Jerry laughed. “Better take the plunge like a shot the way I did, Félicie. Then you’ll have no time to think up objections. Monotony! The way I used to live—the way you’re living now—is the real monotony. Continually seeing one side only of large numbers of young men—one party after another—oh well, there’s no use wasting my flow of English on the subject.”
There was no use. A youth with an attitude of cultivated boredom and repressed correctness, came in for her, and she left them “wishing she could stay, but you see how it is.”
“She never looks eager,” said Joy; “you wouldn’t think she valued a good time so highly.”
“No, not eager; just smug,” said Jerry tersely, and they talked of other things.
Jerry the excitement-eater was dead, that was plain. Joy had always wished to see that side of her dispensed with. Then why did this change, this miraculous, softening change, stir irritation within her, throw a breach between them?
She could not fathom the reason until she took Jerry to the eleven o’clock and told her good-bye. There, with a farewell look at Jerry’s brilliant face, enhanced by the beloved freckles, it came to her in a rush. She was jealous—jealous both ways! Before, she had been jealous of Phil Lancaster only for taking Jerry from her; now, she was jealous of Jerry herself, for the world in which she lived, the world upon which Joy had turned her back. . . .
She did not sleep well that night. Disturbing thoughts pressed urgently about her, and would not postpone their hearing.
It was a powerful force that had led Jerry to stop drinking, to drop her Excitement-Eating ways without regret. To pit oneself against such a force—to eliminate it from one’s life—was an undertaking at the mysterious door of which Joy paused and shivered. . . .
XII
” Oh, dear! What if it should rain? Can you imagine anything worse than organdy in the rain? And yet if it doesn’t rain, can you imagine anything worse than to have on dark silk, at Harvard Class Day, with everyone else in organdy?”