“I can tell you it made me feel pretty sick. If I could have stopped caring for him the way I’d started—but I couldn’t—I’d sort of fixed everything on him and there it hung. And here he was going to the sausages, and wanted me to help him fry himself. I was knocked cold. I hadn’t really got what he had doped me out to be—until he said he’d better go.
“I lost my head then. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Sit down and let me tell you something. You’ve never seen me before. Well, I have you—in at Charlette’s last February—I heard you talking to your sister about “honour and truth and a sure intent.” That was the first look-in I’d ever had on the subject. You were the first real man that I had ever come within shouting distance of, who sprung such stuff, and those words sunk in till they got sewed in me. All the more so because I was—and am—in love with a man who’d never look straight at me till I made myself over, and I figured it that somehow those words might be the combination that would fix me up for him. I always remembered you and what you said, and I’ve been trying to get all those three things. And then when you turned up to-night I was as happy as a fool, thinking I’d be with a real man and he’d give some more dope on how to be a real girl—then you talk about ending it all, like any thirty-center up against a dark pocket, and take me for Mazie-off-the-streets thrown in!’
“He didn’t say anything for a few minutes—turned away from me and did a walk over to the piano. There was a bunch of French stuff on it that Pa was trying to get soaked into me, and a book of Yvette Guilbert’s. Then he turned around and I saw he’d lost most of his edge. ‘I want to beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been so ashamed of myself in all my life. But I shan’t curse myself for writing that note to you—no matter what prompted me to do so. Of all girls in New York—to stumble on one who remembered something I said—something that she thought was doing her good!
“I saw he’d gone sober, and I put away the cup that cheers too loud. He came up to me and looked me over—not hot this time, but impersonal. ‘So you’re in love with someone—who—won’t look straight at you?’ He squinted his eyes up and took in the general effect, the way I do when I stand off and look at a model draped in a half-built creation. ‘War times are not so busy but what I’d like to play Pygmalion for you.’ ‘What kind of a game is that?’ I said.
“He laughed, and gave me a close-up of the Pygmalion-Galatea affair. I didn’t mind if I had pulled a bone—there he was, as keen and peepy as if he hadn’t been talking about putting a bullet through his brains a while ago and glimming me as cool and impersonal as if he hadn’t hauled my hand around a minute back. The main thing was that I’d given him a jolt—and he’d lost his edge.
“When he left that night, he’d given me a list of books to wade through. The newspapers had always been my literature—them, and people. But he told me it would Galatea me some to follow the books for awhile. And he also said he’d come up to the apartment again in two weeks—he only got every other week-end off, usually—and see how I was working it.
“After he went maybe I didn’t turn cart-wheels around the apartment till the people underneath rapped on their ceiling with a broomstick, as they had nothing to do around that time but sleep, and when people get that way their mind runs on one track and you have to humour ’em. So I turned in and thought till it was time to get up. You can always tell when it’s time to get up—you’re just ready for a real sleep by then. I felt I had done a good night’s work. By a trick shake of the dice he had landed with me—and getting interested in my ‘case,’ as I had reeled it off to him, had pulled him out of a pocket.
“I quit Hanley’s after that. I needed the evenings for getting those books down. No matter what way I figured, there wasn’t any other time to do it. He hadn’t supposed I did anything but sing, in which case I would have had lots of time for his books. Every day of that two weeks was just another day until he should come again, and when he did——He looked so much better already that you couldn’t believe it was the same man. First thing he did was to apologize again for the way he’d been the other night. Said he’d never been so limp before and never would be again, thanks to me. Then we slung a line of chatter about the books I had surrounded, and he asked me was I getting along any better with that man. I said no, I didn’t see much progress—which was the truth. He said, well, he’d give me some Mid-Victorian stuff to dive into for next time, and one book would do me. It was Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’—and believe me, Joy, it let in a whole new flood of light. I’d never heard anything like it. When I got to the end of Guinevere I was sobbing as I hadn’t since I was a kid and had had my bunch of papers pinched from me. Joy, that book simply burst on me like dynamite. I’d never heard of ideas like those before. If you read that when you’re in love, it’ll either make you fall out with a thump or fall in harder than ever. I fell in harder than ever. Could I wait until he came again? To talk over the ‘Idylls of the King’ with him?”
Jerry spread out her hands, then looked at them and laughed suddenly. “The action sags from now on, Joy. Because he never turned up again.”
“What?” cried Joy.