"Judith--are we the same as engaged?"
Judith hesitated. "Kissing each other good-night--and all that--is
silly. I don't want to. Only sometimes I want to, and then afterward I'm
ashamed, and can't understand why. Willard, I don't want to grow up. I
don't ever want to. I want things to stay just the way they are. They
are--lovely. Oh, Willard----"
She stopped, with tears in her eyes. There had been a real appeal in his
earnest young voice, and she had done her best to answer it, painfully
thinking out loud, with her heart in her words, making him an authentic
confidence. But the confidence was off the point, and he ignored it,
pursuing his subject with the concentration which will keep his sex the
stronger one, votes for women or no votes for women.
"Are you the same as engaged to me?"
"Will you go home if I say I am?"
"Are you?"
"There isn't any such thing as being the same as engaged."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
Willard, forgetting himself in the heat of debate, had withdrawn his
foot from the door. Judith, narrowly on the watch for this moment, now
seized it, shutting him and his Belle Isle outside, and slamming the
door in his face. He had gained his point, and would not linger. She
heard him ring the bell once or twice in perfunctory protest, then put
down his candy on the steps.
"Good-night," he called cheerfully, through the flimsy barrier of the
pseudo-Colonial door.
"Good-night, Willard--dear!"
Judith's voice was sweet, but indifferent, and her manner was
indifferent, for a young lady who would have seemed, to a literal-minded
person, to have materially affected her whole future life by this
conversation. She did not watch Willard go. She turned and stood in the
library door, smiling absently and humming a little snatch of a waltz
tune. It was eleven now, but the hour had ceased to concern her, as if
she had been watching the clock for Willard. Presently, as if she
really had, she tossed the cushions back on the couch, drew the shades
over the window, turned off the lights, and disappeared upstairs.
Muffled sounds of a methodical but unhurried preparation for bed drifted
faintly down, one last ripple of song, and then it was silent there.
It was very still in the library. The stillness of the whole empty house
and the moonless night outside seemed to centre there. The dying fire
threw out little spurts of flame and made wavering shadows on the hearth
as if Judith were still crouching there. The embers glowed as red as
when she had been fire-gazing, but they did not show what it was she had
seen in the fire. They kept her secrets as safely as she kept them
herself; as youth must keep its secrets, inarticulate, dumb, because it
sees into the heart of the world so deeply that if it were granted
speech it would make the world too wise. What Judith had seen in the
fire, what had really been in her heart when she talked to Willard in
the groping and pitiful language of youth, the only language she had,
the fire could not tell, and perhaps Judith did not know.
It was still, and the tiniest sounds were exaggerated: a board creaking
at the head of the stairs, and creaking again, the stair-rail creaking,
the ghost of a faint little sigh; tiny and intermittent sounds, but the
silence became a listening hush because of them: listening harder and
harder. At last a sound broke it: the doorbell, rung three times, one
long peal and two short.
It was rung faintly, but loud enough. There was a soft hurry of
slippered feet down the stairs, and a slender figure, tall in
straight-falling draperies, slipped cautiously down and across the hall
to the door, stopped and stood leaning with one ear pressed against it,
silent and motionless, hardly breathing. The faint signal was repeated.
Judith did not move.
There was one more ring, a soft tapping, and then silence. Judith
listened for a minute, then whistled softly, a clear little signal, one
long and two short, like the signal ring. There was no answer. She
pulled frantically at the chain, got it loose, and threw open the door.
A boy was standing on the steps, a stolid, unmoving figure, looming
deceptively tall in the dark. He did not step forward or greet her.
Judith put out a groping hand and caught at his shoulder.
"Is it you? Oh, I thought you had gone," she said. "I was watching for
you upstairs."
"I am going. I can't come in so late."
"No, of course not."
"Then what made you watch for me?"
"I wanted to see if you came."
"Well, I did come, and now I'm going."
"You walked past the house five times."
"Eight." The boy laughed shortly, and Judith's soft laugh echoed his.
"Oh, what's the use? I'm going."
"Don't you want to come in?"
"No."
"Then what made you walk past the house?"
"You know well enough."
"I want you to tell me.... You can come in just five minutes if you want
to."
"I--you----"
Judith caught her trailing draperies tighter round her, conscious that
they were under observation. "It's not a kimono, it's a negligee. And
you've seen my hair in braids before, when I played basket-ball. But you
needn't come in unless you want to."
"I don't."
"You're not very nice to me. Willard tried to break in. Rena's been
trying to get me by 'phone, to stay all night with me. You're not nice
to me at all."
His only reply was a kind of tortured groan, but she seemed content with
it. Her voice grew compellingly sweet.
"I want to talk to you."
"Go on and talk."