“I missed a dance this afternoon and a wonderful one this evening,” she crabbed, taking off her outer raiment and donning a kimono, before lying on the bed to recuperate. At Joy’s question of why she hadn’t stayed the house-party through, she batted an injured brown velvet orb. “How could I, with Greg here and acting so awfully just because I wanted to go to Princeton for one day. He needn’t think I’d give up every evening to him—especially after the way he talked Thursday. I tell you, Joy, it’s awful to be in love. I never did such an inconvenient thing as I did when I fell in love with Greg.”
Joy stifled her laughter. “Did you have a good time?”
“Marvelous—simply marvelous. Princeton is the house-party girl’s Mecca. It’s mean of Greg to act so—it isn’t as if I could be asked to Princeton for many more years.”
Joy ran a scale, poising it neatly through the air and listening to the smoothness of tone. In the morning sun, music was more alive and satisfactory, even with no piano near. It was part of her—and little fluctuations of feeling were to be ignored, when she knew that all her being was absorbed in one great purpose. It had been silly of her to grow sentimental just because she had been doused in the atmosphere of sentiment. Inconsistently, she felt angry at Félicie.
“I can’t imagine being in love with a man and going off skating with a dozen others.”
“Oh, Joy, if you’re going to take Jerry’s side I shall just pass out!” wailed the lovely thing on the bed. “Being in love doesn’t stop you from wanting something new once in awhile.”
“Nothing seems to prevent anyone nowadays from going after a new sensation! Excitement-chasing! That’s what everyone’s doing!”
“It’s all very well for those who aren’t in love to theorize about what those who are in love should do. For all Jerry’s talk, I can’t see her giving up her ‘excitement-chasing’ for any man. Can you?”
The thought was a new one. What would happen if Jerry was given the opportunity to know this man so that the novelty would wear off? How would the Excitement-Eater stand a sustained love? She was silent in conjecture, and Félicie, too lazy to voice the triumph she felt, closed her eyes and worked her face down into the pillow.
Joy and Jerry had tickets for an Æolian Hall concert that afternoon, and now Joy went alone. The throngs always pressing ahead on the streets, exhilarated her, and she watched the faces of the people that urged themselves along; faces with success or failure written more or less plainly upon them. Most women, she supposed, succeeded or failed by proxy, as their husbands rose or fell in the foaming rapids of struggle. But there would be no such vicarious state for her! She was plunging directly into the rapids for herself, and some day she would walk in her own success.