Their group swooped down about the table, and the general ordering of more drinks ended their talk. There was a clamor when Helen said she did not want anything. Duddy swept away her protests and ordered for her, but momma came to the rescue.
“Let the kid alone; she’s not used to it. You stick to lemon sours, baby. Don’t let them kid you,” she said. The chatter swept on, leaving her once more unnoticed, but when the music called again Mr. Kennedy took her out among the dancers.
“You’re all right,” he said. “Just let yourself go and follow me. It’s only a walk to music.” And unaccountably she found herself dancing, felt the rhythm beat through blood and nerves, and stiffness and awkwardness drop away from her. She felt like a butterfly bursting from a chrysalis, like a bird singing in the dawn. She was so happy that Mr. Kennedy laughed at the ecstacy in her face.
“You look like a kid in a candy-shop,” he said, swinging her past a jam with a long, breathless swooping glide and picking up the step again.
“I’m—per‑fect‑ly-happy!” she cried, in time to the tune. “It’s awfully good—of you‑ou!”
He laughed again.
“Stick to me, and I’ll teach you a lot of things,” he said.
She found, when she went reluctantly back to the table with him, that the others were talking of leaving. It hurt to hear him enthusiastically greeting the suggestion. But after they were in the machine it appeared that they were not going home. There was an interval of rushing through the cool darkness, and then another restaurant just like the others, and more dancing.
The hours blurred into a succession of those swift dashes through the clean night air, and recurring plunges into light and heat and smoke and music. Helen, faithfully sticking to lemon sours as momma had advised, discovered that she could dance something called a rag, and something else known as a Grizzly Bear; heard Duddy crying that she was some chicken; felt herself a great success. Bob was growing strangely sentimental and talked sorrowfully about his poor old mother; momma’s cheeks were flushed under the rouge, and she sang part of a song, forgetting the rest of the words. The crowd shifted and separated; somewhere they lost part of it, and a stranger appeared with Louise.
Helen, forced at last to think of her work next morning, was horrified to find that it was two o’clock. Momma agreed that the best of friends must part. They sang while they sped through the sleeping city, the stars overhead and the streetlights flashing by. Drowsily happy, Helen thought it no harm to rest her head on Mr. Kennedy’s shoulder, since his other arm was around momma, and she wondered what it would be like if a man so fascinating were in love with her. It would be frightfully thrilling and exciting, she thought, playing daringly with the idea.
“See you, again!” they all cried, when she alighted with momma and Louise before the dark apartment-house. The others were going on to more fun somewhere. She shook hands with Mr. Kennedy, feeling a contraction of her heart. “Thank you for a very pleasant time.” She felt that he was amused by the stilted words.
“Don’t forget it isn’t the last one!” he said.
She did not forget. The words repeated themselves in her mind; she heard his voice, and felt his arm around her waist and the music throbbing in her blood for a long time. The sensations came back to her in the pauses of her work next day, while she dragged through the hours as if she were drugged, hearing the noise of the exchange and the market quotations clicking off the Chicago wire, now very far and thin, now close and sickeningly loud.
She was white and faint when she got home, and Momma suggested a bromo-seltzer and offered to lend her some rouge. But Mr. Kennedy had not telephoned, and she went to bed instead of going out with them that evening. It was eleven days before he did telephone.
IX
In the mornings Helen went to work. The first confusion of the Merchants’ Exchange had cleared a little. She began to see a pattern in the fluctuations of the market quotations. January wheat, February wheat, May corn, became a drama to her, and while she snatched the figures from the wire and tossed them to the waiting boy, saw them chalked up on the huge board, and heard the shouts of the brokers, she caught glimpses of the worldwide gamble in lives and fortunes.
But it was only another great spectacle in which she had no part. She was merely a living mechanical attachment to the network of wires. She wanted to tear herself away, to have a life of her own, a life that went forward, instead of swinging like a pendulum between home and the office.
She did not want to work. She had never wanted to work. Working had been only a means of reaching sooner her own life with Paul. The road had run straight before her to that end. But now Paul would not let her follow it; he did not want her to work with him at Ripley; she would have to wait until he made money enough to support her. And she hated work.
Resting her chin on one palm, listening half consciously for her call to interrupt the ceaseless clicking of the sounder, she gazed across the marble counter and the vaulted room; the gesticulating brokers, the scurrying messengers, faded into a background against which she saw again the light and color and movement of the night when she had met Mr. Kennedy. She heard his voice. “What’s the use of living if you don’t hit the high spots?”
She hurried home at night, expecting she knew not what. But it had not happened. Restlessness took possession of her, and she turned for hours on her pillow, dozing only to hear the clicking of
