She laughed nervously. “Because I want you to so much.”
“Well—try.”
She stood up, walked away under the apple trees, and came back and sat down beside him. “Vance—you remember that night when you brought me the first chapters of Loot to read?” He nodded.
“And you remember what you said afterward—and what I said?” He nodded again.
“That night when I saw you go I thought I couldn’t bear it.”
“No—”
She turned and looked at him. “You too—?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, then—then I can tell you.” He noticed, with that odd detachment which sometimes came to him in emotional moments, that her eyelids trembled slightly, as people’s lips tremble when they are agitated. She seemed conscious of it, for she turned her head away without speaking.
“You were going to tell me,” he reminded her.
She looked at him again, gently, attentively, as if her eyes were feeling the way for her words. “It begins so far back—the day we went up Thundertop. That day I made up my mind I must marry Lewis.” She stopped. It was the first time Vance had ever heard her allude to her marriage. He had poured out all his secret misery to her on the night when he had sought her out to reproach her for having forced her way into Laura Lou’s room. She knew the whole history of his married life, but no allusion to hers had ever escaped her, and he had imagined that she avoided the subject lest her confidences should complicate Vance’s relations with her husband.
After a moment she continued: “But what’s the use? People do what they must—what they think they must. It’s all bound up with my family history—it’s too long to tell. But Lewis was generous to them at a time when I couldn’t be, and that held me fast. … You understand?”
Vance understood. He thought of the generosity of Laura Lou, who had lavished her all on him, and had held him fast.
“Life’s such a perplexity and a waste,” she pursued—“or at the time it seems so. There were so many times when I knew I was utterly useless to Lewis, and when I imagined I could have helped you if I’d been free. And now, all of a sudden, everything’s changed. …” She put her hand on his. “Could I help you still—?”
“Yes.”
“Vance!” She sat silent, and he laid his other hand on hers. At length she began to speak more connectedly, to tell him of two almost simultaneous events in her life—the sudden death of the old Miss Lorburn of Stuyvesant Square, who had left her the Willows, with more money than she could have hoped for, and the discovery that the tie between Tarrant and herself had become as irksome to her husband as to her. The latter announcement was no surprise to Vance, for at the New Hour office the jokes about the Pulsifer First Novel Prize had been coupled with a good deal of gossip about the donor and Tarrant. Vance recalled his own experience with Mrs. Pulsifer, and felt a recoil of disgust.
“And you see I had to tell you first of all—you do see that, Vance? Because it seemed to me that life had slipped back again to that night when you said—oh, Vance, I could repeat to you every word you said! And I knew how you loved me and hated me while you said them—yet I was held fast. But now it’s all over, and I’m free, free, free!” She sprang to her feet again. “What a child I must seem to you! And I’m older than you—and you let me go on talking all this nonsense. …”
He had tried his best to listen attentively to what she was saying; but it was drowned under a surge of joy. It was curious, how hard it was for him to follow the words of anyone too close to his soul for words to be needed. He wondered she did not feel that too—feel that the spring sunshine, and their sitting in it together, was enough for her as it was for him. He caught himself speculating whether, after all, they might not have made a dash for that bit of woodland—and then fixing his thoughts curiously on the long slender hands on her knee. He thought perhaps it was because, for so long, his mind had been all darkness and confusion, that the sudden clarity blinded him, made him want more time before he groped his way back to her. But no—the real trouble, he thought, was that most people took so long to discover the essential; wasted such precious moments clearing away rubbish before they got to the heart of a thing. All women were like that, he supposed—but what did it matter? Presently she would understand—would stop talking, and just let her hand lie in his. “It’s so good, sitting here with you,” he said. “I never thought we should.”
“Oh, Vance …”
By and by, he reflected, there would be a thousand things to tell her; now he could only think of that spring wood, and the Fifth Symphony, and dawn over Thundertop. …
She seemed to understand; she sat down beside him again and gave him back her hand. But after a while the sun waned from the porch, and the chill of the afternoon air fell on them. She gave a shiver and stood up. “It will be dark soon—I must be going.”
He looked at her in surprise; it was bewildering to him that the passing hour should still have rights over them. “Why can’t you stay with me?” he said.
“Stay—now?” She drew back a step, and looked at him, and then over his shoulder at the little house. “Oh, Vance—you must know what I want. If only we could be back together at the Willows. I should be so content if I could help you as I used to. You remember the things we found together when you were
