Then he looked at her, as if for the first time since he had entered the room, and grinned irrepressibly: “Excuse me—but you certainly do look funny, with one side of your face so red and one side so white.”
She wheeled to the mirror, and confronted her uncompleted task. Terror had struck her white as the sheets on her little cot. The splotch of rouge on one cheek, gave a ludicrous, clown-like effect. She laughed shakily. It seemed impossible in the face of her comic appearance and Jim Dalton’s matter-of-fact manner, that but five minutes ago tragedy and ruin had been stalking in upon her. When she turned again, Jim had drawn Barnett up onto his shoulder, and was moving from the room.
“I’ll get him to the Delta-Delta house somehow,” he said in muffled tones—“and anyway, he’ll reach downstairs without being seen.”
The door was closed, and Joy sunk to the floor, whither she had been impending for several moments. In twenty-four hours she had run the gamut of emotions. She had gone through fearsome revelation of what can seem like love to a girl and spell something different indeed to a man. She had seen how the thrills of innocence that scarcely knows why it is thrilling, are as tinder to the flame of desire kindled by that same innocence. She had enveloped man in the white mist of maiden’s dreams—and then the mist had been torn away, leaving reality so terrible that she felt she must go mad if she could not forget. Yet Jim Dalton had told her not to forget . . . to remember it—in connection with everything else! What had he meant? As if she could forget. . . . Love was an idle dream; the reality, a hideousness that could not be borne.
There was really nothing left in life—except to laugh and be gay!
It was half-past six before the orchestra played “The End of a Perfect Day,” and hilarious groups began to straggle toward the fraternity houses. The sun was trying to break through the heavy mists that hung over the valley. Jerry halted her group on the crest of Chapel Hill to enjoy the beauty of the country below; and while everyone gazed at the valley wreathed in delicate mist split with traceries of gold, Jerry looked wistfully down the long slope to the Kappa Beta house. In this life, one has to restrain one’s impulses at times—but the question that always seems to be coming up is, is this one of those times? Jerry decided not, and shaking off her slippers, beat one of the track athletes down the hill.
Having thus ended Prom, Jerry did not stop to wait for the others to come and have breakfast on the fraternity porch. No anticlimaxes for her. She dashed in the house, and up the stairs; but when she opened the door to her room, she paused and whistled. Joy was putting the last stages of a brisk morning make-up together, in front of the mirror.
“Well—take a slant at Foxhollow Corners, New England,” Jerry announced, coming in and regarding Joy with increased respect. “I wondered where you’d gone—of all good lines to pull!”
Joy met her respect with the quiet pride of a good pupil under the approval of his master. “Are they starting breakfast?”
Jerry sank down on the bed. “Good or not—I bite—to leave Prom early, get everyone missing you and all the more keen to see you, meanwhile getting some sleep while the rest of us jazz away the morning hours! And now, when all the beauty of America looks and feels like a dish-rag—when rouge shows up like poison-ivy in the glorious morning hours—when even I don’t care to go through the let-down of breakfast with my pep trickling away—to sail down like this!”