Josephine was suddenly angry; she had humbled herself enough for one afternoon. With a cold nod, she started homeward down the lane.
“Wait!”
Now that there was thirty feet between them, his timidity had left him. She was tempted to go back, resisted the impulse with difficulty.
“I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said coolly.
Walking slowly home, she saw, by instinct rather than logic, that there was something here she failed to understand. In general, a lack of self-confidence was enough to disqualify any boy from her approval; it was the unforgivable sin, the white flag, the refusal of battle. Yet now that this young man was out of sight, she saw him as he had appeared the previous afternoon—unself-conscious, probably arrogant, utterly debonair. Again she wondered if the unpleasantness between the families could be responsible for his attitude.
In spite of their unsatisfactory conversation, she was happy. In the soft glow of the sunset it seemed certain that it would all come right tomorrow. Already the oppressive sense of being wasted had deserted her. The boy who had passed her window yesterday afternoon was capable of anything—love, drama, or even that desperate recklessness that she loved best of all.
Her mother was waiting on the veranda.
“I wanted to see you alone,” she said, “because I thought Aunt Gladys would be offended if you looked too delighted. We’re going back to Lake Forest tomorrow.”
“Mother!”
“Constance is announcing her engagement tomorrow and getting married in ten days. Malcolm Libby is in the State Department and he’s ordered abroad. Isn’t it wonderful? Your sister’s opening up the Lake Forest house today.”
“It’ll be marvellous.” After a moment Josephine repeated, with more conviction: “Perfectly marvellous.”
Lake Forest—she could feel the fast-beating excitement of it already. Yet there was something missing, as if the note of an essential trumpet had become separated from the band. For five weeks she had passionately hated Island Farms, but glancing around her in the gathering dusk, she felt rather sorry for it, a little ashamed of her desertion.
Throughout dinner the odd feeling persisted. She would be deep in exciting thoughts that began, “Won’t it be fun to—” then the imminent brilliance would fade and there would be a stillness inside her like the stillness of these Michigan nights. That was what was lacking in Lake Forest—a stillness for things to happen in, for people to walk into.
“We’ll be terribly busy,” her mother said. “Next week there’ll be bridesmaids in the house, and parties, and the wedding itself. We should have left tonight.”
Josephine went up to her room immediately and sat looking out into the darkness. Too bad; a wasted summer after all. If yesterday had happened sooner she might have gone away with some sense of having lived after all. Too late. “But there’ll be lots of boys,” she told herself—Ridgeway Saunders.
She could hear their confident lines, and somehow they rang silly on her ears. Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be. She stood up, breathing quickly.
A few minutes later she left the house by a side door and crossed the lawn to the gardener’s gate. She heard Dick call after her uncertainly, but she did not answer. It was dark and cool, and the feeling that the summer was rushing away from her. As if to overtake it, she walked faster, and in ten minutes turned in at the gate of the Dorrance house, set behind the jagged silhouettes of many trees. Someone on the veranda hailed her as she came near:
“Good evening. I can’t see who it is.”
“It’s the girl who was so fresh this afternoon.”
She heard him catch his breath suddenly.
“May I sit here on the steps for a moment? See? Quite safe and far away. I came to say good-by, because we’re going home tomorrow.”
“Are you really?” She could not tell whether his tone showed concern or relief. “It’ll be very quiet.”
“I want to explain about this afternoon, because I don’t want you to think I was just being fresh. Usually I like boys with more experience, but I just thought that since we were the only ones here, we might manage to have a good time, and there weren’t any days to waste.”
“I see.” After a moment he asked, “What will you do in Lake Forest? Be a—a speed?”
“I don’t much care what I do. I’ve wasted the whole six weeks.”
She heard him laugh.
“I gather from your tone that someone is going to have to pay for it,” he said.
“I hope so,” she answered rather grimly. She felt tears rise in her eyes. Everything was wrong. Everything seemed to be fixed against her.
“Please let me come up there on the settee,” she asked suddenly.
There was a creak as it stopped swinging.
“Please don’t. I hate to ask you, but really I’ll have to go if you do. Let’s talk about—Do you like horses?”
She got up swiftly, mounted the steps and walked toward the corner where he sat.
“No,” she said, “I think that what I’d like would be to be liked by you.”
In the light of the moon just lifting over the woods his face was positively haggard. He jumped to his feet; then his hands were on her arms and he was drawing her slowly toward him.
“You simply want to be kissed,” he was saying through scarcely opened lips. “I knew it the first time I saw that mouth of yours—that perfectly selfish, self-sufficient look that—”
Suddenly he dropped his arms and stepped away from her with a gesture of horror.
“Don’t stop!” she cried. “Do anything, tell me anything, even if it isn’t complimentary. I don’t care.”
But he had vaulted swiftly over the railing and, with his hands clasping the back of his head, was walking across the lawn. In a minute she overtook him and stood beseechingly in his path, her small bosom rising and falling.
“Why do you suppose I’m here?” he demanded suddenly. “Do you think I’m alone?”
“What—”
“My wife is with me.”
Josephine shivered.
“Oh—oh—then why doesn’t anybody know?”
“Because my wife is—my wife is colored.”
If it had not been so dark Josephine would have seen that for an instant he was laughing silently and uncontrollably.
“Oh,” she repeated.
“I didn’t know,” he continued.
In spite of a subconscious scepticism, an uncanny feeling stole over Josephine.
“What dealings could I have with a girl like you?”
She began to weep softly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. If I could only help you.”
“You can’t help me.” He turned gruffly away.
“You want me to go.”
He nodded.
“All right. I’ll go.”
Still sobbing, she half walked, half backed away from him, intimidated now, yet still hoping he would call to her. When she saw him for the last time from the gate, he was standing where she had left him, his fine thin face clear and handsome in the suddenly streaming light of an emergent moon.
She had gone a quarter of a mile down the road when she became conscious of running footsteps behind her. Before she could do more than start and turn anxiously, a figure sprang out at her. It was her cousin, Dick.
“Oh!” she cried. “You frightened me!”
“I followed you here. You had no business going out at night like this.”
“What a sneaky thing!” she said contemptuously.
They walked along side by side.
“I heard you with that fellow. You had a crush on him, didn’t you?”
“Will you be quiet! What does a horrible little pill like you know about anything?”
“I know a lot,” said Dick glumly. “I know there’s too much of that sort of thing at Lake Forest.”
She scorned to answer; they reached her aunt’s gate in silence.
“I tell you one thing,” he said uncertainly. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t want your mother to know about this.”
“You mean you’re going to my mother?”
“Just hold your horses. I was going to say I wouldn’t say anything about it—”
“I should hope not.”
“—on one condition.”
“Well?”
“The condition is—” He fidgeted uncomfortably. “You told me once that a lot of girls at Lake Forest had kissed boys and never thought anything about it.”
“Yes.” Suddenly she guessed what was coming, and an astonished laugh rose to her lips.
“Well, will you, then—kiss me?”
A vision of her mother arose—of a return to Lake Forest in chains. Deciding quickly, she bent toward him. Less than a minute later she was in her room, almost hysterical with tears and laughter. That, then, was the kiss with which destiny had seen fit to crown the summer.
V
Josephine’s sensational return to Lake Forest that August marked a revision of opinion about her; it can be compared to the moment when the robber bandit evolved through sheer power into the feudal seignior.
To the three months of nervous energy conserved since Easter beneath the uniform of her school were added six weeks of resentment—added, that is, as the match might be said to be added to the powder. For Josephine exploded with an audible, visible bang; for weeks thereafter pieces of her were gathered up from Lake Forest’s immaculate lawns.
It began quietly; it began with the long-awaited house party, on the first evening of which she was placed next to the unfaithful Ridgeway Saunders at dinner.
“I certainly felt pretty badly when you threw me over,” Josephine said indifferently—to rid him of any lingering idea that he had thrown her over. Once she had chilled him into wondering if, after all, he had come off best in the affair, she turned to the man on the other side. By the time the salad was served, Ridgeway was explaining himself to her. And his girl from the East, Miss Ticknor, was becoming increasingly aware of what an obnoxious person Josephine Perry was. She
