“Don’t be absurd. It is enough to have you say so.”
But he insisted on swearing, standing with one hand upraised, his eyes on her. The Sunday landscape was very still, save for the hum of busy insect life. A mile or so away, at the foot of two hills, lay a white farmhouse with its barn and outbuildings. In a small room in the barn a woman sat; and because it was Sunday, and she could not sew, she read her Bible.
“—and that after this there will be only one woman for me,” finished Max, and dropped his hand. He bent over and kissed Sidney on the lips.
At the white farmhouse, a little man stood in the doorway and surveyed the road with eyes shaded by a shirt- sleeved arm. Behind him, in a darkened room, a barkeeper was wiping the bar with a clean cloth.
“I guess I’ll go and get my coat on, Bill,” said the little man heavily. “They’re starting to come now. I see a machine about a mile down the road.”
Sidney broke the news of her engagement to K. herself, the evening of the same day. The little house was quiet when she got out of the car at the door. Harriet was asleep on the couch at the foot of her bed, and Christine’s rooms were empty. She found Katie on the back porch, mountains of Sunday newspapers piled around her.
“I’d about give you up,” said Katie. “I was thinking, rather than see your ice-cream that’s left from dinner melt and go to waste, I’d take it around to the Rosenfelds.”
“Please take it to them. I’d really rather they had it.”
She stood in front of Katie, drawing off her gloves.
“Aunt Harriet’s asleep. Is—is Mr. Le Moyne around?”
“You’re gettin’ prettier every day, Miss Sidney. Is that the blue suit Miss Harriet said she made for you? It’s right stylish. I’d like to see the back.”
Sidney obediently turned, and Katie admired.
“When I think how things have turned out!” she reflected. “You in a hospital, doing God knows what for all sorts of people, and Miss Harriet making a suit like that and asking a hundred dollars for it, and that tony that a person doesn’t dare to speak to her when she’s in the dining-room. And your poor ma…well, it’s all in a lifetime! No; Mr. K.‘s not here. He and Mrs. Howe are gallivanting around together.”
“Katie!”
“Well, that’s what I call it. I’m not blind. Don’t I hear her dressing up about four o’clock every afternoon, and, when she’s all ready, sittin’ in the parlor with the door open, and a book on her knee, as if she’d been reading all afternoon? If he doesn’t stop, she’s at the foot of the stairs, calling up to him. ‘K.,’ she says, ‘K., I’m waiting to ask you something!’ or, ‘K., wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?’ She’s always feedin’ him tea and cake, so that when he comes to table he won’t eat honest victuals.”
Sidney had paused with one glove half off. Katie’s tone carried conviction. Was life making another of its queer errors, and were Christine and K. in love with each other? K. had always been HER friend, HER confidant. To give him up to Christine—she shook herself impatiently. What had come over her? Why not be glad that he had some sort of companionship?
She went upstairs to the room that had been her mother’s, and took off her hat. She wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened to her. She did not belong to herself any more. It gave her an odd, lost feeling. She was going to be married—not very soon, but ultimately. A year ago her half promise to Joe had gratified her sense of romance. She was loved, and she had thrilled to it.
But this was different. Marriage, that had been but a vision then, loomed large, almost menacing. She had learned the law of compensation: that for every joy one pays in suffering. Women who married went down into the valley of death for their children. One must love and be loved very tenderly to pay for that. The scale must balance.
And there were other things. Women grew old, and age was not always lovely. This very maternity—was it not fatal to beauty? Visions of child-bearing women in the hospitals, with sagging breasts and relaxed bodies, came to her. That was a part of the price.
Harriet was stirring, across the hall. Sidney could hear her moving about with flat, inelastic steps.
That was the alternative. One married, happily or not as the case might be, and took the risk. Or one stayed single, like Harriet, growing a little hard, exchanging slimness for leanness and austerity of figure, flat-chested, thin-voiced. One blossomed and withered, then, or one shriveled up without having flowered. All at once it seemed very terrible to her. She felt as if she had been caught in an inexorable hand that had closed about her.
Harriet found her a little later, face down on her mother’s bed, crying as if her heart would break. She scolded her roundly.
“You’ve been overworking,” she said. “You’ve been getting thinner. Your measurements for that suit showed it. I have never approved of this hospital training, and after last January—”
She could hardly credit her senses when Sidney, still swollen with weeping, told her of her engagement.
“But I don’t understand. If you care for him and he has asked you to marry him, why on earth are you crying your eyes out?”
“I do care. I don’t know why I cried. It just came over me, all at once, that I—It was just foolishness. I am very happy, Aunt Harriet.”
Harriet thought she understood. The girl needed her mother, and she, Harriet, was a hard, middle-aged woman and a poor substitute. She patted Sidney’s moist hand.
“I guess I understand,” she said. “I’ll attend to your wedding things, Sidney. We’ll show this street that even Christine Lorenz can be outdone.” And, as an afterthought: “I hope Max Wilson will settle down now. He’s been none too steady.”
K. had taken Christine to see Tillie that Sunday afternoon. Palmer had the car out—had, indeed, not been home since the morning of the previous day. He played golf every Saturday afternoon and Sunday at the Country Club, and invariably spent the night there. So K. and Christine walked from the end of the trolley line, saying little, but under K.‘s keen direction finding bright birds in the hedgerows, hidden field flowers, a dozen wonders of the country that
