“You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders into the purple kimono. “He’s going to lunch with me to-morrow. He’ll see me in broad daylight without candles and the black velvet dress. It’ll be my turn to talk—in which case I can’t keep up my stride, and will have to slide into the American language. And I’m going to tell him—of course I’m going to tell him. Don’t you see my really being both things—starting the dream, and finishing it—makes it—better than ever? If he doesn’t see it that way—— But he will! I can’t wait to tell him.”
Joy crawled into bed with misgivings which grew faint in the face of Jerry’s firm faith. “It was just as we doped it, wasn’t it, Joy? You said he went across—and I said that I was too small and casual a matter for him to waste pains on—when it got inconvenient for him to do so. They sent him over sooner than he expected—so he simply knocked out of my life. But now! Those years were worth it—I’d go through ’em over again if I were sure this was coming at the end.”
“And he thinks he’s started at the end,” said Joy, “and ‘defeated all the weary preliminaries.’”
Jerry had snapped out the light, opened the windows and jumped into bed, but her head reared up again at this. “You think he’s had an easy time of it—compared to me—that I made it too easy for him, right off—don’t you? I—I didn’t want to make it any harder for myself! And look at his face, Joy—does he look as if he had had an especially satisfying time along the way—before he found me?”
“Forgive me, Jerry,” said Joy after a silence. “He was right, these things should not be analyzed.”
But Jerry did not even hear her. “We have been a long time finding each other. But the finding trims everything on heaven and earth tied together, to a finish!”
And Joy was conscious of an overpowering loneliness. It was a barren feeling; she had never really loved. She had not known Mabel’s radiance or Jerry’s ecstatic fireworks, in the disturbing thrills that had been hers in the past which now seemed so far removed it was as if it belonged to another life. And now, with Jerry silent but not asleep by her side, she felt suddenly, horribly alone. Jerry was her best friend, and save for Jim, her only friend. Yet how that friendship sank into insignificance now. Jerry’s world was full; all her world and life were but one man; and Joy was outside. She lost herself in sleep, where she dreamed that the only person remaining in her world who spelled anything in life to her, had left her. She woke up sobbing bitterly, with “Jim!” on her lips. All was toneless dark, that breathless hour of earliest morning when vitality is at its lowest ebb yet sometimes the heart may beat at its highest. Things are seen at that hour with uninfluenced clarity of vision. And Joy gasped in the shock of the knowledge that was rising within her. Jim Dalton was the only person left—who spelled anything in life to her. Jerry was sleeping quietly; her tears fell unconsoled. “Jim!” she sobbed again; and with his name trembling through the black fringe of dawn, she fell asleep.
X
The next day was Saturday, and Félicie returned around noon just as Jerry left Joy in a whirlwind of breathless anticipation. Félicie was pale and sulky from dancing all night and having to come back to New York the next morning.