"Some men are like that."
"If you only hadn't told him about Anthony."
"I am glad that I told him."
"Oh, but he might have stayed."
"Well?"
"And I might have loved him." She was still glowing with the fires that
Olaf had lighted in her.
"But you are going to marry Anthony."
"Yes," she said, "I am going to marry Anthony. I am going to flirt and
smoke cigarettes and let him--flirt--when I might have been a--goddess."
It was after breakfast on the same day that a letter came to me,
delivered into my own hands by messenger. It was from Olaf, and he left
it to me whether Nancy should see it. It covered many pages and it shook
my soul, but I did not show it to Nancy.
There were nights after that when I found it hard to sleep, nights in
which I thought of Olaf sailing toward the hidden land, holding in his
heart a hope which it was in my power to crown with realization or dash
to the ground. Yet I had Nancy's happiness to think of, and, in a sense,
Anthony's. It seemed almost incredible that I must carry, too, on my
heart, the burden of the happiness of Olaf Thoresen.
When Anthony came back, he and Nancy were caught in a net of
engagements, and I saw very little of them. Of course they romped in now
and then with their own particular crowd, and treated me, as it were,
to a cross-section of modern life. Except for two things, I should have
judged that Nancy had put away all thoughts of Olaf, but these two
things were significant. She had stopped smoking, and she no longer
touched her cheeks with artificial bloom.
Anthony's amazement, when he offered her a cigarette and she refused,
had in it a touch of irritation. "But, my dear girl, why not?"
"Well, I have to think of my complexion, Tony."
I think he knew it was not that and was puzzled. "I never saw you
looking better in my life."
She was wearing a girdle of blue with her clear, crisp white, and her
fairness was charming. She had, indeed, the look which belongs to young
Catholic girls dedicated to the Virgin who wear her colors.
It was not, however, until Anthony had been home for a week that he saw
the blue cloak. We were all on the beach--Mimi Sears and Bob Needham and
the Drakes, myself and Anthony. Nancy was late, having a foursome to
finish on the golf grounds. She came at last, threading her way gayly
through the crowd of bathers. She was without her cap, and her hair was
wound in a thick braid about her head. I saw people turning to look at
her as they had never turned to look when she had worn her shadowy gray.
"Great guns!" said a man back of me. "What a beauty!"
A deep flush stained Anthony's face, and I knew at once that he did not
like it. It was as if, having attuned his taste to the refinement of a
Japanese print, he had been called upon to admire a Fra Angelico. He
hated the obvious, and Nancy's loveliness at this moment was as definite
as the loveliness of the sky, the sea, the moon, the stars. Later I was
to learn that Anthony's taste was for a sophisticated Nancy, a mocking
Nancy, a slim, mysterious creature, with charms which were caviar to the
mob.
But Bob Needham spoke from the depths of his honest and undiscriminating
soul. "Heavens! Nancy. Where did you get it?"
"Get what?"
"That cloak."
"Do you like it?"
"Like it--! I wish Tony would run away while I tell you."