"I thought I'd netted a wren," he answered, "but it seems I've caught a bird of Paradise."
"Then it was your ignorance of natural history, and not I, that deceived you," she retorted gayly, "because I didn't spread my wings for you, did you imagine that they were not brilliant?"
There was a note almost of relief in her voice as she spoke—for she knew now that, so long as he refused to be serious, she could not tell him until to-morrow.
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH LAURA ENTERS THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION
Two weeks later Laura was still able to assure herself that it was this lack of "seriousness" in Kemper's manner which had kept her from alluding to the burned letter. Since the morning on which she had seen Adams, she felt that she had merely skimmed experience without actually touching it; and three days from the date of her marriage she was as far from any deeper understanding of the situation as she had been in the beginning of her love. In the end it was so much easier to ignore her difficulties than to face them; and it seemed to her now that she was forced almost in spite of herself into Gerty's frivolous attitude toward life. To evade the real—to crowd one's existence with little lies until there was no space left through which the larger truth might enter—this was the only solution which she had found ready for her immediate need.
Adams she had not met again; once he had called, but impelled by a shrinking which was almost one of fear, she had turned back on the threshold and refused to see him. Even Gerty she had tried to avoid since the afternoon in Kemper's rooms, but Gerty, who was in her gayest mood, drove down every day "to overturn," as she carelessly remarked, "the newest presents."
"I'm heartily glad you're going to Europe," she said, "and I hope by the time you come back you'll have lost that nervous look in your face. It never used to be there and I don't like it."
At her words Laura threw an alarmed glance at the mirror; then she turned her head with a laugh in which there was a note of bitterness.