第59章

Meanwhile they were having a similarly dismal time at the Thompson house;in fact a twin experience.Gwendolen was ashamed of herself for allowing her disappointment to so depress her spirits and make her so strangely and profoundly miserable; but feeling ashamed of herself didn't improve the matter any; it only seemed to aggravate the suffering.She explained that she was not feeling very well, and everybody could see that this was true; so she got sincere sympathy and commiseration; but that didn't help the case.Nothing helps that kind of a case.It is best to just stand off and let it fester.The moment the dinner was over the girl excused herself, and she hurried home feeling unspeakably grateful to get away from that house and that intolerable captivity and suffering.

Will he be gone? The thought arose in her brain, but took effect in her heels.She slipped into the house, threw off her things and made straight for the dining room.She stopped and listened.Her father's voice--with no life in it; presently her mother's--no life in that;a considerable vacancy, then a sterile remark from Washington Hawkins.

Another silence; then, not Tracy's but her father's voice again.

"He's gone," she said to herself despairingly, and listlessly opened the door and stepped within.

"Why, my child," cried the mother, "how white you are! Are you--has anything--""White?" exclaimed Sellers."It's gone like a flash; 'twasn't serious.

Already she's as red as the soul of a watermelon! Sit down, dear, sit down--goodness knows you're welcome.Did you have a good time? We've had great times here--immense.Why didn't Miss Belle come? Mr.Tracy is not feeling well, and she'd have made him forget it."She was content now; and out from her happy eyes there went a light that told a secret to another pair of eyes there and got a secret in return.

In just that infinitely small fraction of a second those two great confessions were made, received, and perfectly, understood.All anxiety, apprehension, uncertainty, vanished out of these young people's hearts and left them filled with a great peace.

Sellers had had the most confident faith that with the new reinforcement victory would be at this last moment snatched from the jaws of defeat, but it was an error.The talk was as stubbornly disjointed as ever.

He was proud of Gwendolen, and liked to show her off, even against Miss Belle Thompson, and here had been a great opportunity, and what had she made of it? He felt a good deal put out.It vexed him to think that this Englishman, with the traveling Briton's everlasting disposition to generalize whole mountain ranges from single sample-grains of sand, would jump to the conclusion that American girls were as dumb as himself--generalizing the whole tribe from this single sample and she at her poorest, there being nothing at that table to inspire her, give her a start, keep her from going to sleep.He made up his mind that for the honor of the country he would bring these two together again over the social board before long.There would be a different result another time, he judged.He said to himself, with a deep sense of injury, "He'll put in his diary--they all keep diaries--he'll put in his diary that she was miraculously uninteresting--dear, dear, but wasn't she!

I never saw the like--and yet looking as beautiful as Satan, too--and couldn't seem to do anything but paw bread crumbs, and pick flowers to pieces, and look fidgety.And it isn't any better here in the Hall of Audience.I've had enough; I'll haul down my flag the others may fight it out if they want to."He shook hands all around and went off to do some work which he said was pressing.The idolaters were the width of the room apart; and apparently unconscious of each other's presence.The distance got shortened a little, now.Very soon the mother withdrew.The distance narrowed again.Tracy stood before a chromo of some Ohio politician which had been retouched and chain-mailed for a crusading Rossmore, and Gwendolen was sitting on the sofa not far from his elbow artificially absorbed in examining a photograph album that hadn't any photographs in it.

The "Senator" still lingered.He was sorry for the young people; it had been a dull evening for them.In the goodness of his heart he tried to make it pleasant for them now; tried to remove the ill impression necessarily left by the general defeat; tried to be chatty, even tried to be gay.But the responses were sickly, there was no starting any enthusiasm; he would give it up and quit--it was a day specially picked out and consecrated to failures.

But when Gwendolen rose up promptly and smiled a glad smile and said with thankfulness and blessing, "Must you go?" it seemed cruel to desert, and he sat down again.

He was about to begin a remark when--when he didn't.We have all been there.He didn't know how he knew his concluding to stay longer had been a mistake, he merely knew it; and knew it for dead certain, too.And so he bade goodnight, and went mooning out, wondering what he could have done that changed the atmosphere that way.As the door closed behind him those two were standing side by side, looking at that door--looking at it in a waiting, second-counting, but deeply grateful kind of way.And the instant it closed they flung their arms about each other's necks, and there, heart to heart and lip to lip--"Oh, my God, she's kissing it!"

Nobody heard this remark, because Hawkins, who bred it, only thought it, he didn't utter it.He had turned, the moment he had closed the door, and had pushed it open a little, intending to re-enter and ask what ill-advised thing he had done or said, and apologize for it.But he didn't re-enter; he staggered off stunned, terrified, distressed.