Joy’s decision for steadfast endeavour, having once been made, did not waver. In the days that followed she began to feel a calm content; content that she had never known before. All the restlessness, the fits of uneasiness and depression that had been hers, had vanished in the light of a concrete objective; Pa’s talk had miraculously swept away the cobwebs in her brain. There was always the dull ache of Grant’s continued silence; but as the days wore on, it became more and more negative. Pa sent her home for two weeks’ rest before she started in on the program he had mapped out for her, and fourteen days spent in the little town made her the more eager to begin work. Her father, after his first welcome and expression of delight at her progress, was as preoccupied as ever, the surprise incident upon Joy’s exposition of why she must return to Boston and start a more extensive (and expensive) course of study, jolting him only temporarily. After all, he knew that other girls went away to school, and he knew that his wife would have desired this for Joy.
Joy no longer felt guilty over his misunderstanding her place of residence. She had paid the penalty of deceit in hardening experience; more than the penalty in losing Grant. From now on, she was proceeding with her eyes opened. That she was to continue living with Jerry did not mean what her advent to the apartment had meant; it meant that the apartment was now the best background for her labours, with a piano hers to practice upon at all hours, and a ménage that was run to suit three girls instead of thirty, as was the case at the Annex.
The little town was preoccupied. The girls, after their first effusion of greeting, were as preoccupied as ever in trying to bring the rotation of the three or four boys in town their way. Joy was different, anyway, now that she was doing that singing stuff. She wouldn’t sing popular songs, and that highbrow stuff was awfully boring. She wouldn’t go to the movies, or bring her sewing over and gossip, so what could one do with her?
Tom was working for the summer at the Foxhollow Corners bank, of which his father was president and he in turn expected to be some day, as he informed Joy in the first three minutes of his first call. He had another year at college, and in his conversation strayed collegewards.
“Remember Jack Barnett, Joy? Well, he’s married. Pulled it off the other day, I guess—just got the cards. They used to say he was engaged to some home-town specimen that he never dared to take to any of the house parties, and this looks as if there was some truth in it.”
Joy made no comment. Tom babbled on of college affairs. He was the type of youth who took it for granted that the girl whom he was favouring with his company would be enthralled with every detail of happenings that touched upon him. With this genus, the girl’s only requisite is silence that bespeaks the listening ear. Joy made no remarks until the end of his call, then she said casually: “Did you ever know Jim Dalton well in college?”
“Oh, not very. He ran with a different crowd.” It was a familiar college tone; not insulting; merely relegating Jim to the oblivion where he belonged.
“I’ve seen him several times—he’s working in Boston.”
“Oh, he’s all right—I guess his friends like him well enough.”
More praising with faint damns! But Joy did not absorb the mandate of the busy college man, as she would have last spring. She laughed amiably as she sped Tom on his way. She was still laughing as she came into the hall and passed her father, who was coming in from his evening smoke.
“What are you laughing at, my dear?” Mr. Nelson inquired, pausing for a moment although he had an excellent book of the vintage of ’61 awaiting him in the library.
“Myself, mostly!” she replied, and went on into the music room, walking slowly over the tacked-down carpet to her beloved grand piano. How standards of college changed after college, and how futilely provincial were they who still saw life through those standards! Jim Dalton was far from the nonentity class in which she had placed him last spring. If only Grant had been like Jim——
Her fingers found the accompaniment of little bells, chiming from far away—and she was murmuring the words—
“My only love is always near
??In country or in town——”
She broke off with a little sob, and her hands stayed without motion on the soundless keys. “The Unrealized Ideal!” And so it was.
“Lightly I speed while hope is high
??And youth beguiles the race
I follow—follow still—but I
??Shall never see his face.”
“Grant!” she cried, then shivered as the sound travelled around the room, through the tidies and antimacassars, over to the what-not and glass candlesticks, and back again to her.
How could it all have been so dear—how could she have been so tremblingly ecstatic? How could it all be ended—leaving everything as flat and grey as the beach after the sun had been wet-blanketed by the sea mist, on that day of centuries?——But after the sun had gone—the moon had come up. She raised her head and started playing again; and this time it was an old Italian air over which she had been working.
The little town had no place for her; it was preoccupied. And so she came back at the end of two weeks, ready to plunge into work, actually longing for the feverish round of the apartment to swirl about her while she worked. While she worked.
Pa found her a French woman and Italian professor for instructors, and he himself taught her the elements of music. “I don’t always like to bother with this myself,” he said, “but I want you to get it right—see the poetry and fascination of it—not have it dinned into you in a cut-and-dried way that only makes you aware of the toilsome mathematics of the thing.”
She threw herself into her study with an intense concentration that left her no energy for anything else—that left her almost no time to listen to the telephone and door bell, and watch the mail . . . for she still was in that vague expectancy. Surely he would not be forever gone, without a word save the fitful telephoning during her illness. She watched Jerry’s gaiety and wondered if beneath, Jerry also was hiding expectancy—if she still hoped that any day she might hear some word. . . . She could see Jerry reverting to the newsie in grey sweater and bloomers, kicking “The Idylls of the King” about the room. Jerry was not to be blamed. “The Idylls” were long out of date; and where was there a Perfect Knight?
Late one afternoon, Jerry burst in upon her while she was indulging in a little light reading: “How to Listen to an Orchestra.”
“Joy, if you study any more you’ll get eye-trouble, and whoever heard of a singer getting away with wearing glasses? We’ve absolutely got to have another girl to-night—it’ll do you good to get out! How can you stand this perpetual-motion-of-the-brain!”
Joy laughed. “Sorry, Jerry, but I couldn’t. Don’t tempt me.”
“Well—you really ought to get out—it isn’t because we’ve got to have another girl that I wanted you. As it happens, there’s another available. Félicie Durant is back in town.”
Joy had heard Jerry and Sarah speak of Félicie Durant once or twice, and the name had left an impression, being about the only girl’s name they had ever taken the breath to mention.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jerry; “you nail on your lid right now and we’ll wiggle over to Félicie’s. You’ve got to have some exercise, and there’s much more chance of my getting Félicie to go to-night by a personal interview than if I popped the project over the phone. Come on!”
Jerry was wearing a rumpled lavender linen dress of simple lines. She watched with an amused eye, as Joy changed into dark things for street wear.
“You certainly are getting Bostonian,” she jeered. “It’s balmy out if it is fall, and I for one am not going to stifle if other people are sporting advance-model velvet lids!” And crushing a saucy yellow straw down over her eyes without bothering to pat her hair into position on either side, an indispensable rite with most girls in the major operation of putting on a hat, she dragged Joy forth before Joy could add a veil and white kid gloves to her costume.
“This is no afternoon-tea call,” she said, hailing a Brighton-bound street car. “Félicie’s not that kind of a girl—not that she’s my kind, either, except the way that girl swallows excitement down whole would do credit to even my digestion.”
“What is she like?” Joy asked, as they joined the circle of strap-hanging women that crowded the street car full of doggedly sitting men.
“She’s a jellyfish,” replied Jerry, treading on the toes of the man in front of her who spread his newspaper as a defensive sheath between him and the women before him. “She’s got the spine and determination of a jellyfish. Lives out here with her old great-aunt or something——But wait till you see her.”
They disembarked over in Brighton where rows of apartment houses duplicated themselves, and rang the bell at one of faded yellow brick. The door swung open, and Joy followed Jerry to the right on the first floor, where an open door awaited them.
“I’m in the kitchen,” cried a voice whose echoes carried hauntingly silver. “Come on down!”
A first glimpse of Félicie Durant was unforgettable. Large brown velvet eyes trimmed with elaborate fringes of lashes that curled up at the end, giving her face a look of starry oblivion to mundane matters; a face whose daintily regular features were brought out by a skin as smooth as the surface of a pearl, with a cobwebby maze of ringlets dark as her eyes, drifting around and away from her temples. All this Joy saw in one delighted instant. Then the lips, scarlet and full almost to pouting, parted in a smile of welcome, and Félicie waved a soapy hand at the two girls.
“Don’t come too near me—I’m washing the dog!”
Sure enough. There was the kitchen tub—and a little shivering white thing being drowned in suds. It was hard to connect Félicie with washing a dog, however little and white he might be.
“Good for you, old girl,” said Jerry. “Those poodles look like dirty dish-rags if they’re not put into Lux twice a day. Félicie, this is Joy Nelson, and you can see she did you the justice of dressing for a nice formal call.”
“Wait till I rinse him out and then I’ll shake hands,” Félicie panted. Sharing her breathlessness, the two watched while she first rinsed, then wrung out the animated mop, and put it down on the floor with an order to “go to it.” The mop whisked itself out of sight.
“He runs all around and rolls in all the rugs and gets dry all by himself,” she explained proudly.
“Is that hard on the rugs, or isn’t it? I just asked,” said Jerry.
The fringes flustered; the dark eyes drooped. “Why, I—I never—thought of that!” Félicie admitted. “But”—she brightened—“this is a furnished apartment, mostly, and the rugs are the old landlord’s. So it’s quite all right after all!”
“Does ‘the old landlord’ know you keep a dog?”
“Well—but you would hardly call Fizz a dog, now, would you?” she triumphed. “Come on in my room while I put on some clothes. She pulled off and carefully hung up the kitchen apron which had been protecting her somewhat gossamer attire from the wear and tear attendant on canine ablutions, and ran before them to a speckless white boudoir that had the air of not having quite recovered from its last cleaning. In spite of Félicie’s activities, that was also the way the kitchen had looked. Jerry’s apartment always appeared to be waiting for its next cleaning.
“I have a new picture of Greg,” said Félicie, disappearing into a closet. “There on the dressing table.”
A large photograph of a man with sleek, dark hair parted in the middle and watered back; a face whose good looking conformity could have been singled out as “a college type” —framed in ivory which carried out the scheme of the dressing table’s dainty appurtenances.
“It’s good,” said Jerry. “Still in love with him?”
A muffled but none the less sure-fire assent came from the closet. She evidently was the kind of girl who dressed in the closet if there were other girls in the room.
“Then why the devil won’t you marry him?” Jerry exploded, slamming the picture down with a force that made the ivory manicure set start shimmying. She turned to Joy. “Félicie’s in love with Greg; he’s crazy as a fool about her; and she won’t even get engaged, much less marry him!”
“Now, Jerry, you know perfectly well you wouldn’t either,” said Félicie, and again her voice trailed silver, as she came out of the closet.
“Oh, you pretty—pretty—Thing!” thought Joy. A white gown of foaming lace swirled about her, from which the darkness of her eyes and hair and the redness of her lips gleamed. Her figure now was unexpectedly rounded and full, proportioned so beautifully that the breath-taking entirely of the vision inspired Joy to classic simile. As she buttoned herself into her dress, she looked as Venus rising from the foam would have done well to look.
“I’m twenty years old,” Félicie was continuing; “and for a girl at my age to marry would be sacrifice, human sacrifice. If girls marry nowadays at twenty, they’re either afraid they’ve got their only chance, or they haven’t the cash to hold out, or they’re just plain fools. And you know, Jerry, I’m not any one of those.”
“Go on,” said Jerry. “Joy’ll be interested to hear your theories.”
Félicie appealed to Joy. “Don’t you think so, too?”
Her loveliness stirred none of the animosity in Joy that pretty women too often arouse in one another. Joy smiled back at her. “Don’t you think each case is different?”
“Well, take mine. I care more for Greg than anyone. But think if I should marry him now! Why—I’m only twenty. I’ve got at least four good years before me of fun and excitement, the best years of my life and looks, and why should I devote them to being domestic? After I’m married, I can never have the kind of a good time I have now. I may be fonder of Greg than anyone—but I’m fond of other men, too! I like the excitement of each new man, more than—more than——”
“More than marrying Greg,” Jerry supplied.
She nodded in relief. “Yes, that’s it, and the way I look at it is, it’s better to get it all out of my system before I marry than after, don’t you think so?”
“You never will that way.” Jerry spoke curtly. “Haven’t you read that appetite grows on what feeds it?” She lit a cigarette. Félicie’s eyes roved to her fine lace curtains in resignation before she went on.
“It isn’t as if I weren’t sure that Greg will stick for several years at least. Why, he never looks at another girl. And it isn’t as if I were the sort of girl who would expect to go right on adding up men after I marry. No, when I marry I in going to have a home and children, and I’m not going to marry until I’m ready for them.”
“It sounds reasonable,” said Joy, fascinated.
“And when I marry I want to live neatly,” said Félicie, with a comfortable glance around the glistening room. “And neatly to me means enough money. Greg isn’t making enough for that yet—and while I live here with auntie I have enough. I wish, Jerry, you wouldn’t always pick on me about him.”
“I hate to see a waste of good material,” Jerry murmured.
“That’s what it would be, if I married,” she retorted, her voice again carrying high lights. “A girl stands to lose everything by an early marriage—her looks, her youth, and her fun! Can you imagine me with the yowl of a baby for my only excitement? It’s not a bit like you to take this stand!”
Joy stole a look at Jerry, but her face was wreathed in smoke as she answered in lazy tones: “Well, come off the platform, old dear. I was only heaving a couple of sobs for Greg—that boy has a few brains that weren’t put in cold storage at Yale. Of course, I’m glad you’re still on my side of the wall. Came around to make you shove aside anything you’ve started going for to-night and tack yourself on to a dizzy party.”
“I have a date for to-night, but he’s not a new man,” she ruminated. “Is it a good party?”
“I said, dizzy! A bunch of Williams men—they’ve cornered the world’s best jazz-fiends to beat a nasty measure—down at Croft Inn. Private party—we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. There are one or two other girls coming, some subdebs from Boston who are going to climb the waterspout or something, but they told me to get another girl. Like the noise of it?”
“I should say so! I was only going in town to dance with him alone. Give me a crowd every time! What’ll you wear?”
“Evening dress stuff, they say, which means the girls will and the men won’t.” She threw her cigarette stub at the wastebasket, and after a few waverings which Félicie watched tensely, it went in. “Well—we’ve got to go along. We’ll be around for you to-night, some time. Be ready!”
“Good-bye, Miss Durant,” said Joy, taking a last comprehensive look at the massed loveliness before her. She half wished that she were going that night. To see it drawn up in battle array!
“We must have a movie date some time,” Félicie smiled, but her smile was changed to a shriek as she followed them down the hall. “You didn’t close the door, and he got out! Oh, Fizz!”
She captured him in the lower entry and held him carefully away from the lace of her dress, his red tongue dangling, his little eyes peering pinkly from beneath his drying bangs, as she again speeded them on their way.
“Well, what did you think of the human jellyfish?” Jerry asked, as they made for their regular “taxi,” a Subway prepayment car.
“Jerry—I think she’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. But I don’t in the least get why she’s like a jellyfish.”
“Listen. If you’ve ever seen the animal, you know it’s flabby and yet you can’t pull it apart. That’s what she is.”
“I don’t know. Her arguments were pretty good; they’ve started me thinking.”
“Well, all I’ve got to say is this: I never saw anyone fill the flowing bowl—and drink it and have it left. And I don’t think she can pull it off any more than anyone else.”
Joy was a little more weary of work than she cared to admit, and found a welcome diversion in watching Jerry and Sarah prepare for the evening. Even the familiar spectacle of Sarah whitewashing her neck, back, shoulders and arms with liquid powder, was amusing. When they left, wrapping about themselves with conscious sumptuousness new evening cloaks that Jerry had recently evolved, she could not circumvent a sigh. After all—she was going from one extreme to the other.
She went to the piano and started playing the score of Faust, as Pa was now working her through the r?le of Marguerite. “Old fashioned, but it will teach you much,” he had said. It was all within her increased powers of vocalisation except the trill in the Jewel Song. When she sang and played exultantly through the score, she felt lifted to a zenith of mauve heights which trembled in ecstasy of tone—until her next lesson. She played now, supporting an even lusciousness of tone—
“Je voudrais bien savoir quel était ce jeune homme
Si c’est un grand’seigneur, et comment il se nomme.”
The piano under her hands transmuted itself into a great orchestra; the walls of the room widened to the huge stage of the Metropolitan; and she, Marguerite, was standing with clasped hands savouring the wonder of love at first sight. She was glad that she was more slender than most of the vocalists who could essay the r?le; and no wig would be needed to cover her own golden hair.
The sharp ringing of the door bell cut in upon her dream, and stage and great orchestra vanished together with Marguerite-who-needed-no-wig. She went to the door with a feeling of irritation. Who——
A tall, brown figure, somewhat leaner and older looking. Eyes that were clear——
“Grant!” she cried.
With no more thought than a snowflake takes to melt, she was in his arms, and their lips met in a kiss that stopped and sighed, then began again.
“We’d better close the door,” said Grant. In the little pause while he preserved appearances by shutting them in the apartment, she put herself away from him, a little breathless, her hair slipping down about her shoulders.
“What made me do that?” she trembled; he was turning to her again, and she drew away farther and kept the distance between them while leaving the hall.
“Joy——” The living room gained, he had come up to her again and was stroking her hair. “I’ve thought everything all out—oh, I’ve thought of nothing else—and everything’s clear in my mind now. Darling—I want you to marry me just as soon as you can.”
She stared up at him without meaning, her brain a tumult of horror about which revolved the question: “What made me do that?”
“I’ve thought it all out—and now I know—I was a fool to judge you by anything but my own love. I—want you, Joy.”
She jerked her head, and his caressing fingers tore her hair. “Go away, Grant, go and sit down far away from me—so we can talk this out—impartially!”
“Impartially! What’s there to talk out—impartially? Joy—I don’t know what I was thinking of, that night. To even question you—after what we had been, to each other——It’s all come clear to me, in these weeks of being without you.”
“Let me hope for your sake—that it won’t take as long for you to get other facts in life clear to you—as it did, this!”
“I called you up before—and they said you were ill. Of course I knew that just meant you wouldn’t see me. So I waited—and took a chance on coming unannounced.”
“I was—ill. I would have seen you—I waited for you, after I was better——”
“Joy! You were really ill? Why didn’t you send for me?”
“Why would I have had to? Others—came without being sent for.”
With a hissing intake of breath she drew away from him again, putting the table between them.
“Why, Joy, what’s the matter, dear? You’re acting as if I were a wild beast.”
She moved to the piano and sat on the bench before it. “No, Grant—I’m merely—protecting myself against myself. When I saw you so suddenly—after I thought I’d never see you again;—sit down there a minute—I’ve got to get all this straight.”
He obeyed with a frown. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither—did—I. But now I do! Now I do!” She threw back her head, and looked at him impersonally. “Grant, you’ve come back too late. I’ve learned to do without you.”
He made an impatient motion as if to brush her words away. “Do you expect me to believe that—after what happened a minute ago?”
“That—is what helped me to see! I don’t think—I ever was really in love with you. It was infatuation—blind infatuation—or else—how could I have done—what I did just now! I haven’t missed you—except when I was idle; and when girls are idle they always have to be in love, or missing someone, or moping because they haven’t got anybody to miss—that’s the way girls seem to be made!”
“You only missed me—when you were idle,” he repeated as if it were the statement of a theorem he could not prove.
“Yes, and then I missed only you! I didn’t miss your spirit, your soul to mingle with my own—and so you see, I didn’t have the real, true longing for you!”
“Then you did long for me!” He had left his seat and come to her; but she held up wavering hands.
“Passion—dressed up! I wonder how many people know it from love—before it is too late!”
“Joy, you’re morbid. It doesn’t do to analyze things so. You’ve been brooding here all evening over your old music; no wonder you see in such a light. When you marry me, everything will straighten out, and you won’t get yourself all wrought up over the piano all the time.”
“I see what you mean—and that’s another thing. If I married you now, I would have to give up my music.”
“Oh, not entirely, of course. You would always have it as a lovely gift, to take up now and then—but not as a god to slave before and give everything to——I’ve watched you, Joy, and that’s the way you are. I wouldn’t respect a man much, who let his wife peg on at the thing in a professional way, when he could take care of her himself.”
Joy laughed, almost stonily. “Apart from the fact that I don’t love you—I’m not ready to marry anyone yet. Since I’ve last—seen you, I’ve made my decision. And I’m only standing on the threshold of my work! And I never—never could be happy to give it up now—even if I was in love——A girl waits for the man she loves to establish himself in his line of work, waits until he has gotten to the place where her partnership is possible. But judging by you, a man wouldn’t wait for me—wouldn’t wait until I got my head above water, and then let me carry on my work after marriage, as he carries on his.”
“Women who advance such arguments are liable to forget that their business after marriage should be quite different from before,” he said in a low tone.
She looked at him with unembarrassed eyes. “Supposing I recognised that. Supposing I said, I will be Domesticity itself after I am married. But I still require you to wait several years for me—as I must attain the perfection for which I am aiming, or my soul will always yearn after it, and I will never be content? What then?”
He did not speak. She turned and played a few chords on the piano. “I’m nineteen years old—nearly twenty. Say you wait three years and a half for me—until I’m twenty-three. Would you do that?”
“Joy, you’re talking perfect rot. To wait over three years—to waste the best years of our life we might be having together——”
“Stop a minute. I will be only twenty-three then. You will be only twenty-five. That is an age at which most young people nowadays think themselves lucky to start—and so would you if you didn’t have your own little inherited income through no effort of your own. Only three years and a half, Grant! Would you do it?”
“You know perfectly well you’re asking too much for any man. Be reasonable, Joy. What has gotten into you to make you talk like this? It seems to me that after I have fought out my problem, and come to you like this, there might be a little something expected of you.”
She smiled, faintly amused. “Since you had decided, you thought there was no more to it—but you see, Grant, all that time I was going through experiences and thoughts—that have made me see that as far as I’m concerned—there’s no more to it.” She rose, her gesture spelling dismissal. “So you wouldn’t wait—three years and a half, or whatever it might be. I think that shows, Grant, that your love was about the same as mine.”
Mesmerized by the finality of her tone, he started to the door, but stopped halfway. “Am I to believe—that you are always going to take this stand—be this way?”
“Please do believe it. I am not drunk with music—I shall always take this stand with you—because, you see, I don’t really love you, and I suppose that—makes all the difference!”
He gained the door, and stood looking back. She was regarding him with parted lips, cheeks darkly flushed, a little pulse beating in her temple, her hair blanketing her shoulders in folds of gold. “And please,” she articulated in a thin thread of sound—“please forget me—very quickly!”
“Forget you——” The words escaped him in a sort of wonder. They stood motionless, eyes fixed upon one another, and into the faces of each there stole an impatient bewilderment. They had leaped to the peaks of poetry and youth’s dreams for a few lambent hours, and now the peaks were far away again. Veiled in the clouds of awakened scepticism and analysis, the peaks were higher than before, and their aspect had forever changed.
A tremor passed in the air between them. Knifing across it came the stab of the doorbell—anticlimax of everyday routine cutting the wheels of drama from under. Few can stand the swift descent. Joy hesitated, then came forward. Grant hastily captured his hat, which had rolled to the hall floor some time ago, and stood brushing off the dust of which there was a disgraceful amount.
As the door swung open both fell back in different reactions. Jim Dalton stood on the threshold.
“Good evening, Miss Nelson,” he smiled. “I——” His glance travelled past her to Grant.
“This seems to be Miss Nelson’s evening at home,” Grant said evenly. “Good-bye, Joy.”
She watched him signal for the elevator, still brushing the dust from his hat. Grant would probably be a masculine replica of his mother when he was her age——
Jim did not speak until the elevator had sunk from sight. “I was—passing by—and saw the sixth story light on—so I took the chance of interrupting a party.”
“There was no party, as you see,” Joy answered. Her resentment against this man had long since died—had died with her regard for Grant—and instead she felt something she told herself was not quite positive enough to be pleasure. “Do come in; I think it was very nice of you to take this chance. You see,” she continued as she led the way to the living room for the second time in that half hour, “you see. I have had no chance—to thank you for anything.”
“I hate to be thanked,” he said quickly. “There’s no more futile feeling than teetering on one’s toes through anything like that—it makes one feel like such a fool—and then simpering, ‘Oh, please don’t mention it!’ Oh, please, Miss Nelson, don’t make me say that!”
He was talking away from the subject, and she made no further attempt to express her gratitude; words on anything touching that night came with difficulty. He was not looking at her with such persistency that she remembered that her hair was still flowing down her back, scattering hairpins hither and yon. She anchored her arms to her sides against the involuntary hands-flying-to-hair-motion. That would spell a self-conscious guilt. No, she would leave it that way, and he would think she was wearing it unconfined because she had just washed it, or thought it was good for it, or something.
“I am going to say something very frank now,” he began, transferring his gaze to her. This time her hands almost did fly to her hair. Was he going to speak of it? He continued: “I want to tell you that I know you don’t like me, and never have, and this dropping-in to-night is going to be my positively last appearance. To tell the truth—I wasn’t just passing here at all; I came out on purpose. I had to see you again—to see if you were really all right now—I haven’t seen you since your convalescence, you know. But now that I have—and you’re looking better than I’ve ever seen you—I’m not going to bother you any more by popping around.”
Joy laughed, which rather spoilt the effect of his speech. “You talk as though you were in the habit of shadowing me!”
“Well—once or twice I did take that upon myself—and I know what you must have thought of my officiousness. I didn’t have the right, which I have now assumed really does belong to someone.”
“You mean—Grant? Oh, no.” She brushed the subject aside. “I never disliked you, Jim; I just hadn’t made room for you in my mind.”
She did not realize that the change in his face was partly due to the fact that she had called him by his first name; she was so accustomed to slipping into colloquial terms on short acquaintance, since she had been with Jerry.
“You mean—that you have ‘made room for me in your mind’—now?”
“Why—yes. I didn’t know it, but I have. The reason I didn’t know it—was probably because I never think of you as a man. I think of you as a friend—who once was a friend indeed to me.”
He did not speak for a short space.
“There are very few girls whom I should care to have as friends. Most girls simply can’t achieve the atmosphere, the uncoloured give-and-take of friendship,—but I have always felt that you would be different.”
“Don’t put it all on the girl!” Joy laughed. “There are men with whom it is just as impossible to establish an—an uncoloured atmosphere.”
“Maybe they have been led to think that’s the only atmosphere that can exist between a man and a girl, by their experience with girls.”
“I wonder why it is,” she mused, “that sooner or later the blame always comes back to us.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you defend your sex; girls so often think it’s a good line to be witty about girls. When ever I hear a girl say she doesn’t like other girls, I look for something wrong with her.”
“You’re always lecturing!” she cried. “Ever since I first met you, you’ve lectured about something!”
He laughed. “I certainly take a long way around saying that I would like you as a friend!”
“I said the same thing myself, a long while ago; so let’s stop arguing about friendship between man and woman, and be it!”
Their minds were not on their argument. Joy was thinking how rushed, or distracted, “or something,” she must have always been, not to notice before how good looking he was. But of course he wasn’t tall, and tall men were “her type.” “He’s a blond, and I’m a blonde,” she told herself. “We’re not the ‘opposites that attract,’ but we can be good friends, just the same.”
If he could have read her thoughts, he would have used them as further proof for his argument; but since one of Joy’s greatest assets was the power of preserving a sweet, listening attitude no matter what went on beneath, he was kept busy, thinking up general subjects to discuss with this anomaly among the girls, one who did not take the initiative in conversation.
When he rose to go, they felt as if they were very old friends already, having matched opinions, likes and dislikes for nearly an hour.
“Remember, this isn’t your last appearance,” said Joy.
“Remember!——You’re musical, aren’t you? You told me at that dance that you were studying music here in town. Well—what do you say we take in some concerts together? And the Symphony—that’ll be fun if only to watch the audience. Would you care?”
“I’m awfully afraid I shan’t know enough to appreciate the Symphony,” she hesitated. “But I know it would be a good thing for me, and I’ll go with you if you’ll promise not to know too much about it.”
“If you could see me! I go—and sit through it—and sometimes I feel like jumping out of my seat—but most of the time I’m vaguely bored. We’ll go together, and maybe combined we can get what we should out of it.”
After he had gone, she went back and sang through the score of Marguerite as if she had had no interruption a little over an hour and a half ago. A little over an hour and a half—had so short a time passed since she had seen Grant, had decided so much, had let so much go out of her life? She could not evoke even a shiver over the blotting out of that vista of her dreams, nothing but a little impatient frown. Things had no right to get so dead, after having been so alive.
Lovely girl, that Félicie Durant; even if Jerry did call her a jellyfish. Her arguments were clear—to marry now when she had four good years before her which marriage could not replace——Her voice hesitated on a measure. It sounded almost like her argument with Grant—three years and a half from her life at this time, which marriage could not replace——
“Oh, but that’s different,” and her voice caught up with the piano accompaniment and spun heart-satisfying melody—
“Je ris—de me voir
Si belle—en ce miroir——”