“Remember!——You’re musical, aren’t you? You told me at that dance that you were studying music here in town. Well—what do you say we take in some concerts together? And the Symphony—that’ll be fun if only to watch the audience. Would you care?”
“I’m awfully afraid I shan’t know enough to appreciate the Symphony,” she hesitated. “But I know it would be a good thing for me, and I’ll go with you if you’ll promise not to know too much about it.”
“If you could see me! I go—and sit through it—and sometimes I feel like jumping out of my seat—but most of the time I’m vaguely bored. We’ll go together, and maybe combined we can get what we should out of it.”
After he had gone, she went back and sang through the score of Marguerite as if she had had no interruption a little over an hour and a half ago. A little over an hour and a half—had so short a time passed since she had seen Grant, had decided so much, had let so much go out of her life? She could not evoke even a shiver over the blotting out of that vista of her dreams, nothing but a little impatient frown. Things had no right to get so dead, after having been so alive.
Lovely girl, that Félicie Durant; even if Jerry did call her a jellyfish. Her arguments were clear—to marry now when she had four good years before her which marriage could not replace——Her voice hesitated on a measure. It sounded almost like her argument with Grant—three years and a half from her life at this time, which marriage could not replace——
“Oh, but that’s different,” and her voice caught up with the piano accompaniment and spun heart-satisfying melody—
“Je ris—de me voir
Si belle—en ce miroir——”
VIII
“Say, Joy, can’t you practice your trilling with the door shut?”