They walked on some time without speaking. Twice Ethan glanced down at the face beside him. For all its profound trouble, it was not the face of one defeated. He drew a perverse pleasure from the observation. Curiosity had from the first played no small part in the charm his cousin cast about him. What would she do under such and such conditions? And, meanwhile, what new longing, what new pain, that mutinous little face had planted in his heart! "I have never kissed her," he kept thinking as he looked at her mouth. "Has Wilbur ever kissed her?" The idea was revolting. He put it from him. He thought of the people that never have children. Suppose— He looked down at her again. This time he caught her eye, and she flushed hotly. He had no need of speech to assure him they had been thinking along the same lines.
"Of course," said Val, with an obvious effort, "I ought to behave as if I didn't understand what's involved. Any nice girl would pretend she—" Her voice got tangled and lost in a dry little sob; but she burst out again under her breath: "Oh, they aren't like me—the nice girls. Nobody ever cared so much as I do. Everything's different when you—when you care like this."
His heart contracted sharply. Had this come into his life only to go and leave him stricken in poverty? Under the girl's extravagance of speech was a richness of nature that gave her fierce young words authority. This primitive, unfaltering passion, naked and unashamed, was not only beautiful in his eyes with a kind of pagan splendor, but it soothed and satisfied his weary, doubting spirit. For the moment it carried his questioning down its swift current, making of his fears a mock, and whirling his heavy doubts like straws. And yet he kept a vigilant watch upon himself. With a man's abiding fear of being ridiculous, he was uncomfortably conscious of the little group of belated church-goers turning into St. Thomas's from Market Street, not so hurried but they might notice Val's excited face. To his companion, in her absorption, these acquaintances had been thin air.
"I dare say my father knew that, to many a girl, it wouldn't really matter much whether she married Harry Wilbur, or any other nice convenient person; but to me—"
"Come down this street," Ethan said. "You don't want to get into that mob."
He felt himself to be in one of those positions where to turn left or right, to go forward or go back, is equally to find offence and suffering. "It doesn't matter about me; I must think of her," he said to himself. At all hazards he must not forget that the girl at his side was little more than a child. He could neither explain to her why he was bound in honor to leave her, nor must he leave her with any haunting memory of the pain this going cost him. She had turned obediently when he suggested the side-street.
"Oh, I'm certain of it"—she brought one tight-clinched hand with a quick movement to her breast—"nobody ever cared like this before. Just look at their faces."
She stopped on the corner, eying, with a kind of impersonal disdain, the people that passed up the church-steps.
"You can see from their faces they've never cared—like this."