“Why?”
“Hurts their eyes.”
Confusedly Basil deliberated this piece of logic.
“But don’t talk to me about dogs,” said De Vinci with a profound sigh; “I’m trying to keep from thinking of dogs.”
Basil obligingly changed the subject for him by asking him if he was in college.
“Two weeks.” For emphasis De Vinci held up two fingers. “I passed quickly through Yale. First man fired out of ’15 Sheff.”
“That’s too bad,” said Basil earnestly. He took a deep breath and his lips twisted up in a kindly smile. “Your parents must have felt pretty badly about that.”
De Vinci stared at him as if over a pair of spectacles, but before he could answer, the dance ended and the others came back to the table.
“Hello there, Skiddy.”
“Well, well, Skiddy!”
They all knew him. One of the freshmen yielded him a place next to Jobena and they began to talk together in lowered voices.
“Skiddy De Vinci,” George whispered to Basil. “He and Jobena were engaged last summer, but I think she’s through.” He shook his head. “They used to go off in his mother’s electric up at Bar Harbor; it was disgusting.”
Basil glowed suddenly with excitement as if he had been snapped on like an electric torch. He looked at Jobena—her face, infinitely reserved, lightened momentarily, but this time her smile had gone sad; there was the deep friendliness but not the delight. He wondered if Skiddy De Vinci cared about her being through with him. Perhaps, if he reformed and stopped drinking and went back to Yale, she would change her mind.
The music began again. Basil stared uncomfortably into his cup of tea.
“This is a tango,” said George. “You can dance the tango, can’t you? It’s all right; it’s Spanish.”
Basil considered.
“Sure you can,” insisted George. “It’s Spanish, I tell you. There’s nothing to stop your dancing if it’s Spanish, is there?”
One of the freshmen looked at them curiously. Basil leaned over the table and asked Jobena to dance.
She made a last low-voiced remark to De Vinci before she rose; then, to atone for the slight rudeness, she smiled up at Basil. He was light-headed as they moved out on the floor.
Abruptly she made an outrageous remark and Basil started and nearly stumbled, doubtful that he had heard aright.
“I’ll bet you’ve kissed about a thousand girls in your time,” she said, “with that mouth.”
“What!”
“Not so?”
“Oh, no,” declared Basil. “Really, I—”
Her lids and lashes had drooped again indifferently; she was singing the band’s tune:
“Tango makes you warm inside;
You bend and sway and glide;
There’s nothing far and wide—”
What was the implication—that kissing people was all right; was even admirable? He remembered what John Granby had said: “Every time you kiss a nice girl you may have started her on the road to the devil.”
He thought of his own past—an afternoon on the Kampf’s porch with Minnie Bibble, a ride home from Black Bear Lake with Imogene Bissel in the back seat of the car, a miscellany of encounters running back to games of post office and to childish kisses that were consummated upon an unwilling nose or ear.
That was over; he was never going to kiss another girl until he found the one who would become his wife. It worried him that this girl whom he found lovely should take the matter so lightly. The strange thrill he had felt when George spoke of her “behaving disgustingly” with Skiddy De Vinci in his electric, was transformed into indignation—steadily rising indignation. It was criminal—a girl not yet seventeen.
Suddenly it occurred to him that this was perhaps his responsibility, his opportunity. If he could implant in her mind the futility of it all, the misery she was laying up for herself, his visit to New York would not have been in vain. He could go back to school happy, knowing he had brought to one girl the sort of peace she had never known before.
In fact, the more he thought of Jobena and Skiddy De Vinci in the electric, the madder it made him.
At five they left Emil’s to go to Castle House. There was a thin rain falling and the streets were gleaming. In the excitement of going out into the twilight Jobena slipped her arm quickly through Basil’s.
“There’s too many for the car. Let’s take the hansom.”
She gave the address to a septuagenarian in faded bottle green, and the slanting doors closed upon them, shutting them back away from the rain.
“I’m tired of them,” she whispered. “Such empty faces, except Skiddy’s, and in another hour he won’t be able to even talk straight. He’s beginning to get maudlin about his dog Eggshell that died last month, and that’s always a sign. Do you ever feel the fascination of somebody that’s doomed; who just goes on and on in the way he was born to go, never complaining, never hoping; just sort or resigned to it all?”
His fresh heart cried out against this.
“Nobody has to go to pieces,” he assured her. “They can just turn over a new leaf.”
“Not Skiddy.”
“Anybody,” he insisted. “You just make up your mind and resolve to live a better life, and you’d be surprised how easy it is and how much happier you are.”
She didn’t seem to hear him.
“Isn’t it nice, rolling along in this hansom with the damp blowing in, and you and I back here”—she turned to him and smiled—“together.”
“Yes,” said Basil abstractedly. “The thing is that everybody should try to make their life perfect. They can’t start young enough; in fact, they ought to start about eleven or twelve in order to make their life absolutely perfect.”
“That’s true,” she said. “In a way Skiddy’s life is perfect. He never worries, never regrets. You could put him back at the time of the—oh, the eighteenth century, or whenever it was they had the bucks and beaux—and he’d fit right in.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Basil in alarm. “That isn’t at all what I mean by the perfect life.”
“You mean something more masterful,” she supplied. “I thought so, when I saw that chin of yours. I’ll bet you just take everything you want.”
Again she looked at him, swayed close to him.
“You don’t understand—” he began.
She put her hand on his arm. “Wait a minute; we’re almost there. Let’s not go in yet. It’s so nice with all the lights going on and it’ll be so hot and crowded in there. Tell him to drive out a few blocks more. I noticed you only danced a few times; I like that. I hate men that pop up at the first sound of music as if their life depended on it. Is it true you’re only sixteen?”
“Yes.”
“You seem older. There’s so much in your face.”
“You don’t understand—” Basil began again desperately.
She spoke through the trap to the cabby:
“Go up Broadway till we tell you to stop.” Sitting back in the cab, she repeated dreamily, “The perfect life. I’d like my life to be perfect. I’d like to suffer, if I could find something worth suffering for, and I’d like to never do anything low or small or mean, but just have big sins.”
“Oh, no!” said Basil, aghast. “That’s no way to feel; that’s morbid. Why, look, you oughtn’t to talk like that—a girl sixteen years old. You ought to—to talk things over with yourself—you ought to think more of the after life.” He stopped, half expecting to be interrupted, but Jobena was silent. “Why, up to a month ago I used to smoke as many as twelve or fifteen cigarettes a day, unless I was training for football. I used to curse and swear and only write home once in a while, so they had to telegraph sometimes to see if I was sick. I had no sense of responsibility. I never thought I could lead a perfect life until I tried.”
He paused, overcome by his emotion.
“Didn’t you?” said Jobena, in a small voice.
“Never. I was just like everybody else, only worse. I used to kiss girls and never think anything about it.”
“What—what changed you?”
“A man I met.” Suddenly he turned to her and, with an effort, caused to spread over his face a caricature of John Granby’s sad sweet smile. “Jobena, you—you have the makings of a fine girl in you. It grieved me a lot this afternoon to see you smoking nicotine and dancing modern suggestive dances that are simply savagery. And the way you talk about kissing. What if you meet some man that has kept himself pure and never gone around kissing anybody except his family, and you have to tell him that you went around behaving disgustingly?”
She leaned back suddenly and spoke crisply through the panel.
“You can go back now—the address we gave you.”
“You ought to cut it out.” Again Basil smiled at her, straining and struggling to lift her up out of herself to a higher plane. “Promise me you’ll try. It isn’t so hard. And then some day when some upright and straightforward man comes along and says, ‘Will you marry me?’ you’ll be able to say you never danced suggestive modern dances, except the Spanish tango and the Boston, and you never kissed anybody—that is, since you were sixteen, and maybe you wouldn’t have to say that you ever kissed anybody at all.”
“That wouldn’t be the truth,” she said in an odd voice. “Shouldn’t I tell him the truth?”
“You could tell him you didn’t know any better.”
“Oh.”
To Basil’s regret the cab drew up at Castle House. Jobena hurried in, and to make up for her absence, devoted herself exclusively to Skiddy and the Harvard
