Up in her room, she was excited again by the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. Oh, what if she should die in her sleep tonight?
“Oh, what a shame!” she whispered.
She opened the window, and holding her only souvenir of Anthony, a big initialed linen handkerchief, crept desolately into bed. While the sheets were still cold, there was a knock at the door.
“Special delivery letter,” said the maid.
Putting on the light, Josephine opened it, turned to the signature, then back again, her breast rising and falling quickly under her nightgown.
DARLING LITTLE JOSEPHINE:
It’s no use. I can’t help it, I can’t lie about it. I’m desperately, terribly in love with you. When you went away this afternoon, it all rushed over me, and I knew I couldn’t give you up. I drove home, and I couldn’t eat or sit still, but only walk up and down thinking of your darling face and your darling tears, there in that vestibule. And now I sit writing this letter—
It was four pages long. Somewhere it disposed of their disparate ages as unimportant, and the last words were:
I know how miserable you must be, and I would give ten years of my life to be there to kiss your sweet lips good night.
When she had read it through, Josephine sat motionless for some minutes; grief was suddenly gone, and for a moment she was so overwhelmed that she supposed joy had come in its stead. On her face was a twinkling frown.
“Gosh!” she said to herself. She read over the letter once more.
Her first instinct was to call up Lillian, but she thought better of it. The image of the bride at the wedding popped out at her—the reproachless bride, unsullied, beloved and holy with a sweet glow. An adolescence of uprightness, a host of friends, then the appearance of the perfect lover, the Ideal. With an effort, she recalled her drifting mind to the present occasion. Certainly Mary Jackson would never have kept such a letter. Getting out of bed, Josephine tore it into little pieces and, with some difficulty, caused by an unexpected amount of smoke, burned it on a glass-topped table. No well-brought up girl would have answered such a letter; the proper thing was to simply ignore it.
She wiped up the table top with the man’s linen handkerchief she held in her hand, threw it absently into a laundry basket and crept into bed. She suddenly was very sleepy.
IV
For what ensued, no one, not even Constance, blamed Josephine. If a man of twenty-two should so debase himself as to pay frantic court to a girl of sixteen against the wishes of her parents and herself, there was only one answer—he was a person who shouldn’t be received by decent people. When Travis de Coppet made a controversial remark on the affair at a dance, Ed Bement beat him into what was described as “a pulp,” down in the washroom, and Josephine’s reputation rose to normal and stayed there. Accounts of how Anthony had called time and time again at the house, each time denied admittance, how he had threatened Mr Perry, how he had tried to bribe a maid to deliver letters, how he had attempted to waylay Josephine on her way back from school—these things pointed to the fact that he was a little mad. It was Anthony Harker’s own family who insisted that he should go West.
All this was a trying time for Josephine. She saw how close she had come to disaster, and by constant consideration and implicit obedience tried to make up to her parents for the trouble she had unwittingly caused. At first she decided she didn’t want to go to any Christmas dances, but she was persuaded by her mother, who hoped she would be distracted by boys and girls home from school for the holidays. Mrs. Perry was taking her East to the Brearley School early in January, and in the buying of clothes and uniforms mother and daughter were much together, and Mrs. Perry was delighted at Josephine’s new feeling of responsibility and maturity.
As a matter of fact, it was sincere, and only once did Josephine do anything that she could not have told the world. The day after New Year’s she put on her new travelling suit and her new fur coat and went out by her familiar egress, the side door, and walked down the block to the waiting car of Ed Bement. Downtown she left Ed waiting at a corner and entered a drug store opposite the old Union Station on LaSalle Street. A man with an unhappy mouth and desperate, baffled eyes was waiting for her there.
“Thank you for coming,” he said miserably.
She didn’t answer. Her face was grave and polite.
“Here’s what I want—just one thing,” he said quickly: “Why did you change? What did I do that made you change so suddenly? Was it something that happened, something I did? Was it what I said in the vestibule that night?”
Still looking at him, she tried to think, but she could only think how unattractive and rather terrible she found him now, and try not to let him see it. There would have been no use saying the simple truth—that she could not help what she had done, that great beauty has a need, almost an obligation, of trying itself, that her ample cup of emotion had spilled over of its own accord, and it was an accident that it had destroyed him and not her. The eyes of pity might follow Anthony Harker in his journey West, but most certainly the eyes of destiny followed Josephine as she crossed the street through the falling snow to Ed Bement’s car.
She sat quiet for a minute as they drove away, relieved and yet full of awe. Anthony Harker was twenty-two, handsome, popular and sought after—and how he had loved her—so much that he had to go away. She was as impressed as if they had been two other people.
Taking her silence for depression, Ed Bement said:
“Well, it did one thing anyhow—it stopped that other story they had around about you.”
She turned to him quickly: “What story?”
“Oh, just some crazy story.”
“What was it?” she demanded.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said hesitantly, “but there was a story around last August that you and Travis de Coppet were married.”
“Why, how perfectly terrible!” she exclaimed. “Why, I never heard of such a lie. It—” She stopped herself short of saying the truth—that though she and Travis had adventurously driven twenty miles to New Ulm, they had been unable to find a minister willing to marry them. It all seemed ages behind her, childish, forgotten.
“Oh, how perfectly terrible!” she repeated. “That’s the kind of story that gets started by jealous girls.”
“I know,” agreed Ed. “I’d just like to hear any boy try to repeat it to me. Nobody believed it anyhow.”
It was the work of ugly and jealous girls. Ed Bement, aware of her body next to him, and of her face shining like fire through the half darkness, knew that nobody so beautiful could ever do anything really wrong.
