VI

She wanted Martin. Everything that had happened that night made her

want Martin. He knew that she was a kid, and treated her as such. He

didn't stand up and try and force her forward into being a

woman--although, of all men, he had the right. He was big and generous

and had given her his name and house and the run of the world, but not

from his lips ever came the hard words that she had heard that night.

How extraordinary that they should have come from Alice as well as from

Gilbert.

She wanted Martin. Where was Martin? She felt more like a bird, at that

moment, than a butterfly--like a bird that had flown too far from its

nest and couldn't find its way back. She had been honest with Martin,

all along. Why, the night before they had started on the street of

adventure, she had told him her creed, in that dark, quiet room with

the moonlight on the floor in a little pool, and had frankly cried out,

"Who cares?" for the first time. And later, upstairs in her room, in

his house, she had asked him to leave her; and he had gone, because he

understood that she wanted to remain irresponsible for a time and must

not be taken by the shoulders and shaken into caring until she had had

her fling. He understood everything--especially as to what she meant by

saying that she would go joy-riding, that she would make life spin

whichever way she wanted it to go. It was the right of youth, and what

was she but just a kid? He had never stood over her and demanded

payment, and yet he had given her everything. He understood that she

was new to the careless and carefree, and had never flung the word

honest at her head, because, being so young, she considered that she

could be let off from making payments for a time.

She wanted Martin. She wanted the comforting sight of his clean eyes

and deep chest and square shoulders. She wanted to sit down knee to

knee with him as they had done so often on the edge of the woods, and

talk and talk. She wanted to hear his man's voice and see the

laughter-lines come and go round his eyes. He was her pal and was as

reliable as the calendar. He would wipe out the effect of the

reproaches that she had been made to listen to by Alice and Gilbert.

They might be justified; they were justified; but they showed a lack of

understanding of her present mood that was to her inconceivable. She

was a kid. Couldn't they see that she was a kid? Why should they both

throw bricks at her as though she were a hawk and not a mere butterfly?

Where was Martin? Why hadn't she seen him for several days? Why had he

stayed away from home without saying where he was and what he was

doing? And what was all this about a girl with a white face and red

lips? Martin must have friends, of course. She had hers--Gilbert and

Hosack and the others, if they could be called friends. But why a girl

with a white face and red lips and hair that came out of a bottle? That

didn't sound much like Martin.

All these thoughts ran through Joan's mind as she walked about the

drawing-room with its open windows, in the first hour of the morning,

sending out an S. O. S. to Martin. She ought to be in bed and

asleep--not thinking and going over everything as if she were a woman.

She wasn't a woman yet, and could only be a kid once. It was too bad of

Alice to try and force her to take things seriously so soon.

Seriousness was for older people, and even then something to avoid if

possible. And as for Gilbert--well, she didn't for one instant deny the

fact that it was rather exciting and exhilarating for him to be in love

with her, although she was awfully sorry for Alice. She had done

nothing to encourage him, and it was really a matter of absolute

indifference to her whether he loved her or not, so long as he was at

hand to take her about. And she didn't intend to encourage him, either.

Love meant ties and responsibility--Alice proved that clearly enough.

There was plenty of time for love. Let her flit first. Let her remain

young as long as she could, careless and care-free. The fact that she

was married was just an accident, an item in her adventure. It didn't

make her less young to be married, and she didn't see why it should.

Martin understood, and that was why it was so far-fetched of Alice to

suggest that her attitude could turn Martin's armor into broadcloth,

and hint at his having ceased to be a knight because he had been seen

with a girl--never mind whether her face was white and her lips red,

and her hair too golden.

"I'm a kid, I tell you," she said aloud, throwing out her justification

to the whole world. "I am and I will be, I will be. I'll play the fool

and revel in it as long as I can--so there. Who cares?" And she laughed

once more, and ran her hand over her hair as though waving all these

thoughts away, and shut the windows and turned out the lights and went

upstairs to her bedroom. "I'm a selfish, self-willed little devil,

crazy about myself, thinking of nothing but having a good time," she

added inwardly. "I know it, all of you, as well as you do, but give me

time. Give me my head for a bit. When I must begin to pay, I'll pay

with all I've got."

But presently, all ready for bed, she put on a dressing gown and left

her room and padded along the passage in heelless slippers to Martin's

room. He might have been asleep all this time. How silly not to have

thought of that! She would wake him for one of their talks. It seemed

an age since they had sat on the hill together among the young buds,

and she had conjured up the high-reaching buildings of New York against

the blue sky, like a mirage.

She had begun to think again. Alice and Gilbert between them had set

her brain working--and she couldn't stop it. What if the time had come

already when she must pull herself together and face facts and play

what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply

couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said, she

would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "I care"

with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen. I don't know

quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty. I'm still not

much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed,

fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid. I know all

about that as well as they do. I'm making no pretense to be anything

different. Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself. But

it's only a phase. Why not let me get over it and live it down? If

there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out sooner or

later. Why not let me go through it my own way? A few months to play

the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know what it means to be

old?"

She hadn't been along that passage before. It was Martin's side of the

house. She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of anything. She

tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the button that would turn the

light on and found it. It was a large and usefully fitted dressing room

with a hanging cupboard that ran all along one wall, with several

doors. Two old shiny-faced English tallboys were separated by a boot

rack. Between the two windows was a shaving glass over a basin. There

was a bookcase on each side of the fire-place and a table conveniently

near a deep armchair with a tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes.

Every available space of wall was crammed with framed photographs of

college groups, some showing men with the whiskered faces and the

strange garments of the early Victorian period, others of the

clean-shaven men of the day, but all of them fit and eager and

care-free, caught in their happiest hours. It was a man's room,

arranged by one, now used by another.

Joan went through into the bedroom. The light followed her. There was

no Martin. It was all strangely tidy. Its owner might have been away

for weeks.

With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went back

to the dressing room. She wanted Martin. If Martin had been there, she

would have had it all out with him, freely and frankly. Somehow she

couldn't wave away the idea any longer that the time had come for her

to cross another bridge. Thank God she would still be young, but the

kid of her would be left on the other side. If Martin had been there,

she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about

being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the

girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away

among her toys.

Alice and Gilbert Palgrave,--curious that it should have been those

two,--had shaken her individualism, as well as something else, vague

and untranslatable, that she couldn't quite grasp, that eluded her

hand. She sat down in the deep chair and with a little smile took up

one of Martin's pipes and looked at it. The good tobaccoey scent of it

took her back to the hill on the edge of the woods, and in her mind's

eye there was a picture of two clean eyes with laughter-lines coming

and going, a strong young face that had already caught the sun, square

shoulders and a broad chest, and a pair of reliable hands with

spatulate fingers clasped round a knee. She could hear birds calling.

Spring was in the air.

Where was Martin?