“Oh, Jimmy!” she cried again. “How—how could you?”
Suddenly she remembered the house at the end of the garden. She glanced quickly, fearfully, at the white clapboard façade. The clump of evergreens hid the living-room windows. But was that Miss Parrot’s white sleeve in the playroom bay above? Jane felt suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of humiliation. She had been kissed—kissed like a pretty chambermaid in her own garden. She had glanced at her own front windows, fearful of a spying servant’s ironical eye.
“Jimmy,” she said, “I wouldn’t have believed it of you!” He was looking down at her, now, still breathing rather quickly. The excited little smile still twisted the corners of his mouth. He looked more like a faun than ever, thought Jane, with an unconscious shiver. “Will you please go back to Chicago, now, at once?” she said with dignity. “Will you please go back without coming into the house?”
Jimmy looked very much astonished.
“Why, Jane—Jane—” he faltered. “Do you really mind, so awfully?”
“I’m going in,” said Jane. “And I don’t want you to follow me.” She turned abruptly away from him and walked up the garden path to the terrace, trying to put her face in order. She opened the terrace door and entered the living-room. The family were all still lounging about the fire.
“Where’s Jimmy?” asked Isabel.
“He’s gone,” said Jane, turning her back on them to close the terrace door. “He wasn’t staying to supper. He had to get back to the News.” Lies, she thought contemptuously, lies, forced on her by Jimmy, forced on her by her own damnable lack of foresight! She ought to have known what was coming. She ought to have prevented it. She turned from the door and faced the family tranquilly.
“What’s up, Jane?” asked Robin. “You look like an avenging angel. Your cheeks are as red as fire.”
“It’s just the wind,” said Jane. More lies! “There’s a perfect tornado blowing.” She raised her hands to rearrange her pompadour. As she did so, she rubbed her fingers violently across her mouth. She could still feel Jimmy’s lips there. She could feel his kiss, still vibrating through her entire body. Suddenly she caught her father’s eye. Mr. Ward was sitting comfortably in Stephen’s armchair beside the smouldering fire. Behind a cloud of cigar smoke he was watching his younger daughter very intently. Jane managed to achieve a smile. No one else was paying any attention to her whatever. Jane sat down on the sofa beside Isabel and tried to listen to what she had to say about the cubistic designs that Flora was painting on the wall of the old coach-house. Isabel thought they were very comic. Mrs. Ward thought they were hardly respectable. Mr. Ward continued to watch them all from behind the cloud of cigar smoke. Jane tried to look as if she had forgotten that kiss.
IV
Mrs. Lester’s living-room was in festive array for a very gala occasion. The occasion was Mrs. Lester’s seventy-fifth birthday. When Jane entered the room with Stephen and the children, she could not see her hostess, at first, in the crowd of people who were laughing and talking around the hearth beneath the Murillo Madonna. Mr. and Mrs. Ward were there, and Flora and Mr. Furness, and Isabel and Robin, and Rosalie and Freddy Waters, of course. Edith and her husband had come on from Cleveland for the celebration and Muriel had invited Cyril Fortune. Bert Lancaster was not yet out of his bed. Rosalie’s daughter was in school in Paris and Edith’s son was in Oxford, but young Albert was there, home from Saint Paul’s for the Christmas vacation, so Isabel had brought Jack and Belle and Jane had brought Cicily and Jenny and little Steve. It was little Steve’s first dinner-party. The children were to eat at a separate table in a corner of the dining-room.
Mrs. Lester was sitting in her wheelchair on one corner of the hearthrug. Enormously fat and somewhat crippled with gout, she had not left her wheelchair for years. She still gave parties, however, great gay parties, and was pushed to the head of her dining-room table to preside over them with all her old-time gaiety. Her three dark-haired daughters and their attendant husbands had never ceased to flutter about her. They weren’t dark-haired any longer, of course. Edith was really white-headed, slim, worn, and distinguished at forty-three. Pretty Rosalie was growing grey, and even Muriel had one white Whistler lock, that she rather exploited, in the centre of her dark pompadour. Mrs. Lester herself, with her straight snow-white hair, her wrinkled, yellow face, and her great gaunt nose hooked over her ridiculous cascade of double chins, had come to look much more Jewish with advancing years. In spite of her invincible gaiety, her large dark eyes, with yellow whites, were shadowed with racial sadness. No eyes, thought Jane, were ever as beautiful as Jewish eyes. Mrs. Lester’s had always touched her profoundly. They were twinkling now, up at Mr. Ward, as she sat enthroned on the hearthrug. An enormous bowl of seventy-five American beauties nodded over her snowy head. Jane kissed her with real emotion. Then turned to Muriel.
“How is Bert tonight?” she asked.
“Oh—Bert’s fine,” said Muriel easily. “He’s going to sit up next week. They’ve given him exercises for his arm. They think he’ll get some motion back.”
“I see,” said Isabel, at Muriel’s elbow, “you asked Cyril to fill his place.”
“Cyril’s always helpful,” grinned Muriel shamelessly. “He does what he can.”
“Who else is coming?” asked Isabel interestedly. “You’re still a man short.”
“Jimmy Trent,” said Muriel, smiling. “I asked him for our Jane.”
Jane glanced casually at her father, then turned, to smell an American beauty, rather elaborately. She had not expected this. She had not seen Jimmy since she had turned away from him, five
