They circled the floor again, but her feet were heavy, and the knowledge that she was dancing badly added to her effort. Phrases half formed themselves in her mind and escaped. She wanted to be able to carry off the situation well, to make her meaning clear in some graceful, indirect way, but she could not.
“It’s this way,” she said. “I’m not your kind. Maybe I talked that way for a while, but I’m not really. I—well—I’m not. I wish you’d leave me alone. I really do.”
The music ended with a crash, and two thumps of many feet echoed the last two notes. He still held her close, and she felt that inexplicable charm like the attraction of a magnet for steel.
“You really do?” His tone thrilled her with an intoxicating warmth. The smile in his eyes was both caressing and confident. Consciously she kept back the answering smile it commanded, looking at him gravely.
“I really do.”
“All right.” His quick acquiescence was exactly what she had wanted, and it made her unhappy. They walked back to the table, and for hours she was very gay, watching him dance with momma and Louise. She crowded into the tonneau during their quick, restless dashes from one dancing place to the next. She laughed a great deal, and when they met Duddy and Bob somewhere a little after midnight she danced with each of them. But she felt that having a good time was almost as hard work as earning a living.
It was nearly two weeks before she went out again with momma and Louise, and this time she did not see him at all. Louise was astonished by his failure to telephone.
“What in the world did you do with that Kennedy man?” she wanted to know. “You must have been an awful boob. Why, he was simply dippy about you. Believe me, I’d have strung him along if I’d had your chance. And a machine like a palace car, too!” she mourned.
“Oh, well, baby, Helen doesn’t know much about handling men,” momma comforted her. “She did the best she could. You never can tell about ’em, anyway. And maybe he’s out of town.”
But this was not true, for Louise had seen him only that afternoon with a stunning girl in a million dollars’ worth of sables.
Helen was swept by crosscurrents of feeling. She told herself that she did not care what he did. She repeated this until she saw that the repetition proved its untruth. Then she let her imagination follow him. But it could do this only blindly. She could picture his home only by combining the magnificence of the St. Francis with scraps from novels she had read, and while she could see him running up imposing steps, passing through a great door and handing his coat to a dignified man servant, either a butler or a footman, she could not follow him further. She could see him with a beautiful girl at a table in a private room of a café; there were no longer any veils between her and that side of a man’s life, and she no longer shrank from facing the world as it exists. But she knew that this was only one of his many interests and occupations. She would have liked to know the others.
She turned to thoughts of Paul as one comes from a dark room into clear light. At times she felt an affection for him that made her present life seem like a feverish dream. She imagined herself living in a pretty little house with him. There would be white curtains at the windows and roses over the porch. When the housework was all beautifully done she would sit on the porch, embroidering a centerpiece or a dainty waist. The gate would click, and he would come up the walk, his feet making a crunching sound on the gravel. She would run to meet him. It had been so long since she had seen him that his face was vague. When with an effort she brought from her memory the straight-looking blue eyes, the full, firm lips, the cleft in his chin, she saw how boyish he looked. He was a dear boy.
The days went by, each like the day before. The rains had begun. Every morning, in a ceaseless drizzle from gray skies, she rushed down a sidewalk filmed with running water and crowded into a streetcar jammed with irritated people and dripping umbrellas. When she reached the office her feet were wet and cold and the hems of her skirts flapped damply at her ankles.
She had a series of colds, and her head ached while she copied endless quotations from relentlessly clicking sounders. At night she rode wearily home, clinging to a strap, and crawled into bed. Her muscles ached and her throat was sore. Momma, even in the scurry of dressing for the evening, stopped to bring her a glass of hot whiskey-and-water, and she drank it gratefully. When at last she was alone she read awhile before going to sleep. One forgot the dreariness of living, swept away into an artificial world of adventure and romance.
Christmas came, and she recklessly spent all her money for gifts to send home; socks and ties and a shaving cup for her father, a length of black silk and a ten-dollar gold piece for her mother, hair ribbons and a Carmen bracelet for Mabel, a knife and a pocketbook with a two-dollar bill in it for Tommy. They made a large, exciting bundle, and when she stood in line at the post-office she pictured happily the delight there would be when it was opened. She hated work with a hatred that increased daily, but there was a deep satisfaction in feeling that she could do such things as this with money she herself had earned.
The brokers at the Merchants’
