II
Yet it was that very night after the Thorstads had gone to bed and were sleeping in the pale light of a quiet moonlit sky, that Freda was forced to admit that it wasn’t nonsense.
All along she had hated staying without her mother, who after all was her reason for being here. She had to do it, however, or else abandon the chance of getting the job as secretary to the committee. Freda herself was a little homesick under all her excitement but, steadying her, there had come letters from her father which urged her to make the most of any opportunities which might come to her, which bade her make suitable and wise friends and learn as much as she could.
One or two of the young men Freda met stood out, as being more interesting than the others. Ted Smillie, because he was so attracted to her from the first, had more or less intrigued her. Barbara’s obvious dislike of the situation had forced both Ted and Freda into somewhat closer acquaintanceship than would have naturally developed, but they both worked against Barbara’s interference. There was in Ted, for all his amorousness, a real feeling for health and beauty. That drew him to Freda and her to him and there was enough in the glamour of being chosen by the most competed-for man as worthy of attention, to make Freda feel rather strongly in his favor. If he had been rude to her, as he might have been to the country guest of the Brownley’s, she would have seen him more clearly, seen his weakness, his impressionability, read the laziness of his mind, seen the signs of self-indulgence which were already beginning to show on his handsome face. She would have seen him as too “soft” of mind and body. But he was frankly at her feet and it would have taken an older head than Freda’s to analyze too clearly past that during those first few weeks.
It was not the first attention she had had, of course. There were always young men who were ready to be nice to Freda in Mohawk. But much as they had liked her they had not, as she would have said, “made love to her.” Ted did that. In his own way, he was good at it and Freda was collecting experiences and naïve in spite of her power to get a perspective on her own situation. He had singled Freda out as capable of giving him a fresher thrill than any of the girls of his own “crowd.” And he had ended by being pushed a little more than he expected by his own emotions. The prospect of Freda’s return to Mohawk had annoyed him. He had felt that if she went now, it would be an incomplete experience. He wanted more than he had had. Freda had been pleasant, had been more than pleasant, been frank enough in showing how much she liked him. But he was used to more abandonment in the girls he knew—more freedom of caresses. He wasn’t quite sure how far he wanted to go and of course he had no intention of marrying anybody, certainly not Freda. But he was unsatisfied.
Mr. and Mrs. Brownley had gone to Chicago the day after Mrs. Thorstad had gone home and the three girls were alone in the house with the servants. There had been a gay party at a hotel ballroom and at one o’clock the three girls had left the hotel with their escorts. Ted had his small car and Freda had wanted him to take Barbara home. But Barbara had demurred, strangely enough. She was going in the big car with the others, she said.
Barbara had been making life hard for Freda all day. Wherever they had been she had managed to make Freda miserable. When the older Brownleys were home, and when her mother was with her, Freda had never been so completely at Barbara’s mercy as she was to-day. Allie, her usual ally, had suddenly fallen away too. The fact was that Allie, having pressed her mother for the purchase of the new runabout, had been put off on the ground that her father said it was too expensive and on the further ground that Freda’s visit was not over and that anyway Mrs. Brownley had made no definite promise. Allie was disgruntled and the enthusiasm she had had for Freda having run its brief course, like most of Allie’s enthusiasms, she was willing to lend some slight support to Barbara’s evident ennui with their guest. All through luncheon Barbara had engineered an extremely rude conversation about things and places which were entirely foreign to Freda. Not once had she let her guest slip into the conversation. She had misled Freda deliberately into wearing her flame colored satin dress to a very informal afternoon affair and appeared herself, like every one else, in the most simple suit, making Freda feel foolishly over dressed. It was a little thing but it pricked Freda. At dinner she had asked some people to come in whom she knew would follow her lead and they had again left Freda high and dry on the conversational sands. It had not been a pleasant day and even as they danced, she and Ted, that evening, Freda felt Barbara’s eyes rather scornfully on her and guessed at the little tide of innuendo that was being set in motion. She knew Barbara’s ways by this time. She could not stand it another day, she vowed. In the morning she would see Mrs. Flandon or go to a hotel or back to Mohawk.
It was clear that the others had not arrived when they drove up under the Brownley porte-cochère where a single light was burning. Freda did not want Ted to come in. She wanted to make her escape to bed before Barbara might arrive and make her a further target. Besides it was clear that Ted had been drinking and that he was most amorous. But he was insistent. The others would be along in a minute and he wanted to see one of the boys, he said.
They went into the long drawing-room. A single standing lamp was lit beside a big divan and at Freda’s gesture as if she would turn on more, Ted caught her hand.
“Quite enough light,” he said. “Come sit down.”
His methods were not as subtle as usual and they frightened Freda. But she thought it wiser not to quarrel with him and sat down obediently beside him on the divan—much too close for her taste.
“You aren’t really going away, are you, Freda?”
“I can’t stay forever. My welcome’s wearing a little thin.”
She tried to pull away from that encircling arm but he would not have it. His strength had surprised her before, and she had not before minded his demonstrations. To-night she felt them as different, vaguely repellent.
“Please don’t, Ted.”
“I’m crazy about you, Freda. I’ve never seen a girl like you. There aren’t any girls like you. Never have been any. I never knew what it meant to be in love before.”
And all the time that arm tighter, heavier. His face seemed to Freda to thicken. She discovered that she hated it. Abruptly she wrenched herself free. But he followed her and unfortunately she had gone to an even darker corner.
He pulled her to him and kissed her. It was the first time he had done it and it seemed to exhilarate him.
There followed one of the worst half hours of Freda’s life. She kept wondering what had happened to the others. She was conscious of herself growing disheveled. She realized that he was in earnest, that he was excited past his own control.
In desperation she cried at him—
“But I don’t care for you at all.”
“That makes it more interesting to a man,” said Ted, gallantly. “Anyway, I’ll never give up.”
“And,” thought Freda, suddenly, with directness, “he hasn’t said one word about marrying.” With a kind of vague desire to sound the situation fully, she said—
“Do you really want me to marry you?”
The drinking that Ted had done had not improved his keenness of wit. He laughed.
“I think you could almost make me do that,” he answered, “but what’s the use of marrying? What we want is love—you know. I sized you up at the start. Freda—you wonderful girl—let me tell you—”
What he told her, the outlines of his plan, struck Freda with impersonal clearness. She had an odd sense of watching the scene from the outside, as an observer who jeered at her a little for being implicated. Similar scenes she had read about ran through her mind. She thought of Ann Veronica and Mr. Ramage. “He hasn’t gone quite far enough for me to actually fight him,” she thought—and then—“I ought to ring for a servant or something—that’s what’s always done. I’m being insulted. I ought to either faint or beat him. I’m interested. Isn’t it shocking!”
Above all these almost subconscious thoughts her mind dealt with practicalities. She wondered where the others were. She must get out of the house early in the morning. She wondered if Ted would keep this up even if the others came in.
She tried to get to the door but her movement towards escape roused him further. It had evidently never entered his head that she really meant to rebuff him. He caught her in his arms.
“So you see, beautiful, how easy the whole thing will be—”
He was growing noisy and she realized that she did not want the servants to hear. After all it wasn’t her house. She saw that they had been alone for an hour. It was past two. And then to her immense relief she heard the limousine outside.
“The others are here,” she said to him.
“Damn the others,” he said mumblingly, and, without apology, forced himself into his overcoat. In the hall he seemed to recover himself. Perhaps his sense of social convention struggled and overcame his amorousness temporarily. He went out, past the entering girls, vaguely speaking rather at them than to them.
Nothing of what happened after that seemed quite real to Freda. She was fairly worn out from her trying day and hour of struggle and embarrassment. As she stood for a minute by a long window trying to collect her thoughts, she heard the girls at the door and it flashed through her mind to ease the disgust from her own mind by telling the whole business. She knew how frankly these girls talked of such things among themselves.
They came in, Barbara leading. With a quick, sharp movement Barbara turned on all the lights and as if in a spotlight the disarrayed parts of the room seemed to stand out, the rug in which Ted’s foot had caught and which he had kicked aside, the several chairs at unfamiliar angles, the divan all tossed, with pillows crushed—most of all Freda herself, hair somewhat disheveled, cheeks angrily flushed. Allie looked a little queer as she gazed around. Barbara, after one scornful glance, never took her eyes off Freda.
“So you brought him here?”
“Brought him? Ted? Where were the rest of you?”
“You knew where we were. We said where we were going. We waited and waited at the Hebley’s. Every one was wondering where you’d gone. You and Ted Smillie—at two o’clock. But I didn’t really think you’d have the audacity to make my mother’s house the scene of your—”
The awful thing, thought Freda, is that she doesn’t believe that. But she’s going to pretend she believes it and it’s just as bad as if she did. Some one had let her in for this. It looks exactly as if—she looked around and the color swept her face again.
“You shameless girl!” Barbara went viciously on. “If my mother was here you wouldn’t dare have done it. To think that we have to stay in the same house—to think—come Allie—”
But Freda was roused, infuriated. The scorn of her own position, a position which allowed her to be insulted by such a person, rose above all else. She flung her cloak around her.
“I wouldn’t stay in your house another night,” she cried, “if I have to sleep on a park bench all night.”
The front door closed after her. As she reached the sidewalk she heard the door open again, her name called cautiously, heard the latch slipped. They were leaving the door open. As if she would go back—
She went through the streets swiftly.