” Look at that sailboat,” said Grant Grey. “Yes,” said Joy contentedly.
The two were sitting on the piazza of the Grey’s summer home, which fronted the beach.
It had not been Grant who had finally called Joy up, but Betty, all thrills and eagerness. She asked Joy to come down for the week-end—“and Grant wants you to come, too!” she added, as if that settled it.
It had.
Sarah was frankly envious, Jerry rejoiced, at her invitation.
“You’ll get some rest,” said Jerry; “you never do here.”
“I wish we could get away,” Sarah grumbled; “I get so sick of summer in the city.”
“Why don’t you go somewhere for a few weeks?”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders, and knocked the ashes off her cigarette. “No funds, as the banks tell me constantly. I have to stick around town and do a little work once in awhile.”
“Work!”
Jerry laughed. “It’s time I took in washing on the side again. I am not a young lady of independent means.”
Sarah gave forth a groan. “Oh, dear, Jerry, are you going to start again?”
“Must, my lady, the situation spells must, if I am to continue to buy our delicatessen breakfasts. At times, food seems scarcely worth while to me.”
“It seems to me,” said Joy, “that we are pretty extravagant for people having no visible income.”
“How?” demanded Sarah. “We hardly ever buy any meals except breakfasts——”
“But look at the stuff we drink and pass around—so far as I can see, keeping the cellarette filled is as expensive as running a free bar——”
“Little one,” Jerry drawled, “our cellarette is endowed. Some day when I have a lot of time I’ll take you around to the wine closet and tell you the names of who has contributed to which. To send a case of spirits to a young lady was ever a delicate mark of attention. We had a wonderful collection this spring, and before the first of July—don’t you remember the cases and cases of supplies that were pouring in around then? We have to go easy on those Prohibition allotments, though. The donors collect on them every once in so often.”
Joy realized that she was learning something new every day. She travelled down to the Grey’s in a rather sombre frame of mind. Her father had returned home and she had just escaped his descending upon her on the way by business necessity which had made him haste on through and write her, wishing her to return as soon as she could. She had written him that she was at a critical period in voice-placing and did not want to leave her teacher just now, especially when she was so lucky as to have him in Boston during the summer. It was true, she was going through a critical period in voice placing. In spite of her irregular hours, under Pa Graham’s magical touch and through the scales she practised regularly, her voice was coming forth in a way that now bewildered her, now filled her with an exultant sense of power. But the moments of exultation were few and far between. It was baffling to let loose one pure, golden note, and while yet tingling from the joy of it, to follow it with half a dozen that were edgy, or swallowed, or had a thread in them—there seemed to be no end to the variety of ways one could defeat tone production. She had just achieved sufficient grasp in the art of singing to know how little she knew, and instead of discouraging her as it might have at first, she was lured on and stimulated to further endeavour. She was right not to leave Pa,—but she knew that was not the real reason she had signified her wish to remain in Boston. Was it this boy—this boy whom she had seen only once? She ought to know by this time how transient her fancies were. But this was so different from her other affair. She knew more about men now.
Betty met her at the station in a little runabout, and had driven away the flurry in Joy’s brain with her eager chatter. Grant had been intending to come to the station, too, she informed her; but at the last minute Mrs. Grey had found a number of things for him to do. Grant humoured mother a lot. Betty didn’t believe in it; encourage mothers too much, and they’ll expect everything of you.
It had been a shock to meet Mrs. Grey. She was the woman who surveyed Joy so critically the night of the dance. A tall, large woman, with independent demeanor, marcelled white hair and snapping eyes still almost as blue as Grant’s. She was gracious, but far from cordial. Very little appeared to escape the scrutiny of those eyes, and she made Joy feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Joy remembered what Packy had said: “Mother’s the Gorgon of the beach;” she decided that Packy had great descriptive powers. Mrs. Grey inspired the “what-have-I-done-anyway” feeling in one. Mr. Grey was only a shade more approachable. He seemed to consider Joy Betty’s age, to be talked to as such at convenient moments, and ignored as such most of the time.
Immediately upon arriving, Joy had had to dress for dinner, which was an absurdly formal meal for a beach house, and then after dinner the whole family had gone for a moonlight sail. She had no moment alone with Grant, and both were silent most of the evening, acutely conscious of each other’s presence, while Betty chattered and Mr. and Mrs. Grey admired the light effects of the moon on the water, and spoke of art and science and other impersonally interesting subjects to which none of the three young people listened.
Betty came in while Joy was undressing, her eyes dancing with excitement. “Joy—mother thinks Grant’s crazy about you—I heard her tell father. Do you think so? It would be so screaming! He never gets that way!”
“I think so? Why, Betty——”
“Well—can’t you always tell when a man’s crazy about you? I can!”
Joy laughed hysterically. “Maybe I haven’t had as much experience as you, Betty,” she suggested.
After Betty had gone, something happened that terrified her. For no concrete reason she burst into tears, and the more she cried, the more hysterical she became at the thought that she was crying with no apparent reason. Of course, she was very much excited. And her nerves were pretty raw, and she had not had the usual “prescription” with which to deaden them. But it couldn’t be because she had no recourse to alcohol that she felt this way. That was the way only awful people got, and after they had been drinking for years and years and years! She finally fell into a tear-tinted slumber, from which she awoke barely in time for breakfast.
And now she and Grant found themselves miraculously left alone. Betty had gone to play tennis with some friends, and to Joy’s stupefaction, Mr. and Mrs. Grey had motored up to town together. And so the two sat on the piazza, still wrapped in an anticipatory silence.
They watched the sailboat out of sight, then Grant turned to her. “I say—let’s get away from everything. Let’s take the roadster and some lunch and go way off into the country—will you?”
There are few perfect days in life that stand out golden, untarnished, with no flaws or worrisome little details to bar the way of loving memory; but that Saturday was one for Joy. As they rode far into the country, past orchards and immaculate white New England farmhouses, the hours seemed to be resting motionless, while they talked aimlessly and with long, happy silences, shyly sitting as near together as they dared. Time, as well as everything else, had gone away and left them alone.
They ate beside a pebble-hindered brook, with tall trees gossiping above them. There were not even mosquitoes to hum their way through the rainbow haze in which the two were lingering. A large and elaborate repast had been put up for them, but Joy could not eat. He, too, seemed to find difficulty in raising any enthusiasm over the luncheon, and looked at her instead. Finally they gravely repacked the almost unimpaired repast, then looked at each other over the basket. Because they were young and American, they laughed.
“It’s too hot to eat now,” said Grant, recovering hastily; “we’ll take out the basket again later, when we get hungry.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Joy, with dancing eyes.
It was so peaceful by the brook; she had not realised how the hectic life in the apartment had been wearing upon her. She closed her eyes with a little shiver of ecstasy. “Let’s stay here a little while,” she said. “It’s nice under the trees.”
“I was just going to suggest that,” said Grant. “We think the same in almost everything, don’t we?”
How many millions of lovers have “thought the same”—lovers are distanced in tastes, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, as the poles are distanced one from the other!
“Yes,” said Joy dreamily. By now they had passed into the “you and I” stage. They drifted into what they thought was a discussion of modern education; but he was telling her about his years at Harvard. He had just graduated; Packy’s class.
“But Packy and I never ran together much,” he said. “Packy is a natural-born fusser; I’ve always been more or less of a woman-hater.”
“They say woman-haters are really the most romantic,” said Joy lightly.
“Well, they usually have the highest ideals; that’s what makes ’em dislike most women. I had almost impossibly high ideals; so high that I was getting afraid I’d never meet her.”
Silence. A twig fell from a tree, and the two started.
“I said,” said Grant, looking up at a patch of sky through the branches while Joy plucked a blade of grass into tiny bits; “I said—I was getting afraid I’d never meet her.”
A throbbing stillness in the woods; then Joy spoke breathlessly. “So—was I,” she said.
A blue-jay shrieked discordantly from near by, and with a hitch, they resumed more general subjects. Somehow, when one talks about ideals, one always gets personal.
“Girls nowadays don’t encourage men to look up to them,” said Grant. “There isn’t the respect there used to be—and the girls don’t seem to miss it.”
“Some girls miss it,” said Joy; “but what can they do about it? If they object, and try to bring back past conditions, they are labelled old-fashioned, slow, stiff,—and let alone. Respect and what men consider a good time can no longer be combined.”
“That’s the girls’ side, I suppose. But a man’s position is hard, too. No man wants to fall in love with a girl who is unattractive to other men. Probably you would call that sheep-like, but it’s something we can’t help. And the popular girls nowadays, the girls that men run after, are spoiled by that very quality that makes them popular. Betty says I’m awfully stuffy—but most of them seem to me hard—flippant—and—well, unreserved. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” said Joy, amazed at his putting into words the half-formed thoughts that had been sifting through her brain ever since she had begun to observe boys and girls together, which had been at an early age, as with most small-town girls.
“It seems,” Grant went on, “it seems almost as if girls were trying to break down every difference that exists between them and men—smoking and drinking are only two examples——”
She winced. Vaguely conscious of her unrest, he turned to her with an impulsive gesture. “The only reason I’m saying all this is because it’s so wonderful to find a girl like you nowadays——”
“Oh, I don’t think things are as bad as all that!” she said. He sensed her withdrawal, and they left the Modern Girl to return to Modern Education.
They started back when the sun began to gleam redly through the trees. The way seemed shorter than coming, and they talked more, whirling through a world of fiery golden sun. Before they had even thought of opening the luncheon basket, they were back at the beach house where Betty with an accusing face awaited them on the piazza.
“We’re back,” said Joy. The sun had gone, and everything seemed suddenly grey and flat.
Betty came dashing down to them. “Do you call this nice, to go off and leave me for a whole day?” she demanded, pouting. “Lucky mother and father haven’t got back yet. And now you’ll have to hurry like everything to get ready for the dance!”
They realized that she was in evening dress.
“Oh, yes, there’s a dance to-night,” said Grant intelligently.
“There usually is, Saturday nights at the club house,” Betty retorted with fine sarcasm appreciated by no one but herself. “I’m not going to wait for you two—here comes my man now and there’s a wonderful orchestra!” She waved to her “man,” a gentleman about town, possibly all of seventeen, who was boiling up the driveway in a racer, and ran off to meet him.
Joy and Grant looked at each other. “I had forgotten all about the dance,” said Grant.
“Let’s not go!” It was Joy who spoke impulsively. “I—I dance so much up in town—and it’s so beautiful just here, by the sea——”
But the golden day had faded, the perfect moment passed. “We ought to go,” Grant considered. “Mother would think Betty and I weren’t entertaining you very well. Besides, there are some duty dances I’ve got to work off, that mother’s been after me about for a long time.”
Joy bowed her head. What was this feeling of impending distress—it must be only that the sun had set!
“We’ll get dressed,” said Grant, “and then we can decide whether it’s too late to go or not.” He met her eyes with a twinkle in his. “I dress—very slowly!”
“I’ve torn my evening gown—and it will take me a long time to mend it!” Joy returned with a laugh, and they separated.
Joy dressed as slowly as she dared. Her head was aching—two days now without her prescription. Was that why she felt so depressed? She had brought the same blue evening dress, and when the work was over, even to her anxious eyes she had never shone more gorgeously. The only question was color. Her face was temporarily red from driving in the wind; but she knew it wouldn’t stay, and it would leave her pale and dragged looking, as she had been lately most of the time. Which was preferable; to put on some rouge and run the risk of looking conspicuously painted until the wind-burn died down, or to omit the rouge and face the certainty of looking ghastly later?—She put on some rouge.
When she finally went down, about nine o’clock, Grant was on the piazza. She stood in the doorway and looked at him, as he came towards her. Why couldn’t all boys be like Grant—Grant, with reverence and purity shining in those clear blue eyes——
“I was hoping you’d wear that dress,” he was saying. “It’s the one you wore the first time I ever saw you——”
The first time already seemed impossible ages away.
“That’s why I wore it,” said Joy, in a matter-of-fact tone.
Neither kept the other in doubt by word or look. They looked now—and then, because they were human, they went and ate a fairly good meal from the lunch basket. Now there was no excuse for not starting to the dance—but still they lingered.
“I never heard you sing, you know,” said Grant. “Can’t you sing after eating—or will you sing to me before we go?”
They went into the music room, where Joy had already sounded out the piano. “Singing right after a meal gives me an excuse for not doing it well,” she smiled, but her fingers trembled as she played a few chords. What if he shouldn’t like it? That would be something she could not bear. Unconsciously music was already a part of herself. It would be so hard to sing to him—the hardest singing she had ever done! “I’ll sing a song called ‘The Unrealized Ideal,’” she said.
To most singers it is a handicap to play for themselves, but for Joy, to whom playing was as natural and spontaneous as breathing, it was only an added delight. She could almost hear her heart trembling as she modulated into the song.
The accompaniment stole out—a sound as of little bells chiming from far away—and then Joy’s voice, muted and shaky, but all the more poignant for that reason——
“My only love is always near
??In country or in town
It seems that he must feel, must hear
??The rustle of my gown.
 
“I foot it after him, so young
??My locks are tied in haste—
And one is o’er my shoulder flung
??And hangs below my waist.
 
“He runs before me in the meads
??And down the world-worn track
He leads me on—but as he leads
??He never glances back.
 
“Yet still his voice is in my dreams
??To witch me o’er and o’er
That wooing voice! Ah, me—it seems
??Less near me than before.”
A pause—a little wistful interlude of tinkling notes in a minor key.
“Lightly I speed while hope is high
??And youth beguiles the race
I follow—follow still—but I
??Shall never see his face.”
Grant had risen and had come over to her, his eyes blazing.
“You have never sung that to Packy, have you? Joy——”
“No—I haven’t ever sung it to anybody.”
“Somehow—I couldn’t have borne it, if you had, Joy——”
A cool voice from the doorway smote in upon their throbbing hearts. “Dear me! Have you two not gone to the dance yet?”
Mrs. Grey came forward into the room, her chill eyes dwelling first on Grant, then upon Joy, lingering on her face where the mixed colours strove for supremacy. “It was a great pity Mr. Grey and I were delayed in town.” She turned to Joy. “So you’re a—singer! I rather thought you—expressed yourself in some way.” Her eyes still rested with emphasis upon Joy’s colour; it was almost as if she wished Grant to follow her gaze and see what she saw. But Grant was not looking at Joy with his mother’s eyes. “What are you going to do with your voice?”
Joy took a deep breath. “I am going to study for opera.” It was the first time she had admitted it, even to herself. Once the statement was out, she contemplated it with delight.
“Oh, indeed. A professional—with all that that entails.” The bleak words fell between Joy and Grant; and although neither dreamed it then, with the rose flush of the vanished day still upon them, they stayed between them.
Almost without words, it was determined that they start at once for the dance. Grant remarked that he and Joy would walk up the beach. A snowbound glance from the blue eyes, and the two left the house, with the understanding that they would meet Mr. and Mrs. Grey over there.
The tide had gone out, leaving long stretches of hard sand. The moon was up, full and round, staring down upon them with friendly curiosity.
“I always used to wonder why people raved so about the moon,” said Grant. A little farther on, and they were out of sight of the house, on a lonely stretch of beach and sky. “Joy, when you sang, I felt—I can’t explain how I felt. It’s wonderful, it’s—you.”
Somehow they came to a pause on the sands looking out on the moon’s arclight reflection on the water.
“I—I once read some of Shelley—in college,” and Grant looked down at her, suddenly scarlet——
“See the mountains kiss high heaven
??And the wavelets kiss the sea
What is all this kissing worth
??If thou kiss not me?”
Almost a gasp in the murmuring ocean air—and then their lips met, brushing shyly, in a frightened thistledown of contact.
“Joy—I worship you.” His trembling whisper in her ear. “I love you—I love you so! Joy——”
This time they clung together, half frightened at the passion that surged to their lips.
And then a long interval without words—until they found themselves sitting on the sand, she with her head on his shoulder, he stroking her hair.
“You have the prettiest hair I’ve ever seen. Everything about you is the most wonderful I’ve ever seen. Your eyes, your voice, your lips—” Another interval. “Joy—I never knew what it was to feel like this. You—you’re the only girl I’ve ever kissed.”
“I didn’t know a man existed, who could say that,” said Joy with a happy laugh which died away on his next words.
“And I didn’t know there were girls like you—until I met you. For I am the first with you—am I not?”
“I’ve been kissed before—once.”
An intake of breath. Then, before she could continue: “Don’t tell me about it, Joy, dear—” a pause to accustom oneself to the unfamiliar “dear”—“don’t tell me about it—I’d rather not hear any more. I’ll make you forget him—just once isn’t much——”
After a month of whiles, they walked slowly up the beach. Their conversation was incoherent, but adequate.
“The dance will be almost over—what does it matter to us—isn’t it all strange and wonderful—your mother will think we were drowned——”
They came into the club house with unmistakably luminous faces. There is something about young love that stands starkly revealed, and they were as patent as if they had been hung with sandwich-man signs.
At times life seems to move in a quick succession of scenes until the scenes begin to seem unreal, and one feels apart from the drama of events, watching impersonally while life plays on with oneself. So Joy felt, as she saw Packy at the far corner of the room, and so she watched with impartial interest as he looked at them, first carelessly, then in swift incredulity, then with a face that grew thunderous, as, hands in pockets, he strode across to where they were about to join the dancers.
“Hello, Joy,” he said shortly. “Doesn’t take you a long time to change running mates, does it?”
“My goodness, look at Packy, entirely surrounded by a frown,” she tossed back at him—how easily Jerry’s line came to one’s lips.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, blocking their way as they started again to join the dancers.
Joy remembered a saying of Jerry’s which seemed peculiarly pat at this moment: “A girl never has the right amount of men. If she has few, it’s boring; if she has many, they get in the way and cramp her style.” She laughed. Packy was really a grotesque figure, with his glowering face and childish remarks. “You make me feel like a dancing school, with all this talk of changing partners,” she observed, and turned to Grant. She was amazed at the transformation. Grant’s lips were drawn back over his teeth, his eyes glittering.
“Would you mind stating what business it is of yours, who Joy goes to a dance with?” he asked, in a voice as chill and cold as Mrs. Grey’s herself; a voice with the ring of generations of Boston ancestors behind it.
It was the end of the dance; and Joy now realized, in a sort of detached horror, that they were becoming conspicuous. Grant and Packy were facing each other in the same tense, bristly pose that dogs assume before a pitched battle; faces were turning their way; she could see Mrs. Grey rising, in impotent protest, across the room——
A voice assailed her memory. “Is it really you, Miss Nelson?” Standing close at hand, his eyes upon their little group in grave attention, was a good-looking boy of medium height, with blond, wavy hair that had been plastered back in an attempt to make it look straight—At her look of vague recognition, he stepped nearer, said to Grant and Packy in an undertone: “Couldn’t you talk it over just as well out-doors?” then smiled at Joy, and in a normal, bread-and-butter voice that seemed to have the effect of suddenly bringing everything back to an everyday basis, said: “You don’t remember me, do you? I met you at Prom this spring—my name’s Dalton.”
“Mr. Dalton—of course!” she exclaimed. “I remember you very well—” she stopped, and twinkled. The echo of his blunt lecture seemed for a moment to hang in the air. She turned to introduce him to Grant and Packy; but Packy had gone. The scene was over, and she relaxed.
“I’ll cut in later,” said Jim Dalton, and moved away. The music had started again, the orchestra-leader announcing that this was “the last dance.” In Grant’s arms she floated off to the strains of “I Love You Truly.”
“Hope that fellow who said he’d cut in, will have sense enough not to do it on the last dance,” he growled, clasping her almost fiercely to him.
“If that fellow hadn’t come up just then, I don’t know what might have happened,” Joy suggested.
“Damn Packy! Forgive me, Joy; but don’t you think Packy rates a damn or two? Of all the cake-eating parlour pythons——”
“Your mother was watching us. In fact, she still is. That was an awful scene to make, Grant.”
“Scene! Asking him one question. It was nothing to what I wanted to do. At that, though, he faded away pretty quick. Joy you dance like—like nothing at all.”
“So do you!” she thrilled up at him; and they drifted rapturously past Mrs. Grey, whose eyes, freshly iced, followed them everywhere.
Jim Dalton did not cut in until the very last encore. Grant relinquished Joy, then went revengefully to cut in on Betty, who looked far from delighted to be interrupted in the midst of “I Love You Truly” by a brother.
“I want to thank you for coming up when you did,” Joy said.
“It was nothing; I wanted to see you. How have you been? You look——”
“I look—what?”
“It’s not easy to describe the change. I would hardly have known you if I hadn’t overheard one of those two young men—ah—mentioning your name.”
Joy’s lips twitched. “Do I look like ‘a typical model showing off some undress creation’?” She was as surprised as he at the ease with which she remembered his words. Certainly, being with Jerry sharpened one’s wits.
“No. Of course not. You look older, for one thing—and——”
“And—what?”
“And as if—well, as if you were—unsettled in your mind—looking for something you hadn’t found.”
“Everyone—always is looking for something they haven’t found—don’t you think so?” she countered, watching Grant from the corner of her eye, while her heart beat a painful tattoo of triumph against her side. She had—found what she had always been looking for! Girlhood’s tentative dream was victorious certainty.
“I haven’t asked you how you happened to be around these parts?”
She told him she was studying music in Boston, and living with Jerry. This he received in a silence which became so long that she did not know what thread he was taking up when he finally demanded:
“Did you mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“That you were living with Jerry. Were you serious?” Receiving an affirmative answer, he fell back again into a silence which lasted until Grant cut back at the end of the dance.
They rode home with Betty and her “man,” thus escaping Mrs. Grey, and Joy and Betty went upstairs before Mr. and Mrs. Grey returned. Betty was full of thrills. She confided to Joy that she “had found someone harmonious, even to dancing, at last.” He was her escort of the evening, and they were engaged.
“Engaged!” Joy exclaimed. “You, at your age—you don’t want to be married at sixteen, do you?”
“Of course not!” Betty tossed her head. “My goodness, Joy, I’ve been engaged three times already—being engaged and getting married have got nothing to do with each other!”
Saying which, she departed, leaving Joy undecided whether to laugh or be horrified. Decidedly, there was more to these na?ve, sunburned kittens than met the eye of the innocent bystander.
Sunday breakfast at the Greys’ was a late affair, and the table was not fully assembled until eleven. Joy dreaded meeting Mrs. Grey’s scrutiny again; she even shrank from seeing Grant, for in the morning sun she blushed at the memory of things under the white heat of the moon, and longed for another moon with no glaring day intervening; but finally she could not longer postpone it. Mrs. Grey was presiding at the table, immaculate and unruffled as ever, not a hair of her marcel straying from its designated path. She enquired meticulously if Joy had slept well, then talked past Joy on one side and Grant and Betty on the other, to Mr. Grey at the head. Joy and Grant met each other’s eyes for one glowing moment, then devoted their attention to their plates. After all, it was the first real meal they had had since yesterday morning. Conversation flitted its way about as noncommittally as a feather-duster, ignoring the vital corners. It was Mr. Grey who grew expansive after his soft-boiled eggs and toast.
“In my day,” he remarked with a chuckle, “we didn’t choose a club-house dance in which to pick a fight. We chose some vacant lot.”
“We weren’t fighting,” said Grant curtly.
Mrs. Grey allowed her sea blue eyes, cold and sparkling as salt water, to rest on Joy for one pungent moment. The air tingled with omission. She spoke finally, as she rose from the table: “We shall hope to hear you sing later in the day, Miss Nelson.”
A stupid, hot Sunday, composed of working through the Sunday papers, sitting on the piazza talking about weather probabilities, and keeping maids perspiring to bring cooling drinks. Grant and Joy had no excuse to slip away, with the events of the day before stalking in the minds if not the words of the Greys, and the stubborn fact that Joy was nominally Betty’s guest. Betty remarked that it was a pity church attendance had gone out of style; it did fill in part of Sunday, anyway. She had suggested golf, which Joy did not play, and tennis, which Joy had expressed a willingness to watch; and everyone had unanimously declared that it was too hot to go down on the beach in the blaze of the sun. Motoring was voted down, since on Sunday “there was such a fearful rabble in the road,” and the day groaned away in an agony of repressions for Grant and Joy.
Towards evening, as it grew cooler, some callers arrived, and Betty pointed out that now was the time for Joy to sing. So Joy sang—not the “Unrealized Ideal” this time, but some little French songs which evoked polite murmurs of appreciation from the guests who were of the type that know nothing about music and care less, but know that it is the thing to appreciate it. And then Betty, rolling her eyes in a manner she considered romantic, requested “Last Night.”
The room with its conventional puppets of listeners faded away; Joy was only conscious of one intent brown face. What if all day they had been and still were hedged about by tiresome details; she could speak to him if there were thousands listening. Oh, to make love with one’s voice:
“I think of you in the daytime
??I dream of you by night
I wake and would you were here, love
??And tears are blinding my sight.
I hear a low breath in the lime-tree
??The wind is floating through
And oh, the night, my darling,
??Is sighing, sighing for you, for you.”
Her emotion was mastering her, so that her voice came forth in bursts of gorgeous tone or died away in a tremulous whisper; but it carried a quality that made her listeners look uncomfortable, as conventional people tend to do when they feel that their emotions are being aroused in a public place.
She ended, and there was a small moment of recapitulation before the polite murmurs started again. She left the piano and crossed to Grant—veiled under the general chatter, it was the first moment they had to speak to each other.
“I sang to you,” she said; and the Chinese masks which they had both been assuming all day, made easier by the breath-taking weather and the environment, fell away from them as they looked at each other.
“You must always sing to me, Joy—your singing’s you—and I can’t bear to have anyone else even get a part of you.”
She smiled up at him, seeing only the worship of the idea. The callers stayed to a “simple” Sunday supper of three courses and “on the sides,” then left the Grey family to settle down to a repletely quiet Sunday evening. Not so Betty; she announced that “Mr. Cortland” was coming to take her riding, and Joy and Grant could come along too. Mrs. Grey made a few quiet remarks about the ordinary people who rode Sunday evenings, but “Mr. Cortland,” Betty’s newly-acquired fiancé, arrived about that time, and the four set off without even a pretense of asking Mr. and Mrs. Grey to accompany them. They went in “Mr. Cortland’s” racer, which necessitated three-in-one seat and one-on-the-floor, always a piquant combination.
“No use taking a larger car,” said the fiancé, in a bored-man-of-the-world tone: “everyone would scrap as to who wouldn’t drive, and I’d have to, and I can’t drive with one arm—I can only stop.”
“Oh, Nick, you do tear off the worst line,” trilled Betty. “Come on—take the Jerusalem road—of course we’ll go to Nantasket. I want to ride in the roller-coasters!”
Grant turned and looked up at Betty. “You’re not going to Nantasket to-night,” he said. “I suppose you want to ride the merry-go-round too, and dance in the Palm Garden! Where do you get your lowbrow tastes?”
Betty played a tune on Nick’s shoulder. “Drive straight to the border,” she told him in a sepulchral voice, then to Grant: “Stuffy old thing! I’ve been cooped in all day till I could scream—, thank goodness, we can forget it’s Sunday at Paragon Park!”
What was there about visiting an amusement park on Sunday to call forth such dignity from Grant? It was almost like his mother might have spoken—Joy anxiously intervened before the brother-and-sister controversy became too distressing: “It’s Mr. Cortland’s car, so we can’t help where they go;—but we can sit and wait for them.”
So they sat in the car outside Paragon Park, while Betty went in to try her fiancé’s endurance on the roller-coaster and in eating pop-corn. The time raced by as swiftly as their heart-beats; they had a whole day to catch up with, Grant said. “Our whole lives, too, Grant,” Joy whispered against his lips.
“To think that we never knew each other—before!”
“But—loving this way is much more beautiful! If we had known each other always—love would have made no more impression than a—a candle lighted in a room blazing with electricity. But what a difference—when the candle is lit in the darkness!”
“Joy, how can you say such wonderful things? You say them all—everything that I can only feel, you say—or sing! How can a girl like you ever be satisfied with me?”
“Don’t, Grant—that’s blasphemy! Or something!”
“I can’t bear to think of you going away to-morrow. We’ve seen each other so little. I’ll be coming up to Boston every day, though.”
“Every day!—Every single day? Could—could we honestly keep that up?”
“Silly girl. . . . Now you make me feel almost up to your level. Do you realize how much we’ll have to see of each other before we dare spring an engagement on my people?”
“Oh . . . I had forgotten all about . . . people and things,” she mumbled and the exalted rhythm of her heart-beat sagged ever so little. Mrs. Grey had such adequately discouraging eyes. . . .