Because there were two city lads this time: not only just the rich young earl but the young earl’s foreign friend or anyway house-guest: the dark romantic foreign knight that heat the young earl riding the young earl’s own horses and then took the young earl’s sword away from him with a hearth-broom. Until at last all he had to do was ride at night up to the young earl’s girl friend’s window, and whistle — . Wait,’ she said.
She got up. She was already walking before she got onto her feet. She crossed the room and jerked the door open before he could even move, her heels clapping hard and fast in the hall. Then the front door banged. And still his uncle just stood there looking at the open door.
‘What?’ he said. What?’
But his uncle didn’t answer; his uncle was still watching the door and then almost before his uncle could have answered, they heard the front door again and then the hard brittle girl-heels in the hall, two pairs of them now, and the Harriss girl came in fast and crossed the room and flipped one hand backward behind her and said, There she is,’ and went on and swirled down into the chair again while he and his uncle looked at the other girl — a country girl, because he had seen her face before in town on Saturday, but that was the only way you could tell them now because their mouths and faces were painted too and sometimes their fingernails and the Sears, Roebuck clothes didn’t look like Sears, Roebuck now and sometimes they were not even Sears, Roebuck even if they were not trimmed off in thousand-dollar mink; — a girl about the same age as the Harriss girl but not quite as tall, slender yet solid too, as country-bred girls can look, with dark hair and black eyes, looking at him for a second and then at his uncle.
‘Come in,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m Mr. Stevens. Your name is Mossop.’
‘I know it,’ the girl said. ‘No, sir. My mother was a Mossop. My father is Hence Cayley.’
‘She’s got the ring too,’ the Harriss girl said. ‘I asked her to bring it because I knew you wouldn’t believe it any more than I did when I heard it. I don’t blame her for not wearing it. I wouldn’t wear anybody’s ring either that said to me what Max said to her.’
The Cayley girl looked at the Harriss girl — a look level and black and unwinking and quite calm — for about a minute while the Harriss girl took another cigarette from the box, though this time nobody went to strike the match for her.
Then the Cayley girl looked at his uncle again. Her eyes were all right so far. They were just watchful.
‘I never did wear it,’ she said. On account of my father. He don’t think Max is any good. And I’m not going to even keep it, as soon as I can find him to give it back. Because I don’t think so too now—’
The Harriss girl made a sound. It didn’t sound to him like anything she would have learned in a Swiss convent either. The Cayley girl gave her another of the hard black contemplative looks. But her eyes were still all right. Then she looked at his uncle again.
‘I didn’t mind what he said to me. I didn’t like the way he said it. Maybe that was the only way he could think of to say it at the time. But he ought to have been able to think of a different way. But I wasn’t mad because he felt he had to say it.’
‘I see,’ his uncle said.
‘I wouldn’t have minded his having to say it, anyway,’ she said.
‘I see,’ his uncle said.
‘But he was wrong. He was wrong from the beginning. He was the one that said first that maybe I better not wear the ring out where folks could see it for a while yet. I never even had time to tell him I already knew better than to let Papa find out I even had it—’
The Harriss girl made the sound again. This time the Cayley girl stopped and turned her head quite slowly and looked at the Harriss girl for five or six seconds while the Harriss girl sat with the unlighted cigarette between her fingers. Then the Cayley girl looked at his uncle again.
‘So he was the one that said we better not be engaged except in private. So since I wasn’t to be engaged except in private, I didn’t see any reason why Captain Golldez—’
‘Gualdres,’ the Harriss girl said.
‘Golldez,’ the Cayley girl said. ‘ — or anybody else couldn’t ride up and sit on our gallery and talk to us. And I liked to ride horses that didn’t have trace-galls for a change too, so when he would bring one along for me—’
‘How could you tell whether it had a trace-gall or not, in the dark?’ the Harriss girl said.
Now the Cayley girl, and still without haste, turned her whole body and looked at the Harriss girl.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
‘Here,’ his uncle said. ‘Stup it.’
‘You old fool,’ the Harriss girl said. She wasn’t even looking at his uncle. ‘Do you think that any man except one like you with one foot already in the grave, would spend half the night every night riding a horse up and down an empty polo field by himself?’
Then the Cayley girl moved. She went fast, stooping and hiking up the hem of her skirt and taking something from the top of her stocking as she went, and stopped in front of the chair and if it had been a knife, he and his uncle would still have been too late.
‘Stand up,’ she said.
Now the Harriss girl said ‘What?’ looking up, the hand still holding the unlighted cigarette in front of her mouth. The Cayley girl didn’t speak again. She just rocked back onto her heels, slender and solid too, and swung her arm back and his uncle was moving now, hollering ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ hut the Cayley girl had already swung, slapping the Harriss girl’s face and the cigarette and the hand that held it, all together, and the Harriss girl jerked in the chair and then sat with the broken cigarette dangling between her fingers and a long thin scratch down her cheek; and then the ring itself, a big diamond, tumbled winking down the front of her coat and onto the floor.
The Harriss girl looked at the cigarette a moment. Then she looked at his uncle. ‘She slapped me!’ she said.
‘I saw her,’ his uncle said. ‘I was just about to, myself —— and then jumped too; he had to: the Harriss girl coming fast out of the chair and the Cayley girl already rocked back onto her heels again. But his uncle got there first, between them this time, flinging the Harriss girl back with one arm and the Cayley girl with the other, until in another second they both stood there crying, bawling, exactly like two three-year-olds who have been fighting, while his uncle watched diem for a moment and then stooped and picked up the ring.
‘That’ll do now,’ his uncle said. ‘Stop it. Both of you. Go to the bathroom and wash your faces. Through that door yonder’ — saying quickly ‘Not together’ as they both moved. ‘One at a time. You first,’ to the Harriss girl. ‘There’s styptic in the cabinet if you want it, fear hydrophobia rather than merely believe in it. Show her the way, Chick.’
But she had already gone on into the bedroom. The Cayley girl stood wiping her nose on the back of her hand until his uncle handed her his handkerchief.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffling, snuffling, that is. ‘But she ought not to have made me do it.’
‘She ought not to have been able to,’ his uncle said. ‘I suppose she had you waiting out there in the car all the time. Drove out to your house and got you.’
The Cayley girl blew her nose into the handkerchief. ‘Yes sir,’ she said.
‘Then you’ll have to drive her home,’ his uncle said to him, not looking back. ‘They both cant—’
But the Cayley girl was all right now. She gave her nose a good hard wipe right and then left and started to hand the handkerchief back to his uncle and then stopped, letting the hand drop at her side.
‘I’ll go back with her,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of her. It wont he but two miles home even if she wont take me any further than her gate.’
‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Here’: holding out the ring. It was a big diamond; it was all right too. The Cayley girl didn’t hardly look at it.
‘I don’t want it,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t either,’ his uncle said. ‘But you owe yourself the decency of
