VIIIINTIMACYBy hunger sharply spedTo grasp at weapons ere he learns their use.SOONRené found himself engaged upon an intimacy with Linda Brock—that is to say, he was ever at her command, her constant escort, her listener. She talked of everything, seemed to empty her mind for him. Everything she discussed—the relation of the individual to the race, the race’s rights in the individual, childbirth, the upbringing of children, and the position of women. He had not her reading, and was at first fogged by her discourse, her voluble juggling with topics and ideas that could not enter his mind without engendering a certain heat and releasing some emotion. It was not long, however, before he found himself master of her jargon, not long either before she found out how to use it to bring him to a confusion from which there was no issue but by kisses and embraces, and because he kissed and embraced he loved, or believed that he loved. All his unhappiness he ascribed to their necessary separations, and he was persuaded that his soreness could be healed, his dissatisfactions repaired in a future possession. Theforce of old habit kept his working life intact, and there he was happy and proud to think that in his love there should be so noble a coolness. He tried to explain this to her, and she said:“Yes, of course. You must keep your work separate. Love and fine thinking, you know.”He liked the phrase, not knowing it for a quotation; but he never observed that she always set herself to disturb his coolness, and never let him go from her till it was drowned in a flood of warmth.She took him in hand, made him buy clothes, gloves, spats, chose his ties for him and his shirts; discovered that he only wore one shirt a week, and tacitly informed him that two was the irreducible minimum; persuaded him to abolish the parting in his hair and to brush it back; to abandon his straight for winged collars; presented him with gaily-colored socks; lent him books, modern works of fiction and fashionable philosophy; induced him to become a member of the Union, though she could never get him to speak at debates. On her instigation he joined a tennis club in the summer term, proved rather skillful, and was invited by M’Elroy to play for the University second team.Linda was ambitious for him, but she could not make him ambitious, and she failed to develop opinions in him; but always, just as she was despairing of him and on the point of dismissing him from her mind as dull, he would come out with some simple comment that delighted her with its directness and force. Then she would go to Professor Smallman and talk about René, and the Professor would say:“A good sound brain. Nothing unusual except that one feels in him things unroused. No passion.”“Ah! Passion!”“Yes,” he said, purring, “I put it rather neatly, I think, the other day. The temperament of a clerk with a brain too good for that kind of work. He has a conscience.”“But do you think he will do anything?”“He will do what he thinks right.”“Then you do agree that he is a force? I feel that so strongly about him.”Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.“Not much good being a force if you are an economist. That’s specialist’s work. Even business would be better.”And Linda began to map out a career for René—business, the city council, Parliament, and thereafter—who knows?René was very docile. His friendship for Linda made life more gracious, more full, and he was shedding the awkwardness that had grown on him during his two years of solitude. He was able to go to Professor Smallman’s whenever he liked, and other houses had been thrown open to him.At first he had endeavored to bring the new spirit that he had won into his life at home, but his father had become merely ribald, and in his mother the spark of feeling that had been struck out of her on his return from Scotland had died away and would not comeagain. What she felt and thought she concealed with chatter, and too many of her notes were now exasperatingly echoes of her husband’s. For a short while René went through an agony of shame when he felt his parents as a drag on him, and he could never return home without an acute feeling of sadness. To counteract this he used to talk to Linda of his mother as she had been before his father’s return, brave, humorous, quick to see and to understand. In such talk Linda delighted, and she made him promise to introduce her to his household.It was arranged.“Afternoon tea, I suppose,” said Mrs. Fourmy. “Thin bread and butter in the parlor.”“I think she’d like what we always have. She particularly said you weren’t to make any fuss.”“But I’d like to wear my black silk. I don’t often, now.”“You can wear what you like, mother. Only let us have tea as we always have it. I’m sure she’d like it better. Not sardines or tinned salmon or any of those things. They only have light tea because they have dinner afterward. It would be silly of us to pretend to be anything but what we are.”“But they’ll think——”“I don’t care what they think.”Mrs. Fourmy stole a quick glance at him and said:“No. You never do.”Her tone roused him to a hope that the old mother had come again, and he turned to her, only to see the quick light die down in her eyes and into them come thequerulous questioning expression that seemed to forbid him to pass beyond the empty words and looks she gave him. He realized then how false an idea he must have given to Linda, and he wished she were not coming.When the day arrived, just before he went to fetch Linda he sought out his mother, and found her dressing in her room with his father lying on his bed smoking and reading.“I’m going now,” said René. “I shan’t be more than half an hour.”“I don’t mind betting,” chuckled his father, “that you’ll be more than that. There’s no end to it when these women get to dressing up for each other. Look at your mother; she’s been brushing her hair this half-hour past.”“I thought you were out,” said René, cold with an almost hatred.“Me? Tea-partying’s my line. Always has been.”“Don’t tease him,” said Mrs. Fourmy. “Don’t tease him.”Mr. Fourmy had his waistcoat unbuttoned, so that to René he seemed all fat stomach bulging through coarse shirting. He turned away in disgust. As he closed the door he heard his mother say:“It isn’t fair when the boy’s in love.”He held the door open, and heard his father turn on the creaking bed and laugh and say:“Love? A gawk like that? Statues are his line, not women.”Upon that René so lost himself in a sick dread that he was hardly conscious as he walked, and seemed to have been marvelously propelled from Hog Lane to Galt’s Park.Linda was ready for him in a light muslin frock and an adorable little tip-tilted hat. He had never seen her so pretty.They decided to walk by way of Potter’s Park to see the flowers. René could hardly get his words out, but he felt that he must do something to explain.“You may be disappointed, you know. It mayn’t be all that you think it is.”“Oh, but I have seen the outside of the house, and one knows what to expect. I mean, if you saw the outside of our house you’d know the inside was pretty much the same as hundreds of others. The curtains always give you away. And nearly all the houses on this side of Thrigsby are like yours. When I was at school I knew a girl who lived next door to you. And, of course, I’m excited because it is—don’t you think—reassuring when you are fond of people to know that they have relations like the rest of the world.”René’s shyness, the delicacy of his feelings had forced upon her the use of the phrase, “fond of each other.” For all the excitement she had roused in him he had never become possessive nor made any attempt to assert a monopoly. And one evening when she had flirted with M’Elroy at the tennis club he had left her to it, apparently not at all distressed, and subsequently he visited on her none of the jealousy she hadexpected. With M’Elroy her relationship had become nothing but jealousy, and she preferred René’s diffidence to that. And also, as she had shaped René outwardly, so inwardly she hoped to mold him to her liking. M’Elroy was too conceited for that.“I promise you I shan’t be disappointed,” she said.“I want to ask you not to mind anything my father may say. He does talk so. I hoped he would not be in.”“You dear silly, I shan’t mind anything. I shall like it. I want to see how you live, and if I don’t like anything it will only be the more wonderful that you are you.”He gripped her arm very tight. She laughed though he hurt her. It was the first uninvited caress he had given her.“You are so strong,” she said, and she took his arm and did not relinquish it until they came to the gate of 166.To his dismay René found Elsie with his father and mother. She declared that she had only dropped in, but she was arrayed in her most garish best and had put on her primmest and most artificial manner, talking mincingly like a chorus girl. And she patronized Linda, swaggered over her as the married woman, chattered about her darling baby, and made the party so uncomfortable that Linda could not hold her own, and a gloom would have descended on them had not Mr. Fourmy come to the rescue and told droll stories, spiced and hot, of the doings of women in various parts of the world. He cut into Elsie’s gushing storieswith the story of the marine and the admiral’s French governess, and wound up:“In Brazil the women eat men. No half measures. Eat you they do. Look to the right or the left and they knife you. What I can’t make out, Miss Brock, is why any men stay in England.”Linda laughed merrily.“Hardly complimentary to us! But you came back, you know.”“So I did, for my old age. England’s an old man’s country.”“You won’t get me to believe that, or René either.”“Ah, but René can’t see things as they are. Short-sighted René is. And George is blind; isn’t he, Elsie?”Elsie giggled. She had been wanting to giggle for some time, and the appeal to her set her off. She could not stop herself.“Oh! Lor’!” she gasped, “you are funny, Mr. Fourmy. You ought to be in a pantomime. I never laugh like I do with you.”And once more Elsie dominated the party. René wilted. Linda drank the many cups of tea pressed on her by Mrs. Fourmy in her nervous anxiety. Conversation flagged, sputtered, and Mr. Fourmy in desperation kept Elsie giggling with familiar jokes. Linda laughed at them too, and René sank into gloom and his mother watched him anxiously.At five o’clock Elsie gave a little scream and said she must hurry away to see that the servant (she had no servant) had made George’s tea. She hurried away,and then, relieved of the oppression of her presence, René was just beginning to hope for better things when Linda, to escape from the table, asked if she might see the picture on the easel in the corner of the room. Delighted, Mr. Fourmy turned the picture to the light. Linda bit her lip and a dimple came in her cheek.“Not bad for an amateur,” said Mr. Fourmy. “Just the lid of a cigar-box and a little paint. I never did care about anything but the figure.”He took the picture up and looked at it lovingly, and with pride and in a queer confidential voice that startled René and stung Mrs. Fourmy into a sudden attention, he said:“You can understand an old man liking to do something with his hands, and it’s strange how, when I paint a little bit like that”—he pointed to the hip—“it brings back wonderful moments I have had and rare pleasures, not just in remembering, but as they were—wonderful!”“I think so,” said Linda with unwonted simplicity, and Mr. Fourmy took her hand, stooped over it, and kissed it.René looked at his mother, she at him, and Linda, turning to Mrs. Fourmy, smiled and said:“I am so glad to have come, Mrs. Fourmy. René and I are such friends. We have such great hopes for him and I wanted to see you. Will you take me home, René?”Mr. Fourmy opened the door of the room for her, hurried ahead to open the front door, and with atremendous dignity, bowed again over Linda’s hand, thanked her for coming, and said:“May life be good to you, and very amusing.”And Linda answered:“I’d like to buy your picture, Mr. Fourmy. Will you send it to me when it is finished?”“I would rather give it to you.”René’s horror sent him flying down to the gate. It was a minute or two before Linda came. She was smiling, and Mr. Fourmy had come out on to the doorstep to watch her walk down. René saw his eyes follow her and appreciate her movements, and he became acutely, alarmingly conscious that she also was a woman. He was frightened of her as she came up to him, but he was also angry, and he let fly:“Linda, you can’t.”“Can’t what?”“You can’t let my father give you his beastly picture. You didn’t seem to mind. I thought you would. I thought you would. He sits all day doing those things over and over again.”“Oh, René, don’t be silly. I’m older than you.”That was the first he had heard of it, and it dashed him. That a man should love, could love a woman older than himself was in flat contradiction to all his notions. He was furious. Linda went on:“Two years older. Twenty years older in experience and knowledge. You think like a silly little boy.”In a rage he turned on his heel and left her. But at once a fierce hunger to be with her seized him, to clutch her by the arm as he had clutched her before,and to hurt her more, to feel her soft flesh yielding under his grip. That desire was stronger than his fury, and he ran after her, and caught her up just at the gates of Potter’s Park.“I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. I do beg your pardon. I can’t help it. I must be with you.”And he seized her arm and rushed her ahead for a few paces until she cried out at the hurt:“René! René! Quiet! Not now! Wait!”She was as excited as he, but not, like him, absorbed in her excitement. It was a delight to her.He released her, and she led him to a seat opposite a bed of Darwin tulips, red and mauve and yellow. He sat by her side trembling, drowning in a flood of savage emotion, thinking not at all. Slowly he became aware of the tulips in front of him, and he said:“The flowers are very pretty.”That relaxed the tension he was in, and he stretched out his legs and stared up into the sky, and presently he broke into words:“And the summer sky is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, and I love you.”His arms were folded on his chest, and he seemed to be hardly conscious of his words Then in a calmer voice he said:“I never noticed before how the sky is always changing and moving and alive. I would like to sit like this until it all grows dark and the stars come out and the glow of the lights of the town goes up into it? And, Linda, it has all become very different, hasn’t it?”She said:“I knew it would come.”Then they laughed together, and René clapped his hand on her knee and told her she was a wonderful darling.Linda observed then that they had begun to attract attention, and she rose and walked quickly away. He followed her slowly, thrilling to the present, seeing nothing in the world but her brave little figure in muslin with the tip-tilted hat. Her hair was golden in the sun, and her neck was white and the lines of her shoulders were lovely. René touched her lightly as he came up with her.“We’re going to be married,” he said.“Yes.”“Isn’t it fun?”Her answer struck him as amusing and he laughed. She asked:“Is Elsie better in her own house?”“Oh, she’s a good sort, really, and George—that’s my brother—George couldn’t have done better.”“I have an idea from the way you speak that I shall rather like George.”“I didn’t say anything to show I like him.”“No, darling.” (René’s heart leaped at the word.) “No. I think you dislike him. You hate your father. He is impossible, but such a dear.”René, sensitive in his ecstasy, for the tulips and the sky and she had brought him to nothing less, felt a malice in her that scratched at his heart. But, loving her, worshiping the new radiant intimacy that had sprung up between them, he loved even her malice.They walked home slowly, laughing over the mischances, the absurdity of the tea-party, and when they reached her house she made him come in, played to him for an hour, and sent him home drunk with love. He called it love, for he suspected not that it could have any other name. She had promised to marry him as soon as he had his degree and a position, and he was to write to her mother and make a formal proposal, since Mrs. Brock was old-fashioned enough and German enough to desire that much of formal ceremony.
By hunger sharply spedTo grasp at weapons ere he learns their use.
By hunger sharply sped
To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use.
SOONRené found himself engaged upon an intimacy with Linda Brock—that is to say, he was ever at her command, her constant escort, her listener. She talked of everything, seemed to empty her mind for him. Everything she discussed—the relation of the individual to the race, the race’s rights in the individual, childbirth, the upbringing of children, and the position of women. He had not her reading, and was at first fogged by her discourse, her voluble juggling with topics and ideas that could not enter his mind without engendering a certain heat and releasing some emotion. It was not long, however, before he found himself master of her jargon, not long either before she found out how to use it to bring him to a confusion from which there was no issue but by kisses and embraces, and because he kissed and embraced he loved, or believed that he loved. All his unhappiness he ascribed to their necessary separations, and he was persuaded that his soreness could be healed, his dissatisfactions repaired in a future possession. Theforce of old habit kept his working life intact, and there he was happy and proud to think that in his love there should be so noble a coolness. He tried to explain this to her, and she said:
“Yes, of course. You must keep your work separate. Love and fine thinking, you know.”
He liked the phrase, not knowing it for a quotation; but he never observed that she always set herself to disturb his coolness, and never let him go from her till it was drowned in a flood of warmth.
She took him in hand, made him buy clothes, gloves, spats, chose his ties for him and his shirts; discovered that he only wore one shirt a week, and tacitly informed him that two was the irreducible minimum; persuaded him to abolish the parting in his hair and to brush it back; to abandon his straight for winged collars; presented him with gaily-colored socks; lent him books, modern works of fiction and fashionable philosophy; induced him to become a member of the Union, though she could never get him to speak at debates. On her instigation he joined a tennis club in the summer term, proved rather skillful, and was invited by M’Elroy to play for the University second team.
Linda was ambitious for him, but she could not make him ambitious, and she failed to develop opinions in him; but always, just as she was despairing of him and on the point of dismissing him from her mind as dull, he would come out with some simple comment that delighted her with its directness and force. Then she would go to Professor Smallman and talk about René, and the Professor would say:
“A good sound brain. Nothing unusual except that one feels in him things unroused. No passion.”
“Ah! Passion!”
“Yes,” he said, purring, “I put it rather neatly, I think, the other day. The temperament of a clerk with a brain too good for that kind of work. He has a conscience.”
“But do you think he will do anything?”
“He will do what he thinks right.”
“Then you do agree that he is a force? I feel that so strongly about him.”
Professor Smallman smiled in his charming, uninterested way.
“Not much good being a force if you are an economist. That’s specialist’s work. Even business would be better.”
And Linda began to map out a career for René—business, the city council, Parliament, and thereafter—who knows?
René was very docile. His friendship for Linda made life more gracious, more full, and he was shedding the awkwardness that had grown on him during his two years of solitude. He was able to go to Professor Smallman’s whenever he liked, and other houses had been thrown open to him.
At first he had endeavored to bring the new spirit that he had won into his life at home, but his father had become merely ribald, and in his mother the spark of feeling that had been struck out of her on his return from Scotland had died away and would not comeagain. What she felt and thought she concealed with chatter, and too many of her notes were now exasperatingly echoes of her husband’s. For a short while René went through an agony of shame when he felt his parents as a drag on him, and he could never return home without an acute feeling of sadness. To counteract this he used to talk to Linda of his mother as she had been before his father’s return, brave, humorous, quick to see and to understand. In such talk Linda delighted, and she made him promise to introduce her to his household.
It was arranged.
“Afternoon tea, I suppose,” said Mrs. Fourmy. “Thin bread and butter in the parlor.”
“I think she’d like what we always have. She particularly said you weren’t to make any fuss.”
“But I’d like to wear my black silk. I don’t often, now.”
“You can wear what you like, mother. Only let us have tea as we always have it. I’m sure she’d like it better. Not sardines or tinned salmon or any of those things. They only have light tea because they have dinner afterward. It would be silly of us to pretend to be anything but what we are.”
“But they’ll think——”
“I don’t care what they think.”
Mrs. Fourmy stole a quick glance at him and said:
“No. You never do.”
Her tone roused him to a hope that the old mother had come again, and he turned to her, only to see the quick light die down in her eyes and into them come thequerulous questioning expression that seemed to forbid him to pass beyond the empty words and looks she gave him. He realized then how false an idea he must have given to Linda, and he wished she were not coming.
When the day arrived, just before he went to fetch Linda he sought out his mother, and found her dressing in her room with his father lying on his bed smoking and reading.
“I’m going now,” said René. “I shan’t be more than half an hour.”
“I don’t mind betting,” chuckled his father, “that you’ll be more than that. There’s no end to it when these women get to dressing up for each other. Look at your mother; she’s been brushing her hair this half-hour past.”
“I thought you were out,” said René, cold with an almost hatred.
“Me? Tea-partying’s my line. Always has been.”
“Don’t tease him,” said Mrs. Fourmy. “Don’t tease him.”
Mr. Fourmy had his waistcoat unbuttoned, so that to René he seemed all fat stomach bulging through coarse shirting. He turned away in disgust. As he closed the door he heard his mother say:
“It isn’t fair when the boy’s in love.”
He held the door open, and heard his father turn on the creaking bed and laugh and say:
“Love? A gawk like that? Statues are his line, not women.”
Upon that René so lost himself in a sick dread that he was hardly conscious as he walked, and seemed to have been marvelously propelled from Hog Lane to Galt’s Park.
Linda was ready for him in a light muslin frock and an adorable little tip-tilted hat. He had never seen her so pretty.
They decided to walk by way of Potter’s Park to see the flowers. René could hardly get his words out, but he felt that he must do something to explain.
“You may be disappointed, you know. It mayn’t be all that you think it is.”
“Oh, but I have seen the outside of the house, and one knows what to expect. I mean, if you saw the outside of our house you’d know the inside was pretty much the same as hundreds of others. The curtains always give you away. And nearly all the houses on this side of Thrigsby are like yours. When I was at school I knew a girl who lived next door to you. And, of course, I’m excited because it is—don’t you think—reassuring when you are fond of people to know that they have relations like the rest of the world.”
René’s shyness, the delicacy of his feelings had forced upon her the use of the phrase, “fond of each other.” For all the excitement she had roused in him he had never become possessive nor made any attempt to assert a monopoly. And one evening when she had flirted with M’Elroy at the tennis club he had left her to it, apparently not at all distressed, and subsequently he visited on her none of the jealousy she hadexpected. With M’Elroy her relationship had become nothing but jealousy, and she preferred René’s diffidence to that. And also, as she had shaped René outwardly, so inwardly she hoped to mold him to her liking. M’Elroy was too conceited for that.
“I promise you I shan’t be disappointed,” she said.
“I want to ask you not to mind anything my father may say. He does talk so. I hoped he would not be in.”
“You dear silly, I shan’t mind anything. I shall like it. I want to see how you live, and if I don’t like anything it will only be the more wonderful that you are you.”
He gripped her arm very tight. She laughed though he hurt her. It was the first uninvited caress he had given her.
“You are so strong,” she said, and she took his arm and did not relinquish it until they came to the gate of 166.
To his dismay René found Elsie with his father and mother. She declared that she had only dropped in, but she was arrayed in her most garish best and had put on her primmest and most artificial manner, talking mincingly like a chorus girl. And she patronized Linda, swaggered over her as the married woman, chattered about her darling baby, and made the party so uncomfortable that Linda could not hold her own, and a gloom would have descended on them had not Mr. Fourmy come to the rescue and told droll stories, spiced and hot, of the doings of women in various parts of the world. He cut into Elsie’s gushing storieswith the story of the marine and the admiral’s French governess, and wound up:
“In Brazil the women eat men. No half measures. Eat you they do. Look to the right or the left and they knife you. What I can’t make out, Miss Brock, is why any men stay in England.”
Linda laughed merrily.
“Hardly complimentary to us! But you came back, you know.”
“So I did, for my old age. England’s an old man’s country.”
“You won’t get me to believe that, or René either.”
“Ah, but René can’t see things as they are. Short-sighted René is. And George is blind; isn’t he, Elsie?”
Elsie giggled. She had been wanting to giggle for some time, and the appeal to her set her off. She could not stop herself.
“Oh! Lor’!” she gasped, “you are funny, Mr. Fourmy. You ought to be in a pantomime. I never laugh like I do with you.”
And once more Elsie dominated the party. René wilted. Linda drank the many cups of tea pressed on her by Mrs. Fourmy in her nervous anxiety. Conversation flagged, sputtered, and Mr. Fourmy in desperation kept Elsie giggling with familiar jokes. Linda laughed at them too, and René sank into gloom and his mother watched him anxiously.
At five o’clock Elsie gave a little scream and said she must hurry away to see that the servant (she had no servant) had made George’s tea. She hurried away,and then, relieved of the oppression of her presence, René was just beginning to hope for better things when Linda, to escape from the table, asked if she might see the picture on the easel in the corner of the room. Delighted, Mr. Fourmy turned the picture to the light. Linda bit her lip and a dimple came in her cheek.
“Not bad for an amateur,” said Mr. Fourmy. “Just the lid of a cigar-box and a little paint. I never did care about anything but the figure.”
He took the picture up and looked at it lovingly, and with pride and in a queer confidential voice that startled René and stung Mrs. Fourmy into a sudden attention, he said:
“You can understand an old man liking to do something with his hands, and it’s strange how, when I paint a little bit like that”—he pointed to the hip—“it brings back wonderful moments I have had and rare pleasures, not just in remembering, but as they were—wonderful!”
“I think so,” said Linda with unwonted simplicity, and Mr. Fourmy took her hand, stooped over it, and kissed it.
René looked at his mother, she at him, and Linda, turning to Mrs. Fourmy, smiled and said:
“I am so glad to have come, Mrs. Fourmy. René and I are such friends. We have such great hopes for him and I wanted to see you. Will you take me home, René?”
Mr. Fourmy opened the door of the room for her, hurried ahead to open the front door, and with atremendous dignity, bowed again over Linda’s hand, thanked her for coming, and said:
“May life be good to you, and very amusing.”
And Linda answered:
“I’d like to buy your picture, Mr. Fourmy. Will you send it to me when it is finished?”
“I would rather give it to you.”
René’s horror sent him flying down to the gate. It was a minute or two before Linda came. She was smiling, and Mr. Fourmy had come out on to the doorstep to watch her walk down. René saw his eyes follow her and appreciate her movements, and he became acutely, alarmingly conscious that she also was a woman. He was frightened of her as she came up to him, but he was also angry, and he let fly:
“Linda, you can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“You can’t let my father give you his beastly picture. You didn’t seem to mind. I thought you would. I thought you would. He sits all day doing those things over and over again.”
“Oh, René, don’t be silly. I’m older than you.”
That was the first he had heard of it, and it dashed him. That a man should love, could love a woman older than himself was in flat contradiction to all his notions. He was furious. Linda went on:
“Two years older. Twenty years older in experience and knowledge. You think like a silly little boy.”
In a rage he turned on his heel and left her. But at once a fierce hunger to be with her seized him, to clutch her by the arm as he had clutched her before,and to hurt her more, to feel her soft flesh yielding under his grip. That desire was stronger than his fury, and he ran after her, and caught her up just at the gates of Potter’s Park.
“I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon. I do beg your pardon. I can’t help it. I must be with you.”
And he seized her arm and rushed her ahead for a few paces until she cried out at the hurt:
“René! René! Quiet! Not now! Wait!”
She was as excited as he, but not, like him, absorbed in her excitement. It was a delight to her.
He released her, and she led him to a seat opposite a bed of Darwin tulips, red and mauve and yellow. He sat by her side trembling, drowning in a flood of savage emotion, thinking not at all. Slowly he became aware of the tulips in front of him, and he said:
“The flowers are very pretty.”
That relaxed the tension he was in, and he stretched out his legs and stared up into the sky, and presently he broke into words:
“And the summer sky is beautiful, but not so beautiful as you, and I love you.”
His arms were folded on his chest, and he seemed to be hardly conscious of his words Then in a calmer voice he said:
“I never noticed before how the sky is always changing and moving and alive. I would like to sit like this until it all grows dark and the stars come out and the glow of the lights of the town goes up into it? And, Linda, it has all become very different, hasn’t it?”
She said:
“I knew it would come.”
Then they laughed together, and René clapped his hand on her knee and told her she was a wonderful darling.
Linda observed then that they had begun to attract attention, and she rose and walked quickly away. He followed her slowly, thrilling to the present, seeing nothing in the world but her brave little figure in muslin with the tip-tilted hat. Her hair was golden in the sun, and her neck was white and the lines of her shoulders were lovely. René touched her lightly as he came up with her.
“We’re going to be married,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it fun?”
Her answer struck him as amusing and he laughed. She asked:
“Is Elsie better in her own house?”
“Oh, she’s a good sort, really, and George—that’s my brother—George couldn’t have done better.”
“I have an idea from the way you speak that I shall rather like George.”
“I didn’t say anything to show I like him.”
“No, darling.” (René’s heart leaped at the word.) “No. I think you dislike him. You hate your father. He is impossible, but such a dear.”
René, sensitive in his ecstasy, for the tulips and the sky and she had brought him to nothing less, felt a malice in her that scratched at his heart. But, loving her, worshiping the new radiant intimacy that had sprung up between them, he loved even her malice.
They walked home slowly, laughing over the mischances, the absurdity of the tea-party, and when they reached her house she made him come in, played to him for an hour, and sent him home drunk with love. He called it love, for he suspected not that it could have any other name. She had promised to marry him as soon as he had his degree and a position, and he was to write to her mother and make a formal proposal, since Mrs. Brock was old-fashioned enough and German enough to desire that much of formal ceremony.