“Too bad.”
“— and today they got together—and tried to tell me that you didn’t know I was alive!”
After a long pause, Anthony contributed feebly. “I hope you didn’t let them convince you.”
She laughed shortly. “I just laughed and came down here.”
Her hand burrowed its way into his; when he pressed it, her eyes, bright now, not dark, rose until they were as high as his, and came towards him. A minute later he thought to himself: “This is a rotten trick I’m doing.”
He was sure he was doing it.
“You’re so sweet,” she said.
“You’re a dear child.”
“I hate jealousy worse than anything in the world,” Josephine broke forth, “and I have to suffer from it. And my own sister worse than all the rest.”
“Oh, no!” he protested.
“I couldn’t help it if I fell in love with you. I tried to help it. I used to go out of the house when I knew you were coming.”
The force of her lies came from her sincerity and from her simple and superb confidence that whomsoever she loved must love her in return. Josephine was never either ashamed or plaintive. She was in the world of being alone with a male, a world through which she had moved surely since she was eight years old. She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are.
“But you couldn’t be in love with me,” Anthony wanted to say, and couldn’t. He fought with a desire to kiss her again, even tenderly, and began to tell her that she was being unwise, but before he got really started at his handsome project, she was in his arms again, and whispering something that he had to accept, since it was wrapped up in a kiss. Then he was alone, driving away from her door.
What had he agreed to? All they had said rang and beat in his ear like an unexpected temperature—tomorrow at four o’clock on that corner.
“Good God!” he thought uneasily. “All that stuff about giving me up. She’s a crazy kid, she’ll get into trouble if somebody looking for trouble comes along. Big chance of my meeting her tomorrow!”
And neither at dinner nor at the dance that he went to that night could Anthony get the episode out of his mind; he kept looking around the ballroom regretfully, as if he missed someone who should be there.
III
Two weeks later, waiting for Marice Whaley in a meagre, indefinable downstairs ‘sitting-room,’ Anthony reached in his pocket for some half-forgotten mail. Three letters he replaced; the other—after a moment of listening—he opened quickly and read with his back to the door. It was the third of a series—for one had followed each of his meetings with Josephine—and it was exactly like the others—the letter of a child. Whatever maturity of emotion could accumulate in her expression, when once she set pen to paper was snowed under by ineptitude. There was much about “your feeling for me” and “my feeling for you,” and sentences began, “Yes, I know I am sentimental,” or more gawkily, “I have always been sort of pash, and I can’t help that,” and inevitably much quoting of lines from current popular songs, as if they expressed the writer’s state of mind more fully than verbal struggles of her own.
The letter disturbed Anthony. As he reached the postscript, which coolly made a rendezvous for five o’clock this afternoon, he heard Marice coming downstairs, and put it back in his pocket.
Marice hummed and moved about the room. Anthony smoked.
“I saw you Tuesday afternoon,” she said suddenly. “You seemed to be having a fine time.”
“Tuesday,” he repeated, as if thinking. “Oh, yeah. I ran into some kids and we went to a tea dance. It was amusing.”
“You were almost alone when I saw you.”
“What are you getting at?”
Marice hummed again. “Let’s go out. Let’s go to a matinee.”
On the way Anthony explained how he had happened to be with Connie’s little sister; the necessity of the explanation somehow angered him. When he had done, Marice said crisply:
“If you wanted to rob the cradle, why did you have to pick out that little devil? Her reputation’s so bad already that Mrs. McRae didn’t want to invite her to dancing class this year—she only did it on account of Constance.”
“Why is she so awful?” asked Anthony, disturbed.
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
His five o’clock engagement was on his mind throughout the matinee. Though Marice’s remarks served only to make him dangerously sorry for Josephine, he was nevertheless determined that this meeting should be the last. It was embarrassing to have been remarked in her company, even though he had tried honestly to avoid it. The matter could very easily develop into a rather dangerous little mess, with no benefit either to Josephine or to himself. About Marice’s indignation he did not care; she had been his for the asking all autumn, but Anthony did not want to get married; did not want to get involved with anybody at all.
It was dark when he was free at 5:30, and turned his car towards the new Philanthropological Building in the maze of reconstruction in Grant Park. The bleakness of place and time depressed him, gave a further painfulness to the affair. Getting out of his car, he walked past a young man in a waiting roadster—a young man whom he seemed to recognize—and found Josephine in the half darkness of the little chamber that the storm doors formed.
With an indefinable sound of greeting, she walked determinedly into his arms, putting up her face.
“I can only stay for a sec,” she protested, just as if he had begged her to come. “I’m supposed to go to a wedding with sister, but I had to see you.”
When Anthony spoke, his voice froze into a white mist, obvious in the darkness. He said things he had said to her before but this time firmly and finally. It was easier, because he could scarcely see her face and because somewhere in the middle she irritated him by starting to cry.
“I knew you were supposed to be fickle,” she whispered, “but I didn’t expect this. Anyhow, I’ve got enough pride not to bother you any further.” She hesitated. “But I wish we could meet just once more to try and arrive at a more different settlement.”
“No.”
“Some jealous girl has been talking to you about me.”
“No.” Then, in despair, he struck at her heart. “I’m not fickle. I’ve never loved you and I never told you I did.”
Guessing at the forlorn expression that would come into her face, Anthony turned away and took a purposeless step; when he wheeled nervously about, the storm door had just shut—she was gone.
“Josephine!” he shouted in helpless pity, but there was no answer. He waited, heart in his boots, until presently he heard a car drive away.
At home, Josephine thanked Ed Bement, whom she had used, with a tartlet of hope, went in by a side door and up to her room. The window was open and, as she dressed hurriedly for the wedding she stood close to it so that she would catch cold and die.
Seeing her face in the bathroom mirror, she broke down and sat on the edge of the tub, making a small choking sound like a struggle with a cough, and cleaning her finger nails. Later she could cry all night in bed when everyone else was asleep, but now it was still afternoon.
The two sisters and their mother stood side by side at the wedding of Mary Jackson and Jackson Dillon. It was a sad and sentimental wedding—an end to the fine, glamorous youth of a girl who was universally admired and loved. Perhaps to no onlooker there were its details symbolical of the end of a period, yet from the vantage point of a decade, certain things that happened are already powdered with yesterday’s ridiculousness, and even tinted with the lavender of the day before. The bride raised her veil, smiling that grave sweet smile that made her “adored,” but with tears pouring down her cheeks, and faced dozens of friends hands outheld as if embracing all of them for the last time. Then she turned to a husband as serious and immaculate as herself, at him as if to say, “That’s done. All this that I am is yours forever and ever.”
In her pew, Constance, who had been at school with Mary Jackson, was frankly weeping, from a heart that was a ringing vault. But the face of Josephine beside her was a more intricate study. Once or twice, though Josephine’s eyes lost none of their level straight intensity, an isolated tear escaped, and, as if startled by the feel of it, the face hardened slightly and the mouth remained in defiant immobility, like a child well warned against making a disturbance. Only once did she move; hearing a voice behind her say: “That’s the little Perry girl. Isn’t she lovely-looking?” she turned presently and gazed at a stained-glass window lest her unknown admirers miss the sight of the side face.
Josephine’s family went on to the reception, so she dined alone—or rather with her little brother and his nurse, which was the same thing.
She felt empty. Tonight Anthony Harker, “so deeply lovable—so sweetly lovable—so deeply, sweetly lovable,” was making love to someone new, kissing
