“Oh, but I’m perfectly respectable!”
“All right! Marry me.”
Behind the chaos of her mind there was the tense, suffocating hesitation of the instant before a diver leaves the springboard—security behind him, ecstasy ahead. His nearness, his voice, the light in his eyes, were all that she had been wanting, without knowing it, all these months. The music stopped with a crash.
He stood, as he had stood once before, his arm still tight around her, and in a flash she saw that other time and the dreary months that had followed.
“All right. It’s settled?” There was the faintest question in his confident voice.
“You really do—love me?”
“I really do.” His eyes were on hers, and she saw his confidence change to certainty. “You’re game!” he said, and kissed her triumphantly, in the crowded room, beneath the glaring lights and crepe-paper decorations. She did not care; she cared for nothing in the world now but him.
“Let’s—go away—a little while by ourselves, out where it’s dark and cool,” she said hurriedly as they crossed the floor.
“Not on your life! We’re going to have the biggest party this town ever saw!” he answered exultantly over his shoulder, and she saw his enjoyment of the bomb he was about to drop upon the unsuspecting group at the table. “The roof is off the sky tonight. This is a wedding-party!”
Louise and momma were upon her with excited cries and kisses, and Helen, flushed, laughing, trying not to be hysterical, heard his voice ordering drinks, disposing of questions of license, minister, ring, rooms at the St. Francis, champagne, supper, flowers. She was the beggar maid listening to King Cophetua.
XI
At ten o’clock on a bright June morning Helen Kennedy tiptoed across a darkened bedroom and closed its door softly behind her. Her tenseness relaxed with a sigh of relief when the door shut with the tiniest of muffled clicks and the stillness behind its panels remained unbroken.
Sunlight streamed through the windows of the sitting-room, throwing a quivering pattern of the lace curtains on the velvet carpet and kindling a glow of ruddy color where it touched mahogany chairs and a corner of the big library table. She moved quickly to one of the broad windows and carefully raised a lower sash. The low roar of the stirring city rushed in like the noise of breakers on a faraway beach, and clean, tingling air poured upon her. She breathed it in deeply, drawing the blue silk negligee closer about her throat.
The two years that had whirled past since she became Bert Kennedy’s wife had taught her many things. She had drawn from her experience generalities on men, women, life, which made her feel immeasurably older and wiser. But there were problems that she had not solved, points at which she felt herself at fault, and they troubled her vaguely while she stood twisting the cord of the window-shade in her hand and gazing out at the many-windowed buildings of San Francisco.
She had learned that men loved women for being beautiful, gay, unexacting, sweet-tempered always, docile without being bores. She had learned that men were infuriated by three things; questions, babies, and a woman who was ill. She had learned that success in business depended upon “putting up a front” and that a woman’s part was to help in that without asking why or for what end. She had learned that the deepest need of her own nature was to be able to look up to the man she loved, even though she must go down on her own knees in order to do it. She knew that she adored her husband blindly, passionately, and that she dared not open her eyes for fear she would cease to do so.
But she had not quite been able to fit herself into a life with him. She had not learned what to do with these morning hours while he was asleep; she had not learned to occupy all her energies in useless activities while he was away; in a word, she did not know what to do with the part of her life he did not want, and she could not compel herself to be satisfied in doing nothing with it.
Gathering up the trailing silks of her nightgown and negligee she went back to the pile of magazines and books on the table. She did not exactly want to read; reading seemed to her as out of place in the morning as soup for breakfast. But she could not go out, for at any moment Bert might wake and call to her, and she could not dress, for he saw a reproach in that, and was annoyed. She turned over the books uncertainly, selecting at last a curious one called Pragmatism, which had fascinated her when she dipped into its pages in the library. She had it in her hand when the doorbell rang loudly.
She stood startled, clutching the book against her breast. Her heart beat thickly, and the color faded from her face and then poured back in a burning flush. The bell rang again more imperatively. The very sound of it proclaimed that it was rung by a collector. Was it the taxicab man, the tailor, the collection agency? She could not make herself go to the door, and the third long, insistent peal of the bell wrung her like the tightening of a rack. It would waken Bert, but what further excuse could she make to the grimly insulting man she visualized on the other side of the door? The bell continued to ring.
After a long time it was silent, and she heard the slam of the automatic elevator’s door. A second later she heard
