Glenn’s face was as white as the petals of the paper narcissus blowing in the June breeze by the side of the long chair. Anne’s eyes were black with pain. They were both breathing fast. Short, nervous breaths.
After a minute Anne muttered. “He’ll get over it and be happy yet. He’ll go on and have a good life. See if he doesn’t! It was Joan, of course.”
“How did you know? Yes, it was. But don’t say it to a soul. Promise? He saw her in town after he learned he’d lost out at Yale. He said something to frighten her. Must have, I think. She saw he was desperate, anyway. And she refused to see him again. Cut him right out. I knew he’d written since and called her up. He told me this was what he’d do too,—blow his brains out. But I—fool—couldn’t believe him. Anne, I laughed at him. Didn’t help him any.... You see I simply can’t imagine any one being so desperate he’ll do a thing—like this. I can’t yet, as a matter of fact. But if I’d had the imagination, I might have saved him. It’s worse now, it seems to me, than as if he’d succeeded. Ghastly humiliating, unless he tries again and does a clean job next time. I was a damned fool. I am a damned fool.... I failed him....”
Anne held her cigarette case toward Glenn again, pulling one out for herself at the same time. Glenn lit his from the stub of the one about to burn his fingers, and kicked viciously at the clump of paper narcissus blowing beside them, there in the June garden. Anne’s eyes followed the kick sympathetically. Her hands, clutching the arms of the long chair, were shaking. And she had thought she was going to be calm when Glenn came home!
All that morning, from the time she had happened upon the Times headlines soon after breakfast, she had tramped—she didn’t know where—in woods and fields. And all the afternoon she had lain here, exhausted, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the light change across the lawn and garden and the edges of the woods, and waiting for Glenn. Ariel she had avoided, rather than hunt her out. For Ariel had done for her, Anne, what there had been nobody to do for Prescott. And Anne almost resented that she had had an Ariel to go to, when Prescott had had no one. If Anne herself was any good, Prescott would have had her, as she had had Ariel.... If she had been understanding.... If she had been able to break the snare of her own blind, egoistic passion and had not driven him away from her by clutching at—what never comes for clutching.... How terrible to be deaf and dumb and blind with passionate love—and to lose that way all the possibilities of friendship and its salvations!
And now, even if the beloved ever came sane,—and, blind in one eye and shattered, should undertake to face the world again and its bitterness, it would never be Anne who would help steady him to it. It would be Glenn, perhaps. And, looking at the paper narcissus which had sprung erect again with delicate vitality from Glenn’s kick, she made a resolution that Glenn must not know to what a degree she was suffering over the plight of—his friend. Why, one of the reasons for Prescott’s breaking with her was his desire that Glenn should never know how far their affair had gone. He had valued Glenn’s comradeship mountains above Anne’s stupid, egoistic passion of love. And he was right to do so. One thing she could save from the wreck of what might have become a fine, even a lovely, human relationship with Prescott: she could save Prescott’s self-respect with her brother and incidentally, but not primarily, for truly she was not thinking of herself in the old way any more, her own self-respect.
“Joan’s called off the dinner to-night, I suppose,” Glenn muttered.
“Not so far as I know,” Anne said, keeping her voice from shaking with better success than her hands. “And I don’t think she will. In fact, I hope she won’t. For both Hugh’s and Ariel’s sake. And why should she? She’ll pretend, don’t you think, to be absolutely out of all this business?”
“Yes. I suppose she will. But, of course I shan’t go. And you needn’t either, Anne. After all, you were fond of him too. You can say you’re cut up, as I shall say.”
Suddenly he turned and looked at her with a sharpness that almost broke down her defenses. “And I believe you are. Of course you are. You and Pressy were quite pals. Anyway, I know he liked you tremendously.”