But though life was possible it was less than satisfactory. Her work was hard, she was physically fragile; she was much more tired at the day’s end than the girls with whom she worked. She must consider a precarious future when her capital should be depleted by her son’s education. Thinking of the Corcoran family, she had a horror of being dependent on her son; and she dreaded the day when she must push him from her. She found that her interest in men had gone. Her two experiences had done something to her; she saw them clearly and she saw them darkly, and that part of her life was sealed up, and it grew more and more faint, like a book she had read long ago. No more love.
Caroline saw this with detachment, and not without a certain, almost impersonal, regret. In spite of the fact that sentiment was the legacy of a pretty girl, it was just one thing that was not for her. She surprised herself by saying in front of some other girls that she disliked men, but she knew it was the truth. It was an ugly phrase, but now, moving in an approximately foursquare world, she detested the compromises and evasions of her marriage. “I hate men—I, Caroline, hate men. I want from them no more than courtesy and to be left alone. My life is incomplete, then, but so be it. For others it is complete, for me it is incomplete.”
The day that she looked at her evening dress in the mirror, she was in a country house on Long Island—the home of Evelyn Murdock, the most spectacularly married of all her old Virginia friends. They had met in the street, and Caroline was there for the week-end, moving unfamiliarly through a luxury she had never imagined, intoxicated at finding that in her new evening dress she was as young and attractive as these other women, whose lives had followed more glamorous paths. Like New York the rhythm of the week-end, with its birth, its planned gayeties and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it. The sentiment had gone from Caroline, but the patterns remained. The guests, dimly glimpsed on the veranda, were prospective admirers. The visit to the nursery was a promise of future children of her own; the descent to dinner was a promenade down a marriage aisle, and her gown was a wedding dress with an invisible train.
“The man you’re sitting next to,” Evelyn said, “is an old friend of yours. Sidney Lahaye—he was at Camp Rosecrans.”
After a confused moment she found that it wasn’t going to be difficult at all. In the moment she had met him—such a quick moment that she had no time to grow excited—she realized that he was gone for her. He was only a smallish, handsome man, with a flushed, dark skin, a smart little black mustache and very fine eyes. It was just as gone as gone. She tried to remember why he had once seemed the most desirable person in the world, but she could only remember that he had made love to her, that he had made her think of them as engaged, and then that he had acted badly and thrown her over—into George Corcoran’s arms. Years later he had telephoned like a traveling salesman remembering a dalliance in a casual city. Caroline was entirely unmoved and at her ease as they sat down at table.
But Sidney Lahaye was not relinquishing her so easily.
“So I called you up that night in Derby,” he said; “I called you for half an hour. Everything had changed for me in that ride out to camp.”
“You had a beautiful remorse.”
“It wasn’t remorse; it was self-interest. I realized I was terribly in love with you. I stayed awake all night——”
Caroline listened indifferently. It didn’t even explain things; nor did it tempt her to cry out on fate—it was just a fact.
He stayed near her, persistently. She knew no one else at the party; there was no niche in any special group for her. They talked on the veranda after dinner, and once she said coolly:
“Women are fragile that way. You do something to them at certain times and literally nothing can ever change what you’ve done.”
“You mean that you definitely hate me.”
She nodded. “As far as I feel actively about you at all.”
“I suppose so. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“No. I even have to think before I can really remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden that night, holding all my dreams and hopes in my arms like a lot of flowers—they were that to me, anyhow. I thought I was pretty sweet. I’d saved myself up for that—all ready to hand it all to you. And then you came up to me and kicked me.” She laughed incredulously. “You behaved like an awful person. Even though I don’t care any more, you’ll always be an awful person to me. Even if you’d found me that night, I’m not at all sure that anything could have been done about it. Forgiveness is just a silly word in a matter like that.”
Feeling her own voice growing excited and annoyed, she drew her cape around her and said in an ordinary voice:
“It’s getting too cold to sit here.”
“One more thing before you go,” he said. “It wasn’t typical of me. It was so little typical that in the last five years I’ve never spent an unoccupied moment without remembering it. Not only I haven’t married, I’ve never even been faintly in love. I’ve measured up every girl I’ve met to you, Caroline—their faces, their voices, the tips of their elbows.”
“I’m sorry I had such a devastating effect on you. It must have been a nuisance.”
“I’ve kept track of you since I called you in Dayton; I knew that, sooner or later, we’d meet.”
“I’m going to say good night.”
But saying good night was easier than sleeping, and Caroline had only an hour’s haunted doze behind her when she awoke at seven. Packing her bag, she made up a polite, abject letter to Evelyn Murdock, explaining why she was unexpectedly leaving on Sunday morning. It was difficult and she disliked Sidney Lahaye a little bit more intensely for that.
IV
Months later Caroline came upon a streak of luck. A Mrs. O’Connor, whom she met through Evelyn Murdock, offered her a post as private secretary and traveling companion. The duties were light, the traveling included an immediate trip abroad, and Caroline, who was thin and run down from work, jumped at the chance. With astonishing generosity the offer included her boy.
From the beginning Caroline was puzzled as to what had attracted Helen O’Connor to her. Her employer was a woman of thirty, dissipated in a discreet way, extremely worldly and, save for her curious kindness to Caroline, extremely selfish. But the salary was good and Caroline shared in every luxury and was invariably treated as an equal.
The next three years were so different from anything in her past that they seemed years borrowed from the life of someone else. The Europe in which Helen O’Connor moved was not one of tourists but of seasons. Its most enduring impression was a phantasmagoria of the names of places and people—of Biarritz, of Mme de Colmar, of Deauville, of the Comte de Berme, of Cannes, of the Derehiemers, of Paris and the Chateau de Madrid. They lived the life of casinos and hotels so assiduously reported in the Paris American papers—Helen O’Connor drank and sat up late, and after a while Caroline drank and sat up late. To be slim and pale was fashionable during those years, and deep in Caroline was something that had become directionless and purposeless, that no longer cared. There was no love; she sat next to many men at table, appreciated compliments, courtesies and small gallantries, but the moment something more was hinted, she froze very definitely. Even when she was stimulated with excitement and wine, she felt the growing hardness of her sheath like a breastplate. But in other ways she was increasingly restless.
At first it had been Helen O’Connor who urged her to go out; now it became Caroline herself for whom no potion was too strong or any evening too late. There began to be mild lectures from Helen.
“This is absurd. After all, there’s such a thing as moderation.”
“I suppose so, if you really want to live.”
“But you want to live; you’ve got a lot to live for. If my skin was like yours, and my hair——Why don’t you look at some of the men that look at you?”
“Life isn’t good enough, that’s all,” said Caroline. “For a while I made the best of it, but I’m surer every day that it
