“There is no sense in looking back unless it helps us to look ahead. What your little girl of the ward has been is not so important as what she is going to be.”
“Even granting this to be true,” she said to Christine slowly,—“and it may only be malicious after all, Christine,—it’s surely over and done with. It’s not Palmer’s past that concerns you now; it’s his future with you, isn’t it?”
Christine had finally adjusted her veil. A band of duchesse lace rose like a coronet from her soft hair, and from it, sweeping to the end of her train, fell fold after fold of soft tulle. She arranged the coronet carefully with small pearl-topped pins. Then she rose and put her hands on Sidney’s shoulders.
“The simple truth is,” she said quietly, “that I might hold Palmer if I cared—terribly. I don’t. And I’m afraid he knows it. It’s my pride that’s hurt, nothing else.”
And thus did Christine Lorenz go down to her wedding.
Sidney stood for a moment, her eyes on the letter she held. Already, in her new philosophy, she had learned many strange things. One of them was this: that women like Grace Irving did not betray their lovers; that the code of the underworld was “death to the squealer”; that one played the game, and won or lost, and if he lost, took his medicine. If not Grace, then who? Somebody else in the hospital who knew her story, of course. But who? And again—why?
Before going downstairs, Sidney placed the letter in a saucer and set fire to it with a match. Some of the radiance had died out of her eyes.
The Street voted the wedding a great success. The alley, however, was rather confused by certain things. For instance, it regarded the awning as essentially for the carriage guests, and showed a tendency to duck in under the side when no one was looking. Mrs. Rosenfeld absolutely refused to take the usher’s arm which was offered her, and said she guessed she was able to walk up alone.
Johnny Rosenfeld came, as befitted his position, in a complete chauffeur’s outfit of leather cap and leggings, with the shield that was his State license pinned over his heart.
The Street came decorously, albeit with a degree of uncertainty as to supper. Should they put something on the stove before they left, in case only ice cream and cake were served at the house? Or was it just as well to trust to luck, and, if the Lorenz supper proved inadequate, to sit down to a cold snack when they got home?
To K., sitting in the back of the church between Harriet and Anna, the wedding was Sidney—Sidney only. He watched her first steps down the aisle, saw her chin go up as she gained poise and confidence, watched the swinging of her young figure in its gauzy white as she passed him and went forward past the long rows of craning necks. Afterward he could not remember the wedding party at all. The service for him was Sidney, rather awed and very serious, beside the altar. It was Sidney who came down the aisle to the triumphant strains of the wedding march, Sidney with Max beside her!
On his right sat Harriet, having reached the first pinnacle of her new career. The wedding gowns were successful. They were more than that—they were triumphant. Sitting there, she cast comprehensive eyes over the church, filled with potential brides.
To Harriet, then, that October afternoon was a future of endless lace and chiffon, the joy of creation, triumph eclipsing triumph. But to Anna, watching the ceremony with blurred eyes and ineffectual bluish lips, was coming her hour. Sitting back in the pew, with her hands folded over her prayer-book, she said a little prayer for her straight young daughter, facing out from the altar with clear, unafraid eyes.
As Sidney and Max drew near the door, Joe Drummond, who had been standing at the back of the church, turned quickly and went out. He stumbled, rather, as if he could not see.
CHAPTER XIV
The supper at the White Springs Hotel had not been the last supper Carlotta Harrison and Max Wilson had taken together. Carlotta had selected for her vacation a small town within easy motoring distance of the city, and two or three times during her two weeks off duty Wilson had gone out to see her. He liked being with her. She stimulated him. For once that he could see Sidney, he saw Carlotta twice.
She had kept the affair well in hand. She was playing for high stakes. She knew quite well the kind of man with whom she was dealing—that he would pay as little as possible. But she knew, too, that, let him want a thing enough, he would pay any price for it, even marriage.
She was very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing or two.
During that entire vacation he never saw her in anything more elaborate than the simplest of white dresses modestly open at the throat, sleeves rolled up to show her satiny arms. There were no other boarders at the little farmhouse. She sat for hours in the summer evenings in the square yard filled with apple trees that bordered the highway, carefully posed over a book, but with her keen eyes always on the road. She read Browning, Emerson, Swinburne. Once he found her with a book that she hastily concealed. He insisted on seeing it, and secured it. It was a book on brain surgery. Confronted with it, she blushed and dropped her eyes.
His delighted vanity found in it the most insidious of compliments, as she had intended.
“I feel such an idiot when I am with you,” she said. “I wanted to know a little more about the things you do.”
That put their relationship on a new and advanced basis. Thereafter he occasionally talked surgery instead of sentiment. He found her responsive, intelligent. His work, a sealed book to his women before, lay open to her.
Now and then their professional discussions ended in something different. The two lines of their interest converged.
“Gad!” he said one day. “I look forward to these evenings. I can talk shop with you without either shocking or nauseating you. You are the most intelligent woman I know—and one of the prettiest.”
He had stopped the machine on the crest of a hill for the ostensible purpose of admiring the view.
“As long as you talk shop,” she said, “I feel that there is nothing wrong in our being together; but when you say the other thing—”
“Is it wrong to tell a pretty woman you admire her?”
