The possibility was not unwelcome. She had nothing to live for. She felt not only ill, but old, and not only old, but haggard. Hitherto, wherever she had gone, she had drawn the eyes of men. She had trailed admiration as a torch trails smoke. It had all been myrrh and cassia to her. But now its savor had gone, and this girl who had the charm and the caress of spring in her face, decided that she had nothing to live for.
Then, precisely as a moment before she had evoked Tams, now she evoked “that creature.”
She had had but one good look at her. That had been at the post office. He had tooted up, got out, and gone in just as Nelly had approached. He had not seen her nor, apparently, had his companion deigned to. The latter had sat in the car staring indifferently at nothing.
It was then that Nelly had had the one good look. It had frozen her. In none of the picture galleries of romance, in the museums of history, had she seen or imagined such a face. The quality of its beauty—coldly austere, as true beauty ever is—was unearthly. The eyes were stars, and in the carriage of the head, the cameo features, the glowing skin, the brilliantly invincible mouth, there were suggestions polar and dazzling. It was as if flesh and blood had achieved the impossible ability to detain and display some glory of the arctic aurora.
Before it Nelly had shrunk. In her own face was the loveliness of the lily, but before that other face she had felt it wither. A moment only. She had rallied at once.
“She isn’t a gentlewoman,” she had instantly and arrogantly decided. “And she’s common.”
The latter attenuation had been induced by the lady’s dress, which, though evidently a Fifth Avenue production, had been in coloring too pronounced for good taste and consequently unbecoming. Beauty, when fulgurant, should be soberly attired. This costume, the latest revival of a mid-Victorian mode, had been as gaudy as a peacock’s tail, and the gaudiness of it had dimmed her beauty, which had been otherwise diminished by a necklace of coral. But her face was supernal.
These details, however long in the telling, Nelly, with feminine ability, had summarized in that one good look, which had consumed hardly more than a second and amounted to but a glance.
Next to the post office was a shop, with that odor of having everything in it which village shops contrive to exhale. Nelly had turned and strolled in, turned and looked out.
Tams had issued from the post office, approached the car, said some word to the young woman, got in beside her, and they had driven off.
At that Nelly had vacated the shop. Then, in passing the post office, she had noticed a little crowd that had gathered, and, as she had moved on, she had overheard detached philosophies:
“Well, I never!” “And the airs of her!” “A ballet girl, I’ll bet.” “One of those Russians.”
Nelly knew better. Through her brother, she knew that, whatever the creature’s nationality might be, she was not a dancer, but Tams’ secretary and probably respectable, though certainly vulgar, and poignantly she wondered whether the awful costume had been his selection—which, she later discovered, it had.
But that afterward. At the time, dismissing the costume, she had wondered, and still more poignantly, whether Tams was to marry the person who wore it. The mere idea had made her sick.
Since then several days had intervened, days punctured by the spectacle of the creature shooting by, as she had on this high noon, like a comet. It was a little too much.
Now, in her bedroom which gave on the lawn and the road, Nelly seated herself at the window. There, as she sat, as sits Durer’s image of Melancholy—only much better dressed—something from without or within vibrated.
Before her the man again appeared, but not the one she had known. Another had come, a new one, composed of prowesses and powers hitherto ignored, and at once the form invisible and undefined that inevitably resides in the heart of a girl, and which is but the unincarnated soul of him who is destined to rule it, took substance. Then, as a weed of the sea, loosened and detached, rises slowly, stayed by one eddy, deflected by another, before achieving its gradual, yet assured ascent, a revelation, arrested by a tremor, again by a blush, from the depths of her being.
“But I love him!” she cried.
There is magic in those words. No sooner were they uttered than an exterior force seemed to lift from herself. Her mind became a rendezvous of apparitions. He appeared in countless phases—as she had seen him first, as she had seen him last, in all the changes of their acquaintance—and a shudder seized her at the knowledge of this love, of which she had been unconscious, and which had been tossed into existence by the sight of that creature.
That was it. She stood up and confronted it. That was the solution of the riddle of her anger. She was in love and she was jealous, and she could not be jealous unless she loved, and she could not love without being jealous.
Then immediately the exterior force that had lifted her from herself threw her back on that chair.
“I love him,” she stranglingly repeated, “and he is in love with another!”
Like a flying picture, torn from the cinematograph of memory, the wonder of that other’s face flashed by.
The picture fainted, succeeded by another—the green depths of the wood, the surprise, the kiss, the lash—that lash which now, consoled as he was, he never would forgive, and that kiss which now never would be repeated.
Despairingly she turned, threw a glance out of the window, and wished she could follow it.
Instead of anything so dramatic, she stared. Her hand clenched
