The idea enchanted her. “I’d love it! Matthew, what fun!” They found an apron of his mother’s, and in the icebox, cold roast beef, lettuce which Philadelphians call salad, beets and corn. “I’ll make muffins,” said Angela joyously, “and you take a dish after dinner and go out and get some ice-cream. Oh, Matthew, how it’s all coming back to me! Do you still shop up here in the market?”
They ate the meal in the little dark cool dining-room, the counterpart of the dining-room in Junius Murray’s onetime house across the way. But somehow its smallness was no longer irksome; rather it seemed a tiny island of protection reared out of and against an encroaching sea of troubles. In fancy she saw her father and mother almost a quarter of a century ago coming proudly to such a home, their little redoubt of refuge against the world. How beautiful such a life could be, shared with someone beloved—with Anthony! Involuntarily she sighed.
Matthew studying her thoughtfully said: “You’re dreaming, Angela. Tell me what it’s all about.”
“I was thinking what a little haven a house like this could be; what it must have meant to my mother. Funny how I almost pounded down the walls once upon a time trying to get away. Now I can’t think of anything more marvellous than having such a place as this, here, there, anywhere, to return to.”
Startled, he told her of his surprise at hearing such words from her. “If Virginia had said them I should think it perfectly natural; but I hadn’t thought of you as being interested in home. How, by the way, is Virginia?”
“Perfect.”
With a wistfulness which barely registered with her absorption, he queried: “I suppose she’s tremendously happy?”
“Happy enough.”
“A great girl, little Virginia.” In his turn he fell to musing, roused himself. “You haven’t told me of your adventures and your flight into the great world.”
“There’s not much to tell, Matthew. All I’ve seen and experienced has been the common fate of most people, a little sharpened, perhaps, a little vivified. Briefly, I’ve had a lot of fun and a measure of trouble. I’ve been stimulated by adventure; I’ve known suffering and love and pain.”
“You’re still surprising me. I didn’t suppose a girl like you could know the meaning of pain.” He gave her a twisted smile. “Though you certainly know how to cause it. Even yet I can get a pang which no other thought produces if I let my mind go back to those first few desperate days after you left me. Heavens, can’t you suffer when you’re young!”
She nodded, laid her hand on his. “Terribly. Remember, I was suffering too, Matthew, though for different causes. I was so pushed, so goaded … well, we won’t talk about that any more … I hope you’ve got over all that feeling. Indeed, indeed I wasn’t worth it. Do tell me you haven’t let it harass you all these years.”
His hand clasped hers lightly, then withdrew. “No I haven’t. … The suddenness, the inevitableness of your departure checked me, pulled me up short. I suffered, oh damnably, but it was suffering with my eyes open. I knew then you weren’t for me; that fundamentally we were too far apart. And eventually I got over it. Those days!” He smiled again wryly, recalling a memory. “But I went on suffering just the same, only in another way. I fell in love with Jinny.”
Her heart in her breast stopped beating. “Matthew, you didn’t! Why on earth didn’t you ever say so?”
“I couldn’t. She was such a child, you see; she made it so plain all the time that she looked on me as her sister’s beau and therefore a kind of dependable brother. After you went I used to go to see her, take her about. Why she’d swing on my arm and hold up her face for a good night kiss! Once, I remember, we had been out and she became carsick—poor little weak thing! She was so ashamed! Like a baby, you know, playing at being grown-up and then ashamed for reverting to babyhood. I went to see her the next day and she was so little and frail and confiding! I stayed away then for a long time and the next thing I knew she was going to New York. I misjudged you awfully then, Angela. You must forgive me. I thought you had pulled her away. I learned later that I was wrong, that you and she rarely saw each other in New York. Do you know why she left?”
There was her sister’s pride to shield but her own need to succour; who could have dreamed of such a dilemma? “I can’t betray Jinny,” she said to herself and told him that while she personally had not influenced her sister the latter had had a very good reason for leaving Philadelphia.
“I suppose so. Certainly she left. But she’d write me, occasionally, letters just like her dear self, so frank and girlish and ingenuous and making it so damnably plain that any demonstration of love on my part was out of the question. I said to myself: ‘I’m not going to wreck my whole life over those Murray girls.’ And I let our friendship drift off into a nothingness. … Then she came to visit Edna Brown this summer. I fairly leaped out to Merion to see her. The moment I laid eyes on her I realized that she had developed, had become a woman. She was as always, kind and sweet, prettier, more alluring than ever. I thought I’d try my luck … and Edna told me she was engaged. What’s the fellow like, Angela?
“Very nice, very fine.”
“Wild about her, I suppose?”
Desperately she looked at him. “He’s a rather undemonstrative sort. I suppose he’s wild enough. Only—well they talk as though they had no intention of marrying for years and years and they both seem perfectly content with that arrangement.”
He frowned incredulously. “What! If I thought they weren’t in earnest!”
Impulsively she
