“Under our circumstances, yes.”
He twisted himself around in the seat and sat looking at her.
“The loveliest mouth in the world!” he said, and kissed her suddenly.
She had expected it for at least a week, but her surprise was well done. Well done also was her silence during the homeward ride.
No, she was not angry, she said. It was only that he had set her thinking. When she got out of the car, she bade him good-night and good-bye. He only laughed.
“Don’t you trust me?” he said, leaning out to her.
She raised her dark eyes.
“It is not that. I do not trust myself.”
After that nothing could have kept him away, and she knew it.
“Man demands both danger and play; therefore he selects woman as the most dangerous of toys.” A spice of danger had entered into their relationship. It had become infinitely piquant.
He motored out to the farm the next day, to be told that Miss Harrison had gone for a long walk and had not said when she would be back. That pleased him. Evidently she was frightened. Every man likes to think that he is a bit of a devil. Dr. Max settled his tie, and, leaving his car outside the whitewashed fence, departed blithely on foot in the direction Carlotta had taken.
She knew her man, of course. He found her, face down, under a tree, looking pale and worn and bearing all the evidence of a severe mental struggle. She rose in confusion when she heard his step, and retreated a foot or two, with her hands out before her.
“How dare you?” she cried. “How dare you follow me! I—I have got to have a little time alone. I have got to think things out.”
He knew it was play-acting, but rather liked it; and, because he was quite as skillful as she was, he struck a match on the trunk of the tree and lighted a cigarette before he answered.
“I was afraid of this,” he said, playing up. “You take it entirely too hard. I am not really a villain, Carlotta.”
It was the first time he had used her name.
“Sit down and let us talk things over.”
She sat down at a safe distance, and looked across the little clearing to him with the somber eyes that were her great asset.
“You can afford to be very calm,” she said, “because this is only play to you; I know it. I’ve known it all along. I’m a good listener and not—unattractive. But what is play for you is not necessarily play for me. I am going away from here.”
For the first time, he found himself believing in her sincerity. Why, the girl was white. He didn’t want to hurt her. If she cried—he was at the mercy of any woman who cried.
“Give up your training?”
“What else can I do? This sort of thing cannot go on, Dr. Max.”
She did cry then—real tears; and he went over beside her and took her in his arms.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “Please don’t do that. You make me feel like a scoundrel, and I’ve only been taking a little bit of happiness. That’s all. I swear it.”
She lifted her head from his shoulder.
“You mean you are happy with me?”
“Very, very happy,” said Dr. Max, and kissed her again on the lips.
The one element Carlotta had left out of her calculations was herself. She had known the man, had taken the situation at its proper value. But she had left out this important factor in the equation,—that factor which in every relationship between man and woman determines the equation,—the woman.
Into her calculating ambition had come a new and destroying element. She who, like K. in his little room on the Street, had put aside love and the things thereof, found that it would not be put aside. By the end of her short vacation Carlotta Harrison was wildly in love with the younger Wilson.
They continued to meet, not as often as before, but once a week, perhaps. The meetings were full of danger now; and if for the girl they lost by this quality, they gained attraction for the man. She was shrewd enough to realize her own situation. The thing had gone wrong. She cared, and he did not. It was all a game now, not hers.
All women are intuitive; women in love are dangerously so. As well as she knew that his passion for her was not the real thing, so also she realized that there was growing up in his heart something akin to the real thing for Sidney Page. Suspicion became certainty after a talk they had over the supper table at a country roadhouse the day after Christine’s wedding.
“How was the wedding—tiresome?” she asked.
“Thrilling! There’s always something thrilling to me in a man tying himself up for life to one woman. It’s—it’s so reckless.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not exactly the Law and the Prophets, is it?”
“It’s the truth. To think of selecting out of all the world one woman, and electing to spend the rest of one’s days with her! Although—”
His eyes looked past Carlotta into distance.
