As Josephine came to the iron gate of her house, she saw her sister shivering on the top steps with a departing young man; then the front door closed and the man came down the walk. She knew who he was.
He was abstracted, but he recognized her for just a moment in passing.
“Oh, hello,” he said.
She turned all the way round so that he could see her face by the street lamp; she lifted her face full out of her fur collar and towards him, and then smiled.
“Hello,” she said modestly.
They passed. She drew in her head like a turtle.
“Well, now he knows what I look like, anyhow,” she told herself excitedly, as she went on into the house.
II
Several days later Constance Perry spoke to her mother in a serious tone:
“Josephine is so conceited that I really think she’s a little crazy.”
“She’s very conceited,” admitted Mrs. Perry. “Father and I were talking and we decided that after the first of the year she should go East to school. But you don’t say a word about it until we know more definitely.”
“Heavens, mother, it’s none too soon! She and that terrible Travis de Coppet running around with his cloak, as if they were about a thousand years old. They came into the Blackstone last week and my spine crawled. They looked just like two maniacs—Travis slinking along, and Josephine twisting her mouth around as if she had St. Vitus dance. Honestly—”
“What did you begin to say about Anthony Harker?” interrupted Mrs. Perry.
“That she’s got a crush on him, and he’s about old enough to be her grandfather.”
“Not quite.”
“Mother, he’s twenty-two and she’s sixteen. Every time Jo and Lillian go by him, they giggle and stare—”
“Come here, Josephine,” said Mrs. Perry.
Josephine came into the room slowly and leaned her backbone against the edge of the opened door, teetering upon it calmly.
“What, mother?”
“Dear, you don’t want to be laughed at, do you?”
Josephine turned sulkily to her sister. “Who laughs at me? You do, I guess. You’re the only one that does.”
“You’re so conceited that you don’t see it. When you and Travis de Coppet came into the Blackstone that afternoon, my spine crawled. Everybody at our table and most of the other tables laughed—the ones that weren’t shocked.”
“I guess they were more shocked,” guessed Josephine complacently.
“You’ll have a fine reputation by the time you come out.”
“Oh, shut your mouth!” said Josephine.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Mrs. Perry whispered solemnly, “I’ll have to tell your father about this as soon as he comes home.”
“Go on, tell him.” Suddenly Josephine began to cry. “Oh, why can’t anybody ever leave me alone? I wish I was dead.”
Her mother stood with her arm around her, saying, “Josephine—now, Josephine”; but Josephine went on with deep, broken sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of her heart.
“Just a lot—of—of ugly and jealous girls who get mad when anybody looks at m-me, and make up all sorts of stories that are absolutely untrue, just because I can get anybody I want. I suppose that Constance is mad about it because I went in and sat for five minutes with Anthony Harker while he was waiting last night.”
“Yes, I was terribly jealous! I sat up and cried all night about it. Especially because he comes to talk to me about Marice Whaley. Why!—you got him so crazy about you in that five minutes that he couldn’t stop laughing all the way to the Warrens.”
Josephine drew in her breath in one last gasp, and stopped crying. “If you want to know, I’ve decided to give him up.”
“Ha-ha!” Constance exploded. “Listen to that, mother! She’s going to give him up—as if he ever looked at her or knew she was alive! Of all the conceited—”
But Mrs. Perry could stand no more. She put her arm around Josephine and hurried her to her room down the hall.
“All your sister meant was that she didn’t like to see you laughed at,” she explained.
“Well, I’ve given him up,” said Josephine gloomily.
She had given him up, renouncing a thousand kisses she had never had, a hundred long, thrilling dances in his arms, a hundred evenings not to be recaptured. She did not mention the letter she had written him last night—and had not sent, and now would never send.
“You mustn’t think about such things at your age,” said Mrs. Perry. “You’re just a child.”
Josephine got up and went to the mirror.
“I promised Lillian to come over to her house. I’m late now.”
Back in her room, Mrs. Perry thought: “Two months to February.” She was a pretty woman who wanted to be loved by everyone around her; there was no power of governing in her. She tied up her mind like a neat package and put it in the post office, with Josephine inside it safely addressed to the Brearley School.
An hour later, in the tea room at the Blackstone Hotel, Anthony Harker and another young man lingered at table. Anthony was a happy fellow, lazy, rich enough, pleased with his current popularity. After a brief career in an Eastern university, he had gone to a famous college in Virginia and in its less exigent shadow completed his education; at least, he had absorbed certain courtesies and mannerisms that Chicago girls found charming.
“There’s that guy Travis de Coppet,” his companion had just remarked. “What’s he think he is, anyhow?”
Anthony looked remotely at the young people across the room, recognizing the little Perry girl and other young females whom he seemed to have encountered frequently in the street of late. Although obviously much at home, they seemed silly and loud; presently his eyes left them and searched the room for the party he was due to join for dancing, but he was still sitting there when the room—it had a twilight quality, in spite of the lights within and the full dark outside—woke up to confident and exciting music. A thickening parade drifted past him. The men in sack-suits, as though they had just come from portentous affairs, and the women in hats that seemed about to take flight, gave a special impermanence to the scene. This implication that this gathering, a little more than uncalculated, a little less clandestine, would shortly be broken into formal series, made him anxious to seize its last minutes, and he looked more and more intently into the crowd for the face of anyone he knew.
One face emerged suddenly around a man’s upper arm not five feet away, and for a moment Anthony was the object of the saddest and most tragic regard that had ever been directed upon him. It was a smile and not a smile—two big grey eyes with bright triangles of colour underneath, and a mouth twisted into a universal sympathy that seemed to include both him and herself—yet withal, the expression not of a victim, but rather of the very demon of tender melancholy—and for the first time Anthony really saw Josephine.
His immediate instinct was to see with whom she was dancing. It was a young man he knew, and with this assurance he was on his feet giving a quick tug to his coat, and then out upon the floor.
“May I cut in, please?”
Josephine came close to him as they started, looked up into his eyes for an instant, and then down and away. She said nothing. Realizing that she could not possibly be more than sixteen, Anthony hoped that the party he was to join would not arrive in the middle of the dance.
When that was over, she raised eyes to him again; a sense of having been mistaken, of her being older than he had thought, possessed him. Just before he left her at her table, he was moved to say:
“Couldn’t I have another later?”
“Oh, sure.”
She united her eyes with his, every glint a spike—perhaps from the railroads on which their family fortunes were founded, and upon which they depended. Anthony was disconcerted as he went back to his table.
One hour later, they left the Blackstone together in his car.
This had simply happened—Josephine’s statement, at the end of their second dance, that she must leave, then her request, and his own extreme self-consciousness as he walked beside her across the empty floor. It was a favour to her sister to take her home—but he had that unmistakable feeling of expectation.
Nevertheless, once outside and shocked into reconsideration by the bitter cold, he tried again to allocate his responsibilities in the matter. This was hard going with Josephine’s insistent dark and ivory youth pressed up against him. As they got in the car he tried to dominate the situation with a masculine stare, but her eyes, shining as if with fever, melted down his bogus austerity in a whittled second.
Idly he patted her hand—then suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.
“So that’s that,” she whispered after a moment. Startled, he wondered if he had forgotten something—something he had said to her before.
“What a cruel remark,” he said, “just when I was getting interested.”
“I only meant that any minute with you may be the last one,” she said
