“I was pretty dumb not to see that it was Joan Nevin all the time, from the first minute he saw her!
“When he got back to New Haven, after his visit here, he didn’t write. He’d written every day for months. I nearly went insane watching for mail. I wrote him at first, pretending everything was the same. But when he wouldn’t answer, I began calling him up on long distance. He was always out—they said. I sent telegrams too. I hadn’t any pride. Or I’d have it one hour, decide I’d let eternal silence on my part show him how indifferent I was, and the next minute, almost, I was calling long distance again. It was wild, but I didn’t seem to have any will. Then, to-day, I couldn’t stand it. I had to see him if he was never going to answer the telephone, never write. So I cut all my classes and went to New Haven. I’d gone to classes right along. Even studied. Patty never guessed anything, right in the room with me! I didn’t cry, not once. Till you came in just now.
“I went right from the train to Prescott’s dorm. And I met him coming out of the street door. I had meant to go right up to his room, unless somebody stopped me. But there he was—like Fate. He took me away from the college into the town to an awful, dirty little eating place, miles away. It seemed miles. And all the time he talked. He said I was crazy and he despised me for chasing him like that. He’d made love to dozens of girls and got through with them. But not one of them had ever done a crazy thing like coming to his dormitory and trying to throw a scene. Girls of my sort understood how much necking meant with a man, and how little. If they didn’t, he’d written a book, to help them to, hadn’t he! If a man of his sort wanted something more serious than necking, he didn’t usually take it with the sisters of his best friends. Or with my kind of girl at all. He thought I’d understood that. I’d pretended to understand, he said.
“And he talked like anything against Mother—sneered—kept saying that in inviting him to visit us she’d tacitly admitted that she expected me to be able to take care of myself. Or hadn’t she believed in the sincerity of ‘Stephen’s Fall’? She had read it, hadn’t she? Well, then—and so on! He said that she, Mother, expected to have her cake and eat it too. That she didn’t think straight.
“He said it had come to him here at Wild Acres that in spite of Mother’s and my stupidity, he didn’t want to go on fooling along with his best friend’s sister any longer.
“I grabbed his hands. We were in the tearoom. They were building a house out of matches. He has marvelous hands, do you remember? Just looking at them stops your heart,—my heart. He pulled them away, and there mine lay, flat, on the tablecloth. I looked at them and looked at them. They seemed to have dropped off from my arms and be just lying there, you know.
“He wouldn’t even look at me any more. His face was all twisted—snarly. Loathing me. I left my hands on the table and said over and over, ‘I love you. I love you. What has Glenn got to do with it? Or Mother? I’ll take all the responsibility. You’re afraid, that’s what’s the matter. You’re afraid of Glenn. And Mother. Afraid.’
“He got even angrier. He said, ‘Be quiet. Glenn Weyman’s friendship means more to me than necking with a dozen girls like you, or a hundred. How couldn’t it! He has a mind I respect. He’s a person. A contemporary I value. He means something in my life and always will, I hope. And of course, I’m not afraid of him. He isn’t the sort to let me down because I’ve kissed his sister a few times without matrimonial intentions. Not Glenn. Hugh’s in that class, perhaps. Hugh might raise a rumpus, even now, when we haven’t done anything. So what if we had? Doesn’t that scare you?’
“He said he didn’t suppose I was capable of understanding how much more real satisfaction it was to him to spend his time with a person like Glenn than to waste it dabbling for hours with me on the edge of a slough of sentimentality tainted with sensuality. The economical and fastidious thing, he said, was for him to take his intellectual companionship where he could find it, with fellows like Glenn, and when he wanted a girl he’d do what Stephen did before he lost his soul and married the nice daughter of his president.... Yes, Ariel. He said that.
“He said, ‘If I ever do fall romantically in love, it would have to be with a developed personality, a real woman. Some one who has a life of her own, and to whom our passion would be just an incident of that life, not a fulfillment. Some one like Mrs. Nevin.’