By ten o’clock Josephine and Ridgeway were out in somebody’s car—far out where the colony becomes a prairie. As minute by minute she grew wearier of his softness, his anguish increased. She let him kiss her, just to be sure; and it was a desperate young man who returned to his host’s that night.
All next day his eyes followed her about miserably; Miss Ticknor was unexpectedly called East the following afternoon. This was pathetic, but certainly someone had to pay for Josephine’s summer. That score settled, she returned her attention to her sister’s wedding.
Immediately on her return she had demanded a trousseau in keeping with the splendor of a maid of honor, and under cover of the family rush had so managed to equip herself as to add a charming year to her age. Doubtless this contributed to the change of attitude toward her, for though her emotional maturity, cropping out of a schoolgirl dress, had seemed not quite proper, in more sophisticated clothes she was an incontestable little beauty; and as such she was accepted by at least the male half of the wedding party.
Constance was openly hostile. On the morning of the wedding itself, she unburdened herself to her mother.
“I do hope you’ll take her in hand after I’m gone, mother. It’s really unendurable the way she’s behaving. None of the bridesmaids have had a good time.”
“Let’s not worry,” Mrs. Perry urged. “After all, she’s had a very quiet summer.”
“I’m not worrying about her,” said Constance indignantly.
The wedding party were lunching at the club, and Josephine found herself next to a jovial usher who had arrived inebriated and remained in that condition ever since. However, it was early enough in the day for him to be coherent.
“The belle of Chicago, the golden girl of the golden West. Oh, why didn’t I come out here this summer?”
“I wasn’t here. I was up in a place called Island Farms.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Ah-ha! That accounts for a lot of things—that accounts for the sudden pilgrimage of Sonny Dorrance.”
“Of who?”
“The famous Sonny Dorrance, the shame of Harvard, but the maiden’s prayer. Now don’t tell me you didn’t exchange a few warm glances with Sonny Dorrance.”
“But isn’t he,” she demanded faintly—“isn’t he supposed to be—married?”
He roared with laughter.
“Married—sure, married to a mulatto! You didn’t fall for that old line. He always pulls it when he’s reacting from some violent affair—that’s to protect himself while he recovers. You see, his whole life has been cursed by that fatal beauty.”
In a few minutes she had the story. Apart from everything else, Sonny Dorrance was fabulously rich—women had pursued him since he was fifteen—married women, débutantes, chorus girls. It was legendary.
There actually had been plots to entangle him into marriage, to entangle him into anything. There was the girl who tried to kill herself, there was the one who tried to kill him. Then, this spring, there was the annulled marriage business that had cost him an election to Porcellian at Harvard, and was rumored to have cost his father fifty thousand dollars.
“And now,” Josephine asked tensely, “you say he doesn’t like women?”
“Sonny? I tell you he’s the most susceptible man in America. This last thing shook him, and so he keeps off admirers by telling them anything. But by this time next month he’ll be involved again.”
As he talked, the dining room faded out like a scene in a moving picture, and Josephine was back at Island Farms, staring out the window, as a young man appeared between the pine trees.
“He was afraid of me,” she thought to herself, her heart tapping like a machine gun. “He thought I was like the others.”
Half an hour later she interrupted her mother in the midst of the wedding’s last and most violent confusion.
“Mother, I want to go back to Island Farms for the rest of the summer,” she said at once.
Mrs. Perry looked at her in a daze, and Josephine repeated her statement.
“Why, in less than a month you’ll be starting back to school.”
“I want to go anyhow.”
“I simply can’t understand you. In the first place, you haven’t been invited, and in the second place, I think a little gayety is good for you before you go back to school, and in the third place, I want you here with me.”
“Mother,” Josephine wailed, “don’t you understand? I want to go! You take me up there all summer when I don’t want to go, and just when I do want to, you make me stay in this ghastly place. Let me tell you this isn’t any place for a sixteen-year-old girl, if you knew everything.”
“What nonsense to be bothering me with just at this time!”
Josephine threw up her hands in despair; the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“It’s ruining me here!” she cried. “Nobody thinks of anything but boys and dances from morning till night. They go out in their cars and kiss them from morning till night.”
“Well, I know my little girl doesn’t do anything like that.”
Josephine hesitated, taken a little aback.
“Well, I will,” she announced. “I’m weak. You told me I was. I always do what anybody tells me to do, and all these boys are just simply immoral, that’s all. The first thing you know I’ll be entirely ruined, and then you’ll be sorry you didn’t let me go to Island Farms. You’ll be sorry—”
She was working herself into hysteria. Her distracted mother took her by the shoulders and forced her down into a chair.
“I’ve never heard such silly talk. If you weren’t so old I’d spank you. If you keep this up you’ll be punished.”
Suddenly dry-eyed, Josephine got up and stalked out of the room. Punished! They had been punishing her all summer, and now they refused to punish her, refused to send her away. Oh, she was tired of trying. If she could think of something really awful to do, so that they would send her away forever—
Mr. Malcolm Libby, the prospective bridegroom, happened upon her fifteen minutes later, in an obscure corner of the garden. He was pacing restlessly about, steadying himself for the rehearsal at four o’clock and for the ceremony two hours later.
“Why, hello!” he cried. “Why, what’s the matter? You’ve been crying.”
He sat down on the bench, full of sympathy for Constance’s little sister.
“I’m not crying,” she sobbed. “I’m just angry.”
“About Constance going away? Don’t you think I’ll take good care of her?”
Leaning over, he patted her hand. If he had seen the look that flashed suddenly across her face it would have alarmed him, for it was curiously like the expression associated with a prominent character in Faust.
When she spoke, her voice was calm, almost cool, and yet tenderly sad:
“No, that wasn’t it. It was something else.”
“Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”
“I was crying”—she hesitated delicately—“I was crying because Constance has all the luck.”
Half an hour later when, with the rehearsal twenty minutes late, the frantic bride-to-be came searching through the garden and happened upon them suddenly, Malcolm Libby’s arm was around Josephine, who seemed dissolved in uncontrollable grief, and on his face was a wildly harassed expression she had never seen there before. Constance gave a little gasping cry and sank down upon the pebbled path.
The next hour passed in an uproar. There was a doctor; there were shut doors; there was Mr. Malcolm Libby in an agonized condition, the sweat pouring off his brow, explaining to Mrs. Perry over and over that he could explain if he could only see Constance. There was Josephine, tight-lipped, in a room, being talked to coldly by various members of the family. There was the clamor of arriving guests; then frantic last minutes’ patching up of things, with Constance and Malcolm in each other’s arms and Josephine, unforgiven, being bundled into her dress.
Then a solemn silence fell and, moving to music, the maid of honor, her head demurely bowed, followed her sister up the two aisles of people that crowded the drawing-room. It was a lovely, sad wedding; the two sisters, light and dark, were a lovely contrast; there was as much interest in one as in the other. Josephine had become a great beauty and the prophets were busy; she stood for the radiant future, there at her sister’s side.
The crush was so great at the reception that not until it was over was Josephine missed. And long before nine o’clock, before Mrs. Perry had time to be uneasy, a note from the station had been handed in at the door:
My Dearest Mother:
Ed Bement brought me here in his car, and I am catching the train to Island Farms at seven. I have wired the housekeeper to meet me, so don’t worry. I feel I have behaved terribly and am ashamed to face anyone, and I am punishing myself as I deserve by going back to the simple life. It is, after all, better for a girl of sixteen, I feel, and when you think it over you will agree. With dearest love.
Josephine.
After all, thought Mrs. Perry, perhaps it was just as well. Her husband was really angry, and she herself was exhausted and didn’t feel up to another problem at the moment. Perhaps a nice quiet place was best.
