“Je ris—de me voirSi belle—en ce miroir——”
“Je ris—de me voirSi belle—en ce miroir——”
“Je ris—de me voir
Si belle—en ce miroir——”
“Say, Joy, can’t you practice your trilling with the door shut?”
Sarah and Joy had met in the kitchenette, about four-thirty in the afternoon. Their encounters were always a matter of routine, and to-day they both happened to strike the same time to search for “afternoon tea.” Sarah had just come to light, and was yawning about in a wrinkled kimono, her hair done up in curlers, her face pettishly grey. There was something positively undressed about Sarah’s face at times like these. Joy had been uptown all day, first at Pa’s, then at her French and Italian lessons. Returning, she had been practicing a trill exercise, not aware that Sarah was arising a little later than usual.
“I’m sorry,” she said now, and chewed a cold English muffin—the kind one buys at the corner delicatessen. “I usually close the door when I practice, anyway. I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“It certainly is nerve-racking to live in the house with a singer,” Sarah complained. She had caught sight of her face in a mirror, which added to the drag of her voice. “Of course I know you have to practice and all that, Joy, but now that your voice has gotten so much bigger it carries everywhere—simply everywhere!”
“Glad to hear it, that’s what I’m after,” snapped Joy, and bit into another discouraged muffin. “It’s hard enough to work all the time without being picked on for it. To hear you talk, you’d think I sang all day.”
“Now you’re getting cross. I suppose singers have to be temperamental, though.” Receiving no response to this, Sarah twirled her infinitesimal braid and tried again: “It’s funny to see you try to be so earnest. No girl with the looks you know you have can stand the strain of the student’s life without weakening and breaking away once in a while. And you can’t tell me that you and that Jim Dalton go to concerts every time you leave here.”
“We never have gotten along well together, have we, Sarah? I think the best way for us to do is not to talk when we’re around each other, unless we can’t avoid it.”
Sarah stared at Joy, incredulous that the mist over the animosity of the two had at last blown away.
“I mean it,” said Joy, “I need every bit of my energy for my work. I can’t waste any of it on you. I’m sure you feel the same way about me. So, let’s not—waste any energy.”
Sarah, regarding her beneath incendiary brows, was just taking on energy. “It’s true we’ve never gotten on together. It started the first day you came and put Packy away in your reticule. You walked away with him, reticule and all. Packy was one of the best playmates I ever had—his hand and his pocket-book had well oiled connections. And now through you he’s queered himself, and will never blow around here again.”
“I always felt Packy was at the bottom of it. But I don’t care. I’ve done my next-best to get along with you, and you too have made somewhat of an effort, but we can’t get along—so let’s not waste any more energy.”
She walked out of the kitchenette, trembling. After a day of unmitigated, although varied, work, her nerves were rigid, and had given away at the first little jab.
So far, the fall had been one of steady labour, punctuated only by Sarah’s jeers and by the music to which she had listened with Jim. Galli-Curci had come, a marvel and a thrill.
And then, a little after that, they went to hear Frieda Hempel. If Galli-Curci’s voice was silver, Hempel’s was a rainbow shot with colours that danced or remained steadfast at will. Joy was powerless to compare the shimmering of her Proch’s Variations with the crystal joy of Galli-Curci in the same song. And the roguish dance of her “Fêtes Galantes,” where by winking she upset the Bostonians to such an extent that they made her repeat it. The stark tragedy of “The Linden Tree,” and “Home, Sweet Home,” at the end. Galli-Curci had played it for herself, and sung it gingerly, with such changes that Jim remarked: “Do you like ‘Home Sweet Home au naturel or maître d’hôtel?’” “I don’t like it at all,” Joy had said; “I wish people wouldn’t keep singing it—it’ll fly to pieces any minute, it’s so used up.” But when Frieda Hempel sang it, it took the aspect of a new song—new in its charm, old in its universal appeal——Joy looked around her at the faces turned to the blue-velvet figure pouring forth the hackneyed words; there was not a face that did not have a tense, strained expression—hardly a person who was not winking back a tear or letting them come unashamed. “Home, Sweet Home,” at which the critics groaned. . . .
She and Jim did not look at each other until they were making their way out. Then Jim spoke. “Made you think—that the only important thing in life—was something we both are missing—didn’t it?”
“Oh, to move people like that!” said Joy.
The fall concerts set her to work more furiously than ever. She had not had the opportunity to compare her voice with others, to gain a proper perspective, before. Pa remarked that she was actually becoming musical in leaps and bounds; every week now showed a gain in voice, technique and musical understanding.
But little incidents like Sarah pricked; and when one was bending every part of one’s self to work, one had to be perfectly frank about elbowing little incidents aside. So she justified herself, the remainder of that day, for taking the stand on which she had walked out of the kitchenette. Sarah went out for the evening before Jerry had come back to the apartment, and did not come to tell Joy where she was going before she started, as had been the desultory custom. Joy was relieved. Then Sarah had accepted her suggestion. It would really be better for both of them.
The next morning she was out before there were any signs of life in the apartment, which was quite customary. She stayed long uptown, as she attended an afternoon concert and then ate dinner alone at a cafeteria on Huntington Avenue. It was late when she finally let herself into the apartment. Jerry darted at her in the hall—a wild looking Jerry, hair roughed up until her head was one bristle.
‘Joy—for God’s sake—I thought you’d never come back.Do you know where Sal is?”
“Why, no, of course not. She hasn’t been with me. What’s the mat——”
“When did you see her last?”
“Why—yesterday afternoon.”
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“No. I didn’t see her when she went out. What——”
“You didn’t even see her?” Jerry collapsed on the hall table, leaning against it with every sagging muscle, her freckles starting out hurriedly on her white face. “Listen—When I got in thisA.M.I looked in her room to see if she was in yet. She wasn’t. It was pretty late, but I didn’t think anything about it and went to bed and slept like a fool. Went there when I woke up at nine-thirty and—she wasn’t there. Bed, room, everything just the same way it was last night. Her American Beauty evening dress the only one of her clothes gone—I looked last night to see what she’d worn, and that was missing—and now—it still is.Where is she?”
“You are sure she hadn’t come in—and gone out again——”
“In her American Beauty evening dress? That would mean she came in at threeA.M.the soonest she could have come and I not heard her—and gotten up at nine at the latest she could have and I not heard her—and gone out in evening dress and not come back yet! It’s nearly nine now.”
Joy considered, putting down her music roll. “You don’t know who she went out with last night?”
Jerry shook her head. “If I’d only been home when she started——”
The shriek of the telephone scared them both out of their positions. “You answer,” said Joy, and together they shivered to the closet down the hall in whose privacy they had their telephone conversations. Jerry lifted up the receiver. “Hello, oh, hello, Davy. She isn’t here just now. Oh, that’s all right, weweregoing to that dance to-night. Do you know by any chance who Sal went out with last night? You do?” She wound the telephone cord around one finger and then watched it tighten as she pulled until the finger grew livid. “Oh, will they be around at the dance to-night? Oh, well—you needn’t bother. Oh, all right, only I haven’t put on my gingham yet, so don’t make the poor kid race all the way. See you later.”
She slammed down the receiver and turned to Joy. “That was Davy—he and Wigs were taking us to that Tech dance to-night, you know. He called up to say they were sending a Freshman who has a car, over to get us—they have to bone for some nine o’clock exam to-morrow till the last minute. Come on into my room till I get into something.”
“But what—who——” stuttered Joy as she followed her into the wilderness of clothes that was Jerry’s room, and watched her pull a glittering green sequin dress from the collection—“What did he tell you about——”
“He said he knew that Sal was going to the Toast and Jam last night—there was some big celebration there—with Crawf Harris and Dum-Dum Barnes, because they had asked him to come along too with a girl he had a date with, but he had theatre tickets and so they didn’t——”
“And now what are you going to do?”
Jerry raked her hair smooth with two military brushes, her latest idea. “Do? Why, go to that dance and get those damn little rounders to tell me what went on, where they left Sal, and so on—and believe me, there’ll have to be some fluent explaining!”
“I don’t understand.” Joy moved about around the debris of the room, too nervous to sit down. “But I—I can’t stay here, Jerry, while you——” She vanished from the room. When she returned some minutes later, she wore hat and coat. Jerry, who was swiftly puckering up a split in a silk stocking made by putting her foot in it too abruptly, jerked an inquiring eyebrow. “What in——”
“Jerry—I know you can look after yourself and do everything and always have; but nevertheless there are times—if we are unlucky enough to have those times—when a man is absolutely necessary—a man we can trust. I think this is one of those times—and I’ve telephoned Jim Dalton to come out here as quickly as possible.”
Jerry nodded. “I’m glad you did. It—it does look like one of those times—and Wigs and Davy wouldn’t be even up to zero on a proposition like this.”
The two girls sat waiting in a silence broken only once or twice.
“Of course—it may come to nothing.” This from Jerry. “There must be all sorts of reasons——”
“Oh, there must be reasons. But——” Joy could not throw off the horror that was settling upon her. “But—where else could she be, and why? She has no other girl friends—oh,Jerry! Why, of course—there’s Félicie Durant!”
“I called her up at noontime,” Jerry droned. “She hadn’t seen her for a week or so.”
The bell rang finally.
“Bet it’s the freshman; freshmen always are early”; from Jerry.
But it was Jim. Just the sight of him made Joy a little more calm. He was the sort of person to whom one turned naturally; he gave out that “quiet strength” which is too often imposed upon to carry the burdens of others. A few swift questions, more or less hysterical answers, and the story was before him. A moment, and Jerry found the generalship taken away from her as Jim gave orders of procedure. He had not completed mapping out their line of action when the freshman arrived, a freshman who looked rather stunned to find instead of the described pair of girls in evening dress, a girl in street clothes, with a man, and one lone girl with pale face, fiery eyes, and bobbed hair, who was wrapped in a velvet cloak from which protruded a peacock fan—a girl who treated him, doggone it! like a regular chauffeur. She might at least have come in front with him and left the two street-clads by themselves; but no, they all sat in back, whispering until he hauled his car into place at the end of a moderately long line in a narrow Boston street. Then, and then only, did the girl with the bobbed hair condescend to speak to him.
“Do you happen to be familiar with Dum-Dum Barnes and Crawf Harris?”
“Not too familiar,” he replied cautiously. “They’re Seniors.” Then, as they made no move to disembark: “Aren’t you coming in?”
“That’s as might be,” drawled that bobbed-haired girl. “You can go in and see if Crawf and Dum-Dum are there. If they are, you can tell ’em to come out here Q. E. D.—if not, come out and tellusQ. E. D. As for Wigs and Davy—if they’ve got there yet, why, you can tell ’em I’m located here.”
He went off, muttering “Gotcha,” more than ever convinced that she thought he was a chauffeur. When he returned five minutes later, the three were in the same rigid expectancy in which he had left them, with that continued stillness which denotes an uninterrupted absence of conversation. The freshman cleared his throat. Decidedly there was something very cagey about this whole affair.
“I—well, I can’t locate Crawf and Dum-Dum,” he said. “They’re Seniors, you know; I don’t know them very well; and everyone’s dancing in the dark in there, so I can’t make out. Wigs and Dave don’t seem to have gotten there yet——”
“Then we’ll come in—I can see in the dark better than any other way,” and one by one the three climbed from the car. The freckled faced girl turned to him with a sudden, grandiloquent sweep. “Thank you very much for the use of your car, sir. I shall mention you favourably in my next letter to theTranscript.”
The three were gone, and the freshman, after a bewildered grunt, drove off to the Copley, where a party of his own kind awaited him. Not for him as yet the Tech fraternity dances.
As they entered the hall, Joy caught her breath. Never before had she seen such a spectacle. Three wide rooms were given up to dancing—the orchestra playing in the hall—sole illumination, the dim one that filtered from the hall into two of the rooms, and as for the third, it remained in blackness relieved only by ghostly dresses clasped to white shirtfronts. The three stared from the doorway for a moment of silent fascination. It was like some hazy, voluptuous dream—feverish music, quickening the throbbing of desire—the little sigh of figures interlocked, moving in time to the throb, in the dripping black velvet of the dark. It was something one might have imagined in the days of Nebuchadnezzar.
“Barbaric,” Joy murmured as she caught Jim’s eye and knew she was flushing—flushing under the music, which quickened the uneven pulse of memory.
“No—not barbaric,” said Jim. “Barbarians are—more direct.” He turned to Jerry. “Do you see them yet?” She shook her head, eyes straining after the dancers. “That freshman had no initiative. He ought to have——” He strode over to the orchestra, spoke to the boy at the piano. A few more bars, and the music stopped, the pianist tapping on the drum for quiet.
“I am asked to announce,” he said shrilly, “that Mr. Barnes and Mr. Harris are wanted in the hall.”
The music took up its beat, and the dancers in the dark, who had barely stopped, began again.
“I should have thought of paging them, only I’m so rattled,” said Jerry. “Thank God for Jim.”
He came back to them; through another opening into the hall charged two lads with question and not much else on their wide young faces. Jerry stepped forward and spread her fan in front of them, an excellent substitute for buttonholing, as they drew up with a start.
“Hullo, Jerry,” said one. The other said nothing; he was presumably Dum-Dum.
“This is them,” said Jerry, with a jerk of the fan. “You two, this is Miss Nelson and Mr. Dalton. And we want to know right now where Sal Saunders is.”
Dum-Dum opened his mouth and closed it.
“Did—didn’t she get back?” Crawf demanded, jaw hanging loosely. “You aren’t stringing us, Jerry? Trying to get a rise?”
“Nix!” Jerry snarled, her wide lips curling back from her teeth. “Where did you leave her?”
Crawf looked at Dum-Dum, whose speechless countenance gave forth no help. “Why—why—we—I——Haven’t you heard a word from her? Don’t you know where she is?”
“We do not,” said Jim. “And you two, since you are the last two known to be with her, are responsible.”
“Jesus!” said Dum-Dum, and collapsed upon the stairway.
“I’ll swear—I’ll swear—if she’s gotten into anything, it’s her own fault!” Crawf’s sagged jaw did not close with this chivalrous utterance.
“Buzz on with the tale, you little gnat!” Jerry cried, threatening him with her fan. He retreated, a few steps.
“I—I—well, we went down to the Toast and Jam.”
“We know that—go on.”
“And—and I suppose we did get pretty fuzzy. You know Sal—you know she never can hold it. We told her to cut down, but you know how much effect that has on her; pretty soon she was so blotto she was making eyes at a couple of old boys in the corner. Isn’t that so, Dum-Dum? Wasn’t she blotto?”
Dum-Dum nodded.
“The old boys got fresh and we were feeling good, so—well, I guess we got mixed up pretty well. Well, then we thought we’d come away, in fact the head waiter or some such stuff requested our departure, all of us, so we eased out. Got out to the car and the old boys’ was next. Of course Dum-Dum couldn’t start it.”
“The old boys’ car?”
“Nope; ours. Sal got sore right off—said we were doing it on purpose. The old boys stayed in their car and watched the fun. Dum-Dum got under the car, but that didn’t do any good. Finally I got under too. Dunno how long we were fooling around there—my pocket lamp burnt out—but we heard Sal talking. Thought she was talking to us, so we didn’t listen. Then all of a sudden we heard some brakes grinding a tune, and Sal yelling she’d never get back to town with us so she was going with them. I rolled out from under and saw the tail-lights of the old boys’ car spinning away.” He stopped and looked at them appealingly. “What could we do? We couldn’t speed up and follow after. All we could do was sit around and cuss Sal—which we did, complete. Then we worked on the car some more till somehow Dum-Dum slipped a cog and fixed it.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Jim. “You take a girl down to a road house, get her drunk, and then let her sail off with two strange men, having no other objection than cussing?”
“What else could we do? We couldn’t get a taxi and follow them up—it was no free garage.”
“But there were other cars, and owners who could be made to understand.”
“Whadyoumean, understand?” Crawf had been regarding Jim with increasing objection. “Perhaps you’re in the habit of stealing cars from understanding owners. I don’t get that way.”
“And seeing her go off, you thought no more of the matter—didn’t even call up to-day to see if she had reached home safely.”
“We’re having exams——” began Dum-Dum defensively, still on the staircase.
“I’ll admit—it did occur to me to call up, but we’ve been so busy——”
“Busy dancing,” Jerry supplemented.
“And honestly, it never for a minute entered my head but what Sal would get back; she’s a girl who takes darn good care of herself——”
“We are living in strange times indeed if a man thinks a girl can take care of herself under such circumstances,” said Jim.
“What did the old boys look like?” Jerry snapped.
Again Crawf looked at Dum-Dum for aid, but Dum-Dum closed his eyes with a weary air.
“I—I swear I don’t remember. They were about fifty—or maybe forty, or thirty-eight——”
“Or even seventy——” Jerry bit in.
“Hang it, no! They had teeth and hair and things. Grey hair or getting grey—that sort of stuff. One of ’em wore glasses and one of ’em smoked rotten cigars.”
Jim squared off, looking at them in unhurried, but imperative fashion. “Have you two got your car here? Well, get your evening wraps and come along with us while we use it. We’re going to the Toast and Jam—to see if the people there know anything more, or can remember better than you, about these two men. And on the way down you can try to call back a better description of them.”
Jim was of compact build, although so thin that he had not an ounce of flesh that could be trained down. There was something about him that looked very forceful as he faced the two boys.
“I—we both have girls at this dance——” Crawf began, while Dum-Dum looked wildly around from four corners of his eyes.
“Well, get two stags to take ’em, if you feel any responsibility about ’em—tell ’em anything—but come as quickly as you can.”
The two boys vanished through the opening.
“They’re still dancing in the dark,” said Joy monotonously.
Jim consulted his watch. “We’ve only been here a little over six minutes.”
“I never saw anything like it—whole dances in the dark. Do they keep it that way all evening?”
“Oh, no.” Jerry was weaving with her fan an accompaniment to the music, unconsciously swaying back and forth in rhythm as she did so. “They turn ’em on after awhile. It gives you a new sensation, anyway——That’s good jazz, I’ll tell anyone.”
That was it. Dancers in the dark—in search of a new sensation. Jerry was beckoning to a man who had come out to speak to the orchestra. “Oh, Fred,” she said, easily: “do me a favor? When Wigs and Davy see fit to blow in, will you tell them that we got sick of waiting and have gone out with Crawf and Dum-Dum?”
“I’ll do that little thing for you; but they’ll be fit to be tied,” Fred responded with a grin. He stayed carrying on a light badinage with Jerry until the two boys reappeared, coats over their arms, their broad, mild countenances for once overrun with emotions, which were added to as Fred thrust them parting darts about how Wigs and Davy would pay them out for playing the fresh young Lochinvars.
The two boys sat in front, and the trio sat together in back as before. Jerry was still humming the tune that the orchestra had been playing—
“All the knowledge learned at CollegeStill that don’t explain——”
“All the knowledge learned at CollegeStill that don’t explain——”
“All the knowledge learned at College
Still that don’t explain——”
Jerry had found time to wish that she might have been among the dancers; Jerry, the excitement-eater. They had passed a movie palace letting out crowds from its first show. Excitement-eaters all . . . who for want of excitement of their own, had gone to swallow down excitement in reels—of indiscriminate kinds. Indiscriminate excitement by proxy—excitement that exhausted or stimulated, but created the appetite for excitement at first hand.
Jerry stopped humming. “If only this hadn’t happened at the time of the police-strike. But what can those Home Guard birds do?”
“It may not have to come to that,” said Jim.
They veered away from the city outskirts, and started pounding down the State Road towards the South Shore. It was cold, and the boys in front drove with sullen swiftness.
“I feel somehow—as if this were the end of the world,” said Joy miserably. Such awful things are happening that the world’s just got to topple over sometime—and to-night feels just like it.”
“I wonder whatisgoing to happen to the world,” said Jim. “Every year since I can remember people have been saying we’ve been going from bad to worse, and I used to think they were old fogies; but I can see the descent myself, it’s getting so rapid—and I can’t be an old fogy—not at twenty-four.”
“Funny how we’ve all gone back on the way we used to feel during the war,” said Jerry. “It’s just as if the world had turned a double back somersault.”
“Everyone admits that the world is turning around too fast, and that everyone’s got their eyes turned in upon themselves too hard, but then they go right on,” said Joy somewhat pointedly. The memory of Jerry’s evident reluctance to leave the music was still repugnant.
The three lapsed into a silence supported by the sucking gasps of the tires as they slid along over the well oiled highway. After fifteen minutes had passed in quiet travel, their progress became slower, the boys in front casting uncertain eyes up each side road they passed.
“What’s wrong?” Jim called to them.
“Why—I’ve forgotten just where we turn,” Crawf responded. “Sal pointed out the way last night—we’d never been down before, you know——”
Dum-Dum put on the brakes and came to a stop. There was a lone man wandering along the road, coming into the spotlight with which the front lamps were cleaving ahead.
“Where do you turn off to get to the Toast and Jam?”
The wayfarer jerked his thumb. “Next to your right, an’ straight through the cross roads. But you won’t find no toast nor no jam there!”
The echoes of his cackling appreciation of his own wit followed them even through the cross roads.
The “Toast and Jam” proved to be a large, rambling white farmhouse, nestled on a hill, with a dense thicket of automobiles flanking the barn. Riotous music surged from the windows, and a man’s loud voice singing.
“You girls stay out here,” said Jim, “Mr. Barnes will stay with you.”
“Not a prayer!” Jerry cried, leaping out. “I want to ask a few little questions myself. If I don’t look in on this, what was the sense of my cutting the dance?”
“True,” said Jim, and met Joy’s eyes for a moment as he helped her descend. Jerry had joined the two boys, and Joy and Jim brought up the rear.
“It’s just that if you saw anyone you knew here, they’d wonder what you were doing in a place like this,” Jim said suddenly.
“They’d be here, too,” she retorted, “And although I may not have been to this particular place, the first of the summer I thought I took in every road house there was. Goodness knows that I long ago stopped worrying about appearances!”
This was the sort of speech that would have made Grant’s hair rise, she reflected, the minute she spoke; Grant would have thrown back some icy remark that would only have goaded her on. But Jim looked down at her without speaking, and something in his keen eyes made her feel very wriggly.
They entered the Toast and Jam. A low-ceilinged white hallway through which they looked in to a long, cozily gotten-up dining-room, with tables thrust along the sides. A colored orchestra at one end with a negro bawling out the words of the selection, and a piebald mass of dancers, exercise of contact whipping their blood higher and higher, the heat from the low-studded room growing with motion, so that they had to cling but stickily; but they clung. An assortment of all ages, having a preponderance of older men with more or less younger women whose general get-ups were equivocal.
“Do you remember your waiter? And find whoever it was who requested you to leave last night,” said Jim to Crawf, who slid into the dining room. Jerry streaked after him, her fan waving in determination, and Jim followed, with a request that Dum-Dum stay with Joy.
They waited in a silence that grew so appalling, with nothing to watch but the shivering of the dancers to the syncopated shriek of the orchestra, that Joy finally said in a tone as nearly ferocious as she could make it: “Do they call you Dum-Dum after the bullet or because you’re just plaindumb?” At his amazement, she hurled on; “It must be because you’re dumb—otherwise I don’t understand—how you could have been so careless—of a nice girl!”
He opened his mouth and closed it. His silence had suddenly changed colour. It was almost as if he had; and she read it as easily as if he had spoken. They were not so—careful—with Sarah as they might have been with “nice” girls. Jerry had diagnosed it—the key of their relationship with men was that the men acted as if they were among themselves. There had been just that careless oblivion, that utter lack of the protective instinct toward Sarah; and the idea of it was so horribly perverted that she gave a little shiver.
“Aha, shimmying?” said Dum-Dum, finding speech at last. “Music too much for you? Come on, let’s dance till the others get through.”
She looked at him so strangely that his inviting pose disintegrated and he toppled back. “That’s—the first thing I’ve heard you say. Must I take that—as the keynote to your character?”
He was regarding her with alarm and now spoke soothingly. “Oh all right; but it’s darn good music!”
“Good music!” She checked herself. After all, silence was preferable to talking in different tongues.
Jerry came back to them on feet that no longer lilted to the music, her face sagging white against the painted masks of the girls on the floor. Crawf followed with a defiant expression, and Jim came last.
“They don’t remember a thing,” said Jerry; “they’re perfect nitwits, the whole nest of ’em. Every waiter spilled a different description—the head waiter doesn’t even remember whether they were old or young.”
“It seems to be the custom here,” said Jim, “to forget things like that!”
“But the cash you forked out would have tickled their memory if there had been anything to tickle,” said Jerry.
“What can we do now?” Joy asked limply. Somehow she had felt that coming down here would solve everything—that it was going to end up smoothly, things would explain themselves and roll into place, just like the ending of a story.
The five stood in an indecisive little group, looking at each other. A waiter who had been darting his head around a corner to survey them at intervals now darted himself around and approached them with a velvet-covered but none the less insistent air. “If your party is not coming inside——?”
They left as indecisively, and drove home in amazement. It had not occurred to them that they would not be able to read the dark pages of this affair. The sensation of utter futility is new to youth, and momentarily stuns. Until they had followed up every avenue of investigation left them, they had evaded the wings of horror that had been hovering ahead. Now there was room for all that awfulness. They spoke in low tones, the situation becoming more hopeless as they discussed it. Jim said the publicity of the police was not to be desired; Crawf and Dum-Dum, abject almost to cringing by now, said that of course they would finance investigation through a private detective agency, which proposition was speedily approved by Jerry. Joy sat in the tentacles of a memory that added horror.What were the last words she had ever said to Sarah?A practical request to keep out of her life, and she, Joy, would do the same. Under the calcium ray of this dreadful evening’s events, her words were conceited, selfish, ill-tempered—self-sufficient. If one only knew, when words were flying around, that those were the last words that person would ever hear from one’s mouth—how many things would remain unsaid!
A repressed goodnight to the two guilty youths, and leaving Jim, who was to go straight to the detective office. She and Jerry went to Sarah’s room of one accord, then wandered aimlessly through the empty-seeming apartment before going to bed. . . .
“She’ll turn up,” said Jerry; but her voice hung fire.
She did not turn up. Days thickened into weeks, with the detective bringing steady reports of investigation along a blank wall. Something that he had said on undertaking the case quivered in Joy’s memory.
“A missing-girl proposition is almost hopeless, you know, when twelve thousand disappear every year.”
“Twelve thousand a year—in this country!” she cried, and he nodded.
“So you see—it gets pretty difficult.”
It was a strange thing—this voidness that had been Sarah. When Sarah had been there, their lives were as separate as if they had been two strange boarders in the same boarding house. She had never found anything in common with Sarah; she had never tried to. She had disliked her, and not done her best to conceal this dislike. Now Sarah was gone, and her absence made no ripple in Joy’s life. How could she miss her absence, having never really felt her presence—having even suggested that they ignore each other’s presence? But her going left Joy with a queer feeling of self-hatred. Sarah had been a lonely figure, a drifter on the churning waters of excitement; a drifter with nothing upon which to cling, knowing no more than to keep her head above the rising tide. And Joy had faithfully imitated the performance related of certain people, who, some nineteen hundred years ago, had passed by on the other side.
Passing by on the other side was glossed over nowadays as: “It isn’t any of my business.” Everyone did it about everyone. In this new analysis she wondered—-if she had not been passing Jerry by on the other side also. The answer rose automatically to her throat: “It isn’t any of my business.”
It was after the Christmas holidays, which Joy had worked through with no let-up save Christmas day at home with her father, that Pa announced a change in schedule.
“You are working too steadily,” he said. “You never do anything else; you will turn into a machine; then you will no longer be a girl, and the warmth and glory of your appeal will be gone. Like that! Moreover, it takes a fine shade of quality from your voice; I want you to use it as an instrument, of course, but I think too much of how hard you have worked, and how dull your skin and eyes are getting, when I hear you.”
“Do you really think I’m losing my quality?” Joy demanded.
He laughed. “There—do you see what you just said? That shows you are turning into a little tuning fork, my dear. Agirlwould have cried: ‘Are my skin and eyesreallydull?’ or at least looked in the mirror in front of you.” Before her attitude of unrelaxed question, he grew serious. “No, your quality is not as yet impaired in the slightest; and you are soaring along so swiftly that I cannot believe you have been with me for so few months. But a good teacher can see a fault pending before it takes possession; and as I have so often remarked, I am a good teacher. You need a change.”
“Are you going to send me home for a rest?” she asked in swift antagonism.
“No. You are going to New York. Take some friends along with you if you wish; stay at the Belmont, where all theniceBostonians stay when they deign to turn their faces westward; go to the opera; go shopping; in short, have not a rest, but a vacation.”
“New York!” she breathed. “Oh, Pa—do you really mean it?”
He nodded. “And I want you to sing for my baby.” He mentioned a name that was a household word for glory of song, a name that shone high and clear in the eminence where only the truly great stars remain, while others tremble for a day and then are gone.
“Sing—for—her!” Joy gasped. “Oh, Pa, I couldn’t—not yet!”
“Little Joy—you will find as you go on, that the greatest ones will always be the easiest and kindest before whom to sing. They know the real elements, and can distinguish lack of training from lack of endowment; and they know of how much value is encouragement, along the weary ladder of the artist. I shall write her a letter, and she will send you word at the Belmont when to come.”
As she thought it over, she could not remember when she had been so excited. Jerry shared her anticipation, and announced that she was going also; it was a good opportunity to select models for her next sale.
“We can get Félicie, too,” she said; “It’s about time she went over to see Greg again.”
Neither voiced the mutual thought, that two of them going to New York alone seemed incomplete. Félicie made a third—possibly a more harmonious third than the other who had silently dropped from their lives.
Félicie acceded to their plans, and Joy wrote her father for money for the trip. His answering check and letter came when the three girls were all in Jerry’s room, Jerry “toning up” several of Félicie’s costumes. Joy read the letter with half her attention on Félicie’s bewitchingness in a pale green velvet that shone dully like moonlight on an even lawn, throwing out her colouring and features in rich relief. Suddenly a name on the page caught her attention. She looked again and then read the paragraph over slowly:
“I hope while you are in New York that you will see your cousin Mrs. Eustace Drew, who was Mabel Lancaster. The Lancasters of whom you have heard me speak; they were your mother’s cousins once removed, and we have not kept up the relationship as she would have wished. I have written Mabel that you are coming, and she will undoubtedly call on you at the Belmont.”
She sat for a moment watching Jerry swirl the velvet on Félicie into marvelous lines. Mabel Lancaster—who had come into Charlette’s for her trousseau, with her brother, Phil Lancaster—of whom Jerry still thought with unquenchable flame. Her first impulse was to show Jerry the letter, share her surprise at this identification of New York cousins she had heard her father mention so many times. Then she held herself back. What if cousin Mabel would forget to call upon her—what if she wasn’t the same one, after all—Joy had forgotten the married name Jerry had given. So she tore the letter into tiny bits, and prepared for the trip with excitement that grew to boiling point as she savoured the amazing possibilities of the coincidence, if coincidence it was.
They took the midnight train, landing in New York in time for breakfast, which they ate at Childs’ opposite the Belmont.
“Although even this place is getting too expensive,” Jerry grumbled.
They giggled all through the meal from sheer light-headedness at being off together. The French waitress had brought them their griddle-cakes, smiled at them in delight, and said as they left: “You act like all young girls should—happy and gay.” This set them off with renewed impetus, and after installing their luggage at the Belmont and as Jerry said “spreading more around in the way of tips than we ate for our breakfast,” they spent the morning going through the Fifth Avenue shops, seeing all “the latest models” with an economical thoroughness that left enraged saleswomen behind them. In the afternoon Félicie curled up for a rest.
“I never sleep on sleepers, and if I don’t look my best, Greg will notice it and say it’s because I’ve been running myself ragged in Boston,” she explained, burrowing her head down under the covers, from which came forth the muffled request: “Please don’t open any windows; you know I can’t sleep where there’s too much air around; it distracts my attention.”
Jerry had made arrangements for tea with two Princeton men, and Joy had willingly consented to go with her. She was just in the mood for squeezing the orange of her good time in New York dry.
They met the Princetonites in the lobby—two well-tailored youths, with that sleek, parted-in-the-middle college expression. The taller of the two, one Steve Mitchell, combed Joy up and down in one competent sweep of the eyes, and annexed her, while the other, poetically called Harry Hanigan, followed Jerry, who had done no more than greet them airily, shove Joy at them just as airily, then make her way to the nearest door, which fronted on the line of taxis.
“This place always acts as if it were the Methodist quarterly conference,” Harry complained loudly. “Come on, Jerry; let’s put in a little pep.”
He stepped with Jerry inside the swinging door, and pushed it, starting off so fast they had to dart around with it in self-protection—or so it seemed. A gentleman around forty, of a comfortable figure, had happened to be entering the swinging doors on the other side, and he too was forced to dart around for self-protection. But whereas his expression was varied, Jerry and Harry seemed to be enjoying themselves. The pace of the revolving doors increased; it almost looked as if the gentleman of no longer comfortable proportions were running a marathon, while the two-in-one on the other side sped over more merrily.
“Why—they’re doing it onpurpose!” Joy exclaimed.
Her companions looked about them at the crowd of grinning bellboys collecting, together with the scattering of guests who were pretending not to watch while keeping tabs on every round. “I should think Harry’d get sick of this; he’s done it in almost every hotel in New York,” he said restfully, and waited. The pace slackened; soon the two wedged themselves out of the pinwheel, and waited until, crimson-faced, the third party in the proceedings flew out and bore down upon them.
“Awfully sorry, sir,” said Harry earnestly. “I got packed in with this lady by mistake, and we were so confused we started whirling around—you can see how that would be—and then I lost my head and lost count——”
The intent to kill was by no means abated in the eye of the flaming one. With a hasty, “By George, Mary, we must catch the train; we’ve lost a lot of time with this gentleman here!” Harry seized Jerry and drifted through the revolving doors once more. No one went after them. Joy and Steve found them by a taxi outside, Harry leaning up against it in a Napoleonic attitude.
“Was that neat, or was it not?” he hailed them triumphantly. Steve helped the girls into the taxi, pushed Harry inside, and said to the man: “Drive to the Astor roof.”
“Where’s that?” the driver asked, turning a helpless expression upon him.
“Why,—you drive to the Hotel Astor, and then just keep on driving up to the roof.” Steve spoke sweetly, considerately, as one might to a child, then climbed in and banged the door.
“Just for that, he’ll go the long way around,” Harry complained, peering out at the meter as they started off.
“You have such cheap ideas, Harry!” said Dave. “Jerry knows us, of course; but I was going to make Miss Nelson think we were millionaires.”
“Never mind—we’ll make the waiters at the Astor think we’re millionaires. Not in the obvious way! But by the good old method of gas. What do you say—are you game, Jerry?”
“The waiters don’t listen the way they used to,” Jerry objected.
“Oh, you haven’t been around with us for some time! Look here; I—-I’ll be the Western magnate; I’ve got a whacking black cigar I’ve been keeping just for this. Jerry, you look as though you could have come from most anywhere; you’ll be my wife, and I probably picked you up in some mining camp while I was getting rich, or something. See? Act with that as a background. We’re the recent rich, that want anything that’s high-priced or has a fancy name. Get it?”
“And I,” Steve contributed, “will be a New York crest-rider—gay young rounder—look down on you of course, but keen to wangle the contract out of you through this social means.”
“Contract! Oh, yes, there’s got to be a contract!”
“Cer-tain-ly. A million dollar one. We’ve got to make this party as doggy as possible. And Miss Nelson here can be my fiancée—I’ve dragged her along to impress her with my importance—you’ll be typical New York yearling, Miss Nelson, bored with anybody but your own set, bored with business, furious at me for bringing you, try to get all the men at the other tables to look at you, then turn ’em down with a haughty stare—you know.”
Jerry stood up on the taxi, struggling with herself. “I am nothing if not artistic,” she said; “and if I’m to be a mining-camp-varnished-with-dollars-product, I shall look the part.”
“That’s one of your best points, Jerry,” approved Steve. “You do a thing up right.”
She sat down again, barely in time before they drew up at the Astor and poured forth. Joy caught her breath in an abortive laugh, as they solemnly filed through the luxurious lobby, Jerry leading as usual. In a few swift touches, Jerry had changed herself from the breezy mondaine upon whom everything naturally looked right and leads to the harmony of that elusive completeness that is style, to the woman who, with obvious’ means and as obvious a wish to look well, pathetically falls just short of the mark. Her skirt sagged, ever so little, but still condemning enough; the buttons on the coat of her duveteen suit were fitted loosely in the wrong buttonholes; her hat was tilted back ingenuously, revealing a wide expanse of forehead, and she had pinned her hair in here and there so that the remains of its bobbed audacity had the appearance of little ends that had messily strayed from their moorings. Her gloves were partly unbuttoned, and one flapped as she walked. Even her walk had changed—it was a businesslike stride, with “getting-there” written all over her hastening back.
“Not a girl in a hundred would show she could look like that,” said Steve, in critical approval, as he kept pace with Joy in behind. “No wonder Jerry’s an institution that never fails.”
As they reached the roof Harry pulled out his cigar, a huge black affair that he stuck in his mouth at an angle of forty-five degrees. With cunning eye he marked out the head waiter and bore down upon him, thumbs in his waist-coat pocket, twirling his fingers. “We want the best table in the place,” he said, speaking through the cigar, at which the waiter tried not to look. “No expense shall be spared!”
He swaggered as the waiter hastily led them to a corner table. Joy was about to sink down, conscious that forks were being suspended in midair all about them, when Jerry put in a word.
“I don’t like this table, Bill,” she said querulously. “I want to be out in the middle where I can see everything that goes on, I do.”
“Waiter, did you hear my wife? What my wife says goes! Nothing’s too good for her!” Harry turned fiercely upon the waiter, jerking his cigar up and down in time to his words. The head waiter, all apologies, conducted them to a more centrally located table, and beckoned to a lesser menial, who helped install them. Jerry gave a bereft wail.
“Where’s the flowers! We haven’t got no flowers! Look, Bill, at that tabletherethey got flowers!”
Her fingers pointed firmly to an adjoining table, all eyes of which were already fixed upon them with that passionate interest that only Americans display in the affairs of others.
“Now, Rosie, didn’t I tell you not to point at things with your fingers?” Harry admonished in a penetrating lower tone.
“Well, a fork wasn’t handy; the man ain’t set the table yet,” Jerry responded.
“Let us order,” interposed Steve in a suave, glossing-it-over tone, as the waiter thrust the menu before them.
“Just rustle us the best tea on the premises, young feller,” said Harry to the waiter, with a wave of the hand. “With all the fixin’s; see?”
Jerry interposed once more. “Say, Bill, I want a merring glass. Does that come with the tea?”
“A meringue glacé,” said Steve smoothly to the by now distracted waiter.
“What kind does madame prefer?”
“Kind?” Jerry looked bewildered. “Is there different kinds? Can’t I just have a plain merring glass?”
“A vanilla one, perhaps,” said Steve with a reassuring smile directed first at her and then at the waiter. Then, as the waiter fluttered away, leaving several around pouring water and adjusting the table, and others poised near by with their ears cocked, Steve leaned across the table, and addressed Harry in a loud, confidential tone:
“Rather a pleasant idea of yours, Mr.—er—Billings, to combine business with afternoon tea.”
“Well, I hope your girl and my wife get to be real good friends,” said Harry cordially. “I can remember when a million-dollar contract would ’a’ looked pretty big to me.”
“It is practically certain, then, that we have underbid the—the Standard Oil Company on this?” Steve demanded.
“Lemme tell you, young man, underbiddin’ don’t always mean you get a million-dollar contract. Not by a jugful!”
“Bill, remember there is ladies present!” from Jerry.
“Rosie, we’re talkin’ in business terms now, an’ you can chew on that piece of bread the waiter handed you, till we get through. Now lemme tell you, young man, the fact is, the underbiddin’ don’t cut so much ice as my private an’ personal opinions. I get hunches, that’s what I do; an’ hunches is what made Bill Billings what he is to-day, if I do say it.”
Joy could only watch, all her energies concentrated on stifling the mirth that their antics were inspiring. The waiter brought their tea and Jerry’s “merring,” which Jerry devoured with the aid of a spoon, a knife and fork, using her roll also as a pusher now and then. Harry drank tea from his saucer and discoursed on the grudge he bore the Standard Oil; they were a bunch of cheap skates, and they would be a bunch of soreheads to-morrow when they learned that Mr. Mitchell had nailed this contract. “For it is yours, young man, for the asking; and yours is a firm I would trust a lot further than that.” The people of the next table had given up all pretense of eating or talking to each other, and the table back of Joy was also avidly silent. She could not see them, but she could feel the tense attention, and sense the vibrations of vision that centered on their table.
Tea being over, Harry grew more expansive. “You going to step round to the minister’s soon, you two?” he beamed benevolently. “Better not waste any time. I married Rosie when she was sixteen—Told her then to stick to me and she’d wear diamonds. I notice you stuck, old girl?”
“Now, Bill, you stop!” Jerry simpered. The head waiter was presenting the check. Several other waiters who had added to their sense of well-being were lined up in back of the head waiter. Steve started to take the bill, but Harry intervened.
“Pay my way’s my motto,” he said, whereat Steve lost his composure for the first time and gulped while Harry drew his rather thin wallet from his pocket and carefully counted out what looked like a small amount which he laid on the salver with the check. Steve recovered himself and filled in the awkward pause by saying:
“Yes, we intend to be married as soon as Miss Nelson can get her trousseau together. It’s already taken a year—as fast as she gathers a few little things together, why, they go out of style, and then she has to start all over again. It’s such a fearful ordeal for the poor darling!”
They rose to go, Joy conscious of an acute sag in the waiter’s expression as he took the salver and walked away with failing footsteps. And then she turned and saw the table whose listening silence she had been appreciating throughout that time. She stared in stupefaction. The Lamkins; the Alfred Lamkins from Foxhollow Corners; pillars of the church, two solid, well-buttressed souls, with four white-eyelashed, shiny-nosed, unmarried daughters. All staring at Joy in that awful delight experienced by small-town souls when they find their neighbours doing something out of the ordinary.
“Why—there’s Joy Nelson!” said Mrs. Lamkin, in obviously manufactured surprise.
“So it is!” chorused the four white-eyelashed things. “Hello, Joy!”
It was plain that they expected her to stop and speak to them, exchange the usual banal what-are-you-doing-in-the-big-city of the out-of-towner, and present her companions. It was just as plain that she intended doing nothing of the sort, and with a confused nod of acknowledgement, her head down, she almost ran past them to the elevator.
“Did you see that waiter wilt at my twenty-five cent tip, and all the others melt away?” Harry chortled as they went down.
“Who were those people, Joy?” Jerry demanded, pulling her hat down and her hair out.
“People from home.”
“Home-town stuff!” Steve cried. “You’re compromised forever now, Joy; you’ll have to marry me now!”
“That’s not as bad as this fall, in at the Knickerbocker,” said Harry reminiscently. “I had the waiter sure I was the Prince of Wales and Steve here an escaped nobleman from Russia, conferring together about starting royalty over here, when up blows Dick Lindley and another poor egg, calling us by name and requesting the loan of some cash to get back to Princeton!”
The blithe youths left them at the Belmont. “We’ve been lowbrow this afternoon; we’ll be highbrow to-night,” said Steve. “We’ve wangled Harry’s mother’s box at the opera.”
“Can Félicie Durant and Greg Stevens come along?” Jerry asked. “Félicie’s over with us, and I said we’d do something to-night with them.”
“Félicie Durant can come anywhere with me where I can look at her,” said Harry; “if she’ll keep her mouth shut. Still going around with Greg Stevens, is she?”
“Greg Stevens—” Steve repeated; “not Princeton?”
“Nope—Yale—managed most of the teams there, and all that sort of flutter. He’s all right, though. Don’t take more than an hour now, you two!”
They found Félicie still sleeping in a breathlessly stuffy room, as she had not even turned off the heat.
“Well, Joy, what do you think of our Princeton specialties?” Jerry asked, turning on the lights and pulling the covers from Félicie’s face.
“Lovely. I can’t tell which one is talking when I close my eyes. But of all places I’ve been to around Boston—why did I have to come to New York to run into some home-towners!”
“That is one thing about New York—you’re always running into people you know, in the wrong places. Wake up, Félicie! You’ve only got an hour to get dressed, and we’ve a box at the opera!”
Félicie, after a struggle with herself, arose with an injured expression. “I was awake all the time—you needn’t have spoken so loud. I haven’t slept hardly a wink. Just as I was falling asleep someone called Joy on the phone—Madame Somebody’s maid, or something, who said Joy was to come at four to-morrow, she would send her car.”
It was characteristic of Félicie that she had not even recognised the great name that brought Joy to a standstill and drew a whistle from Jerry.
“Perhaps we’ll hear her to-night,” said Jerry. “Don’t lose your nerve, Joy; you’ll sing circles around her some day. Go and run a tub and do some scales—they won’t be heard over the tub if you close the door.”
“I hope you’re not running a tub forme,” Félicie objected; “too many baths are bad for me, I’m funny that way.”
Strange anomaly—the Félicie who had everything about her as neat as a bee-hive, but slept in sealed rooms and disagreed with baths!
An hour later they admitted they were fit to sit in anyone’s box at the opera. Félicie was almost bewilderingly lovely in pale green velvet; Jerry was audacious and stunning in low-cut purple with cerise ostrich feathers; Joy wore a cloth-of-gold that Jerry had ripped from an old model of hers and put together in a few simple lines.
“With your hair,” said Jerry, looking her over in professional pride, “that get-up’s a knock out.”
Joy found herself wishing that Jim was going to see her, instead of the Princeton youths.
“Wait till we hit the diamond horseshoe!” Jerry was saying. “Although we’re probably higher up than that.”
“I wish I had some diamonds to wear,” Félicie sighed. “I do love diamonds so.”
“If you’d give in to Greg, you might have one,” Jerry suggested.
“One about the size of a pin-point! I couldn’t stand that. Men don’t half appreciate what it means to a girl to have a ring that she won’t have to be ashamed of. When I get one, I want a good one, as long as it’s a thing I’ll have to wear all my life.”
“Oh, so you’ve thought up another argument now for not getting married for four years,” said Jerry.
“Now you’re picking on me again!”
The ring of the telephone announcing that their escorts awaited them downstairs interrupted here, and they sailed down after a mere ten minutes for last rites of re-powdering, going over one’s hair, and general touching up.
Gregory Stevens was as dark as Félicie, scarcely more than an eager boy, and very much in love, as Joy saw and could have seen if she had not been told. They ate at the Belmont, and throughout dinner Félicie and Greg carried on a low-toned conversation, refusing to be drawn into the general chatter. They reached the opera late, and Joy lost herself in a heaven of sound oblivious to the whispering all about her. The first grand opera she had ever heard; small wonder that she could not come out of her trance between the acts, to enjoy the sensation of being a beautiful girl sitting in a box at the Opera. A little before the end Harry pulled her back to the world of Excitement-Eaters by whispering: “Come on, we don’t want to be caught in this mob; we’re going somewhere to dance.”
Surprised dumb that they could leave the greatest of music quivering in mid-air, she followed them as they streaked out and lost the time they had gained in debate of where to go. Steve voted for the “Bré Cat;” Jerry downed that with a sniff; “Princeton’s playground!” “Weisenrebber’s,” Harry’s suggestion, was voted down as “too rough;” Jerry declared she positively would not go to any of the hotels, she could get the same thing in Boston. Steve groaned, and said he supposed they’d have to fork out fifty dollars or so for a table at the Frolic; Félicie and Greg cried out in swift protest that they wanted to go somewhere quiet.
“I tell you what,” said Harry: “let’s slum uptown. There’s a place up around Columbia with good music—Fennelly’s, or something. Come on, we’re off!”
No one knowing enough about the place to object, they piled into a taxi and worked their way uptown, Félicie and Greg following alone in another. The first four were well established at the uptown dancing palace before Félicie and Greg joined them. Félicie’s colour was heightened almost to a dark purple flush; Greg was pale, his features standing out sharply. They sat down at the table without a word, and stared vaguely at the dancers.
“You two ought never to go to the opera,” said Harry sweetly. “It’s got you all—wrought—up.”
“Not the opera,” said Greg, each word sheared off almost before it came. “We’ve been discussing the modern girl.”
“I don’t want to talk about it any more,” Félicie’s pouting lips twitched out. “I’m so nervous now I could just scream!”
“We’ve ordered for you,” said Steve as the waiter brought up some soft drinks. “Do you think opera is as crazy as I do? Come on, Harry; let’s do our favourite scene from Madame Butterfly. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an actual transition from part of this famous opera.” He rose, pouring some gingerale into a glass, singing solemnly: “Will you have some more whiskey?”
“Thank you!” sang Harry in response, taking the glass and draining it. They sat down looking for appreciation; but Joy and Jerry were regarding the two who still sat without a flicker of attention to anything.
“Well, what is there about the modern girl that brings on this run-over attitude?” Harry inquired, ignoring Steve’s warning eyebrows.
“The modern girl,” said Greg, “is selfish to cruelty. I think that—carries the situation in a nutshell.”
“Is the modern girl any more selfish than the modern man?” said Joy quickly, anxious to alleviate the mauve tints of Félicie’s face. “I haven’t noticed it, if it’s so.”
“Oh, now we’re in for deep discussion!” Harry proclaimed joyously. “I do love deep discussions in frivolous places!”
“From my point of view, the man as he is to-day is the result of the modern girl,” said Greg, turning to Joy.
“If she is selfish, so selfish that she wishes to have everything, while giving nothing in return, so selfish that she looks upon the world as her debtor—she must mold the man’s attitude toward her. And men can no longer regard her with the chivalry and reverence in which men held women when women made the sacrifices that made the name of woman something to be worshipped.”
“But we’re sick of being worshipped!” cried Félicie, whose silence had been fading to lavender. “The viewpoint you have is the viewpoint of the last century and so on—men dividing women into two classes—” She stopped, and Jerry took up the sentence:
“Félicie wants to say—two classes—good and bad; good to be worshipped and do all the work and have a generally poky time; bad to be despised, but taken around and having the whirl their good little sisters missed.”
“And why boast that the old-fashioned distinction has disappeared?” Greg thrust forth. “Nowadays the line has vanished. Good and bad comport themselves alike. The ‘good’ girl—so-called—refuses to undertake any of the responsibilities that for centuries have made her sheltered and protected. She paints her face more recklessly than her sister on the street. She aims to out-demi the demi-mondaine in her dress. She does not disdain to use any weapon, no matter how blood-stained, to bring men to her feet; and then she leaves them there. The old-fashioned girl gave a man the mitten. This new girl never kills them off; she must have strings to her bow; she keeps them dangling around her as long as is humanly possible. And then she turns around and says: ‘Men aren’t as chivalrous as they used to be!’” He looked around at them, with almost a sneer. “No wonder things are happening nowadays that a few years ago you couldn’t have believed possible!”
Joy, clutching at her throat, was conscious that her nails were biting into the skin. She was back at her first Prom—last spring. She saw herself standing in front of a mirror gazing in fascination at her white shoulders, her blazing cheeks, her painted lips. Again she beard Jim Dalton telling her what he thought of her appearance. Had she been in some way responsible for what had happened? “You’re ripping me all to pieces.” . . . The words leaped up at her from the stagnant channels of that memory. She drew in her breath so sharply that it caught in her lungs.
“That’s a very fluent argument, Greg,” Harry was saying: “I’m surprised and pleased to see an Eli whose brains weren’t lost under the training table. All the same, I think you’re on the wrong tack. As Jerry says, the old-fashioned girl was poky. I couldn’t stand her alone for five minutes; she’d drive me to drink.”
“Maybe, but she wouldn’t drink with you,” grinned Steve.
“That’s just it, Harry!” said Joy. “An old-fashioned girl bores men nowadays. So what stimulus have we for being old-fashioned?”
“It’s one of those vicious circles,” said Greg. “But the girls are responsible in the first place—they can’t get away from it. They have fooled the men into thinking they’re more attractive this way.”
“Well, they are,” Harry persisted. “I wouldn’t go back to the Clinging-Vine Age for marbles. When I go to see a girl, I want to have a good time with her—and as far as I can see, if the gallants in other times ever did get to see a girl, all they did was sit and twiddle their thumbs.”
“You didn’t hear any complaints from anybody,” said Greg undaunted. “Nobody realized they were having what we could now term a dull time. I tell you things are getting too complicated. There are too many new inventions for having good times. We just dash from one new sensation to the next. When a man goes to see a girl nowadays, what do they do? Do they sit in the parlor and talk, do they go out into the kitchen and make fudge? They do not. They duck the family, and step into his or her father’s Rolls-Royce or Ford and ride seven or seventy miles to the nearest place that has the best dance music or they go to the movies, during which they laugh and talk and say: ‘Why did we come? We could have done this at home and not be bored by a rotten show;’ but they go next time just the same; or if they stay home for once, they gather a large bunch around them and turn on the home jazz variety. Is this true or isn’t it?”