"We could always make ourselves believe, of course, that we were doing that to cheer up the men who were going to France--and were very likely never coming back. Like the English women one read about. The only thing that used to trouble me in those days was a perfectly scorching self-contempt that used to come when I realized that I was enjoying it all; enjoying the emotional thrill of it. I knew I was getting off cheap.

"I suppose I needn't have told you all that. You'd have understood it anyhow. But that was how I felt when I went to that dance. As if it would be a relief to do something--costly.

"It was a uniform dance as far as the men were concerned. We made ourselves, of course, as--attractive as we knew how. Somebody introduced this boy to me with just the look that said, 'Do be kind to him,' and that's what I set out, very resolutely and virtuously, to be. He couldn't talk much beyond monosyllables and he couldn't dance,--even with me. I mean, I've danced so much ..."

"I've seen you dance, my dear," he reminded her, and saw how, with a deep-drawn breath, the memory of that night at Hickory Hill came back to her.

"Don't," she gasped. "Let me go on." But it was the better part of a minute before she could.

"We sat out two or three dances together and then, when I might decently enough have pa.s.sed him on to some one else with that same sort of explanatory look--I didn't. Partly because of the feeling I have told you about and partly because I was attracted to him. He was big and young and good-looking, and his voice--oh, one can't explain those things. It wasn't pure altruism. That's what you must see. And then he got up suddenly and said, 'Good-by.' It was early, you know, and I asked him why he was going. He said he wanted to get out of there. Rather savagely.

"I got up too and said I felt the same way about it. So he asked if he might 'see me home.' The dance was in the East Sixties. There had been a shower but it was clear then and warm. There weren't any taxis about and, anyhow, he didn't seem to think of looking for one, and we went over and took a Lexington Avenue car. When we turned at Twenty-third Street I said we'd get out and walk. He'd said hardly anything, but we had sat rather close in the car and he had been holding a fold of my cloak between his fingers.

"We went on down Lexington to Gramercy Park. There was shrubbery in flower inside the iron fence and some of the trees had been leafing out that day and the air was very still and sweet. We both stopped for a minute without saying anything and I slipped my hand farther through his arm and took his.

"He gave a sort of sob and said, 'You wouldn't do that if you knew about me.' I said, 'You'd better tell me and see.'

"We walked on again, around the park and across Twentieth Street and down Fifth Avenue. When we got to my door he hadn't told me.

"My flat was just the second story of an old made-over house. There was no one about, I mean, to stare or wonder, and I asked him to come in.

When we were inside I looked at my watch and asked him what time he had to report. He said not until seven o'clock in the morning. He was going over detached. There was nothing but a hotel to go back to.

"If I'd asked him that question out on the sidewalk, and got that answer, I don't know whether I'd have asked him in or not.

"He just stood looking at me for a minute after telling me he hadn't anywhere to report that night. Then he turned away and sat down on the edge of my couch and bent his face down on his hands and began to talk.

He told me what was the matter with him. Of course, the same thing must have tormented thousands of them,--the terror of being afraid. He felt pretty sure he was a coward.

"Mostly, I think, that fear was pretty sensibly dealt with in this war.

It got talked out openly. But he must have been a terribly lonely person. He came from Iowa, but somehow he got sent to one of the southern cantonments, and had his officer's training, such as it was, down there.

Then he was sent along to fill in somewhere else. I don't remember all the details. He'd come to New York alone. The men he had gone to the dance with he had only met that afternoon.

"I tried to help him. I told him how some of the officers in the French and English armies, who had the highest decorations for courage, had suffered most horribly, in advance, from fear. I could tell him two or three that I knew about personally; men who had told their own stories to me. Well, that helped a little, roused him out of his daze, gave him a little gleam of hope perhaps. But it wasn't much; words can't be, sometimes.

"He wanted more than that. He wanted me. He didn't want to go back alone to that hotel. So I kept him. Early in the morning, about six o'clock, I cooked his breakfast and ate it with him and kissed him good-by."

She made a sudden savage gesture of impatience. "I didn't mean to make it sound like that. That sounds n.o.ble and self-sacrificial and sickening. I suppose because that's the half of the truth that is easiest to tell. I _did_ want to make an end of perpetually getting off cheap. I did have a sort of feeling of establishing my good faith with myself. I wanted to comfort him and make him happy. But it's also true that I'd been attracted to him from the very first minute, and that it thrilled me when I first touched his hand, there by the park railing, and afterward when he took me in his arms."

Since his last interruption he had sat motionless, even breathing small in the extremity of his effort not to hinder. But now he rose and without speaking, came to her and bending down, kissed her forehead, her eyes, her mouth. Then he seated himself on the table close beside her and took possession, thoughtfully, of one of her hands.

"Did you ever hear anything more of him?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I don't think he remarked my name at all when we were introduced," she said, "nor asked what it was afterward. I think it must all have seemed afterward a little unreal to him. The girls he'd known at home don't smoke cigarettes nor drink champagne--nor wear their dresses as low as we do. He couldn't once have thought of people like father and Rush and Aunt Lucile as belonging to me. I remembered his name and used to look to see if it was there when I read the casualty lists, but I never did see it again.--No, that's the whole story; just what I have told you."

CHAPTER XXV

DAYBREAK

There followed the conclusion of the story, an interval of ease. It gave March, to begin with, a new access of courage, almost of confidence, to note that she did not fade white again and that the sick look of horror, banished from her eyes by the mere intensity of her determination to convey the whole truth to him, did not return to them. She subst.i.tuted her other hand for the one he held in order to shift her position a little and lean against his knees.

Her mind had not detached itself from the story as she made evident by the reflective way in which she went on thinking aloud about it; dwelling on some of the curious consequences of the adventure. It was surprising--she wondered if it indicated anything really abnormal in her--the way she had felt about it afterward.

She'd felt nothing in the least like shame. Certainly not at first. On the contrary, she'd taken a deep soul-satisfying pride in it, a kind of warm sense of readiness for anything.

She told him with a little clutch of embarra.s.sment and resolution, about another incident that happened somewhat later, attributing an importance to it which he conceded while he reflected with a smile that most people, men and women virtuous or otherwise, would have regarded as ridiculously disproportionate. The incident concerned a man whom she didn't much like, she said, but found somehow, fascinating. He had been paying her attentions of a rather experimental sort for weeks, maneuvering, arranging. He knew she lived by herself and had been angling for an invitation to come to see her, alone. Finally, he telephoned her office one day and asked point-blank if he mightn't come to tea that afternoon.

She said he might without telling him that she was expecting Christabel Baldwin at the same time. An hour later, a restless hour it had been, she had telephoned Christabel and put her off so that when her other guest came he found just what he had expected. In the manner of one sure of his welcome and intent on wasting no time, he had begun making love to her (she apologized for the employment of that phrase but said she knew no other that was usable). She admitted that she had never had any real doubt that this was what he had meant to do and conceded him the right to think that she had invited it. But she found it, nevertheless, unendurable. She felt unspeakably degraded by it and presently flew into a rage and turned the man out of the house, feeling, she added, as much ashamed of that part of the performance as of anything else.

This encounter, she told March, made a profound change in her feeling about the other episode--closed a door upon it. Nothing like that could happen to her again. She simply stopped thinking about it after that, buried it and it had stayed buried comfortably for the better part of a year, until Rush came home from France. At least she wasn't aware that it had troubled her. The twinges of discomfort she'd felt whenever she'd faced the prospect of coming home, she had attributed to another cause altogether.

"Paula," he observed. "That's easy enough to see."

"Oh, you are a comfort," she said; "only not Paula by herself. Paula and father and I, in a sort of awkward triangle, all doing our best and all nagging one another. That has got terribly worse in the last few days."

She seemed to find no difficulty at all in informing him fully about this home situation; needed only a question or surmise dropped here and there to develop the whole story.

It wasn't a chronological narrative. Her mind drifted like a soaring kingfisher over the whole area between her childhood and the events of this very morning, swooping down here or there to pick up some incident wherever a gleam of memory attracted her.

Her spirit was finding compensation for the agonies of the past hours in a complete detachment. Nothing she told him, no matter how close home it came, seemed to involve any painful emotion. Her body, pressed so close against his that he could have felt the faintest muscle quiver, conveyed no message to him but the relaxation of complete security.

About himself there was a curious duality. One of him was lulled irresistibly into sharing her mood of serene detachment. The other, recognizing the transitoriness of hers, knowing that when this interlude came to an end, as come it must, the storm would break upon them once more, was casting about desperately for the means of saving her.

He had come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt the clutch of it upon his own heart. She or some impish power acting through her agency had certainly made a mess of things. Her father's happiness destroyed; Rush's partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham's place; Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably hurt. And the prospect for the future....

She had told him of her tramp about the streets yesterday with her newspaper clipping and he was able to feel the full terror of it; and, beyond the terror, the gray emptiness.

There was only one way out of the tangle and this was to marry the man she loved and knew loved her. Well, he knew with merciless certainty what her answer would be when he asked her--begged her--to do that. He had provided her with the answer himself, with his soph.o.m.oric talk about traveling light and refusing to wear harness. And he'd worse than talked. His flight from her at Hickory Hill was enough to show that these weren't mere empty phrases. And yet her life depended to-night upon his ability to persuade her, in the face of those phrases and that fact, to marry him. So he sat very still, wondering how soon she would divine these undercurrents of his thought, listening while she talked to him.

The hours were slipping away, too. A glance at the watch braceleted upon the wrist he held startled him and he covered it with his hand. Had they already, he wondered, begun a search for her? Her words supplied presently the answer to that question. She was talking, with a dry sort of humor, about the commotions of that day.

He could not be sure he was getting it quite straight, for she was commenting upon events rather than narrating them. Apparently she had telephoned to her brother at Hood's apartment immediately after young Stannard left the house the evening or afternoon before, telling him not to bother about her, as she was going straight to bed. Let him go to a show and be careful not to wake her when he came in. She'd done this and gone to sleep at once, not waking until she'd heard him getting ready for bed in the adjoining room. But after that she hadn't been able to get off again.

March reflected, with a shudder, what a ghastly procession of hours those must have been. Had it been then, he wondered, that, looking for some harmless thing to help her sleep, she had come upon the deadlier stuff?

Her encounter with her brother at breakfast, which she had prepared, was their first, it seemed, since her visit to Hickory Hill and Rush had been shocked at her wan, lifeless appearance. He'd guessed, of course, that his friend's suit hadn't prospered and now took the line, which no doubt seemed to him the most tactful and comforting one available, that she was too ill to attempt any final decision on such a subject just now and that things would look different when better health had driven morbid thoughts away.

Her vehemence in trying to convince him that she had acted finally in the matter, that Graham now acquiesced fully in her decision and no longer wanted to marry her, and that Rush _must_ let him alone--not even try to talk with him about it--had only made him the more confident in his diagnosis.

It must have been pat in the middle of this scene that Graham's midnight-written letter arrived. Rush's att.i.tude toward his partner's flight--after the first moments of mere incredulity--had been one of contemptuous irritation, the natural att.i.tude for any young man who sees a comrade taking no more of a matter than a disappointment in love with an evident lack of fort.i.tude. This was heightened, too, by a rapidly developed sense of personal grievance. What the devil did Graham think was going to happen to him with Hickory Hill left on his hands like that?

There was more than enough work for the two of them. And then the financial aspect of it! Mr. Stannard, who had just been brought to the point of loosening up and letting them have a little more money, would of course leave Rush to his fate. If he didn't call his loans and sell him out! Ruin them altogether! Graham must simply be found and dragged back before his father learned of his flight.

He couldn't have been paying his sister much attention while he ran on like that! Unwisely, perhaps, but inevitably, Mary attempted to defend the fugitive--in the only way she thought of as possible; namely, by showing her brother what the true situation was.

She didn't try to tell March what she said. The thing which, with a forlorn smile, she dwelt upon, was the terrified vehemence with which Rush had stopped her at his first inkling of what she was trying to make him see. She was simply out of her head. A bad case, he p.r.o.nounced, of neurasthenia. Her having set out yesterday to find a job should have made that plain enough. What she needed was a nurse and a doctor--and he meant to provide both within the next few hours. He then compromised by saying that the nurse he had in mind was for the moment Aunt Lucile and the doctor their father.

With an alternation of truculence and cajolery, he had got her to lie down and to promise not to talk--that was the important thing--and this accomplished he devoted half an hour to the composition of a note to Miss Wollaston (whom it was difficult to tell anything to over the telephone, particularly with long distance rural connections) which he despatched, in charge of Pete, in the big car. Pete would get back with her by three at the latest.