"Come along, then! Run, get your hat. It gives us an excuse for at least
two hours more...."
By the time she had repaired the damage this miracle had wrought with
her appearance, Matthias had walked to the Astor and brought back a
taxicab. The attention affected Joan with a poignant and exquisite
sense of happiness.
It was only her second ride in a motor vehicle. The top being down, they
sat very circumspectly apart; but Matthias captured her hand and eye
spoke to eye with secret laughter of delight, each reading the other's
longing thought. The speed of the cab and its sudden slackening as it
picked its path down Broadway, the flow of cool air against her face,
the swimming maze of lights through which they sped, the sense of luxury
and protection, added the last touch of delirious pleasure to Joan's
mood.
Matthias had chosen the café of "Old Martin's," at Twenty-sixth Street,
the first place that suggested itself as one where they could sup
without the girl being made to feel out of place in her modest
work-a-day attire; but his thoughtfulness was misapplied: Joan was
exalted beyond such annoyances; and those feminine glances which she
detected, of pity, disdain, and jealousy, she took complacently as
envious tributes to her prettiness and her conquest.
From a seat against the wall, in a corner, she reviewed the other
patrons of the smoke-wreathed room with a hauteur of spirit that would
have seemed laughable had it been suspected. She thought of herself as
the handsomest woman there, and the youngest, of Matthias as the most
distinguished man and--the luckiest. The circumstances of the place and
her partner enchanted her to distraction.
The food Matthias ordered she devoured heedlessly; but there was a
delicious novelty in the experience of sipping her first glass of
champagne. It was, for that matter, the first time she had ever tasted
good wine, or any kind of alcoholic drink other than an occasional glass
of lukewarm beer, cheap and nasty to begin with and half-stale at best,
and that poisonous red wine of the Italian boarding-house to which
Charlie Quard had introduced her. She had never dreamed of anything so
delicious as this dry and exhilarating draught with its exotic bouquet
and aromatic bubbles.
With a glowing face and dancing eyes she nodded to Matthias over the rim
of her goblet.
"When we are rich," she laughed softly, "I'm never going to drink
anything else!"
He smiled quietly, enjoying her enjoyment; but, when emptied, the
half-bottle he had ordered was not renewed.
There was without that enough intoxication in his fondness, in the
simulacrum of gaiety manufactured by the lights, the life, the laughter,
and in the muted, interweaving strains of music. Joan felt that she was
living wonderfully and intensely, a creature of an existence
transcendent and radiant.
It was after one when another taxicab whisked them homeward through the
quieting streets. She sat as close as could be to her lover and would
not have objected on the grounds of "people looking" had he put an arm
round her. Though he didn't, she was not disappointed, sharing something
of his mood of sublimely sufficient contentment. But when he bade her
good night at the foot of the stairs in the deserted and poorly lighted
hallway, she gave herself to his caresses with a passion and abandon
that startled and sobered Matthias, and sent him off to his room and bed
in a thoughtful frame of mind.
Lying awake in darkness until darkness was dimly tempered by the
formless dusk that long foreruns the dawn, he communed gravely with his
troubled heart.
"Things can't go on this way--as they've started. There's _got_ to be
sanity.... It's myself I've got to watch, of course," he said with
stubborn loyalty to his ideal. "I mustn't forget I'm a man--nine years
older--nearly ten.... Why, she's hardly more than a kiddie.... She
doesn't _know_.... I've got to watch myself...."
And in her room, four floors above, Joan sat as long before her bureau,
chin cradled on her slim, laced fingers, eyeing intently the face shown
her by gas-light in the one true patch of the common, tarnished mirror.
When at length she rose, suddenly conscious of a heavy weariness, she
lingered yet another long moment for one last fond look.
"It's true," she told herself with a little nod of conviction; "I am
beautiful. _She_ said I was ... he thinks I am ... I must be...."