Florence felt half shocked, half relieved, to hear them talking thus, as they would have talked if there had been no situation. But she left the responsibility with Longacre. She nodded casually enough to him as she went away with Thair. But, for all her lightness, she could not conceal the evidences of what had happened to her. She dared not give her eyes all the light they knew, and still Thair wondered at their brightness. She could not keep the caress out of her voice. Her laugh lay too near her lips. Her breast heaved too high. She saw that Thair noticed it, but she felt it no longer mattered. Whom she danced with, what she said, she hardly knew. “Is that yes?” she heard Longacre saying, and then her answer: “Why not?”
Why not? Had she thought herself old? Her pulse was a girl’s, her color inconstant, her heart quick and irregular. She saw him across the crowd—a look. It was like a hand laid in her own. Was she beginning to live over again? Had he, for what she had given him, repaid her with youth? She was splendid in the flower of her mood.
She saw Julia Budd amid the crowd, distinct from it, yet somehow less vital—a colorful, restless-eyed ghost. Among the dispersing dancers—with the carriages at the door, and the morning faint yellow through the banana leaves—Julia passed her with the others, a dimly disturbing spirit. There was something searching, seeking, baffled in the look she gave Longacre as he helped her into the carryall. He was so vital, so alive, that he seemed to have taken from Julia some of her gorgeous magnetism. But Florence knew it was from another source the vitality had sprung. She was flushed and warm and sparkling with the thought of it. It kept her brilliant through the long ride back in the cold sea wind toward the cold saffron east. She was a whirl of feeling. She rushed along with her sensations as if she dared not think. The spin of the automobile helped her.
But when the rapid motion in the sharp half-light had changed for the long upward house-stair; when Longacre’s good night was but the memory of a hand-clasp around her fingers,—then she hurried to escape what was crowding on her elation. She shut the door of her room. She locked it; but the shadow that threatened had been too quick for her. The four walls closed it in. She turned up all the lights in the room. In their glare the shadow was fainter. She drew the curtains over the windows. She shut herself away from the growing light. She saw an image in her glass, a woman who loved, and was loved again, bright-eyed, hectic. The room was too small to hold her. The walls weighed down upon her. Her heart was too small to hold her happiness. Was it for that reason it ached, that it lay lead in her breast? And the fullness in her throat—tears of joy? It was very near to anguish.
She tried to recall Longacre’s face when he questioned, “Is that yes?” But she only saw the confused distraction with which he had answered Julia’s seeking look. She knew he belonged to her as never before. But she felt guilty, uneasy, criminal.
She was suffering. She pressed her hands on her smarting eyes, with her old impulse for reason crying, “Why?” What had she done? Whom had she robbed? She had only taken what was hers. Rather, it had been given freely, freely, she told herself insistently. Surely they belonged to each other, herself and the man she loved. What had the other people to do with it? Whom had she wronged?
She flung herself on her bed. The tumult of brain and soul ran out in tears. Triumph, strength, color, hope, were flowing from her; but the figures of the dark spelled out words before her closed, unsleeping eyes—motives that she had obscured, meanings that had been dim.
Whom had she wronged? One figure filled her inturned sight. The man she loved stood there, accusing her. The wrong she had done was between the two of them. To him she must answer.
“What had she done?” the poor ghost seemed to ask.
She had made him. For what? That question stared at her horribly. “For himself,” she tried to answer. It had been true in past years, but now it was inexplicably false. For herself, now. She would have hidden from the truth, but it was too quick for her. She lay still, seeing it all, flinching, but looking it in the face.