“Oh, no, she might object—mothers hate to see their daughters leave them. But after she sees how well fixed and happy you are, she won’t mind.”
“I guess you’re right. I—I don’t see how I can ever pack. I’m so tired.” Her figure slacked weakly against the chair.
“You don’t need to. Just wear something dark and quiet. We’ll get everything you want in Atlantic City, or maybe Philadelphia.”
“No, no—not in Philadelphia, we won’t stop there now,” she told him feverishly.
“All right. Now run up to bed. Kiss me, Maggie.”
She gave him her cold, stiff lips.
“Good girl! Tomorrow at ten. You ain’t foolin’ me?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Neal!”
“Henderson’s my name. Good night, little girl.”
Shaking, she got up to her room to lie vacant-eyed across the bed, watching the darkness deepen, shade into gray, vanish. The sun came bringing a new day, to her a new life.
She wrote her mother a note, then dressed herself carefully in a little tan poplin suit, a small brown hat and a white veil. “Brides wear veils,” she thought to herself numbly. “Oh, I didn’t think I’d be a bride like this!”
Well, it was too late now. At quarter of nine she went downstairs. Her mother had left long since. Presently she heard a taxi drive up and Neal, heavy but immaculate, got out. He was coming for her. She walked stiffly to meet him; they entered the cab together and were whirled away.
“This was marriage,” she thought, murmuring some words later to a Justice of the Peace. They entered the waiting taxi again and drove to the Pennsylvania station. A surprising number of the redcaps seemed to know Mr. Neal—her husband. Well, of course, of course why shouldn’t they? They walked down the steps past car after car. Neal ushered her finally into a drawing-room. She had never dreamed of traveling like this. As the train pulled out Neal hailed a passing waiter. “Bring us something to eat as soon as possible.”
He sat down beside her, immaculate in a gray suit, gray tie, carefully brushed low shoes. His tan overcoat rested in the corner of the seat. He put his arms around her.
“Poor, sleepy, frightened Maggie,” he said tenderly.
She burst into sharp, strangling sobs, burying her head against his shoulder.
So she left New York, weeping, to return to it one day dry-eyed but with a bitterness that was worse than tears.
XII
“Really, Joanna, you ought to treat me better. You know I’m staying in New York just on account of you!”
“How do you want me to treat you, Peter?”
“Oh, hang it all. Why can’t you be nicer to me? When Brian comes to see Sylvia she runs to meet him, puts her arms about his neck.”
“But Sylvia and Brian are engaged. You and I are just friends.”
“Just friends! Joanna, have a heart. What do you think I spend all my spare time with you for? You know how I feel.”
Joanna raised a slim, protesting hand. “None of that, Peter! You come to see me because both of us are interested in the same things. Each of us is going to be an artist in different ways. What other girl is there in New York who would let you talk to her about the joys of surgery?”
“What other girl would want me to?”
Joanna, looking at the long brown figure lying full length on the grass, thought it highly improbable that any other girl would. She had seen other girls in the company of Peter, and watched quite without jealousy their ways with him. She rather prided herself on her own aloofness from such tactics. Of course, some day she might let Peter talk to her about things other than work and art, and she might answer him, but at present the big things of life must be arranged. Love was an after consideration, she felt, and as far as she knew she meant it.
It was a Saturday afternoon in July and the two were in Van Cortlandt Park. Peter was to go to school in Philadelphia in the fall, and it was important for him to earn as much money as possible for his expenses. He might have gone with a group of other boys to one of the watering places and worked in a hotel. But that took him too far away from Joanna. Ragtime was coming into vogue then, and Peter proved himself an adept at it. The butcher shop was of course a thing long since of the past.
“Here’s where I put my gift of strumming to some use,” he laughed to Joanna. “You ought to see how glad they were to take me on at that cabaret.”
“I hope you won’t learn anything you shouldn’t in that atmosphere,” she had answered primly.
“Oh, of course I won’t,” he returned, thinking how amazed she would be if she ever looked down from her pinnacle long enough to understand what life really was. He would have liked her to see that cabaret with its jostling crowds and blaring lights, and the host of noisy good-hearted dancing girls. He tried to give her some description of it. But Joanna turned away.
“Men and women are like that, just the same,” he protested. “Everybody isn’t living on the mountaintops like you, Janna. I can’t live there of my own accord myself. That’s why I haunt you so because you do keep me on the heights, dear.” She liked that.
“But just the same,” he resumed, rolling over on the short grass like a lithe handsome animal, “all the big things of life smack of the earth. Your poet has to eat, or he can’t write poetry. Well, so does the commonest laboring-man. The queen has children, in agony, Janna, just like the poorest charwoman. And love is the—the driving force for both of them.” He mused a little. “Love is the most natural and ordinary thing in the world.”
But Joanna didn’t believe that. “Love is a wonderful, rare thing, very beautiful,
