“Lossie waited pretty well for just coming in, don’t you think? And ain’t it heavenly to think of the dishes all washed!”
“It seemed to me you had to do an awful lot of whispering,” May said discouragingly. “And my goodness, Lily, I was never so mortified in my life as I was at the way you kept smiling at her!”
But Lily hadn’t been able to help it, for she had remembered the way Lossie used to play “Company to Dinner” with them when they were children, in the tender green light under the beech tree, and she had almost expected to find slices of peony petal ham and maple seed fried potatoes on the plates that Lossie’s black hand set before them, and mud-and-water coffee in the cups.
“Well, I thought she did pretty well,” Maggie repeated. “But I oughtn’t to have trusted her to make the coffee—how could she have gotten it that way? It was just like mud and water.”
“Was there any ice-cream left? Doesn’t anybody want some?”
“Lily! Don’t yawn that way—you’ll dislocate your jaw! Goodnight, Victor! Aren’t you going to say goodnight?”
Victor, floating up the stairs, came out of his trance with a start.
“Oh—goodnight!”
“Can you see why he’s so moony about Lucy? Really, it’s a good thing she’s going home soon. She’s a right nice little thing, but she hasn’t enough sense to say boo to a goose.”
The clouds washed over the moon like thin waves, the whole sky was flowing. In the few clear patches the stars were pale in the flood of silver light. Feathery dark clouds, clouds thin as gauze, streaming over the moon.
Maggie looked out at the night, yawning, thinking how early she would have to get up to look after her newly hatched chickens. And as she looked, another moon rose in her heart, a great bubble of apricot pink floated up from the river, and she and Edward watched it, speaking to each other without words.
May looked out at the night before she lay down beside Lily, placidly sleeping with her fringe in a row of cocoons on her forehead. Oh, the moon made you feel queer! Why had she acted like such a cheap fool in the garden after supper? Oh, why had she let Prentice say those things, flattering and insolent? She knew she had been crazy to think he meant them when she saw him in the lamplight again, saying goodbye in the hall, with Fannie’s pretty ringed hand dangling through his arm. Perhaps, lying in bed before they went to sleep, he would tell her about it, laughing a little, and Fannie would laugh, too, pityingly, and say, “Poor old May!”
Oh! She crushed her cold hands against her blazing face.
Victor leaned out his window looking up at the sky. Of course, he had thought he was in love, hundreds of times, but this was different.
Lucy! Lucy!
“You are a dove, Lucy, my Lucy. You are a little white lamb. You are everything that is gentle and pure—
“It’s like praying to think of you, Lucy—
“Well, really, Lucy, I don’t call myself an authority—oh, no, no, you are too kind—but since you ask for my opinion—
”
Suddenly he put his head down in his arms, loving her.
“It means waiting, darling.
”
And he could imagine her answering:
“I would wait for you forever.
”
“Lucy, I come to you stained and scarred—
”
(Oh, those glasses of beer at Billy Park’s! Oh, the last horsecar jingling out to Cambridge!)
“Oh, Lucy, I think you’re so lovely!”
The clouds flowed over the moon, from the river he heard the wash of the tide coming in. Through all his being he felt the stir, the flow of the night, the clouds, the waves, the faintly breathing wind, the people all over the world who were awake, who were loving each other.
XIX
Maggie hung Victor’s dress-suit on the clothesline to get rid of the smell of camphor. He was going to New York to stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel where Papa had stayed, and to go to Lucy Hawthorn’s ball. There had been a glazed cream-colored invitation for the girls, too, that Lily kept lying carelessly on the hall table, where everyone could see it; but Maggie said, of course, they couldn’t think of going.
May had thought of it. Just for a moment she saw herself at the ball, dancing, floating in the arms of a tall stranger with a fascinating ugly face—
Not being able to have a new dress wouldn’t matter—she could fix up the eau de Nil corded silk with the coffee stain on the skirt that Aunt Priscilla had given them, and that had been too grand for anything they would be apt to go to. She was so slender she could take that front breadth right out. And she had seen just the trimming for it in Wilmington—bands of tiny shells. Rainbow-colored shells peeping from waves of faint water-green silk—a mermaid come from the foam.
“I have been looking for you all my life. Where have you been hidden away?”
“Where? Where?” the violins cried. “Where?” cried the plucked strings of the harp.
“But now that I have found you—”
But, of course, she knew that they couldn’t afford it. They really couldn’t afford it for Victor, but for him they would manage somehow.
Coming back from the clothesline, Maggie stopped by the bed of lilies-of-the-valley by the porch, such a convenient place for cherry stones. How sweet, how sweet! She never could get by them, even when she had a hundred things to do in the house she must pause before their altar. Now there was Victor’s grey suit to sponge and press for the trip, a cake to make, and lunch to get, but she knelt beside them, breathing their fragrance, loving them. She gathered a spray or two of great white bells, their stems squeaking as she pulled them,
