He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance
at the restless Manhattan audience--down in the front row with
his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And
she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where
the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the
violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An
instinctive defiance rose within her.
"Silly boy!" she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn't take
her encore.
"What do they expect for a hundred a week--perpetual motion?"
she grumbled to herself in the wings.
"What's the trouble? Marcia?"
"Guy I don't like down in front."
During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an
odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the
promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him--
had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to
pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking--as she had
so often in the last month--of his pale, rather intent face, his
slim, boyish fore, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that
made him charming to her.
And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry--as though an
unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.
"Infant prodigy!" she said aloud.
"What?" demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.
"Nothing--just talking about myself."
On the stage she felt better. This was her dance--and she
always felt that the way she did it wasn't suggestive any more
than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it
a stunt.
"Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon,
After sundown shiver by the moon."
He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking
very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that
expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation
swept over her--he was criticising her.
"That's the vibration that thrills me,
Funny how affection fi-lls me
Uptown, downtown---"
Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly
conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first
appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a
droop of disgust on one young girl's mouth? These shoulders of
hers--these shoulders shaking--were they hers? Were they real?
Surely shoulders weren't made for this!
"Then--you'll see at a glance
I'll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance
At the end of the world I'll---"
The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused
and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her
young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young
girl afterward called "such a curious, puzzled look," and then
without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she
sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi
outside.
Her apartment was very warm--small, it was, with a row of
professional pictures and sets of Kipling and O. Henry which she
had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And
there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them
comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it
and an atmosphere of other stifled pink throughout. There were
nice things in it--nice things unrelentingly hostile to each
other, offspring of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray
moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak
bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad--altogether a
frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a
cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.
Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.
"I followed you this time," he said.
"Oh!"
"I want you to marry me," he said.
Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of
passionate wholesomeness.
"There!"
"I love you," he said.
She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself
into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.
"Why, you infant prodigy!" she cried.
"Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I
was ten thousand years older than you--I am."
She laughed again.
"I don't like to be disapproved of."
"No one's ever going to disapprove of you again."
"Omar," she asked, "why do you want to marry me?"
The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.
"Because I love you, Marcia Meadow."
And then she stopped calling him Omar.
"Dear boy," she said, "you know I sort of love you. There's
something about you--I can't tell what--that just puts my heart
through the wringer every time I'm round you. But honey--" She
paused.
"But what?"
"But lots of things. But you're only just eighteen, and I'm
nearly twenty."
"Nonsense!" he interrupted. "Put it this way--that I'm in my
nineteenth year and you're nineteen. That makes us pretty
close--without counting that other ten thousand years I
mentioned."
Marcia laughed.
"But there are some more 'buts.' Your people---
"My people!" exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. "My people tried
to make a monstrosity out of me." His face grew quite crimson at
the enormity of what he was going to say. "My people can go way
back and sit down!"
"My heavens!" cried Marcia in alarm. "All that? On tacks, I
suppose."
"Tacks--yes," he agreed wildly--"on anything. The more I think of
how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy---"
"What makes you thank you're that?" asked Marcia quietly--"me?"
"Yes. Every person I've met on the streets since I met you has
made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I
used to call it the 'sex impulse.' Heavens!"
"There's more 'buts,'" said Marcia
"What are they?"
"How could we live?"
"I'll make a living."
"You're in college."
"Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts
degree?"
"You want to be Master of Me, hey?"
"Yes! What? I mean, no!"
Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over sat in his lap. He put
his arm round her wildly and implanted the vestige of a kiss
somewhere near her neck.
"There's something white about you," mused Marcia "but it doesn't
sound very logical."
"Oh, don't be so darned reasonable!"
"I can't help it," said Marcia.
"I hate these slot-machine people!"
"But we---"
"Oh, shut up!"
And as Marcia couldn't talk through her ears she had to.