“Oh,” said Missy, desperately tongue-tied and ill-at-ease.
For a long second it endured portentously still in the room and in the world without; then like a sharp thunder-clap out of a summer sky, a door slammed upstairs. There was a sound of someone running down the steps, and Missy glimpsed Mr. Hackett going out the front door, banging the screen after him.
At the last noise, old Mrs. Greenleaf's shoulders stiffened as if under a lash. But she turned quietly and said:
“Thank you so much for the flowers, Missy. I'll give them to her after a while, when she's better. And you can see her to-morrow.”
It was the politest of dismissals. Missy, having remembered the pattern, hurriedly got it and ran home. She had seen a suspicion of tears in old Mrs. Greenleaf's eyes. It was as upsetting as though the bronze Winged Victory on the parlour mantel should begin to weep.
All that afternoon Missy sought solitude. She refused to play croquet with Kitty Allen when that beautiful and most envied friend appeared. When Kitty took herself home, offended, Missy went out to the remote summerhouse, relieved. She looked back, now, on her morning's careless happiness as an old man looks back on the heyday of his youth.
Heavy with sympathy, non-comprehension and fear, she brooded over these dark, mysterious hints about the handsome Cleveland man; over young Doc's blighted love; over Miss Princess's wanting to “back out”; over old Mrs. Greenleaf's strange, dominant “pride.”
Why did Miss Princess want to “back out”?—Miss Princess with her beautiful coppery hair, and eager parted lips, and eyes of mysterious purple (Missy lingered on the reflection “eyes of mysterious purple” long enough to foreshadow a future poem including that line). Was it because she still loved Doc? If so, why didn't it turn out all right, since Doc loved her, too? Surely that would be better, since there seemed to be something wrong with Mr. Hackett—even though everybody did talk about what a wonderful match he was. Then they talked about invitations and things as though old Mrs. Greenleaf thought those things counted for more than the bridegroom. Old Mrs. Greenleaf, Missy was sure, loved Miss Princess better than anything else in the world: then how could she, even if she was “proud,” twist things so foolishly?
She had brought with her the blue-bound Anthology and a writing-pad and pencil. First she read a little—“Lochinvar” it was she opened to. Then she meditated. Poor Young Doc! The whole unhappy situation was like poetry. (So much in life she was finding, these days, like poetry.) This would make a very sad, but effective poem: the faithful, unhappy lover, the lovely, unhappy bride, the mother keeping them asunder who, though stern, was herself unhappy, and the craven bridegroom who—she hoped it, anyway!—was unhappy also.
In all this unhappiness, though she didn't suspect it, Missy revelled—a peculiar kind of melancholy tuned to the golden day. She detected a subtle restlessness in the shimmering leaves about her; the scent of the June roses caught at something elusively sad in her. Without knowing why, her eyes filled with tears.