“Don’t you?” he returned sharply, and, before the bright stare of his angry eyes, her own troubled gaze fell. “You say you don’t know what I mean?”
“Why—no. Not—not at all,” she murmured.
“Well, I do!” And with a brief shot of breath between his almost closed lips, he further expressed an emotion that remained enigmatic to her. He rose. “Seems to me it’s about time you quit standin’ up for him,” he said; and stalked out of the room, leaving her still at the table.
She sat there in an attitude of some rigidity after she had heard him go upstairs, and she continued to sit there, though she had finished her dinner before he departed. The conclusion she reached in her thoughts was that there was a question she would never ask him;—she would never ask him what he had meant by that final remark of his. She hoped he meant only that her pride ought to resent a neighbour’s failure to come to say he was glad to see her at home again—but she feared her father meant more than this. She feared he meant much more, and she so feared it that she would never dare to ask him.
Yet she wondered why she wouldn’t dare. How could it ever be “about time” for her to stop standing up for an old friend? And when Harlan was announced to her, as she sat alone at the table, she rose with a little sigh. She did not sigh because she was sorry he had come; it was because she had just realized how much more his brother was still the heart of her thoughts than was this faithful and constant escort.
For she and Harlan had already fallen into a relation not uncommon among those she had spoken of as “left-overs”: a relation that becomes a habit—a habit that in turn becomes a relation. She “went everywhere” with him; and continued to go everywhere with him; and so, after a while, their contemporaries, all married, never sent an invitation to one without including the other. Then, as time went on, and the habit continued and continued, it became common stock in the prattle of more dashing and precipitous younger people. When talk languished and even weather stencils failed to cover a blank, those who felt such covering a necessity could always fall back on this, and wonder why the two didn’t “get married and be done with it.”
In that manner a worn woman-of-the-world, aged twenty, complained to Frederic Oliphant one evening at the Country Club, as he sat with her after unsuccessfully attempting an imported dance he found himself too old to learn. “You aren’t too old to learn it, if you wouldn’t insist on being too polite to hold a girl as tight as these boys do,” the woman-of-the-world informed him with the new frankness then becoming fashionable. “You aren’t as old as your cousin Harlan. Why on earth don’t he and Miss Shelby get married and be done with it? They’ve certainly been just the same as engaged for almost as long as I can remember. Everybody says they must be engaged—by this time! They say she used to be in love with his brother. I don’t see how anybody could be in love with him!”
She glanced through an archway, near by, to where Dan and his wife and Martha and Harlan and a dozen other people were gravely straggling out of the dining-room; all of this party having the air of concluding a festival that had not proved too hilarious. Dan, in particular, appeared to have thought the occasion a solemn one. He had been placed next to Martha; and she remarked cheerfully that it was the first time he had been so near her “in ages.” After that, however, she found little more to say to him, since he seemed to encounter certain definite difficulties in saying anything to her in return.
“I am coming in to—to call, some evening,” he stammered, laughing uncomfortably to express his cordiality. “I’d have been to see you—I’d have been over oftener, except——” He paused, then concluded his ill-fated excuses hurriedly—“except I’m so busy these days.” And he glanced uneasily across the table to where Lena sat smiling mysteriously at him.
Martha thought it tactful, and the part of a true friend, to talk to Harlan, who sat next to her on the other side.