“Look here, Helen, why didn’t you tell those folks where you live that we’re engaged?” There was nothing but inquiry in his tone, but the words were a bombshell. She straightened in her chair.
“Why—” How could she explain that vague feeling about keeping it from Louise and momma? “Why—I don’t know. What was the use?”
“What was the use? Well, for one thing, it might have cleared things up a little for some of these other fellows that know you.”
What had momma told him? “I don’t know any men that would be interested,” she said.
“Well, you never can tell about that,” he answered reasonably. “I was sort of surprised, that’s all. I had an idea girls talked over such things.”
She was tired, and in the dull little restaurant there was nothing to stimulate her. The commonplace atmosphere, the warmth, and the placidity of his voice lulled her to stupidity.
“I suppose they do,” she said. “They usually talk over their rings.” She was alert instantly, filled with rage at herself and horror. His cheeks grew dully red. “I didn’t mean—” she cried, and the words clashed with his. “If that’s it I’ll get you a ring.”
“Oh, no! No! I don’t want you to. I wouldn’t think of taking it.”
“Of course you know I haven’t had money enough to get you a good one. I thought about it pretty often, but I didn’t know you thought it was so important. Seems to me you’ve changed an awful lot since I knew you.”
The protest, the explanation, was stopped on her lips. It was true. She felt that they had both changed so much that they might be strangers.
“Do you really think so?” she asked miserably.
“I don’t know what to think,” he answered honestly, pain in his voice. “I’ve been—about crazy sometimes, thinking about—things, wanting to see you again. And now—I don’t know—you seem so different, sitting there with paint on your face—” Her hand went to her cheek as if it stung her—“and talking about rings. You didn’t use to be like this a bit, Helen,” he went on earnestly. “It seems to me as if you’d completely lost track of your better self somehow. I wish you’d—”
This struck from her a spark of anger.
“Please don’t begin preaching at me! I’m perfectly able to take care of myself. Really, Paul, you just don’t understand. It isn’t anything, really, a little bit of rouge. I only put it on because I was tired and didn’t have any color. And I didn’t mean it about the ring. I just didn’t think what I was saying. But I guess you’re right. I guess neither of us knows the other any more.”
She felt desolate, abandoned to dreariness. Everything seemed all wrong with the world. She listened to Paul’s assurances that he knew she was all right, whatever she did, that he didn’t care anyhow, that she suited him. But they sounded hollow in her ears, for she knew that beneath them was the same uncertainty she felt. When, flushing, he said again that he would get her a ring, she answered that she did not want one, and they said no more about it. The abyss between them was left bridged only by the things they had not said, fearing to make it forever impassable by saying them.
He left her at her door promptly at the proper hour of ten. There was a moment in which a blind feeling in her reached out to him; she felt that they had taken hold of the situation by the wrong end somehow, that everything would be all right if they had had a chance.
He supposed she couldn’t take the morning off. He had to see the superintendent, but maybe they could manage an hour or two. No, she had to work. With the threat of that missent message hanging over her she dared not further spoil her record by taking a day off without notice. And she knew that one or two hours more could not possibly make up the months of estrangement between them.
“Well, good night.”
“Good night.” Their hands clung a moment and dropped apart. If only he would say something, do something, she did not know what. But awkwardness held him as it did her.
“Good night.” The broad door swung slowly shut behind her. Even then she waited a moment, with a wild impulse to run after him. But she climbed the stairs instead and went wearily to bed, her heart aching with a sense of irreparable loss.
In the morning she was still very tired, and while she drove herself through the day’s work she told herself that probably she had never really loved him. “Unless you can love as the angels may, with the breadth of heaven betwixt you,” she murmured, remembering the volume of poetry she had found on a library shelf. She had thrilled over it when she read it, dreaming of him; now it seemed to her a grim and almost cynical test. Well, she might as well face a lifetime of work. Lots of women did.
She managed to do this, seeing years upon years of lonely effort, during which she would accumulate money enough to buy a little home of her own. There would be no one in it to criticise her choice of friends or say that she painted. That remark clung like a bur in her mind. Yes, she could face a lifetime in which no one would have the right to say things like that!
But when she went home she found that she could not endure an evening of loneliness. Louise and momma were going out, and she was very gay while she dressed to go with them. They said they had never seen her in better spirits.
Unaccountably, the lights, the music, the atmosphere of gaiety, did not get into her blood as usual. At intervals she had moments
