"I don't know. I hate to worry him; but that poor woman must need help."
"Oh, she needs it. We all need it," remarked Gershom flippantly. Then, as they reached the entrance to the Square, he held out his hand. "Well, I'm off now, and I hope you aren't feeling any worse because of your visit. The world ain't made of honeycomb, you know, and there's no use pretending it is. But you're a darn good sport, Patty. You're as good a sport as I ever struck up with in this little affair of life."
CHAPTER XVIII
MYSTIFICATION
Walking slowly home across the Square, Patty told herself that the future had been taken out of her hands. She seemed to have been moved mentally, if not bodily, into another world, into a world where the sleepy old Square, wrapped in a soft afternoon haze, still existed, but from which Stephen Culpeper had vanished in a rosy cloud. She did not know why she had relinquished the thought of Stephen since her visit to the house in East Leigh Street; but some deep instinct warned her that she had widened the gulf between them by her excursion with Gershom. "I can't help it," she thought sensibly enough. "There wasn't anything in it before that, and I might as well go ahead and stop thinking about it." Her anger at Stephen's neglect had melted into a vague and impersonal resentment, a resentment, rather for the dying woman than for herself, against all the needless cruelties of life. Even Gershom, even the unspeakable Gershom, had had discernment enough to see that something good in that poor woman had been blighted and crushed. Was it true that no one was ever given the chance to be one's best? Was this true, not only of that dying woman, but of her father and Stephen and Corinna and herself and all human beings everywhere?
Lingering a moment near the Washington monument, she stood watching the straggling groups that were crossing the Square. Bit by bit, snatches of conversation drifted into her mind and then blew out again, leaving scarcely the shadow of an impression. "They tell me it's going up. I don't know, but I'll find out to-morrow." "I wouldn't wear one of those things for a million dollars, and he says—" "Yes, I've arranged to go unless the strike should be called next week."
The strike? Oh, she had almost forgotten it! She had almost forgotten the message she had promised to deliver to her father. With a gesture that appeared to sweep her last remaining illusion behind her, she started resolutely up the drive to the house. After all, whatever came, she would not let them think that she was either afraid of life or disappointed in love. She would not mope, and she would not show the white feather. On one point she was passionately determined—no man, by any method known to the drama of sex, was going to break her heart!
She had quickened her steps while she made her resolve; and, a minute later, she broke into a run when she saw that Corinna's car stood at the door and that Corinna waited for her in the hall. Had the girl only realized it, Corinna's heart also was troubled; and the visit was one result of the discouraging talk she had had recently with Stephen.
"I had to go down town, so I stopped on the way back to speak to you." Though she said no word of her anxiety, Patty could hear it in every note of her expressive voice and feel it in the protective pressure of her arm. "I want you to go with me to the Harrisons' dance Wednesday night, and I want you to look your very prettiest."