Jerry lit another cigarette. “Look here, Joy, I don’t want to be a thrill-dispeller or anything, but I can’t put on a quiver I don’t feel. This thing may turn out all right, but at present quoting it sounds to me like a bad case of beach and moon. The whole thing has dusted along with that summer swiftness we all read about.”
“Oh, we realize it’s been swift,” said Joy, “and just to test ourselves, we’re not going to see each other until Wednesday, when I am going to meet him at the Copley for dinner.”
“Wednesday,” Joy murmured. “And to-day’s Monday. Oh, well, absence at this stage of the game only makes you keener—you should have stayed down there a week!”
“Bon soir—a week down there! I couldn’t stand that—not with his mother!”
“I gather from what you said that his mother is a riot. Is he anything like her?”
“Of course not—” Joy began indignantly, but the rise of recollection checked denial. Grant ossifying at the idea of Paragon Park on Sunday. . . . But anyone might do that. She rose, gathering conviction about her as a Shakespearean actor whips his cloak about him before an exit on a sounding phrase. “I can’t talk about it any more, Jerry. But when you know, you know.”
And so for a day or two, things remained as static as unexploded dynamite. Joy received a letter over which she wept ecstatic tears; Jerry shrugged her shoulders at both the tears and the ecstasy.
On Wednesday evening, Joy came to her for inspection, sheathed in defiance. “Do I look all right?”
Jerry was doing up a “little model” in one of her long cream paste-board boxes. She snapped the string around and tied it without replying. Then she said: “For the love of mud put on a veil or something to take the edge off those eyes. It isn’t fair to hit a place like the Copley looking like you do.”
“One should never wear a veil after six in the evening,” Joy retorted. “So I even look as if I were in love, do I?”