Part 11 (1/2)
”You appear to take a lot for granted,” he complained.
”I'd been wondering when it would happen,” she admitted coolly.
”It always does, then?”
”Usually I stop it,” she continued. ”I don't believe I'll ever like being kissed. Can you tell me why? No one ever has; they all think they can bring me around to it.”
”And to them,” he added.
”But they end by being furious at me. I've been sworn at and called dreadful names. Sometimes they're only silly. One cried; I hated that the most.”
”Do you mean that you were sorry for him?”
”Oh, dear, no. Why should I be? He looked so odious all smeared with tears.”
Arnaud Hallet returned promptly: ”Linda, you're a little beast.” To counteract his rude speech he kissed her again. ”This,” he said with less security, ”threatens to become a habit. I thought, at forty-five, that I was safely by the island of sirens, but I'll be on the rocks before I know it.”
She laughed with the cool remoteness of running water.
”I wonder you haven't been murdered,” he proceeded, ”in a moonless garden by an elderly lawyer. Do you ever think of the lyric day when, preceded by a flock of bridesmaids and other flowery pagan truck, you'll meet justice?”
”Marriage?” she asked. ”But of course. I have everything perfectly planned--”
”Then, my dear Linda, describe him.”
”Very straight,” she said, ”with beautiful polished shoes and brushed hair.”
”You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends have one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a very satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady man well on his way to preside over the pantry and table.”
”You're not as funny as usual,” Linda decided critically. ”That, too, disturbs me,” he replied. ”It looks even more unpromising for the near future.”
XXI
In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might have been serious in her att.i.tude toward him dissolved by the lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to times before Pleydon had entered her life--the difficulties presented by the term ”love.”
In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes.
It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon.
Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been a.s.sured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be the greatest thing in life.
There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of example and a.s.sociation combined to bathe such developments in the sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now, been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.
Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner, were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined, had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed music.
Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience had prepared her. She began to see why it was called a nuisance--if this were love--and wondered if she had better not suppress it at once. It wouldn't be suppressed. Her thoughts continually came back to Pleydon, and the warmth, the disturbing thrill, always resulted. It led her away from herself, from Linda Condon; a sufficiently strange accomplishment.
A concern for Dodge Pleydon, little schemes for his happiness and well-being, put aside her clothes and complexion and her future.
Until the present her acts had been the result of deliberation. She had been impressed by the necessity for planning with care; but, in the cool gloom of the covered bed, a sharp joy held her at the possibility of flinging caution away. Yet she couldn't quite, no matter how much she desired it, lose herself. Linda was glad that Pleydon was rich; and there were, she remembered, moments for surrender.
As usual these problems, multiplying toward night, were fewer in the bright flood of morning. She laughed at the memory of Arnaud Hallet's humor; and then, it was late afternoon, the maid told her that Pleydon was in the drawing room. Her appearance satisfactory she was able to see him at once. To her great pleasure neither Pleydon nor his clothes had changed. He was dressed in light-gray flannels; a big easy man with a crus.h.i.+ng palm, large features and an expression of intolerance.