CHAPTER LVI
All during her homeward journey Joan had the feeling that she was waking slowly from a long dream; such a dream as ether gives, more vivid than reality itself but impossible of recapture. As he came literally nearer, Archie grew to be the dominant figure in her thoughts rather than Nikolai, though Nikolai was always there; Archie under the new light her friend's parting words had shed upon him. It mortified her to realize that another, almost a stranger to him, should have read her husband better than she did. It occurred to her, too, that with Nikolai she had not left behind her all Romance. A man who was capable of such a sacrifice as Archie Blair's could not be entirely commonplace. Her eyes had been suddenly opened.
Perhaps this was part of the help Nikolai had promised.
Indeed, her sentiments toward her husband became rather puzzling, being composed so far as she could decipher them of a desire to comfort him for the loss of herself, combined with a desire to be comforted by him for the loss of Stefan....
Her fellow-travelers eyed Joan with more than the usual interest she invariably excited among strangers; but to no avail. It was a time when what few barriers exist on shipboard at best went down in the sharing of a common peril, the menace of the submarine. Not so with Joan, however. She seemed unaware of friendly advances or invidious criticism: wrapped in a curious aloofness, from danger and from her fellowman alike. Nor was it an aloofness that would pass.
She had her great renunciation to make, and faced it; a renunciation which took the most difficult form, of dedication. Loneliness was upon her, not loneliness as she had known it before, a groping restlessness, a dissatisfaction. There was nothing left to grope for. She knew quite well now what she wanted, had always wanted, and might never have; but she knew, too, that on this solitary road of life, the warm human clasp of hands is something, the warm human touch of lips.... Thinking of Archie as Nikolai thought of him, her heart seemed to be stretching, literally expanding, with growing-pains; so that there might be room in it for two—or for a dozen, a hundred, as he had promised.
And presently she was able to return in spirit to the first night of her marriage, when for a little interval of time she had lost Joan the individual, and become simply the woman, whose mission is to give....
She had thought so much of her husband that she was quite prepared to find him waiting at the dock for her, yellow boots, Derby hat, and all. But he was not there, nor yet at the station in Louisville, though she had wired him from New York the date and hour of her coming.
Only two of the Misses Darcy were there to meet her, in Effie May's limousine, their manner nicely adjusted between melancholy, importance, and the empressement due a distinguished relative returning from foreign parts.