“But I had nothing to do with it!” declared the ungallant Mr. Waterbury. Flustered and outraged, he was packed back to New Haven, and Miss Brereton, connecting this with last week’s sin, proceeded to lose her head. Josephine, humiliated and furious, lost hers, and Mr. Perry, who happened to be in New York, arrived at the school the same night. At his passionate indignation, Miss Brereton collapsed and retracted, but the damage was done, and Josephine packed her trunk. Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun to mean something, her school life was over.
For the moment all her feelings were directed against Miss Brereton, and the only tears she shed at leaving were of anger and resentment. Riding with her father up to New York, she saw that while at first he had instinctively and whole-heartedly taken her part, he felt also a certain annoyance with her misfortune.
“We’ll all survive,” he said. “Unfortunately, even that old idiot Miss Brereton will survive. She ought to be running a reform school.” He brooded for a moment. “Anyhow, your mother arrives tomorrow and you and she go down to Hot Springs as you planned.”
“Hot Springs!” Josephine cried, in a choked voice. “Oh, no!”
“Why not?” he demanded in surprise. “It seems the best thing to do. Give it a chance to blow over before you go back to Chicago.”
“I’d rather go to Chicago,” said Josephine breathlessly. “Daddy, I’d much rather go to Chicago.”
“That’s absurd. Your mother’s started East and the arrangements are all made. At Hot Springs you can get out and ride and play golf and forget that old she-devil—”
“Isn’t there another place in the East we could go? There’s people I know going to Hot Springs who’ll know all about this, people that I don’t want to meet—girls from school.”
“Now, Jo, you keep your chin up—this is one of those times. Sorry I said that about letting it blow over in Chicago; if we hadn’t made other plans we’d go back and face every old shrew and gossip in town right away. When anybody slinks off in a corner they think you’ve been up to something bad. If anybody says anything to you, you tell them the truth—what I said to Miss Brereton. You tell them she said you could come back and I damn well wouldn’t let you go back.”
“They won’t believe it.”
There would be, at all events, four days of respite at Hot Springs before the vacations of the schools. Josephine passed this time taking golf lessons from a professional so newly arrived from Scotland that he surely knew nothing of her misadventure; she even went riding with a young man one afternoon, feeling almost at home with him after his admission that he had flunked out of Princeton in February—a confidence, however, which she did not reciprocate in kind. But in the evenings, despite the young man’s importunity, she stayed with her mother, feeling nearer to her than she ever had before.
But one afternoon in the lobby Josephine saw by the desk two dozen good-looking young men waiting by a stack of bat cases and bags, and knew that what she dreaded was at hand. She ran upstairs and with an invented headache dined there that night, but after dinner she walked restlessly around their apartment. She was ashamed not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms because they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them—hiding miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by what she found there.
“The darn fools!” she said aloud. And as she said it her chin went up and the faint cloud about her eyes lifted. The phrases of the myriad love letters she had received passed before her eyes; behind her, after all, was the reassurance of a hundred lost and pleading faces, of innumerable tender and pleading voices. Her pride flooded back into her till she could see the warm blood rushing up into her cheeks.
There was a knock at the door—it was the Princeton boy.
“How about slipping downstairs?” he proposed. “There’s a dance. It’s full of Ee-lies, the whole Yale baseball team. I’ll pick up one of them and introduce you and you’ll have a big time. How about it?”
“All right, but I don’t want to meet anybody. You’ll just have to dance with me all evening.”
“You know that suits me.”
She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the music from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future—ready for gaieties as yet unthought of, lovers not yet met. Dancing off, she was certain that life had innumerable beginnings. She had hardly gone ten steps when she was cut in upon by Dudley Knowleton.
“Why, Josephine!” He had never used her first name before—he stood holding her hand. “Why, I’m so glad to see you! I’ve been hoping and hoping you’d be here.”
She soared skyward on a rocket of surprise and delight. He was actually glad to see her—the expression on his face was obviously sincere. Could it be possible that he hadn’t heard?
“Adele wrote me you might be here. She wasn’t sure.”
—Then he knew and didn’t care; he liked her anyhow.
“I’m in sackcloth and ashes,” she said.
“Well, they’re very becoming to you.”
“You know what happened—” she ventured.
“I do. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s generally agreed that Waterbury behaved like a fool—and it’s not going to be much help to him in the elections next month. Look—I want you to dance with some men who are just starving for a touch of beauty.”
Presently she was dancing with, it seemed to her, the entire team at once. Intermittently Dudley Knowleton cut back in, as well as the Princeton man, who was somewhat indignant at this unexpected competition. There were many girls from many schools in the room, but with an admirable team spirit the Yale men displayed a sharp prejudice in Josephine’s favour; already she was pointed out from the chairs along the wall.
But interiorly she was waiting for what was coming, for the moment when she would walk with Dudley Knowleton into the warm, Southern night. It came naturally, just at the end of a number, and they strolled along an avenue of early-blooming lilacs and turned a corner and another corner…
“You were glad to see me, weren’t you?” Josephine said.
“Of course.”
“I was afraid at first. I was sorriest about what happened at school because of you. I’d been trying so hard to be different—because of you.”
“You mustn’t think of that school business any more. Everybody that matters knows you got a bad deal. Forget it and start over.”
“Yes,” she agreed tranquilly. She was happy. The breeze and the scent of lilacs—that was she, lovely and intangible; the rustic bench where they sat and the trees—that was he, rugged and strong beside her, protecting her.
“I’d thought so much of meeting you here,” she said after a minute. “You’d been so good for me, that I thought maybe in a different way I could be good for you—I mean I know ways of having a good time that you don’t know. For instance, we’ve certainly got to go horseback riding by moonlight some night. That’ll be fun.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can really be very nice when I like somebody—that’s really not often,” she interpolated hastily, “not seriously. But I mean when I do feel seriously that a boy and I are really friends I don’t believe in having a whole mob of other boys hanging around taking up time. I like to be with him all the time, all day and all evening, don’t you?”
He stirred a little on the bench; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at his strong hands. Her gently modulated voice sank a note lower.
“When I like anyone I don’t even like dancing. It’s sweeter to be alone.”
Silence for a moment.
“Well, you know”—he hesitated, frowning—“as a matter of fact, I’m mixed up in a lot of engagements made some time ago with some people.” He floundered about unhappily. “In fact, I won’t even be at the hotel after tomorrow. I’ll be at the house of some people down the valley—a sort of house party. As a matter of fact, Adele’s getting here tomorrow.”
Absorbed in her own thoughts, she hardly heard him at first, but at the name she caught her breath sharply.
“We’re both to be at this house party while we’re here, and I imagine it’s more or less arranged what we’re
