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enough, though she did not love her friend so much as she did her parents, she worried more about her, as one equal about another.
The infirmary, a neat white cottage, was set in a remote corner of the grounds. As Lita bounded up the steps she met Miss Barton coming out.
Every head of a school, perhaps every head of an institution, perhaps everyone in the world, acquires an artificial manner to serve as a method of holding off crises. Some adopt the genial, some the meditative, some the stern. Miss Barton had chosen the intellectually airy. As a problem was presented to her she would say "Ah, yes," with a faint, calm smile, as if that special problem were so easy and familiar she might float away to something more stimulating without remembering to give you the answer. She was a tall, good-looking woman, pale eyed, pale skinned, with thick, crinkly gray hair, parted and drawn down to a knot at the nape of her neck; it looked exactly like a wig, but wasn't. She stopped Lita.
"Oh," she said with her habitual gay casualness, "we have been looking for you. Don't be alarmed, but it seems that Aurelia has appendicitis."
"Yes I felt pretty sure she had," answered Lita.
Miss Barton did not think it worth while to contradict this absurd assertion. She merely smiled on one side of her face and replied that the doctors themselves had only decided it fifteen minutes before. It appeared that Aurelia was eager to see her friend before the operation.
"She's in Room 11," said Miss Barton. "They will operate as soon as they can get things ready. Don't alarm her. There is no risk nowadays, nothing to be excited about."
"Is she excited?"
"I think not."
"Of course she isn't."
It is hard sometimes to be patient with older people, playing their own rôles so busily they lose all sense of other individualities. Aurelia, Lita imagined, was probably the calmest person in the infirmary.
In Room 11 she found her roommate lying on her side, very pale, with her dark hair dragged back and tightly braided. The nurse was moving in and out and the two girls were practically alone, while the following dialogue took place.
"Pain?"
"Oh, my!"
"Poor kid!"
"Lita, in my shoe box there are five pictures of Gene Valentine, and a note—"
"From him?"
"No, dodo, from me—a rough draft. Get them, will you?"
"You bet!"
"Thanks."
Then the nurse came in to say that everything was ready, and Lita was hurried out of the room. She kept telling herself that there was nothing to worry about, but her heart was beating oddly.
In the hall a young man was standing; or rather, from Lita's point of view, an older man, for he must have been twenty-eight or nine. He was attired in a long white robe rather like a cook—or an angel. The sight of him dressed thus for his work upset Lita and made her feel like crying; in fact she did cry.
"Don't you worry," said the young man in a deep voice—a splendid, rolling, velvet sort of voice. "We've got the best man in the country to operate; there's no danger."
"Is that you—the best man in the country?" He laughed.
"To be candid, no," he said. "I'm Doctor Burroughs' assistant. He's the best there is. There is nothing to cry about."
"If people only cried when there was something to cry about," said Lita; and added in an exclamation of the deepest concern, "Oh, goodness!"
Her tone alarmed the young man.
"What is it?"
"I haven't got a handkerchief."
He lifted his apron and from the pocket of his blue serge trousers he produced an unfolded handkerchief, which he gave her.
"I have a little sister just about your age," he said.
Lita's face was in the handkerchief as she asked. "How old?"
"Let me see," said the doctor. "I think she must be twelve."
A slight sound that might have been a sob escaped from Lita, and the doctor was so moved with compassion that he patted her on the head. Then the door of Room 11 opened and his professional duties called him away.
A moment later he came out, bearing Aurelia away to the operating room, and Lita went into Room 11 to wait. He promised as he passed to come and tell her as soon as it was over.
She felt perfectly calm now as she sat grasping his handkerchief in her hand. It was fine and embroidered in two letters—L. D. She ran
over the L names and found she liked nearly all of them—Lawrence, Lionel, Leopold—not so good, though Leo was all right—Lewis—oh, of course, it was Lewis! She said the word aloud.
How still the house was! Now they were probably giving Aurelia the anæsthetic; now
There was no use speculating about what D stood for. He thought she was twelve, did he? She put her hand up to where his had rested on the top of her head. She could not begin to make hers cover the same area. He must have a large hand. Well, that was all right; he was a large man. She could see his face before her, smooth as to skin and rather jutty as to outline of brows and jaw, and his heavy, thick, short, black hair, almost like an Indian's in texture. And she had thought that she preferred blond men. L. D.—Lita D.... She wondered if she ought to go immediately and hunt up those photographs of Aurelia's. What a time it would make if they should be found before she got there! How long would this take—an hour? Would he really come back himself, or would he send that lighthearted, gray-haired nurse who looked like Marie Antoinette? If he patted her on the head he might even—Lawrence—Leonard—
Suddenly he was in the room again, smelling horribly of disinfectants.
"It's all right all over," he said. He began to pluck ineffectually at the back buttons of his white robe. "Help me, there's a good child," he said, stooping so that she could reach.
She undid the buttons, the garment slipped to the floor, and he stood revealed as a normal young man in his shirt and dark blue serge trousers. He began rolling down his shirt sleeves, talking as he did so.
"Your friend has good nerve—brave and calm. Your sister? No? What's your name?"
"Hazlitt."
Too kind to smile at this infantile assumption of importance, his eyes did laugh a little, but he said, "I meant your first name."
"Lita. What's yours?"
"Luke— Well, Lita, I'm going to write to Effie about you. Wait! Where are you off to in such a hurry?"
She could not tell him that she was going to destroy the patient's compromising correspondence.
She said mysteriously, "I must go. You've been so kind. Good-by." For one tense moment she thought he was going to kiss her.
Evidently there is such a thing as thought transference, for as she drew back she heard him saying, "No, certainly not. I should not dream of kissing a lady of your mature years."
"You never kiss ladies of mature years?" murmured Lita in the manner of a six-year child.
"Well, I know how Effie feels on the subject. She boxed the ears of our local congressman for a salute which he offered merely as a vote getter. It was a terrible shock to him."
"You have a shock coming to you," she answered gently, and left the room.
She had a shock of her own on entering her bedroom, for Miss Jones, the house mistress, was already busy with Aurelia's bureau drawers. Had she or had she not lifted the top of the shoe box? It was necessary to act quickly; but fortunately Miss Jones was young and pleasant and easy to get round. If it had been Miss Barton— The school often commented with a sort of wondering irritation on the fact that in dealing with girls Miss Barton was not absolutely an idiot.
"Halloo, Jonesy dear," said Lita with a soft friendliness which in pupils is somewhat like the bearing of gifts by Greeks. "She's all
right. The operation's over, the doctor told me."
Miss Jones was winding pink ribbon on a card, and answered, "Oh, isn't he wonderful? Of all the great men I ever met Doctor Burroughs inspires—"
"It wasn't Doctor Burroughs. It was the other one, his assistant what's his name? It begins with a D."
But Miss Jones didn't know anything about the assistant, and drew Lita's attention from a subject tolerably absorbing by asking if she knew where Aurelia kept her bedroom slippers.
"Look here, Jonesy," said Lita. "Who is that queer-looking man—like a tramp—on the piazza downstairs?"
"I'll run down and see," said Miss Jones.
She was small, but there was something about her manner which would have made anything but a mythical tramp tremble.
When she had gone Lita opened the shoe box and found five large photographs of Eugene Valentine lying on top of the shoes: one in the aviator's uniform of his new play; one in his coronation robes in his last success, The King is Bored; and the other three just Eugene Valentine, with the light shining on the ridges of his wavy light hair.
He was an awfully good-looking man, Lita thought—if you liked blonds. She laid the photographs under the paper in the bureau drawer Miss Jones had finished tidying. The draft of the letter had slipped down among the shoes, and Lita had only time to thrust it into the pocket of the coat she was wearing before Miss Jones was back again, saying that the tramp must have gone away.
Supper that evening was exciting. The great Doctor Burroughs had driven magnificently back to town in his car before Aurelia was fairly out of the anæsthetic; but he had left his assistant behind him—a clever young fellow. Miss Barton murmured she hoped he was tactful, discreet; one had to be careful in a school—parents, you know. Doctor Burroughs assured her she need give herself no
concern; Doctor Dacer was quite safe—minded his own business—no trouble with the nurses or anything like that—just the sort of young man to leave in a girls' school. Even the wisest may be betrayed into sweeping statements when in a hurry to get away to Sunday dinner.
Lita, as chairman of the self-government committee, sat at the head of one of the senior tables—a conspicuous position. The girls were all in their places before Miss Barton came in with the tactful and discreet young fellow. It was the school's first view of him, and Lita could hear the comments of her peers rising about her:
"Looks a little like Doug."
"Isn't Aurelia the lucky stiff?"
"What are the symptoms of appendicitis? I feel them coming on."
She tried not to look at Miss Barton's table, and when she did she met his eye. He nodded and smiled with open friendliness; and bending toward Miss Jones, with his eyes still on hers, asked quite obviously for details about his little friend. Lita saw the smile fade from his face as he received them. Then a quite different smile flickered across his face; the smile of a man who says to himself, "To have even mentioned kissing the chairman of the self-government committee!"
As they were all moving out of the dining room again, Miss Barton called Lita to her.
"You will be glad to know," she said, "that Doctor Dacer says Aurelia will be up within two weeks—no complications—no danger. This is Lita Hazlitt, Doctor Dacer, Aurelia's best friend."
The doctor showed some of his advertised caution by merely bowing, but Lita answered, "Oh, yes, Doctor Dacer was so kind this afternoon." And looking up at him she asked, "Have you written to Effie yet?"
"Not yet," he returned politely; but below the level of the teacher's eyes a clenched fist made a distinctly menacing gesture in Lita's direction, and the corner of Lita's mouth, which occasionally created a dimple, just trembled. The doctor turned to Miss Barton, and it would be hard to imagine anything more professional than his manner as he said, "My patient seems to be very dependent on Miss Hazlitt. She was just asking for her. I think it would be a good idea if Miss Hazlitt could be in and out of the infirmary a good deal during the next few days."
"Of course, of course," said Miss Barton, who, though trained to distrust girls, was not trained to distrust doctors. "Aurelia is so alone, poor child." And lowering her voice as she moved away, with the doctor bending politely so as not to miss a syllable, Lita could hear a murmur:
"These terrible divorces! Do you know that over twenty of my girls —"
Lita found herself excused from sacred reading that evening so that she might sit with her friend.
Yet oddly enough, when she reached the infirmary the white-haired nurse seemed surprised to see her, and said that the doctor had given the patient something to make her sleep before he had gone to supper, and that she ought not to wake until morning—at least they hoped not.
But at that moment Dacer came out of another room, where he had evidently been smoking a pipe, and said, "Oh, well, stick round a little. She might wake up."
The nurse gave him a sharp look; and then, being really discreet and tactful, retired into Room 11 and shut the door. Lita and the doctor were left facing each other in the hall.
"Let's go out," he said, "where I can smoke. It's a good sort of evening—with a moon."
"Mercy!" answered Lita. "How do you think a girls' school is run? I couldn't do that."
"I thought the chairman of the self-government committee could do anything."
"On the contrary, she has to be particularly careful, and not go about exposing herself to being patted on the head."
"She was lucky worse than that didn't happen, masquerading as an infant." And then, without the slightest pause, but with a complete change of tone, Lita heard him saying: "No, I'm sorry; but I think it would be better not tonight.... Ah, Miss Barton, I was just saying to Miss Hazlitt that as the patient had fallen asleep it would be better not to disturb her again tonight."
"Of course," said Miss Barton, who, it appeared, was coming upstairs behind Lita's back. "I think if you ran back to the study, Lita, you'd get in for the end of the reading."
And as she turned obediently away she heard Miss Barton suggesting that if Doctor Dacer found the infirmary dull, the sitting room in her cottage was at his service. No, Doctor Dacer had a good deal of work to do. Lita smiled to herself. He had not seemed so busy a few minutes before.
She had never been in love—never even deeply interested before. She had looked with surprise and envy on her classmates; not only Aurelia, with her devouring passion for Valentine; but Carrie Waldron, the senior president, who worshiped a dark-eyed motionpicture actor; and Doris Payne, who loved a great violinist to whom she never expected to speak. The authorities were terribly down on this sort of thing; but Lita, who knew more about it than the authorities, was not sure. Would Carrie be studying Spanish at odd moments so as to know more about her idol's great bull-fighter part would Doris work so hard at her music would Aurelia be learning Romeo and Juliet by heart as she did her hair in the morning— Romeo was a part Valentine was always contemplating—if it were
not for love? More, would Miss Barton's course in English constitutional history be so interesting if Miss Barton did not feel—as the school had discovered—a romantic passion for Oliver Cromwell? Certainly not!
Her mother thought these excitements vulgar. She said if girls must be silly, why not be silly about people in their own class of life? But Lita explained that the boys they knew were not so thrilling. Had her mother, she asked, never bought the picture of an actor? "Never!" said her mother with conviction; but Aunt Minnie, who happened to be there, said, "Nonsense, Alita! You had a picture of Sothern as the Prisoner of Zenda." Mrs. Hazlitt said that she hadn't, and that was entirely different anyhow.
The only result of the conversation was that Mrs. Hazlitt began to suspect Lita of some such ill-bred passion—most unjustly. The whole subject had had merely a theoretical interest for Lita. She was too practical to be fired by these intangible heroes—dream, dead or dramatic.
But now, even that first Sunday, as she stepped out of the infirmary into the bare March moonlight, she found that real life could hold the same thrill for her that dreams did for these others.
"And that," she said to herself, "is where I have the best of it."
IILita had developed a technic by which she slept through the rising gong and for the next twenty-five minutes, allowing herself thus exactly five minutes to get up, dress and reach the dining room. But the morning after her friend's operation she woke with the gong, and five minutes later was on her way to the infirmary, first tying her tie and then smoothing down her hair as she went.
As she ran up the stairs of the infirmary, a voice—whose owner must have recognized the almost inaudible patter of her feet—called to
her from the small dining room of the cottage. She put her face, flushed with running, round the jamb of the door and saw Doctor Dacer seated at breakfast. The nurse was toasting bread on an electric toaster, and he was spreading a piece, just finished, with a thick crimson jam. "Damson," Lita said to herself.
He looked at her.
"Youth's a great thing," he said.
"So the old are always saying," Lita answered. "But there's a catch in it; they get back at you for being young."
"Does that mean you think I'm old?" Dacer asked patiently; and the nurse with the white hair exclaimed to herself "Goodness!" as if to her they both seemed about the same age.
Lita cocked her head on one side.
"Well," she said, "you are too old to be my equal—I mean contemporary. I mean contemporary," she added as they both laughed. Dacer, with a more complete answer, gave her the piece of toast he had been preparing. It was delicious—cool and smooth and sweet on top, and hot and buttery below. Lita consumed it in silence, and then with a deep sigh as she sucked a drop of jam from her forefinger, she said, "How noble that was! Sometimes I'm afraid I'm greedy."
"Of course you are," said Dacer, as if greed were a splendid quality. "Sit down and have some coffee.... Have you been introduced to Miss Waverley? She hates men."
"Goodness!" said Miss Waverley, glancing over her shoulder, as if it were mildly amusing that a man should think he knew anything about how she felt.
"Or is it only doctors?" Dacer went on.
"Men patients are worse," said Miss Waverley.
"Don't go away," said Dacer to Lita. "You are always going away."
"I came to see Aurelia."
"I know, but it's customary to discuss the case first with the surgeon —in some detail too. Sit down."
But she would not do that; her first duty was to her friend. She knew Aurelia would want to know that the photographs and the letter were safe. She stayed by her bedside until it was time to leap downstairs and run across the campus to the dining room, her appetite merely edged by the toast and jam.
Monday was a busy day for Lita. Immediately after luncheon her committee met and went over the reports of the monitors for the week; and then there was basket ball for two hours, and then study. The tennis courts were near the athletic field, and as Lita played with the first team she could hear a deep voice booming out the score as Doctor Dacer and Miss Jones played set after set. Miss Jones had been tennis champion of her college the year before. Lita sent out a young scout to bring her word how the games were going, and learned that Dacer was winning. He must be pretty good, then—Jonesy was no slouch. She would have taunted him in the evening, when she went to say good night to Aurelia, if he had let himself be beaten by Jonesy.
Every Monday evening Miss Fraser, the English teacher, read aloud to the senior members of her class. Miss Fraser was something of a problem, because she was so much more a lover of literature than a teacher. She inspired the girls with a fine enthusiasm for the best; but in the process she often incited them to read gems of the language which their parents considered unsuited to their youth. Shakspere she read quite recklessly, sometimes forgetting to use the expurgated edition. When Miss Barton suggested pleasantly that perhaps Antony and Cleopatra was not quite the most appropriate of the plays, Miss Fraser answered, "Don't they read worse in the newspapers in bad prose?"
At present she was conservatively engaged in reading Much Ado About Nothing. No one could object to that, she said. She made it seem witty and contemporary.
Lita slipped over to the infirmary between supper and the reading to bid Aurelia good night. Dacer wasn't there. She stayed, talking a few minutes with Aurelia, who was well enough to hear about the tramp and the bedroom slippers and a little school gossip. Lita asked casually where the doctor was, but no one seemed to know.
When a little later she entered Miss Fraser's study she found to her surprise that he was there, settled in a corner. Miss Fraser explained that Doctor Dacer was the son of an old friend of hers; he had been kind enough to say that it would be a pleasure to him to stay and hear the reading. She need not have felt under the necessity of apologizing to the six or seven members of her class. They felt no objection to his presence.
Lita was knitting a golf sweater for her father. She could do it at school, but not at home, for her mother was so discouraging about it. She had already objected to its color, shape and pattern; had felt sure that Lita's father wouldn't appreciate the sentiment, and wouldn't wear anything that did not come from a good shop. Probably after all Lita's trouble he'd give it to his manservant. But Lita did not think he would.
The nice thing about knitting is that it leaves the eyes disengaged— at least to an expert, and Lita was expert. She resolved that she would not look at Dacer; and did not for the first half hour or so, for she had a comfortable knowledge that he was looking at her. Then, just once, their eyes met. It was while Miss Fraser was reading these lines:
Butnatureneverfram'dawoman'sheart OfprouderstuffthanthatofBeatrice: Disdainandscornridesparklinginhereyes, Misprisingwhattheylookon;andherwit Valuesitselfsohighly,thattoher Allmatterelseseemsweak. Shecannotlove——
Holding her glance, he seemed to nod his head as if to say that was a perfect description of her. Could he mean that? Did he mean that? She averted her eyes hastily, and when she looked back again he had folded his arms and was staring off over everybody's head, very blank and magnificent, unaware of the existence of little schoolgirls. Had she offended him?
She decided that the next morning at the infirmary, while she was eating his toast and jam, she would ask him a pointed question about the character of Beatrice. She gave a good deal of time to framing the question—wasted time, for when she reached the infirmary she found he had gone—had taken a late train to New York the night before. Lita remembered he had looked at his watch once or twice toward the end of the reading.
"Yes," said the nurse cheerfully, "we're doing so well we don't need him." It was the second nurse. Miss Waverley had gone with the doctor.
Lita's frightened eyes sought Aurelia's, who framed the words: "Back Thursday."
She framed them as if two—almost three days were nothing. Lita, who knew no more of the Einstein theory than the name, discovered that time was relative; that Tuesday morning took what in old times she would have considered several weeks in passing; and that each study period—in the words of William James—lay down like a cow on the doorstep and refused to get up and go on. The truth was that
time had never been time to Lita; it had been action. Now it was emptiness, something to be filled; and yet she couldn't fill it; it was a bottomless abyss. Worse still, she couldn't concentrate. She went to the blackboard to do an original—a simple thing she would have tossed off in a minute in old times—and couldn't think how to begin; she, the best geometer in the class. This was serious, and it was queer. Lita couldn't, as she said to Aurelia, get the hang of it. Time being her problem—this sudden unexpected accumulation of time on her hands—she might have been expected to spend it doing the practical, obvious things that had to be done. Not at all. She was incapable of exertion. She could not study; and even the letter to her father, saying the Italian trip was impossible, was never written.
She had a letter from him Wednesday morning in which he assumed that she had not been able to bring her mother to any conclusion. He said he would call her up when she came to town on Friday. Perhaps she would dine with him on Saturday, and do a play. Ordinarily this would have seemed an agreeable prospect; but now, since it was farther away than Thursday, it had no real existence.
Late Wednesday afternoon her unalterable decision not to discuss Doctor Dacer with anyone broke down, and she told Aurelia the whole story. It took an hour—their meeting, everything that he had said, done and looked, and all that she had felt. She paid a great price, however, for this enjoyment and she did enjoy it—for afterward the whole experience became more a narrative and less a vital memory.
Thursday morning was the worst of all. Thursday morning was simply unbearable, until about noon, when she heard the whistle of the first possible New York train. After that things went very well until about five, when she had a moment to run over to see Aurelia and heard that the doctor had not come—had decided not to come until the next day, Friday.
As far as she was concerned, he might as well not have come at all. All her joy in the anticipated meeting was dead; but this might
possibly have reawakened, except that on Friday she did not have a minute until the three-o'clock train, which she was taking to New York. Of course, she could develop a cold or some mysterious ailment which would keep her at school over Sunday, even in the infirmary; but deceit was not attractive to her; though, as she would have said herself, she was not narrow-minded about it.
The girls of Elbridge Hall were not supposed to make the trip to New York by themselves; but sometimes a prudent senior and who is prudent if not the chairman of the self-government committee?— might be put on the train at Elbridge by a teacher and sent off alone, on the telephoned promise of a parent to meet her on her arrival at the Grand Central.
When, under the chaperonage of Jonesy, Lita stepped out of the school flivver at the station she saw that Doctor Dacer was there before her. He must have come up in a morning train, seen his patient and walked to the station. Wild possibilities rose at once in the girl's mind. Could he have known from Aurelia? Could he have arranged— No, for he took no interest in her arrival; hardly glanced in her direction. He was smoking, and when the train came he got into the smoking car without so much as glancing back to see where Jonesy was bestowing Lita.
The train, which was a slow one, was empty. Lita settled herself by a window and opened her geometry. She said to herself:
"I simply will not sit and watch the door. If he means to come he'll come, and my watching won't change things one way or the other."
She set her little jaw and turned to Monday's lesson: "To prove that similar triangles are to each other as the squares of the medians drawn to their homologous sides." The words conveyed absolutely nothing to her. She read them three times. It wasn't that she couldn't do the problem—she couldn't even think about it. She drew two similar triangles. They seemed to sit side by side like a cat and a kitten. She gave them whiskers and tails. Then, annoyed with
herself, she produced a ruler and constructed a neat figure. She tried reading the theorem again, this time in a conversational tone, as if it were the beginning of a story: "Similar triangles are to each other—"
The door opened, letting in the roar of the train and a disagreeable smell of coal smoke.
"I will not look up," thought Lita; "I will not! I will not!" And raising her eyes she saw that Dacer was there. She smiled not so much in greeting as from pure joy.
He hadn't wasted much time. He took her books and bag from the seat beside her and put them on the rack. Then he sat down and said, "Isn't it dangerous to let such little girls travel by themselves?"
She found speech difficult between her heart's beating too fast and her breath's coming too slow, but she did manage to say, "What does Effie do?"
"Just what you do—she expects me to be on hand to look out for her."
"I didn't expect you."
"No? Can it be you are not such a clever girl as teacher always thought?"
"I thought you were spending the night at Elbridge."
"So did I when I arrived, but my plans changed. I found that it would be better for me to take the three-o'clock to town and go back on Sunday afternoon, by the—what is the train that we take back on Sunday?"
It was almost too serious for jests, and Lita said in a voice that just didn't tremble that she took the 4:08.
Life is not often just right, not only in the present, but promising in forty-eight hours to be just as good or better. Lita spent two
wonderful hours. First they talked about Aurelia—her courage, her loneliness, her parents, divorce in general—and then Lita found herself telling him the whole story of her own position in regard to her parents. Even to Aurelia, with whom she talked so frankly, she had never told the whole story—her own deep emotional reactions. She found to her surprise that it was easier to tell a story of an intimate nature to this stranger of an opposite sex than to her lifelong friend. He understood so perfectly. He did not blame them; if he had she would have felt called on to defend them; and he did not blame her; if he had she would have been forced into attacking them. He just listened, and seemed to think it was a normal and deeply interesting bit of life.
He interrupted her once to say, "But you must remember that they are people as well as parents."
It seemed to her an inspired utterance. She did not always remember that. She offered the excuse: "Yes, but I don't mind their being divorced. Only why do they hate each other so?"
"How
do
you know they hate each other?"
Lita thought this was a queer thing to say after all that she had told him—almost stupid. She explained again: They were always abusing each other; nothing the other did was right; neither could bear her to speak well of
"They sound to me," said Dacer, "as if they were still fond of each other." Then, as Lita just stared at him, he went on: "Didn't you know that? The only people it's any fun to quarrel with are the people you love."
"Oh, no."
"Well, I'm glad you haven't found it out as yet, but it's true."
"I never quarrel," said Lita.
"You will some day. I expect to quarrel a lot with my wife."
"I shall never quarrel with my husband."
"No? Well, perhaps I'm wrong then."
She was angry at herself for glancing up so quickly to see what he could possibly mean by that except—he was looking at her gravely.
"Look here!" he said. "That's a mistake about Italy. You don't want to go to Italy next summer."
She was aware of two contradictory impressions during the entire journey—one that this was the most extraordinary and dramatic event, and that no heroine in fiction had ever such an adventure; and the other that it was absolutely inevitable, and that she was now for the first time a normal member of the human species.
Nothing in the whole experience thrilled her more than the calm, almost martial way in which he said as they were getting off the train at the Grand Central, "Now we'll get a taxi."
She was obliged to explain to him that they couldn't; her mother would be at the gate waiting for her—she always was.
Only this time she wasn't.
Meeting trains in the Grand Central, though it has not the phrenetic difficulty of meeting trains in the Pennsylvania Station, where you must watch two crowded stairways and a disgorging elevator in three different directions, is not made too easy. To meet a train in the Grand Central you must be in two widely separated spots at the same time.
Mrs. Hazlitt, approaching the bulletin board through devious subterranean routes, was caught in a stampede of those hurrying to meet a belated Boston express; and when at last she wormed her way to the front she saw that the impressive official with the glasses well down on his nose and the extraordinary ability for making neat figures had written down Track 12 for Lita's train. She turned liked a hunted animal; and at the moment when Lita and Dacer were
emerging from the gate Mrs. Hazlitt was running from a point far to the west of Vanderbilt Avenue to a track almost at Lexington. It was five o'clock, and many heavier and more determined people were running for their trains, so that she had a good many collisions and apologies before she reached the gate where her daughter ought to have been.
The last passenger, carrying a bunch of flowers and a cardboard box tied up with two different kinds of string, was just staggering through on oddly shaped flat feet. Everyone else had disappeared. Mrs. Hazlitt questioned the gateman. Had he seen a small young lady all alone who seemed to be looking for someone? The gateman said that he could not say he had, but would not care to say he had not. He possessed to perfection the railroad man's art of not telling a passenger anything he doesn't have to tell. His manner irritated Mrs. Hazlitt.
"I suppose you know," she said, "that you have horrible arrangements for meeting trains."
"If some of us had our way we wouldn't have any arrangements at all," answered the gateman.
This shocked Mrs. Hazlitt; it seemed so autocratic. She opened her eyes to their widest and felt she must argue the matter out with him.
"Do you mean," she asked, "that you would not let people meet trains?"
"I would not," said the gateman calmly, and having locked his gate he went his way.
This had taken a few minutes, and by the time Mrs. Hazlitt had gone back to the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance and found her car and driven home, Lita was already in the library—alone.
One of the disadvantages experienced by people who express themselves quickly is that while they are explaining how everything
