Part 15 (1/2)
”People are talking about you, Danny. You won't mind if I tell you?”
Her blue eyes, greatly troubled, looked into mine, then away, and her hand slipped into my hand and held it tightly. ”Sometimes I hate people! They are so mean, so nasty!”
”What are they saying?” I straightened the slender fingers curled about mine and stroked them. ”Only dead people aren't talked about.
What is being said about me?”
”Horrid things--not to me, of course. They'd better not be! But--Mrs.
Herbert came to see me yesterday afternoon. She wasn't at the luncheon and Grace got the first rap, but most of her hatefulness she took out on you. She's worse than a germ disease. I always feel I ought to be disinfected after I see her. If she were a leper she wouldn't be allowed at large, and she's much more deadly. People like that ought to be locked up.”
”What did she tell you about me?” I smiled in Kitty's flushed face, smiled also at the remembrance of Alice Herbert's would-be cut some time ago, but I did not mention it. ”You oughtn't to be so hard on her. She's crazy.”
”But crazy people are dangerous. A mosquito can kill a king, and a king has to be careful about mosquitoes. I'm more afraid of people than I am of insects. If you could only label them--”
”People label themselves. What did Alice Herbert say about me?”
”First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself so aloof from--”
”People like her. I do. What else did she say?”
”That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you.
A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt's told her she'd heard you let a--let a bad woman come in your house.” Kitty's voice trailed huskily. ”She said it would ruin you if things like that got out. I told her it was a lie--it wasn't so.”
”It was so.” I held Kitty's eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving. ”She stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week. Yesterday she went away to the mountains--to die.”
For a moment longer Kitty stared at me, and in her face crept deep and crimson color. ”You mean--that you let a--a woman like that come in your house and stay a week? Mean--”
For a long time we sat by the fire in Kitty's sitting-room with its rose-colored hangings, its mellow furnis.h.i.+ngs, its soft burning logs on their bra.s.s andirons, its elusive fragrance of fresh flowers, and unsparingly I told her what all women should know. In the twilight that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.
”Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?” she said, after a long, long while. ”Oh, Danny, is it I?”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Is it I, Danny? Is it women like me who could do something and don't?”]
”It is all of us.” My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair.
”Every woman of to-day who thinks there's a halo on her head ought to take it off and look at it. She wouldn't see much. We like halos. We imagine we deserve them. And we like the pretty speeches which have spoiled us. What we need is plain truth, Kitty. We need to see without confusion. Sometimes I wonder if we are not the colossal failure of life--we women who have hardly begun to use the power G.o.d put in our hands when He made us the mothers of sons and daughters--”
”But we've only been educated such a little while--most of us aren't educated yet. I'm not.” Her arms on my knees, Kitty looked up in my face, in hers the dawning light of vision long delayed. ”Men haven't wanted us to think. They want to think for us.”
”But ours is the first chance at starting men to thinking right.
Through babyhood and boyhood they are ours. If all women could understand--”
”All women haven't got anything to understand with even if they wanted to understand. Some who have sense don't want responsibility.” Kitty bit her lip. ”I haven't wanted it. It's so much easier not--not to have it. And now--now you've put it on me.”
”When women know, they will not s.h.i.+rk. So many of us are children yet.
We've got to grow up.” Stooping, I kissed her. ”In Scarborough Square I've learned to see it's a pretty wasteful world I've lived in. And life is short, Kitty. There's not a moment of it to be wasted.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Mrs. Mundy cannot find Etta Blake. She went this morning to the house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A ”For Rent” sign is on it. After trying, without success, to find from the families who live in the neighborhood where the people who once occupied the house have gone, she went to the agent, but from him also she could learn nothing.