So he managed for the moment a lighter note. He would not let her help in the preparation of the meager little meal which was all that his immediate resources ran to. He hadn't quite realized how exiguous it was going to be when he spoke of it as supper. It was nothing but a slice of Swiss cheese, a fresh carton of biscuits and a flagon of so-called Chianti illicitly procured from the Italian grocery downstairs.

He cleared his work table and anch.o.r.ed her in the easy chair at the same time by putting into her lap the bulky ma.n.u.script of _The Dumb Princess_, and it was this they talked about while he laid the cloth--a clean towel--and set out his scanty array of dishes. He feared when they drew up to the table that she was not going to be able to eat at all, and he was convinced that she was even more in need of food than he. But the wine, thin and acidulous as it was, helped, and he saw to it that for a while she had no chance to talk. He told her the story of _The Dumb Princess_ in detail and dwelt a little upon the half formulated symbolism of it.

When at last he paused, she said, "I think I know why the princess was dumb. Because when she tried to speak no one wanted to hear what she had to say. They insisted on keeping her an image merely, so that they could go on attributing to her just the thoughts they wished her to think and just the desires they wanted her to feel. That's the spell that has made many a woman dumb upon all the essentials."

He gripped his hands together between his knees, leaned a little forward, drew a steadying breath and said, "There's something I wish you'd do for me just while we're sitting quietly like this. It has been so momentary, this life of ours together,--the times I mean when we've been bodily together. The whole of it could be reckoned quite easily in minutes.

There has been more packed into them, of course, than into many a lover's months and years, but one effect it has had on me has been to make you, when you aren't here physically with me, like this, where by merely reaching out I can touch you, a little--visionary to me. I confuse you with the Dumb Princess over there whom you made me create. I get misgivings that you're just a sort of wraith. Well, if you're going away and we aren't to be within--touching distance of each other again for a long while--perhaps months, I want more of you, that my memory can hold on by. The real every-day person that you are instead, as you say, of the image I've had to make of you. So I wish you'd tell me as nearly as you can remember everything that you've done--everything that has happened to you--to-day."

That last word was like the touch of a spur. She shuddered as she cried, "Not to-day!"

He did not press for a reason and the next moment she went on in her natural manner again. "That's a strange thing for you to wish. At least the strangeness of it strikes me after some of the things that have been happening lately. Yet I don't believe it happens often that a lover asks as specifically as that to be--disillusioned. And that is what you would be. Because the complete story of a day,--any day,--with no suppressions, nothing tucked decently away out of sight, would be a pretty searching test."

"That's why I asked for it," he said, "I'd like to be disillusioned; just as completely as possible."

"That's because you're so sure you wouldn't be." The raggedness of her voice betrayed a strong emotion. With a leap of the pulse he told himself that it was as if she were crying out against some unforeseen hope. "You think it would merely be that lovely little image of yours--the Dumb Princess, coming to life."

"I'd rather have the reality," he told her, "whatever it is. I think I can make you see that that must be true. The person I love is you who are sitting there across the table from me. I don't believe that any one in the world was ever more completely and utterly adored than you are being adored at this moment. I love the things I know you by. The things I've come to recognize as yours. I know some of your qualities that way; your sensitiveness, your uprightness, your fastidious honesty that makes you hate evasions and subst.i.tutes,--everything you mean when you say sentimentality. And I know your resolution that carries you along even when you are afraid,--when your sensitiveness makes you afraid. I admire all those qualities, but it isn't their intrinsic worth that makes me love them. I love them because they're the things I know you by. I can't be mistaken about them because I've felt them. Just as I've felt your hands and your mouth and your hair. Well, then, whatever your days have been, one day after another, they have in the end produced you sitting there as you sit now. Whatever your--ingredients are they're your ingredients. The total works out to you. Whereas my illusions work out to nothing better than my little image of the Dumb Princess."

"Would it surprise you," she asked, "to know that I could be cruel? I mean exactly what the word means. Like a little boy who tears the legs off a beetle. Can you imagine me hurting some one frightfully, whom I needn't have hurt at all? Some one who was trying in his own way to be kind to me?"

He smiled. "I can imagine your being cruel to a sentimentalist," he said.

"Not deliberately, of course. Only after you had been hounded, like a little white cat, into a corner. By some one who wanted you for an image, merely, that he himself could attribute all the appropriate thoughts and desires to. I can imagine you turning, at last, and rending him;--limb from limb, if you like."

She gazed at him, wide-eyed, for a long moment; then she drooped forward over the table and cradled her head in her arms. With his hands he tried to comfort her but he felt that they were clumsy and ineffectual.

"I've hurt you horribly," he said, when he could command his voice.

"Probing in like that."

This must be the unendurable tragedy she had referred to a while ago.

She was speaking, voicelessly and he bent down to listen.

"... if you knew the comfort! I suppose I ought to be frightened--at your guessing like that, but it seems natural, to-night, that you should.--You know who it was, don't you?"

"Yes," he told her confidently. "It happened just to-day, didn't it?"

"It was yesterday he asked me to marry him," she said. "That wasn't hounding. He had a right to, I mean. I thought I would marry him, once. I told him I would if I could. I meant, I would if I could make him understand what I really was. He thought I meant something altogether different, something that his image of me might have meant quite nicely.

Yesterday when he asked me again, I flew into a fury and told him what I am really like. I needn't have done it. I could have told him that the reason I wouldn't marry him was because I was in love with you. That would have been true--in a way. I mean, it wasn't the reason in the beginning; nor even after I was in love with you--so long as you didn't know. But I never thought of telling him that. I just wanted to--smash that image of his. And I did. I knew it was cruel when I did it, but not how terrible until this morning when Rush got a letter from him."

She had to stop there to master a sob. He went around the table and took her in his arms. "Come over to the big chair," he said, "where I can--hold you. I can't let you go on like this. You can tell me the rest of it there."

She released herself from his hands by taking them in her own and pressing them for a moment tight. Then she let them go.

"I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't be comforted like that while I was telling you about him."

He understood instantly. "That's like you," he commented. "You're always like yourself, thank G.o.d." He walked away to the chair he had invited her to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back. "He wrote your brother a letter then." He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his voice for she answered instantly:

"You mustn't be angry about that. He had to write to Rush, you see. Rush had been in his confidence about it all the while. Rush knew his hopes and his explanations. Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up at Wallace Hood's apartment for his news. Now, do you see how horrible it was? He couldn't tell Rush what I had said to him. There was nothing he could tell him. He couldn't even face him. He did the only thing I'd left for him to do."

March asked, "What has he done?"

"We don't know, exactly. Just gone away, I suppose. The letter was written about midnight from the University Club. He said he wasn't coming back to Hickory Hill. That he couldn't possibly come back. He'd arrange things, somehow, later. He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me."

She broke off there and looked intently up at him. In her eyes he thought he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope. "I wonder," she went breathlessly on, "if you can understand this, too. Can you see that, for him, the unbearable thing about it--was that it was ludicrous? The contrast between what he had believed me to be and--what I am?"

He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, "Don't put it like that!"

"Well, then," she amended, "the contrast between his explanation of the way I had been treating him, and the true one?"

"That is a thing I think I can understand," he said. "It was a sort of--awakening of Don Quixote. To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give a sharper wrench than that.--I'm moving in the dark," he added. Yet he knew he was drawing near the light. The secret he had set out to discover was not very far away.

"You see well enough," she said. "Better than Rush, though I tried to explain it to him. He'd caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in New York, when he came back from France and brought me home. But he wouldn't look. Father wouldn't, either, once when I tried to tell him about it. It was too horrible to be thought,--let alone believed.--I don't quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself."

The look he saw in her eyes made him wonder how she could. He managed to hold his own gaze steady. It gave him a sense of somehow supporting her.

"But you," she said,--"you, of all people in the world, don't seem to feel that way about it. You were there--waiting for me--before I even tried to tell you. Oh, you do understand, don't you?"

"I think," he told her--and the smile that came with the words was spontaneous enough, though it did feel rather tremulous--"I think I could almost repeat the sentence you demolished young Stannard with in your own words. But can't you see why it doesn't demolish me? It's because I love you."

"So did he. So do father and Rush."

"Not you. Not quite you. Don't you see? It's just the thing I was trying to tell you a while ago. What they insist on loving is--oh, partly you, of course, but partly a sort of--projection of themselves that they call you, dress you out in, try to compel you to fit. One can fight hard to preserve an outlying bit of one's self like that. But there would be a limit I should think. How your brother, with a letter like that in his hands, could refuse to look at what you were trying to make him see ..."

"He had a theory, that began when we were in New York together as a sort of joke, that I was a case of sh.e.l.l-shock. So whenever there has been anything really uncomfortable to face, he has always had that to fall back upon."

A momentary outburst of anger escaped him. "You've been tortured!" he cried furiously. He reined in at once, however. "You've never, then," he went on quietly, "been able to tell the story to any one. I'm sure you didn't tell it to Graham Stannard. You didn't even try to."

She shook her head. The pitifulness of her, sitting there so spent, so white, blurred his vision again with sudden tears. But after he had disposed of them, he managed a smile and sat down comfortably in his easy chair.

"You couldn't find a better person than me to tell it to," he said.

"You know already," she protested. "At least, you know what it comes to."

"I know the brute fact," he admitted, "but that and the whole truth are seldom quite the same thing."

He saw the way her hands locked and twisted together and remembered with a heart-arresting pang, her half-choked cry, "Don't! Don't hurt them like that!" when his own had agonized in such a grip. But no caress of his could help her now. He held himself still in his chair and waited.

"The whole truth of this story isn't any--prettier than the brute fact.

There weren't any extenuating circ.u.mstances."

Then she sat erect and faced him. He was amazed to see a flush of color come creeping into her cheeks. Her eyes brightened, the brows drew down a little, her voice steadied itself and the words came swiftly.

"I think I must make sure you understand that it isn't the sort of story that you usually find enveloping that particular brute fact. I wasn't deceived nor betrayed by anybody. There isn't anybody you can take as a villain. Just a nice, rather inarticulate boy, whom I met at a dance the evening before he went overseas."

She broke off there to ask him shortly, "When was it that you went over?"

"Not until September," he said, "when it looked like a very long chance if we ever got to the front at all. Of course, you know, we didn't. But this was a lot earlier, wasn't it?"

"The seventeenth of April," she said. "We'll never forget those weeks, any of us, who were in New York doing what we called war work, but it's hard not to feel that we weren't different persons somehow. I don't mean that to sound like making excuses. We were more our real selves perhaps than we will ever be again. Anyhow, we worked harder all day long, and never felt tired, and in the evening most of the people I knew went out a lot, to dinners and dances.