And then she had looked at him—and as Freddie's back was half turned, she hoped he had not seen—in fact, she was sure he had not, or she would not have dared. And Brent—had returned her look with his usual quizzical smile; but she had learned how to see through that mask. Then—she had submitted to Freddie's energetic embrace—had given her hand to Brent—"Good-by," she had said; and "Good luck," he.
Beyond the reach of any of the calamities? Beyond the need of any of the consolations? Yes—it was almost literally true. She felt the big interest—the career—growing up within her, and expanding, and already overstepping all other interests and emotions.
Brent had left her and Clélie more to do than could be done; thus they had no time to bother either about the absent or about themselves. Looking back in after years on the days that Freddie was away, Susan could recall that from time to time she would find her mind wandering, as if groping in the darkness of its own cellars or closets for a lost thought, a missing link in some chain of thought. This even awakened her several times in the night—made her leap from sleep into acute and painful consciousness as if she had recalled and instantly forgotten some startling and terrible thing.
And when Freddie unexpectedly came—having taken passage on the Lusitania for the return voyage, after only six nights and five days in New York—she was astonished by her delight at seeing him, and by the kind of delight it was. For it rather seemed a sort of relief, as from a heavy burden of anxiety.
"Why didn't you wait and come with Brent?" asked she.
"Couldn't stand it," replied he. "I've grown clear away from New York—at least from the only New York I know. I don't like the boys any more. They bore me. They—offend me. And I know if I stayed on a few days they'd begin to suspect. No, it isn't Europe. It's—you. You're responsible for the change in me."
He was speaking entirely of the internal change, which indeed was great. For while he was still fond of all kinds of sporting, it was not in his former crude way; he had even become something of a connoisseur of pictures and was cultivating a respect for the purity of the English language that made him wince at Susan's and Brent's slang. But when he spoke thus frankly and feelingly of the change in him, Susan looked at him—and, not having seen him in two weeks and three days, she really saw him for the first time in many a month. She could not think of the internal change he spoke of for noting the external change. He had grown at least fifty pounds heavier than he had been when they came abroad. In one way this was an improvement; it gave him a dignity, an air of consequence in place of the boyish good looks of the days before the automobile and before the effects of high living began to show. But it made of him a different man in Susan's eyes—a man who now seemed almost a stranger to her.
"Yes, you have changed," replied she absently. And she went and examined herself in a mirror.
"You, too," said Freddie. "You don't look older—as I do.
But—there's a—a—I can't describe it."
Susan could not see it. "I'm just the same," she insisted.