"Oh, yeah?" Elly said. "Maybe you couldn't."

"Not till you got your face out of the way, anyhow," the other said.

That night she and Paul sat on the screened and shadowed veranda. But at eleven o'clock it was she who was urgent and tense: "No! No! Please. Please."

"Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?"

"Yes. I'm afraid. Go, please. Please."

"Tomorrow, then?"

"No. Not tomorrow or any time."

"Yes. Tomorrow."

This time she did not look in when she passed her grandmother's door. Neither did she lean against her own door to cry. But she was panting, saying aloud against the door in thin exultation: "A nigger. A nigger. I wonder what she would say if she knew about that."

The next afternoon Paul walked up onto the veranda.

Elly was sitting in the swing, her grandmother in a chair nearby. She rose and met Paul at the steps. "Why did you come here?" she said. "Why did you?" Then she turned and seemed to watch herself walking before him toward the thin old woman sitting bolt upright, sitting bolt and implacably chaste in that secret place, peopled with ghosts, very likely to Elly at any given moment uncountable and unnamable, who might well have owned one single mouth.

She leaned down, screaming: "This is Mr. de Montigny, Grandmother! "

"What?"

"Mr. de Montigny! From Louisiana!" she screamed, and saw the grandmother, without moving below the hips, start violently backward as a snake does to strike. That was in the afternoon. That night Elly quitted the veranda for the first time. She and Paul were in a close clump of shrubbery on the lawn; in the wild close dark, for that instant Elly was lost, her blood aloud with desperation and exultation and vindication too, talking inside her at the very brink of surrender loud as a voice: "I wish she were here to see! I wish she were here to see!" when something, there had been no sound, shouted at her and she made a mad awkward movement of recovery. The grandmother stood just behind and above them. When she had arrived, how long she had been there, they did not know. But there she stood, saying nothing, in the long anti-climax while Paul departed without haste and Elly stood, thinking stupidly, 'I am caught in sin without even having time to sin.' Then she was in her room, leaning against the door, trying to still her breathing, listening for the grandmother to mount the stairs and go to her father's room. But the old woman's footsteps ceased at her own door. Elly went to her bed and lay upon it without undressing, still panting, the blood still aloud. 'So, she thought, 'it will be tomorrow. She will tell him in the morning.' Then she began to writhe, to toss lightly from side to side. 'I didn't even have a chance to sin,' she thought, with panting and amazed regret. 'She thinks I did and she will tell that I did, yet I am still virgin. She drove me to it, then prevented me at the last moment.' Then she was lying with the sun in her eyes still fully dressed. 'So it will be this morning, today, she thought dully. 'My God. How could I. How could I. I don't want any man, anything.'

She was waiting in the dining-room when her father came down to breakfast. He said nothing, apparently knew nothing. 'Maybe it's mother she told, Elly thought. But after a while her mother, too, appeared and departed for town also, saying nothing. 'So it has not been yet,' she thought, mounting the stairs. Her grandmother's door was closed. "When she opened it, the old woman was sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper; she looked up, cold, still, implacable, while Elly screamed at her in the empty house: "What else can I do, in this little dead, hopeless town? I'll work. I don't want to be idle. Just find me a job anything, anywhere, so that it's so far away that I'll never have to hear the word Jefferson again." She was named for the grandmother Ailanthia, though the old woman had not heard her own name or her granddaughter's or anyone else's in almost fifteen years save when it was screamed at her as Elly now screamed: "It hadn't even happened last night! Won't you believe me? That's it. It hadn't even happened! At least, I would have had something, something..." with the other watching her with that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf. "All right!" Elly cried. "I'll get married then! Will you be satisfied then?"

That afternoon she met Paul downtown. "Was everything all right last night?" he said. "Why, what is it? Did they "

"No. Paul, marry me." They were in the rear of the drugstore, partially concealed by the prescription counter, though anyone might appear behind it at any moment. She leaned against him, her face wan, tense, her painted mouth like a savage scar upon it. "Marry me. Or it will be too late, Paul."

"I don't marry them," Paul said. "Here. Pull yourself together."

She leaned against him, rife with promise. Her voice was wan and urgent. "We almost did last night. If you'll marry me, I will"

"You will, eh? Before or after?"

"Yes. Now. Any time."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Not even if I will now?"

"Come on, now. Pull yourself together."

"Oh, I can hear you. But I don't believe you. And I am afraid to try and find out." She began to cry. He spoke in thin and mounting annoyance: "Stop it, I tell you!"

"Yes. All right. I've stopped. You won't, then? I tell you, it will be too late."

"Hell, no. I don't marry them, I tell you."

"All right. Then it's good-bye. Forever."

"That's O. K. by me, too. If that's how you feel. If I ever see you again, you know what it will mean. But no marrying. And I'll see next time that we don't have any audience,"

"There won't be any next time," Elly said.

The next day he was gone. A week later, her engagement was in the Memphis papers. It was to a young man whom she had known from childhood. He was assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day.

He was a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits, who had been calling on her for about a year with a kind of placid formality. He took supper with the family each Sunday night, and when infrequent road shows came to town he always bought tickets for himself and Elly and her mother. When he called on her, even after the engagement was announced, they did not sit in the dark swing. Perhaps he did not know that anyone had ever sat in it in the darkness. No one sat in it at all now, and Elly passed the monotonous round of her days in a kind of dull peace. Sometimes at night she cried a little, though not often; now and then she examined her mouth in the glass and cried quietly, with quiet despair and resignation. 'Anyway I can live quietly now,' she thought. 'At least I can live out the rest of my dead life as quietly as if I were already dead.'

Then one day, without warning, as though she, too, had accepted the armistice and the capitulation, the grandmother departed to visit her son in Mills City. Her going seemed to leave the house bigger and emptier than it had ever been, as if the grandmother had been the only other actually living person in it. There were sewing women in the house daily now, making the trousseau, yet Elly seemed to herself to move quietly and aimlessly, in a hiatus without thought or sense, from empty room to empty room giving upon an identical prospect too familiar and too peaceful to be even saddening any longer. For long hours now she would stand at her mother's bedroom window, watching the slow and infinitesimal clematis tendrils as they crept and overflowed up the screen and onto the veranda roof with the augmenting summer. Two months passed so; she would be married in three weeks. Then one day her mother said, "Your grandmother wants to come home Sunday. Why don't you and Philip drive down to Mills City and spend Saturday night with your uncle, and bring her back Sunday?" Five minutes later, at the mirror, Elly looked at her reflection as you look at someone who has just escaped a fearful danger. 'God,' she thought, 'what was I about to do? What was I about to do?'

Within the hour she had got Paul on the telephone, leaving home to do it, taking what precautions for secrecy her haste would afford her.

"Saturday morning?" he said.

"Yes. I'll tell mother Phi... he wants to leave early, at daylight. They won't recognize you or the car. I'll be ready and we can get away quick."

"Yes." She could hear the wire, distance; she had a feeling of exultation, escape. "But you know what it means. If I come back. What I told you."

"I'm not afraid. I still don't believe you, but I am not afraid to try it now."

Again she could hear the wire. "I'm not going to marry you, Elly."

"All right, darling. I tell you I'm not afraid to try it any more. Exactly at daylight. I'll be waiting."

She went to the bank. After a time Philip was free and came to her where she waited, her face tense and wan beneath the paint, her eyes bright and hard. "There is something you must do for me. It's hard to ask, and I guess it will be hard to do."

"Of course I'll do it. What is it?"

"Grandmother is coming home Sunday. Mother wants you and me to drive down Saturday and bring her back."

"All right. I can get away Saturday."

"Yes. You see, I told you it would be hard. I don't want you to go."

"Don't want me to..." He looked at her bright, almost haggard face. "You want to go alone?" She didn't answer, watching him. Suddenly she came and leaned against him with a movement practiced, automatic. She took one of his arms and drew it around her. "Oh," he said. "I see. You want to go with someone else."

"Yes. I can't explain now. But I will later. But mother will never understand. She won't let me go unless she thinks it is you."

"I see." His arm was without life; she held it about her.

"It's another man you want to go with."

She laughed, not loud, not long. "Don't be foolish. Yes. There's another man in the party. People you don't know and that I don't expect to see again before I am married. But mother won't understand. That's why I must ask you. Will you do it?"

"Yes. It's all right. If we can't trust one another, we haven't got any business marrying."

"Yes. We must trust one another." She released his arm.

She looked at him intently, speculatively, with a cold and curious contempt. "And you'll let mother believe..."

"You can trust me. You know that."

"Yes. I'm sure I can." Suddenly she held out her hand.

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye?"

She leaned against him again. She kissed him. "Careful," he said. "Somebody might..."

"Yes. Until later, then. Until I explain." She moved back, looked at him absently, speculatively. "This is the last trouble I'll ever give you, I expect. Maybe this will be worth that to you. Good-bye."

That was Thursday afternoon. On Saturday morning, at dawn, when Paul stopped his car before the dark house, she seemed to materialize at once, already running across the lawn. She sprang into the car before he could descend and open the door, swirling down into the seat, leaning forward and taut with urgency and flight like an animal. "Hurry!" she said. "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"

But he held the car a moment longer. "Remember. I told you what it meant if I came back. O. K.?"

"I heard you. I tell you I'm not afraid to risk it now. Hurry! Hurry!"

And then, ten hours later, with the Mills City signs increasing with irrevocable diminishment, she said, "So you won't marry me? You won't?"

"I told you that all the time."

"Yes. But I didn't believe you. I didn't believe you. I thought that when I... after... And now there is nothing else I can do, is there?"

"No," he said.

"No," she repeated. Then she began to laugh, her voice beginning to rise.

"Elly!" he said. "Stop it, now!"

"All right," she said. "I just happened to think about my grandmother. I had forgotten her."

Pausing at the turn of the stair, Elly could hear Paul and her uncle and aunt talking in the living-room below. She stood quite still, in an attitude almost pensive, nun-like, virginal, as though posing, as though she had escaped for the moment into a place where she had forgotten where she came from and where she intended to go. Then a clock in the hall struck eleven, and she moved. She went on up the stairs quietly and went to the door of her cousin's room, which she was to occupy for the night, and entered. The grandmother sat in a low chair beside the dressing table littered with the frivolous impedimenta of a young girl... bottles, powder puffs, photographs, a row of dance programs stuck into the mirror frame. Elly paused. They looked at one another for a full moment before the old woman spoke: "Not contented with deceiving your parents and your friends, you must bring a Negro into my son's house as a guest."

"Grandmother!" Elly said.

"Having me sit down to table with a negro man."

"Grandmother!" Elly cried in that thin whisper, her face haggard and grimaced. She listened. Feet, voices were coming up the stairs, her aunt's voice and Paul's. "Hush!" Elly cried. "Hush!"

"What? What did you say?"

Elly ran to the chair and stooped and laid her fingers on the old woman's thin and bloodless lips and, one furiously importunate and the other furiously implacable, they glared eye to eye across the hand while the feet and the voices passed the door and ceased. Elly removed her hand. From the row of them in the mirror frame she jerked one of the cards with its silken cord and tiny futile pencil. She wrote on the back of the card. He is not a negro he went to Va. and Harvard and everywhere.

The grandmother read the card. She looked up. "I can understand Harvard, but not Virginia. Look at his hair, his fingernails, if you need proof. I don't. I know the name which his people have borne for four generations." She returned the card. "That man must not sleep under this roof."

Elly took another card and scrawled swiftly. He shall. He is my guest. I asked him here. You are my grandmother you would not have me treat any guest that way not even a dog.

The grandmother read it. She sat with the card in her hand. "He shall not drive me to Jefferson. I will not put a foot in that car, and you shall not. We will go home on the train. No blood of mine shall ride with him again."

Elly snatched another card, scrawled furiously. I will. You cannot stop me. Try and stop me.

The grandmother read it. She looked at Elly. They glared at one another. "Then I will have to tell your father."

Already Elly was writing again. She thrust the card at her grandmother almost before the pencil had ceased; then in the same motion she tried to snatch it back. But the grandmother had already grasped the corner of it and now they glared at one another, the card joining them like a queer umbilical cord. "Let go!" Elly cried. "Let it go!"

"Turn loose," the grandmother said.

"Wait," Elly cried thinly, whispering, tugging at the card, twisting it. "I made a mistake. I..." With an astonishing movement, the grandmother bent the card up as Elly tried to snatch it free.

"Ah," she said, then she read aloud: Tell him. What do you know. "So. You didn't finish it, I see. What do I know?"

"Yes," Elly said. Then she began to speak in a fierce whisper: "Tell him! Tell him we went into a clump of trees this morning and stayed there two hours. Tell him!" The grandmother folded the card carefully and quietly. She rose.

"Grandmother!" Elly cried.

"My stick," the grandmother said. "There; against the wall."

When she was gone Elly went to the door and turned the latch and recrossed the room. She moved quietly, getting a robe of her cousin's from the closet, and undressed, slowly, pausing to yawn terrifically. "God, I'm tired," she said aloud, yawning. She sat down at the dressing table and began to manicure her nails with the cousin's equipment. There was a small ivory clock on the dressing table. She glanced at it now and then.

Then the clock below stairs struck midnight. She sat for a moment longer with her head above her glittering nails, listening to the final stroke. Then she looked at the ivory one beside her. 'I'd hate to catch a train by you,' she thought.

As she looked at it her face began again to fill with the weary despair of the afternoon. She went to the door and passed into the dark hall. She stood in the darkness, on her naked feet, her head bent, whimpering quietly to herself with bemused and childish self-pity. 'Everything's against me,' she thought. 'Everything.' When she moved, her feet made no sound. She walked with her arms extended into the darkness. She seemed to feel her eyeballs turning completely and blankly back into her skull with the effort to see. She entered the bathroom and locked the door. Then haste and urgency took her again. She ran to the angle of the wall beyond which the guest room was and stooped, cupping her voice into the angle with her hands. "Paul!" she whispered, "Paul!" holding her breath while the dying and urgent whisper failed against the cold plaster. She stooped, awkward in the borrowed robe, her blind eyes unceasing in the darkness with darting despair. She ran to the lavatory, found the tap in the darkness and tempered the drip of water to a minor but penetrating monotony. Then she opened the door and stood just within it. She heard the clock below stairs strike the half hour. She had not stirred, shaking slowly as with cold, when it struck one.

She heard Paul as soon as he left the guest room. She heard him come down the hall; she heard his hand seek the switch.

When it clicked on, she found that her eyes were closed.

"What's this?" Paul said. He wore a suit of her uncle's pajamas. "What the devil..."

"Lock the door," she whispered.

"Like hell. You fool. You damned fool."

"Paul!" She held him as though she expected him to flee.

She shut the door behind him and fumbled for the latch when he caught her wrist.

"Let me out of here!" he whispered.

She leaned against him, shaking slowly, holding him. Her eyes showed no iris at all. "She's going to tell daddy. She's going to tell daddy tomorrow, Paul!" Between the whispers the water dripped its unhurried minor note.

"Tell what? What does she know?"