“Well, Laura,” answered Mrs. Cressler, “if you don’t love Curtis, don’t marry him. That’s very simple.”
“It’s like this, Mrs. Cressler,” Laura explained. “I suppose I am very uncharitable and unchristian, but I like the people that like me, and I hate those that don’t like me. I can’t help it. I know it’s wrong, but that’s the way I am. And I love to be loved. The man that would love me the most would make me love him. And when Mr. Jadwin seems to care so much, and do so much, and—you know how I mean; it does make a difference of course. I suppose I care as much for Mr. Jadwin as I ever will care for any man. I suppose I must be cold and unemotional.”
Mrs. Cressler could not restrain a movement of surprise.
“You unemotional? Why, I thought you just said, Laura, that you had imagined love would be like Juliet and like that girl in Faust—that it was going to shake you all to pieces.”
“Did I say that? Well, I told you I was one girl one minute and another another. I don’t know myself these days. Oh, hark,” she said, abruptly, as the cadence of hoofs began to make itself audible from the end of the side street. “That’s the team now. I could recognise those horses’ trot as far as I could hear it. Let’s go out. I know he would like to have me there when he drives up. And you know”—she put her hand on Mrs. Cressler’s arm as the two moved towards the front door—“this is all absolutely a secret as yet.”
“Why, of course, Laura dear. But tell me just one thing more,” Mrs. Cressler asked, in a whisper, “are you going to have a church wedding?”
“Hey, Carrie,” called Mr. Cressler from the stoop, “here’s J.”
Laura shook her head.
“No, I want it to be very quiet—at our house. We’ll go to Geneva Lake for the summer. That’s why, you see, I couldn’t promise to go to Oconomowoc with you.”
They came out upon the front steps, Mrs. Cressler’s arm around Laura’s waist. It was dark by now, and the air was perceptibly warmer.
The team was swinging down the street close at hand, the hoof beats exactly timed, as if there were but one instead of two horses.
“Well, what’s the record tonight J.?” cried Cressler, as Jadwin brought the bays to a stand at the horse block. Jadwin did not respond until he had passed the reins to the coachman, and taking the stop watch from the latter’s hand, he drew on his cigar, and held the glowing tip to the dial.
“Eleven minutes and a quarter,” he announced, “and we had to wait for the bridge at that.”
He came up the steps, fanning himself with his slouch hat, and dropped into the chair that Landry had brought for him.
“Upon my word,” he exclaimed, gingerly drawing off his driving gloves, “I’ve no feeling in my fingers at all. Those fellows will pull my hands clean off some day.”
But he was hardly settled in his place before he proposed to send the coachman home, and to take Laura for a drive towards Lincoln Park, and even a little way into the park itself. He promised to have her back within an hour.
“I haven’t any hat,” objected Laura. “I should love to go, but I ran over here tonight without any hat.”
“Well, I wouldn’t let that stand in my way, Laura,” protested Mrs. Cressler. “It will be simply heavenly in the Park on such a night as this.”
In the end Laura borrowed Page’s hat, and Jadwin took her away. In the light of the street lamps Mrs. Cressler and the others watched them drive off, sitting side by side behind the fine horses. Jadwin, broad-shouldered, a fresh cigar in his teeth, each rein in a double turn about his large, hard hands; Laura, slim, erect, pale, her black, thick hair throwing a tragic shadow low upon her forehead.
“A fine-looking couple,” commented Mr. Cressler as they disappeared.
The hoof beats died away, the team vanished. Landry Court, who stood behind the others, watching, turned to Mrs. Cressler. She thought she detected a little unsteadiness in his voice, but he repeated bravely:
“Yes, yes, that’s right. They are a fine, a—a fine-looking couple together, aren’t they? A fine-looking couple, to say the least.”
A week went by, then two, soon May had passed. On the fifteenth of that month Laura’s engagement to Curtis Jadwin was formally announced. The day of the wedding was set for the first week in June.
During this time Laura was never more changeable, more puzzling. Her vivacity seemed suddenly to have been trebled, but it was invaded frequently by strange reactions and perversities that drove her friends and family to distraction.
About a week after her talk with Mrs. Cressler, Laura broke the news to Page. It was a Monday morning. She had spent the time since breakfast in putting her bureau drawers to rights, scattering sachet powders in them, then leaving them open so as to perfume the room. At last she came into the front “upstairs sitting-room,” a heap of gloves, stockings, collarettes—the odds and ends of a wildly disordered wardrobe—in her lap. She tumbled all these upon the hearth rug, and sat down upon the floor to sort them carefully. At her little desk near by, Page, in a blue and white shirt waist and golf skirt, her slim little ankles demurely crossed, a cone of foolscap over her forearm to guard against ink spots, was writing in her journal. This was an interminable affair, voluminous, complex, that the young girl had kept ever since she was fifteen. She wrote in it—she hardly knew what—the
