Part 39 (1/2)
”The veritable curiosity of a j.a.panese woman getting her first foreign gown!”
”Thank you! That is another excuse.”
”And it certainly looks very well,” Jack declared.
”Do you think so?” Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. ”After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?”--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. ”But,” she added, severely, ”I have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!”
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door!
”Having succ.u.mbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop,” Mary said; ”and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert.”
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical apprais.e.m.e.nt, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
”I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!”
”Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!” she answered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler's window.
”To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?”
she inquired.
When they pa.s.sed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
”Why be on the Avenue and not buy?” he queried, enthusing with a new idea.
Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic alt.i.tude swept the breadth of the Avenue.
”Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?” he asked, as if it were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
”Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't ent.i.tled to the Best Swell Place occasionally?”
After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the a.s.semblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a bill of fare.
A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across.
”I wrote you stacks of letters,” he said, ”and you never sent me one little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'”
In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
”A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!”
He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony.
Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it? Famished for her companions.h.i.+p, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct.
They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people pa.s.sing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion.
While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-pa.s.sing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the suns.h.i.+ne of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.