl who has
been brought up behind a screen in a room lighted with one candle. You
know what marriage means. There isn't a book you haven't read or a
thing you haven't talked over. And if you imagine that Martin is
content to play Paul to your imitation Virginia, you're wrong. Oh,
Joan, you're dangerously wrong."
Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably into
the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted another
cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I love to hear
you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to Howard Cannon's
dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and his gloomy rumblings
about the writing on the wall. You stand for the unemancipated married
woman. Don't you?"
"Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that a
girl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."
"A strong word, my dear!"
"But not too strong."
"Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"
"Then she oughtn't to have married him."
"Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."
"Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the game
according to the rules. However modern and civilized people are, they
do that."
Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette ash
expertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her elbow.
She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself to
lecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing. "Dear
old girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my own
rules?"
"I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go by
them--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're going
by one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"
"End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at the
beginning?"
Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's unoccupied
hand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than characteristic
earnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to the Ziegfeld
Follies, and I saw Martin there with a little white-faced girl with red
lips and the golden hair that comes out of a bottle."
"Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"
"Doesn't that give you a jar?"
"Good heavens, no! If you'd peeked into the One-o'clock Club this
morning at half past two, you would have seen me with a white-faced man
with a red mustache and a kink in his hair that comes from a hot iron.
Martin and I are young and giddy, and we're on the round-about, and
we're hitting it up. Who cares?"
There was a little silence--and then Alice drew back, shaking her
pretty neat head. "It won't do, Joany," she said, "it won't do. I've
heard you say 'Who cares?' loads of times and never seen anybody take
you by the shoulders and shake you into caring. That's why you go on
saying it. But somebody always cares, Joany dear, and there's not one
thing that any of us can say or do that doesn't react on some one else,
either to hurt or bless. Martin Gray's your knight. You said so. Don't
you be the one to turn his gleaming armor into common
broadcloth--please, please don't."
Joan gave a little laugh and a little yawn and stretched herself like a
boy and got up. "Who'd have thought it? It's half-past twelve, and
we're both losing our much needed beauty sleep. I must really tear
myself away." She put her arm around Alice and kissed her. "The same
dear little wise, responsible Alice who would like to put the earth
into woolens with a mustard plaster on its chest. But it takes all
sorts to make up a world, you know, and it would be rather drab without
a few butterflies. Don't throw bricks at me until I've fluttered a bit
more, Ally. My colors won't last long, and I know what old age means,
better than most. If I were in love as you are, my man's rules would be
the ones I'd go by all the time; but I'm not in love, and I don't want
to be--yet; and I'm only a kid, and I think I have the right to my
fling. This marriage of mine is just a part of the adventure that
Martin and I plunged into as a great joke, and he knows it and he's one
of the best, and I'm grateful to him, believe me. Good night. God bless
you!"
She stood for a moment on the top step to taste the air that was filled
with the essence of youth. Across a sky as clear as crystal a series of
young clouds were chasing each other, putting out the stars for a
moment as they scurried playfully along. It was a joy to be alive and
fit and careless. Summer was lying in wait for spring, and autumn would
lay a withering hand upon summer, and winter with its crooked limbs and
lack-luster eyes was waiting its inevitable turn.
"A short life and a merry one!" whispered Joan to the moon, throwing it
a kiss.
A footman, sullen for want of sleep, opened the door of the limousine.
Some one was sitting in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Marty! Is that you?"
"It's all right," said Gilbert Palgrave. "I've been playing patience
for half an hour. I'm going to see you home."
V
"You are going home?"
"Yes," said Joan, "without the shadow of a doubt."
"Which means that I'd better tell the chauffeur to drive round to the
One-o'clock, eh?"
"I'll drop you there if you like. I'm really truly going home."
"All right."
Joan began to sing as the car bowled up Fifth Avenue. Movement always
made her sing, and the effect of things slipping behind her. But she
stopped suddenly as an expression of Alice's flicked across her memory.
"You'll catch Alice up, if you go straight back," she said.
"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! I wonder why it is the really good woman is
never appreciated by a man until he's obliged to sit on the other side
of the fireplace? I wish we were driving away out into the country. I
have an unusual hankering to stand on the bank of a huge lake and watch
the moonlight on the water."
Joan was singing again. The trees in the Park were bespattered with
young leaves.
Palgrave controlled an ardent desire to touch with his lips that cool
white shoulder from which the cloak had slipped. It was extraordinary
how this mere girl inflamed him. Alice--Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! She
seemed oddly like some other man's wife, these days.
"Suppose I tell your man to drive out of the city beyond this rabble of
bricks and mortar?"
But Joan went on singing. Spring was in her blood. How fast the car was
moving, and those young clouds.
Palgrave helped her out with a hot hand.
She opened the door with her latch-key. "Thank you, Gilbert," she said.
"Good night."
But Palgrave followed her in. "Don't you think I've earned the right to
one cigarette?" He threw his coat into a chair in the hall and hung his
hat on the longest point of an antler. It was a new thing for this much
flattered man to ask for favors. This young thing's exultant youth made
him feel old and rather humble.
"There are sandwiches in the dining room and various things to drink,"
said Joan, waving her hand toward it.
"No, no. Let's go up to the drawing-room--that is, unless you--"
But Joan was already on the stairs, with the chorus of her song. She
didn't feel in the least like sleep with its escape from life. It was
so good to be awake, to be vital, to be tingling with the current of
electricity like a telegraph wire. She flung back the curtains, raised
all the windows, opened her arms to the air, spilled her cloak on the
floor, sat at the piano and ragged "The Spring Song."
"I am a kid," she said, speaking above the sound, and going on with her
argument to Alice. "I am and I will be, I will be. And I'll play the
fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there!"
Palgrave had picked up the cloak and was holding it unconsciously
against his immaculate shirt. It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso
in the art of pleasing women--who are so easily pleased. At the moment
he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained
almost all his usual assumption of dignity. Even Joan, with her quick
eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude,
and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and not succeeding.
It so happened that over Palgrave's shoulder she could see the bold
crayon drawing of Martin, brown and healthy and muscular, without an
ounce of affectation, an unmistakable man with his nice irregular
features and clean, merry eyes. There was strength and capability
stamped all over him, and there was, as well, a pleasing sense of
reliability which gained immediate confidence. With the sort of shock
one gets on going into the fresh air from a steam-heated room, she
realized the contrast between these two.
There is always something as unreal about handsome men as there is
about Japanese gardens. Palgrave's hair was so scrupulously sleek and
wiglike, his features so well-balanced and well-chosen, his wide-set
eyes so large and long-lashed, and his fair, soft mustache so
miraculously precise. His clothes, too, were a degree more than
perfect. They were so right as to be a little freakish because they
attracted as much attention as if they were badly cut. He was born for
tea fights and winter resorts, to listen with a distrait half-smile to
the gushing adulation of the oh-my-dear type of women.
He attracted Joan. She admired his assurance and polish and manners.
With these three things even a man with a broken nose and a head bald
as an egg can carry a beautiful woman to the altar. He was something
new to her, too, and she found much to amuse her in his way of
expressing himself. He observed, and sometimes crystallized his
observations with a certain neatness. Also, and she made no bones about
owning to it, his obvious attention flattered her. All the same, she
was in the mood just then for Martin. He went better with the time of
year, and there was something awfully companionable about his sudden
laugh. She would have hailed his appearance at that moment with an
outdoor cry.
It was bad luck for Palgrave, because he now knew definitely that in
Joan he had found the girl who was to give him the great emotion.
She broke away from "The Spring Song" and swung into "D'ye Ken John
Peel with His Coat So Gay?" It was Martin's favorite air. How often she
had heard him shout it among the trees on his way to meet her out there
on the edge of the woods where they had found each other. It was
curious how her thoughts turned to Martin that night.
She left the piano in the middle of a bar. "One cigarette," she said,
and held out a silver box.
Palgrave's hand closed tightly over her slim white arm. In his throat
his heart was pumping. He spoke incoherently, like a man. "God," he
said, "you--you take my breath away. You make my brain whirl. Why
didn't you come out of your garden a year ago?"
He was acting, she thought, and she laughed. "My arm, I think," she
said.
"No, mine. It's got to be mine. What's the good of beating about the
bush?" He spoke with a queer hoarseness, and his hand shook.
She laughed again. He was trying his parlor tricks, as Hosack had
called them one night at the Crystal Room, watching him greet a woman
with both hands. What a joke to see what he would do if she pretended
to be carried away. He might as well be made to pay for keeping her up.
"Oh, Gilbert," she said, "what are you saying!" Her shyness and fright
were admirable.
They added fuel to his fire. "What I've been waiting to say for years
and never thought I should. I love you. You've just got me."
How often had he said those very words to other women! He did it
surpassingly well. She continued to act. "Oh, Gilbert," she said in a
low voice, "you mustn't. There's Alice." Two could play at his pet game.
"Yes, there is Alice. But what does that matter? I don't care, and you
don't. Your motto is not to care. You're always saying so. I'm no more
married to Alice than you are to Gray. They're accidents, both of them.
I love you, I tell you." And he ran his hand up to her shoulder and
bore down upon her. Where were his manners and polish and assurance? It
was amazing to see the change in the man.
But she dodged away and took up a stand behind the piano and laughed at
him. "You're an artist, Gilbert," she said. "It's all very well for you
to practice on women of your own age, but I'm an unsophisticated girl.
You might turn my head, you know."
Her sarcasm threw him up short. She was mocking. He was profoundly
hurt. "But you've chosen me. You've picked me out. You've used me to
take you to places night after night! Don't fool with me, Joan. I'm in
dead earnest."
And she saw with astonishment that he was. His face was white, and he
stood in a curious attitude of supplication, with his hands out. She
was amazed, and for a moment thrilled. Gilbert Palgrave, the woman's
man, in love with her. Think of it!
"But Gilbert," she said, "there's Alice. She's my friend." That seemed
to matter more than the fact that she was his wife.
"That hasn't mattered to you all along. Why drag it in now? Night after
night you've danced with me; I've been at your beck and call; you used
me to rescue you from Gray that time. What are you? What are you made
of? Unsophisticated! You!" He wasn't angry. He was fumbling at reasons
in order to try and get at her point of view. "You know well enough
that a man doesn't put himself out to that extent for nothing. What
becomes of give and take? Do you conceive that you are going to sail
through life taking everything and giving nothing?"
Martin had asked her this, and Alice, and now here was Gilbert Palgrave
putting it to her as though it were an indictment! "But I'm a kid," she
cried out. "What do you all mean? Can't I be allowed to have any fun
without paying for it? I'm only just out of the shell. I've only been
living for a few weeks. Can't you see that I'm a kid? I have the right
to take all I can get for nothing,--the right of youth. What do you
mean--all of you?"
She came out from behind the piano and stood in front of him, as erect
as a silver birch, and as slim and young. There was a great indignation
all about her.
His eager hands went out, and fell. He was not a brute. It would be
cowardly to touch this amazing child. She was armed with fearlessness
and virginity--and he had mistaken these things for callousness.
"I don't know what to say," he said. "You stagger me. How long are you
going to hide behind this youthfulness? When are you going to be old
enough to be honest? Men have patience only up to a point. At any rate,
you didn't claim youth when Gray asked you to marry him--though you may
have done so afterward. Did you?"
She kept silent. But her eyes ran over him with contempt. According to
her, she had given him no right to put such questions.
He ignored it. It was undeserved. It was she who deserved contempt, not
he. And he threw it back at her in a strange incoherent outburst in
which, all the same, there was a vibrating note of gladness and relief.
And all the while, unmoved by the passion into which he broke, she
stood watching with a curious gravity his no longer immobile face. She
was thinking about Martin. She was redeveloping Martin's expression
when she had opened the door of her bedroom the night of her marriage
and let him out. What about her creed, then? Was she hiding behind
youthfulness? Were there, after all, certain things that must be paid
for? Was she already old enough to be what Alice and this man called
honest? Was every man made of the stuff that only gave for what he
hoped to get in return?
His words trailed off. He was wasting them, he saw. She was looking
through his head. But he rejoiced as to one thing like a potter who
opens the door of his oven and finds his masterpiece unbroken. And
silence fell upon them, interrupted only by the intermittent humming of
passing cars.
Finally Palgrave took the cigarette box out of Joan's hand and put it
down on a little table and stood looking more of a man than might have
been expected.
"I've always hoped that one day I should meet you--just you," he said
quietly; "and when I did, I knew that it would be to love. Well, I've
told you. Do what you can for me until you decide that you're grown up.
I'll wait."
And he turned and went away, and presently she heard a door shut and
echo, and slow footsteps in the street below.
Where was Martin?