"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have a question or two to ask her?"
But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had not wished them to be readable.
Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into the group about the speaker and singer—a group in which her clothes would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.
Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of the East Side where the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission school. Its assembly rooms, crêches and diet kitchens constituted her present world.
They had said that there was nothing she could do—a society girl with a drawing room and hunting field equipment—and only the All-seeing and herself knew how near true it had proven.
All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.
For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.
A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy Spradling—to talk to her under an assumed name—and to lay to the bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills she had once loved so intensely—something of the man who was now a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.
There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and she would show herself as conquered.
Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the Forties.