_Glen Darrow dines for the first time in her life and tells her
hostesses her opinion of Peter Parker of Pasadena; later confides to
her sleepless pillow that she doesn’t like being touched._
OLD Mrs. Jennings, who welcomed her granddaughter’s guest very
cordially, wore an orchid dinner gown and an orchid complexion. Her
face had at once an oddly tense and expectant look overlaid by a
doll-like blankness.
Janice, catching Glen’s hastily averted glance, whispered an
explanation at the first opportunity. “Grammer’s had her face lifted
twice. That’s what gives her the hard-finish. Kalsomined, just like a
wall. Isn’t it a scream? But if the poor old girl gets a kick out of
it--” she shrugged with a good-natured tolerance. “My child, _you’re_ a
landscape! Good-looking dress. Didn’t get it here?”
“It was a present from Miss Ada.”
“Well, what do you know about that? You’d expect that poor old White
Leghorn to choose polka dots and baby ribbon, wouldn’t you. But at
that, I can see she’s a good egg.”
“She has been a wonderful friend to me,” Glen flushed loyally,
following her hostesses into the glare and blare of the big dining
room. There was a merciless blaze of light and on a shallow stage a
jazz orchestra was committing musical crimes.
As soon as they were seated Janice leaned across the table and pointed
frankly at one of the musicians. “Pipe the bird with the big horn--the
one with a permanent wave in it? That’s Edward Harrington Du Val--_you_
know--they gave him the gate at Harvard and papa pulled the heavy
father stuff,--‘Not another penny, sir!’--you know the line, but the
kid’s called his bluff and proved he can pay for his _own_ hooch and
gardenias. Don’t you love it? I’m crazy about him,” she finished
calmly. He caught her eye and nodded and she shot one thin bare arm
straight up beside her head in salute. “Ye ... ay, Eddie!”
“_Babe!_” her grandmother protested.
“What’s the big idea, Grammer? You know he’s my desert lover.” She
grinned, and relapsed into coolness as a pallid youth with sleek fair
hair stopped beside their table. “’Lo, Ronnie. No. I’m not stepping
to-night. Company.”
“_I’ll_ say,” he murmured, staring appreciatively at Glen.
Miss Jennings mumbled their names. “He’s a blah of purest ray serene,”
she stated, almost before he was out of earshot. “The Human Lady
Finger. They’re an awful mess here, except Eddie. Say, on the low down,
don’t you know any boys?”
“I know Luke.” (Luke, her father’s golden lad, whom she had
disappointed and denied so shabbily to-day.) She colored unhappily, the
more as she found Miss Jennings’s hard little eyes upon her.
“Oh, so _that’s_ it!” Janice pounced.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s your sweetie!”
“No. He--” She could not escape it, then. It was of no use to put
on Miss Ada’s little yellow-buff crêpe de chine and come out of her
cloister into the dazzle and din of the Bella Vista; the mountain of
misery had come with her, moving steadily and implacably behind her,
shadowing her, threatening to crush her. She was a wretched ingrate; a
traitor; false to her father, and to her friend, and to herself. She
got a certain comfort from putting it into determined words. “My father
found Luke in the mountains, and he had the greatest faith in him. He
was our nearest friend, while my father lived; he is my nearest friend
now. I--some day--” she said clearly, “I will marry him.”
“Oh!” The acquaintance of her childhood considered her thoughtfully.
“The plot thickens. Got it all doped out, haven’t you? Well, happy
days, old thing, but I’d breeze around a little and look ’em over
first! And speaking of such, did I tell you I know your boss?”
“Mr. Carey, you mean? Nancy’s father?”
“No, Peter Parker. (Sounds like ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled
peppers,’ doesn’t it?) _You_ know--his dad was old Carey’s partner,
and this bird inherited his share of the mill. Met him at Pasadena
last winter, and we got talking about the places we went, and when I
mentioned this, he mentioned the Altonia mill.”
“His mother is a remarkable woman, in her way,” contributed Mrs.
Jennings. “She is president of the Federated Clubs of the whole
country, and they say she’s the best woman speaker in America. Of
course, that’s all very well for women who like it and haven’t any home
cares. As far as I’m concerned--” she gave a delicate pat to the curl
which was gummed against her temple--“I never seemed to find time for
_clubs_.”
“Peter’s a scream,” Janice took up the tale. “Honestly, I think he’s
got the best line I ever heard in my life. You know, he was canned from
four prep schools and three colleges, and----”
Her guest’s lip curled. “I hate and detest him more than anybody else
in the world!”
Her young hostess laid down her ramekin fork and looked at her with
bright mouth open. “Say, how do you get that way? Hate _Peter_? Peter
_Parker_? Woman, it can’t be done! Besides--did you ever meet him?”
“No, but I don’t need to meet him to know all about him! I know he’s
idle-born, overfed, underworked”--her father’s, vehement adjectives,
these--“grinding down the mill workers--the _children_ so he can live
and travel and--loaf--in lazy luxury!” The color had drained out of
her golden olive face and it looked like ivory in its frame of coppery
hair. Her eyes blazed, the pupils dilated blackly. “He’s a waster, a
parasite!”
“Help!” cried Babe, jovially. “Don’t blame me! Blame the Club
President! She brought him up--or didn’t!”
“But, Janice, can’t you see what a cancerous growth people like that
are in the life of the nation?” (The violent weekly had contributed
this, but she had repeated it until she honestly thought it her own.)
“They take everything; they give nothing! They----”
“Hire a hall!” the other girl cut her briskly short. “Say do you
mind--Eddie always cuts one number to step with me.” She got eagerly
to her feet and went into the arms of the horn player and they moved
slowly away together across the polished floor.
“Babe’s a great girl,” her grandmother remarked complacently. “The
boys are wild about her, everywhere she goes.” She looked curiously
at Glen, still white, and shaking with her fervor. “I met the Parker
boy. I think you’re mistaken about him. Maybe you’ve got him confused
with somebody else. He’s--I don’t know--kind of a _fascinating_ rascal,
if you know what I mean.” Her blandly adoring eyes were following her
granddaughter’s leisurely progress across the big, ornate room. “Babe
can certainly _dance_,” she said, contentedly.
For nineteen, the scene had inevitably its zest in the tang of novelty.
Glen assured herself hotly that she despised it all as a virulent
manifestation of social injustice, but she had a pathetic hope of
cramming her mind so full of new sensations that it would give over
its unhappy ruminations for the moment. She forced her attention upon
the dreadful, bedizened, pitiful old creature across the table, on the
harsh lights, the endless, heavy courses of the meal; the strange,
savage music with its throb and thrill and its sly, insinuating
cadences, its bursts of jungle joy; the diners; the dancers; Janice
Jennings and young Edward Harrington Du Val who had demonstrated that
he could buy his own hooch and gardenias, moving so slowly, almost
stealthily across the floor, their eyes blankly fixed on space,
their mouths unsmiling, their flat and thin young bodies pressed
painstakingly close together, their whole air one of calculated
ecstasy. She tried to make a vehement reality of it all, and she
succeeded fairly well while she was in the midst of it, but back in her
bed at last the radiant mood of fifteen hours before came back to her;
battered and bruised, demanding sanctuary.
There was no illumination for her through the long night; its
impenetrable velvet blackness was no thicker than the bewildered misery
in her mind. Why? _Why?_ Luke, whom she had pedestaled and pinnacled
for five years; whom she had almost worshiped! Luke, who deserved
the best, and to whom she had given her shabby worst. The thing was
a bitter mystery; one moment, as gravely, as exultantly as a child
waiting for its first communion, she had waited for him to ask her to
marry him, ready--oh, rapturously ready--to say yes, the yes which had
been waiting for him ever since the day of her father’s death; and the
next moment she had been shivering, almost shuddering, frightened,
unhappy, repelled. She was so bitterly _ashamed_. She repeated over and
over, flagellating her sore spirit, that she had failed her father and
her friend and herself.
It was not until the first rooster had flung his raucous challenge at
the mocking bird, singing deliriously in a magnolia tree, that the
solution came to her. It was so startling, so simple, so thoroughly
explanatory, that she sat bolt upright with the surprise and relief of
it.
She had been perfectly happy and perfectly _ready_, until Luke caught
her in his arms. That was it! She didn’t like being touched. Her father
had been always bluffly undemonstrative, and Miss Ada’s endearments
were verbal only, and she could remember, as a tiny child, her
restiveness under her mother’s prolific embraces, and that Mrs. Darrow,
little by little, with her sad eyes shining with tears, had given them
up. “You are just like your father ...” she had said again and again.
So, that explained it! It was simply that she, like her father, was
the sort of person who didn’t like kisses. Doubtless there, were many
of the same mind. She laughed aloud with the jubilant release from
wretchedness. If only it had come to her sooner! Now it was crystal
clear; she did love Luke, with her mind, but she didn’t love him
with--well, with her arms and her hands and her lips, that was all.
She could explain it to him to-morrow, and tell him she was ready and
willing to marry him, any day, any hour, if he would only please not
touch her.
Luke would certainly understand and appreciate it; when she told him
that her father, her father, who had meant so much to him--had the same
peculiarity, it would justify itself with Luke.
People were different, that was all; consider Janice Jennings and
the trombone player who looked like lovers and were not in the least,
she felt sure; and herself, who looked up to Luke and--and _idolized_
him, but who certainly could not dance with him in that fashion. In
the few romances she had read there was a good deal of that sort of
thing, to be sure, but she doubted very much if it was so popular in
real life.... She exhaled a long, weary, peaceful sigh, turned her hot
pillow, slipped her palm beneath her hot cheek and composed herself to
sleep.... She was not a wicked ingrate, after all ... she was just ...
a little peculiar ... as her father had been peculiar ... to-morrow she
would tell Luke ... he would understand ... she did love him ... she
just ... didn’t like ... being ... touched....