His unexpected coming upon the whole group broke ever so slightly the charm of their companionship. She had felt the same thing in entering her office when all the salesmen were there. Some intangible current of sympathy was cut, an alien element introduced. One thought before speaking, as if to a stranger who did not perfectly comprehend the language.
“There is a subtle division between men and women,” she thought, talking brightly to Paul while they climbed Tamalpais together or wandered in Golden Gate park. “Each of us has his own world.” After a silence, passing some odd figure on the trail or struck breathless by a vista of heart-stopping beauty, she sought his eyes for the flash of intimate understanding she expected, and found only adoration or surprise.
She felt that the shortening summer was rushing her toward a fate against which some blind impulse in her struggled. Paul’s eager happiness, his plans, his confident hand upon her life, were compulsions she tried to accept gladly. She should be happy, she told herself; she was happy. Searching her heart she knew that she loved Paul. His coming was like sunshine to her; she loved his sincerity, his sweet, clean soul, the light in his eyes, the touch of his hand. When he went away her heart flew after him like a bird, and at the same time some almost imperceptible strain upon her was gone. Alone in her silent house she felt herself become whole again and free.
“You’re feeling like a girl again!” she told herself. The watch on her wrist ticked off the night hours while she sat motionless, staring at the red embers of the fire crumbling to ashes. She saw the twilight of a long-dead summer’s day and a girl swept by tides of emotion, struggling blindly against them.
But it was not Paul’s kisses that she shrank from now. She wanted them. She was no longer a girl caught unawares by love’s terrible power and beauty. She was a woman, clear-eyed, deliberately choosing. Why, then, did she feel that she was compelling herself to do this thing that she wanted to do? “It’s late, and I’m tired. I’m getting all sorts of wild fancies,” she said, rising wearily, chilled.
With passionate intensity she wrung all the joy from every moment of these happy days. She loved the changing colors of the bay, the keen, cool dawns when she breakfasted alone on her balcony with the morning papers spread beside her plate and an unknown day stretching before her. She loved her encounters with many sides of life; the talk of the Italian waiter in a quaint Latin Quarter café; her curious friendship with a tiny Chinese mother who lived in the Wong “family house,” the shadowy corridors of which were filled with a constant whispering shuffle of sandaled feet; the hordes of ragged, adorable Spanish children who ran to her for cakes when she climbed the crazy stairs that were the streets of Telegraph Hill.
And there were evenings at the Radical Club, where she heard strange, stimulating theories contending with stranger ones, and met Russian revolutionists, single-taxers, stand-pat Marxian socialists, and sensation seekers of many curious varieties, while next day at a decorous luncheon table she might listen to a staid and prosperous business man seriously declaring, “All these folks that talk violence—all those anarchists and labor men and highwaymen—ought to be strung up by a good old-fashioned vigilance committee! I’m not a believer in violence and never was, and hanging’s too good for those that do.” The romance of life enthralled her, and she felt that she could never see enough of it.
Best of all she loved the girls, that “wonderful crowd” that never failed her when she wanted companionship, and never intruded when she wished to be alone. In the evenings when they gathered around her fireplace, relaxing from the strain of the day, among her cushions in the soft light of the purring flames, talking a little, silent sometimes, she was so happy that her heart ached.
Sitting on a cushion, she sewed quietly by the light of a candle at her shoulder. Willetta’s knitting needles clicked rhythmically while she told a story of the department-store girls’ picnic; Anne, flung gracefully on the hearthrug, kept her finger between the pages of a History of the Warfare of Science and Religion in Christendom, while she listened, and on the other side of the candle Dodo, chin propped on hands, and feet in the air, obliviously read Dowson, reaching out a hand at intervals for a piece of orange Sara was peeling with slender, fastidious fingers.
“Orange, Helen?” She shook her head.
“Girls, just look what Helen’s doing! Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Too stunning for anything but a trousseau,” Marian commented. “One of us’ll have to get married. I tell you, Helen, put it up as a consolation prize! The first one of us—”
“No fair. You’ve decided on your Russian,” remarked Dodo, turning a page.
“Mother-of-pearl! I should say not! I don’t know why I never seem to find a man I want to marry—” she went on, plaintively. “One comes along, and I think—well, maybe this one—and then—”
They laughed.
“No, really, I mean it.” She sat up, the firelight on her pretty, serious face and fluffy hair. “I’d like to get married. I want a lovely home and children, as much as anybody. And there’ve been—well, you girls know. But always there’s something I can’t stand about them. Nicolai, now—he has just the kind of mind I like. He’s brilliant and witty, and he’s radical. But I couldn’t live with his table manners! Oh, I know I ought to be above that. But when I think—three times a day, hearing him eat his soup—Oh, why don’t radical men
