Louise looked at her watch. It was half past seven. The day was clear and beautiful. Out against the marine horizon stood a ship. That must be Lynndal's. It would be in at eight. She decided she would stroll down the length of the main street and then return to the wharf.
Although the hour was still so early, the little town displayed about as much life as it ever did. There were women with baskets on their arms, examining produce displayed in the few shops where supplies were procurable. There were carefree resorters already about, enjoying a freshness which must soon evaporate under the scourge of the mounting sun. The main street boasted a good many quaint little curio shops, which somehow managed to do a living business. A typical drowsy Northern Michigan small town—not much of a town, yet of course infinitely better than no town at all.
Louise, as she walked down the one business street of the place, scarcely looked to right or left. She knew every nook and angle of the town—at least so she believed. Having come up now so many summers, wasn't it reasonable to suppose that one would eventually exhaust all the slender resources of a[Pg 91] place like this? And yet, had her eyes been really open she would perhaps have been amazed to behold spread about her a wealth of life undreamed of. Something rich and new in Frankfort? Yes, possibly even here. For those individuals in aprons, weighing out sugar and measuring potatoes so humbly, are not, as a matter of fact, mere shop fixtures, as they have always seemed. The clerk at the soda fountain, who will cheerfully dish up ice cream for the hoodlums when they return hot and famished from their walk on the pier, has, after all, other interests in life than syrups and fizz—unimportant, it may be, yet interests, nevertheless. Yon fat and shabby patriarch, who sits so calmly all day long tilted back in a red armchair outside the drygoods store, is something more, at least potentially, than a painted barber's pole. Inside the drygoods store, although Miss Needham has overlooked her, is the old man's grand-daughter, busily working, dreaming. She works hard all summer so she can go to school winters in Grand Rapids. She has a sweetheart in Grand Rapids, who is taking a business course; they are planning to be married sometime in the sweet by-and-bye.
But one with the enormous and stirring preoccupations of Louise Needham could hardly be expected to look on life with open eyes, or, so to say, analytically. Appreciations must bow and conform. A breezy, impressionistic sort of synthesis is the background such a mentally and emotionally active[Pg 92] person seems inevitably to evolve. As it was with the sunrise, so was it also with the people of the world not personally bound up in her destiny. It really wasn't a deliberate narrowness, but simply a sensible recognition of time's limitations. Certainly the living of one's own personal life must always count first.
Reminiscent and dreaming, she passed down the street, while out at sea the steamer drew closer and closer. In one gaily decorated shop window was displayed an array of summer fiction: alluring titles, with often most astonishing jackets—all the season's best sellers, backed up by certain surviving relics of bygone seasons. There were actually volumes in this window (though now badly faded and of course occupying appropriately inferior positions) which had been the avowed, the lauded best sellers during that summertime, long flown, when Louise and Harold Gates indulged in so free an interchange of kisses. There had been, as a matter of fact, rather a profusion of kisses in the best sellers that year, also: how true they were, after all, to life—that best of all best sellers!
Miss Needham paused before the window. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to examine the miscellany, fruitage of so many seasons, badges of so much smart selling. In the midst of the conglomeration she spied a certain volume, modest in title and hue as compared with some of the others, though still extravagant enough of text, which Leslie had[Pg 93] been telling her about. It was a long historical novel, and Leslie had expressed himself as well pleased with it. He hadn't, as a matter of downright fact, read the book all through, but had skimmed along, omitting all descriptions and the pages where the author philosophized about life. But he had captured the gist of the story, and had retold it to Louise one afternoon while they strolled together in delicious solitude through Lovers' Lane. And she had promised him she would read the book some time and give him her opinion—it going without saying that her opinion, at least to him, would be of moment. Louise was no great reader—certainly not an inveterate reader of long historical novels. Nevertheless, as her eye now encountered it nestling there in the window, a sudden caprice swept her right inside the shop. It was a most amazing thing, but the next moment she found herself telling the clerk she wished to purchase the volume. And then—he fished it out.
The clerk, it must be communicated—a man, by the way, with all sorts of interesting and even enthralling human complexes which Louise did not dream of suspecting, since she knew the town so well—was rather surprised that his early morning customer should desire this particular book rather than some of the more gripping things: Diana's Secret, for instance, which was easily one of the most successful works ever exploited in Frankfort. However, since he had long ago given up all hope of[Pg 94] ever selling the historical romance, and since he expected to run out of Diana copies before the season was ended, the clerk naturally offered no comment upon her choice. Covertly blowing a little dust off the book she had asked for, he wrapped it up, and handed it over the counter.
Louise was by this time mildly self-reproachful. "How silly of me to walk right in like that and buy it!" she sighed. "With the money—let's see. What could I have bought instead ...?"
But however nimbly her mind might exert itself in estimating the complete badness of her bargain, the book went under her arm. Just a kind of giddy, final fling, she argued.
As she proceeded on her way, the girl kept assuring herself that the embrace of the historic romance was decidedly more playful than serious. It would be amusing later on—oh, perhaps a great deal later on—to show Leslie she had been as good as her word. Possibly she might actually read the book—who could tell?—just to please him. Poor Les! After all, he was only a boy. She was two years his senior. It would be foolish of them to think of each other, even were her heart perfectly free.
"Of course it's all right," she said, "for us to be the finest sort of friends; but it must stop there. If I'd guessed how serious a thing it was going to turn out for him I'd have seen it wasn't right to let him think he had any chance...."
[Pg 95]
This, to tell the truth, tended to put it all rather more satisfactorily than had hitherto seemed possible. She was quite pleased, in fact, for it left her in the attitude of repeating "Poor Les!"
Well, yes, she had thrown him over, she admitted—in a certain sense. But only in a sense; and anyway it had to be so. However shallow her reasoning might often appear to others—however often it might fail of horizon—Miss Needham was herself seldom conscious of the slightest insincerity at the time. She had inherited, it is true, a certain intellectual shiftiness from the parent most afflicted with a similar disorder; but however often she might fluctuate to a new point of view, so long as she actually held to it the conception possessed for her all the earmarks of probity and permanence.
"Poor Les! No, no.... I shouldn't have encouraged him so much...." But she hadn't thought at first that Lynndal was coming. And Arizona is very, very far away—especially on fine summer nights, when one isn't wearing any ring....
Yet presently the book under her arm began to appear a somewhat awkward possession. However easy it might be for her to tell Leslie they must be merely friends now, and however blithely she might ask him, after an ancient and at best pretty hackneyed ideal, to look upon her as a sister, it was going to be very hard—for him. Wasn't it? Could it[Pg 96] be otherwise than hard for him? Wouldn't her having bought the book, even, especially if he learned she had bought it, make it all still harder?
Louise was naturally so quick in her sympathies that it troubled her when others couldn't attain as convenient solutions for their problems as she generally did for her own. And being herself party to another's unhappiness would, of course, tend to add certain pricks of conscience to any of the more abstract, though still altruistic, sentiments she might feel. "Well," she admitted, "I guess I shouldn't have bought the book, after all—at least not just now." But of course she could keep it hidden. "I needn't show it to Les right away." For that matter, need she ever show it to him? "I suppose—I really suppose I might drop it into the harbour, and be forever rid of it!"
As though, indeed, determined to act upon this dramatic impulse, Louise turned and walked down amongst some fishermen's huts at the water's edge. Most of the fishermen were out at sea, having not yet brought in the morning's haul from the nets. The rude little huts, where the fish were cleaned and packed in ice for shipping, and where the nets were washed, stood idly open. The early sunshine lay across their doorsteps. Some children were at play, running in and out; and before one of the huts a very old woman sat mending a net, working her hard fingers in a quick, intelligent way.
[Pg 97]
Louise walked out upon a little plank dock which was flung, at this point, into the harbour. The fishermen used the dock when they unloaded their cargoes of fish. It did not extend a great way; but from its extremity, as she faced westward, she perceived the approach of a steamer, still out in the "Big Lake," but nearing the harbour channel. It was probably Lynndal's boat, though it might possibly be one of the Ann Arbor car ferries from across Lake Michigan. She must hurry to the wharf. Still, the notion of throwing the book away persisted. She must rid herself of every vestige of the past. She must come to Lynndal—and it was quite thrilling to put it that way—empty-handed! This would seem to be a formal, a conclusive, even a rather grand way of marking a close to this surreptitious, this unfortunate, yet this of course sufficiently innocent little affair with Leslie—poor Les! Yes, it would be the fitting mark of conclusion; after that her heart would be swept clean. She grasped the book. At first she thought she would fling it far out; then that she would just quietly drop it in. But after all, she slipped the book under her arm again, and made her way hurriedly back to the village street.
Her mind was busy with explanation and a readjustment not, a moment ago, foreseen. "It would have been foolish and stagy to have done that. No, it wouldn't have been right! Perhaps—" yes, [Pg 98]perhaps Hilda would want to read it some day. She brightened. "Leslie said there was much instructive reading in it." Why, yes—the book would do for Hilda, if not for her. Mightn't Hilda even do for Leslie, now that she had thrown him over? Ah, it might be so! The idea occurred to Louise at first as a mere flash of whimsy; however, second thought made the possibility rather too possible to be altogether agreeable....
"Why, I should think it would be the most natural thing in the world," she assured herself. "Of course Hilda's awfully young, but I should think it would be perfectly splendid if they came to care for each other in time. I'm sure it would make it ever so much easier for me." She remembered how oddly her sister had behaved earlier in the day, whenever Leslie was mentioned; how Leslie himself had promised Hilda he would be back in time to play in the tennis tournament with her. "I think it would be just splendid!" she thought. "I'll encourage it, of course, all I can!"
At last, she felt, there was a real solution in sight for poor Les. It would be the very thing! She was so pleased that she laughed aloud as she passed the fat and shabby patriarch tilted back in his red armchair before the drygoods store. But it is possible that even the patriarch, in a philosophy of age as opposed to that of youth, merely thought, as he saw her go by: "Another of the resorters." [Pg 99]Indeed, it is even possible that he did not see her at all.
The steamer drew in through the channel. It was the coast steamer from Ludington, and connected with the Milwaukee line. Louise stood eagerly beside the freight house, peering up at the passengers on the deck. Naturally she was very much excited, and experienced a swift, enveloping sense of joyous romance in being there to welcome the man she expected some day to marry.
To marry!
Suddenly it occurred to her that, after all, she had hardly thought of it once that way! Yes, Lynndal was the man who would be her husband. Marrying him—no, she had somehow barely thought of that part.... Nevertheless, though the discovery was a little staggering, she strained her eyes quite gaily for a first glimpse of him; wondered if he would look to her just the way he looked during those few days when they had been together in Arizona. But just how, by the way, did he look then? All at once she thought of Lynndal Barry as an almost absolute stranger! It was an inexplicable but quite vivid, a rather terrifying sensation. It made the roots of her hair faintly prickle. No, for the life of her she couldn't think of any one's being a more perfect stranger than Lynndal!
Louise wasn't mystically inclined. Yet what she[Pg 100] felt seemed almost a kind of foreboding. Then she laughed to herself, a gay little nervous laugh. And she told herself it was only natural one should feel this way, and that it was all a part of her charming, her really absorbing romance.