“Oh, well!” Afterwards when she rose and closed the windows she promised herself: “If I do send it I’ll write him a sweet, sweet letter soon.”
After breakfast she posted it. It fell with a heaviness into the box that made her uneasy. “I’ll write him again tonight,” she thought. “Poor Peter! He’ll be disappointed, I suppose.”
But the night brought her several offers to sing in Southern schools which she thought she might just as well accept. Apparently nothing was to come of her dancing. She had about a week in which to get ready.
Just before she left, a little surprised that she had not already heard from Peter, she wrote him a long letter, her first long love-letter.
“Dearest Peter: [she began]
“You can’t think how awfully I want to see you. If you were here tonight I shouldn’t quarrel with you one moment.”
She quoted lines from one of Goethe’s poems.
“Ein blick von deinen Augen in die meinen,
Ein Kuss von deinen Mund auf meinem Munde:
She hesitated a moment, a little aghast at this disclosure of her feelings. “But I might just as well, he deserves it. Dear, dear Peter, if I could just see you!”
She ended, smiling shamefacedly at her own abandon—
“Mein einzig Glück auf Erden ist dein Wille”—
She might have stopped in Philadelphia on her way South, but she couldn’t after that letter. In Richmond she received a note from Peter which Sylvia had forwarded.
“My dear Joanna: [she was surprised at the formality]
“I have both your letters. I cannot tell you how surprised I was at receiving the first or how much I cherished the second. Joanna, I would give ten years of my life if you had written the second one first. I am very busy now but I am going to write you a final letter very soon.
“ ‘A final letter,’ ” she quoted to herself. “What a funny thing to say! Oh, Peter! And I wanted, I needed a real letter, a love-letter!” Her natural reasonableness helped her. “It’s my own fault. I suppose he feels like I feel sometimes, don’t-care-y. But ‘a final letter.’ I wonder what he meant!”
But she did not puzzle long. Richmond was appreciative and gay. Someone wrote her from Hampton and asked her to do an interpretative dance. Partly because of the interest and excitement, partly because she had forced herself to do so often, she resolutely put Peter out of her mind.
“He’ll know when I write him again,” she told herself ruefully.
Two weeks, a month passed; she came into her room one day to find a bulky letter from Sylvia. “He doesn’t mean it, Joanna, of course, but I had to send it.” Thus her sister’s note. Puzzled, she read the enclosure, which turned out to be a letter from Peter to Sylvia.
“Dear Sylvia:
“I am writing to let you know that I am to be married in June. Joanna told me she didn’t love me and so I am going to marry Maggie Neal; she’s crazy about me. Tell Joanna not to bother sending back any of the things I’ve given her.
XIX
One of the mysteries of the ages will be solved with the answer to the question: Why do men consider women incalculable? Peter had been hurt by Joanna’s indifference again and again, she had refused a dozen times to marry him, she had scolded him, teased him, slighted him. Yet she had always come back to his eager arms. In spite of this he had been unable to see in her attitude at Christmas and in the unkind letter which she had written the logical outcome of her earlier acts—all of which by enduring he had tacitly endorsed.
He read the letter in a maze of anger and wounded pride. Before he knew it he had caught up his cap and started for Maggie’s house. By the time the long, yellow, crawling car had jolted him over the uneven reaches of Lombard Street and set him down at Fifteenth he was in a fever of bitterness, resentment and self-pity. Maggie hardly knew him when he entered her little sitting-room.
“Oh, Peter,” she went up to him swiftly, “something awful has happened.”
He showed her the letter, striding up and down the room as she read it.
She lifted her head to say to him: “She doesn’t mean it; you know Joanna, always making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Instead she heard herself saying: “How could she possibly write such things to you—you’ve always been so kind.”
“Too kind,” he muttered. “I tell you what, Maggie, Joanna’s got no heart, she’s all head, all ideas and if you don’t see and act her way, she’s got no use for you.”
“I do think she thinks herself a lot better than anyone else,” Maggie said slowly, remembering Joanna’s letter to her about Philip.
“Well, she is, you know,” he put in unexpectedly. “Oh, Lord, what am I going to do without her!”
Genuinely touched, she sat down on the little box-couch beside him and slid her arm around his shoulder. “After all, you’ve still got me, Peter.”
He looked up at her, feeling the surge of a new idea in his heart. If he could only punish Joanna—no not punish exactly, you couldn’t punish her, she was always too remote for that—but shock her, let her see, as his boyhood’s phrase would have had it, that she was not the only pebble on the beach. Besides, what a revenge to cut loose altogether from the influence of her ideals and ally himself with one whom she would have characterized as having no ideals at all.
Before the thought was even shaped in his brain he was speaking:
“Of course I always have you, Maggie. How—how would you like
