“Well, it sure sounds good. I wonder… Say, let me say it sometimes, will you?”
“All right,” Jenny agreed. “You can have it. Say, what’s that you keep telling your aunt? something about pulling up the sheet or something?” The niece told her. “That sounds good, too,” Jenny said magnanimously.
“Does it? I tell you what: You let me use yours sometime, and you can take mine. How about it?”
“All right,” Jenny agreed again, “it’s a trade.”
Water lapped and whispered ceaselessly in the pale darkness. The curve of the low ceiling directly over the berth lent a faint sense of oppression to the cabin, but this sense of oppression faded out into the comparatively greater spaciousness of the room, of the darkness with a round orifice vaguely in the center of it. The moon was higher and the lower curve of the brass rim of the port was now a thin silver sickle, like a new moon.
Jenny moved again, turning against the other’s side, breathing ineffably across the niece’s face. The niece lay with Jenny’s passive nakedness against her arm, and moving her arm outward from the elbow she slowly stroked the back of her hand along the swell of Jenny’s flank. Slowly, back and forth, while Jenny lay supine and receptive as a cat. Slowly, back and forth and back… “I like flesh,” the niece murmured. “Warm and smooth. Wish I’d lived in Rome… oiled gladiators…. Jenny,” she said abruptly, “are you a virgin?”
“Of course I am,” Jenny answered immediately in a startled tone. She lay for a moment in lax astonishment. “I mean,” she said, “I — yes. I mean, yes, of course I am.” She brooded in passive surprise, then her body lost its laxness. “Say—”
“Well,” the niece agreed judicially, “I guess that’s about what I’d have said, myself.”
“Say,” demanded Jenny, thoroughly aroused, “what did you ask me that for?”
“Just to see what you’d say. It doesn’t make any difference, you know, whether you are or not. I know lots of girls that say they’re not. I don’t think all of ’em are lying, either.”
“Maybe it don’t to some folks,” Jenny rejoined primly, “but I don’t approve of it. I think a girl loses a man’s respect by pom — prom — I don’t approve of it, that’s all. And I don’t think you had any right to ask me.”
“Good Lord, you sound like a girl scout or something. Don’t Pete ever try to persuade you otherwise?”
“Say, what’re you asking me questions like that for?”
“I just wanted to see what you’d say. I don’t think it’s anything to tear your shirt over. You’re too easily shocked, Jenny,” the niece informed her.
“Well, who wouldn’t be? If you want to know what folks say when you ask ’em things like that, why don’t you ask ’em to yourself? Did anybody ever ask you if you were one?”
“Not that I know of. But I wou—”
“Well, are you?”
The niece lay perfectly still a moment. “Am I what?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Why, of course I am,” she answered sharply. She raised herself on her elbow. “I mean — Say, look here—”
“Well, that’s what I’d ‘a’ said, myself,” Jenny responded with placid malice from the darkness.
The niece poised on her tense elbow above Jenny’s sweet regular breathing. “Anyway, what bus — I mean — You asked me so quick,” she rushed on, “I wasn’t even thinking about being asked something like that.”
“Neither was I. You asked me quicker than I asked you.”
“But that was different. We were talking about you being one. We were not even thinking about me being one. You asked it so quick I had to say that. It wasn’t fair.”
“So did I have to say what I said. It was as fair for you as it was for me.”
“No, it was different. I had to say I wasn’t: quick, like that.”
“Well, I’ll ask it when you’re not surprised, then. Are you?”
The niece lay quiet for a time. “You mean, sure enough?”
“Yes.” Jenny breathed her warm intent breath across the other’s face.
The niece lay silent again. After a time she said: “Hell,” and then: “Yes, I am. It’s not worth lying about.”
“That’s what I think,” Jenny agreed smugly. She became placidly silent in the darkness. The other waited a moment, then said sharply:
“Well? Are you one?”
“Sure I am.”
“I mean, sure enough. You said sure enough, didn’t you?”
“Sure, I am,” Jenny repeated.
“You’re not playing fair,” the niece accused, “I told you.”
“Well, I told you, too.”
“Honest? You swear?”
“Sure, I am,” Jenny said again with her glib and devastating placidity.
The niece said, “Hell.” She snorted thinly.
They lay quiet, side by side. They were quiet on deck, too, but it seemed as though there still lingered in the darkness a thin stubborn ghost of syncopation and thudding tireless feet. Jenny wiggled her free toes with pleasure. Presently she said:
“You’re mad, ain’t you?” No reply. “You’ve got a good figure, too,” Jenny offered, conciliatory. “I think you’ve got a right sweet little shape.”
But the other refused to be cajoled. Jenny sighed again ineffably, her milk-and-honey breath. She said: “Your brother’s a college boy, ain’t he? I know some college boys. Tulane. I think college boys are cute. They don’t dress as well as Pete… sloppy.” She mused for a time. “I wore a frat pin once, for a couple of days. I guess your brother belongs to it, don’t he?”
“Gus? Belong to one of these jerkwater clubs? I guess not. He’s a Yale man — he will be next month, that is. I’m going with him. They don’t take every Tom, Dick and Harry that shows up in up there. You have to wait until sophomore year. But Gus is going to work for a senior society, anyhow. He don’t think much of fraternities. Gee, you’d sure give him a laugh if he could hear you.”
“Well, I didn’t know. It seems to me one thing you join is about like another. What’s he going to get by joining the one he’s going to join?”
“You don’t get anything, stupid. You just join it.”
Jenny pondered this a while. “And you have to work to join it?”
“Three years. And only a few make it, then.”
“And if you do make it, you don’t get anything except a little button or something? Good Lord… Say, you know what I’m going to tell him to-morrow? I’m going to tell him he better hold up the sheet: he’s — he’s — What’s the rest of it?”
“Oh shut up and get over on your side,” the niece said sharply, turning her back. “You don’t understand anything about it.”
“I sure don’t,” Jenny agreed, rolling away and onto her other side, and they lay with their backs to each other and their behinds just touching, as children do…. “Three years… Good Lord.”
Fairchild had not returned. But she had known they would not: she was not even surprised, and so once more her party had evolved into interminable cards. Mrs. Wiseman, herself, Mr. Talliaferro and Mark.
By craning her neck she could see Dorothy Jameson’s frail humorless intentness and the tawdry sophistication of Jenny’s young man where they swung their legs from the roof of the wheelhouse. The moon was getting up and Pete’s straw hat was a dull implacable gleam slanted above the red eye of his eternal cigarette. And, yes, there was that queer, shy, shabby Mr. Gordon, mooning alone, as usual; and again she felt a stab of reproof for having neglected him.
At least the others seemed to be enjoying the voyage, however trying they might be to one another. But what could she do for him? He was so difficult, so ill at ease whenever she extended herself for him… Mrs. Maurier rose.
“For a while,” she explained; “Mr. Gordon. — . the trials of a hostess, you know. You might play dummy until I — no: wait.” She called Dorothy with saccharine insistence and presently Miss Jameson responded. “Won’t you take my hand for a short time? I’m sure the young gentleman will excuse you.”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Jameson called back. “I have a headache. Please excuse me.”
“Go on, Mrs. Maurier,” Mrs. Wiseman said, “we can pass the time until you come back: we’ve got used to sitting around.”
“Yes, do,” Mr. Talliaferro added, “we understand.”
Mrs. Maurier looked over to where Gordon still leaned his tall body upon the rail. “I really must,” she explained again. “It’s such a comfort to have a few on whom I can depend.”
“Yes, do,” Mr. Talliaferro repeated.
When she had gone Mrs. Wiseman said: “Let’s play red dog for pennies. I’ve got a few dollars left.”
She joined him quietly. He glanced his gaunt face at her, glanced away. “How quiet, how peaceful it is,” she began, undeterred, leaning beside him and gazing also out across the restless slumber of water upon which the worn moon spread her ceaseless peacock’s tail like a train of silver sequins.
In the yet level rays of the moon the man’s face was spare and cavernous, haughty and inhuman almost. He doesn’t get enough to eat, she knew suddenly and infallibly. It’s like a silver faun’s face, she thought. But he is so difficult, so shy….
“So few of us take time to look inward and contemplate ourselves, don’t you think? It’s the life we lead, I suppose. Only he who creates has not lost the art of this: of making his life complete by living within himself. Don’t you think so, Mr. Gordon?”
“Yes,” he answered shortly. Beyond the dimensionless curve of the deck
