"d.a.m.n!" muttered Eduard, and shortly took his leave. But first he gave her a note from Mrs. Desmond urging her to dine with them on any evening she cared to name.

"Betty is abroad," wrote Mrs. Desmond, "and I know you have no heart for gaieties just now, so there will be only the four of us, a family party."

Joan hesitated.

"Of course we all realize that you are not in a mood for gaiety," said Eduard with a sympathetic glance at her black. "But I _must_ see you somehow!--and among old friends, who understand--"

To ward off any mention of things that hurt, she hastily agreed to dine with the Desmonds on the following Sat.u.r.day.

Sister Veronica, (who happened to be quite deaf) wondered what could have occurred to give the poor child such an expression of--not exactly pleasure. It was more like triumph. She would have made no sense of what Joan was muttering under her breath, Salome-wise, as she left the parlor: "Off with his head! Oh, off with his head, _and step on it_!"

CHAPTER XLIV

Not only the older girls, but more than one of the nuns, made some excuse to come into Joan's little room when she was dressing that Sat.u.r.day evening. The rumor had gone forth that their charge was beginning to take interest in worldly affairs again, and the good ladies congratulated each other. While they themselves had forsworn the pleasures of the world, they were quite aware that for some these had their uses, if only as an anodyne. They took, too, a quite feminine pleasure in Joan's frock, a simple black chiffon with transparent sleeves, which she had cut out a little at the neck to make it suitable for the evening.

"I suppose," said the Reverend Mother, making her turn round and round for inspection, "that this is what they call in the world a decollete basque, is it not? And very becoming, too! Only"--she added with the frank conventual innocence that occasionally startled Joan, "does not such a display of the person tend to encourage l.u.s.t of the eye, my child?"

Joan laughed a little. "Let us hope so, Mother!" she murmured. "We strive to please"--a remark which the old lady trusted that she had misunderstood.

Her striving on that occasion was by no means in vain. There seems something peculiarly alluring to the masculine taste (as women of the oldest profession in the world are quite aware) about black. Joan, with nothing to relieve her somberness except a cl.u.s.ter of white gardenias at her breast, would have held the gaze of any man who saw her as surely as she held that of Eduard and of Betty's father, who had hitherto not known his daughter's friend and openly regretted his missed opportunity.

She was one of the women whom motherhood, even denied and thwarted motherhood, gives a momentary poignant beauty, of the sort that Leonardo loved to paint. Betty's father was indeed so regretful of his missed opportunity that it was with some difficulty Eduard secured the tete-a-tete upon which he had counted.

"At last!" he sighed when he had finally manoeuvered her into the conservatory to admire orchids. "I began to think this was going to be another wasted hour, like my ghastly experience of the monastic life.--Do you realize, my dear, that I am ent.i.tled to a little praise and comforting on your part?"

"Just why?"

"Why? Why, because of the discretion, the magnanimity, in fact the utter d.a.m.n-fool quixotism of my late conduct! At Longmeadow, you know. Leaving you--when I might have stayed!"

Joan was rather startled. She had not expected him to carry the war into the enemy's country to such an extent as this.

"That makes twice," he murmured, leaning over her, "that I've let you go unscathed, my dear. When you left school--and when you came back to me.

But--Fate is too strong for us. You're not expecting me, I hope, to let you go a third time?"

"In just about five minutes," she smiled, glancing at her wrist.w.a.tch.

"I've ordered my taxi for ten o'clock."

He gave a little exclamation, and caught her hand. "Don't pretend to be so cool and indifferent, you witch! I know you better than that.

You--cool and indifferent! Have I forgotten that night under the beech-tree? Have you?"

Joan suddenly blazed out at him, white with anger. "No! I've not forgotten that. Nor afterwards."

"Afterwards?"

"Will you be good enough to tell me in plain language what was your idea in running away?"

He eyed her appreciatively. He liked a touch of temper in a woman. It gave them a zest your amiable creatures lack.

"Why, Beautiful, what else as a man of honor could I do? A thing like that doesn't stand still, you know! The flare dies out--or it goes further. Our flare would not have died out."

Her lip curled. "And as 'a man of honor' it never occurred to you that we might preserve our flare, as it were, in marriage?"

He sighed ruefully. "Oh, yes, it did! That temptation, too, I had to fight. For you see, my dear, I don't believe in marriage. I've seen too much of it (vicariously). Believe me, it preserves no flares! It quenches them. The thing's as fatal as death--though not, thank G.o.d, as inevitable! I will not put a relation I value to a test it will not bear," he explained, evidently in earnest. "What!--tie a creature of spirit and fire like yourself to the duty of forever loving one man, obeying one man, giving yourself into his hands to break at his leisure?

Can you think of any surer way of killing love than to make a duty of it? 'Duty'--the most hideous, cold, Puritanical word in our hideous, cold, Puritanical language! The French put it better. _Devoir_ suggests something that is by no means cold. Therefore, dearest girl"--he kissed her hands--"let me pay you my _devoirs_ always, and be sure that I shall never trouble you with anything so unpleasant as a 'duty.'--Why, suppose I had taken you then, bound you hand and foot to me by law--think how bored we should be with each other already! It would be from me you would be taking a vacation, instead of from the unfortunate Blair."

(Joan winced.) "As it is--"

"Well?" she prompted, veiling her eyes. "As it is--Eduard?"

He drew her toward him with little inarticulate murmurs. She took a fleeting glance at the face approaching hers. It was flushed, the eyes a trifle glazed as if he had been drinking. He breathed hard.

"How unbecoming it is to them!" she thought, but without resisting. (The reader who happens to like Joan would do well to skip this paragraph. It is not our heroine at her best.)

"As it is," said Eduard rather hoa.r.s.ely, "we have each other for all time, my Beautiful! Nothing to bind us, nothing to hold us, except our sacred--er--"

"Flare?" prompted Joan, helpfully.

But he was not paying his usual attention to words just then. He lifted her face to his, and closed his eyes the better to savor what was coming....

An unexpected sound caused him to open them again. It was laughter, issuing from the very lips he was about to enjoy; not hysterical, nervous laughter such as might have been pardoned under the circ.u.mstances, but cool and sweet, and unimpa.s.sioned as the tinkling of ice in a pitcher.

"You're not really trying to warm it up and serve it over again?"

protested Joan, as she extricated herself from his embrace. "How absurd!

I thought you were too much of an artist for that. And at your age, too!"

She sauntered back to the others, still laughing over her shoulder. He did not follow.

Which may be said to have been the end of Eduard Desmond, so far as this chronicle is concerned....

But it was also the end of what Joan had disloyally spoken of to him as her vacation. The word stuck in her memory, and she was ashamed of it.

Her heart yearned toward Archie.

The nuns bade her a delighted farewell; and all the way home she made amends for her long neglect of him by thinking of her husband constantly. By contrast with Eduard's smooth hair, his slim hands, and well-modulated, expressive voice, Archie appeared to her the very epitome of manliness. She idealized his defects into beauties, big ears, clumsiness, and all. She remembered with a thrill how easily he carried her upstairs when she was tired, how he went tiptoeing squeakily about the house in the morning for fear of waking her, whispering in tones that would have roused the dead--Blessed, funny old Archie! She could hardly wait for the sight of him.

Yet when she did see him, through the car-window, watching the platform for her appearance as tensely as a terrier watches a rathole, Joan shrank back with a faint gasp. He was looking quite appallingly dapper, with shiny new shoes and a Derby hat--an article of wear not designed for people with badly adjusted ears; and his mouth hung slightly open in his eagerness, showing the infantile front teeth, through which issued (she could almost hear it) a sort of a tuneful hissing, as was his way in moments of emotion, just to show that he was not nervous or excited in the least.

Joan shrank back, the last person to leave the train. And as she pa.s.sed a mirror, catching a glimpse of her pale face within it she whispered piteously, "Oh, Joan Darcy, what have you done?"

CHAPTER XLV

For the modern woman there lies, fortunately, a life between the two extremes of domesticity and frivolity, both of which Joan had tried and found wanting. Or rather she had not found domesticity wanting so much as temporary--a period of tranquil suspense, as it were, leading up to an inevitable climax which had somehow failed to come off. Even had her babies lived, it is to be doubted whether Joan could have long satisfied herself with domesticity pure and simple; and she could no more resume it now than a coc.o.o.n may be resumed by a former occupant which has sprouted wings.

As for frivolity, plenty of that offered itself to a young matron with a charming house and a husband who was generally spoken of as a rising young business man. ("Rising," Archie certainly was; he had to be, to keep up with his rising expenditures.)