with a smile shining through them. But he was not prepared for the deluge that swept her when the impenetrable darkness came down over the enchanted garden and the little dream daughter, who might have set things right for the misunderstood artist, cried in the hopelessness of a child’s terrified loneliness “I don’t want to be a ‘Might Have Been.’”
He had seen her weep in poetic enjoyment of pathetic parts before, but this was different and offered no explanation for itself. Sitting as close as the arm of the chair and the formality due in a public place would allow, he got the impact of each fresh shock. He was genuinely concerned. It was a most helpless situation. There were ways of meeting it, of course, which he knew—but not in a public theatre.... If only the lights would go out! Still it troubled him a little. And when it was over her sole comment was “Wasn’t it wonderful!”
“You liked it!”
“It was the most beautiful thing—”
“Even the garden? Just what was the trouble?”
“I hardly know myself. Sometime I’ll try to tell you.”
There would always be something left to tell—a new world dawning every morning, new mysteries unfolding every evening—a wonderful blessing on a long journey together.
When he left her he stood bareheaded, boyish in his humility, and spoke, as thousands of lovers had done before him, of the time when she would go all the way home with him.
It came in October. The painters had fairly crowded the carpenters out of the house, and before the last varnish was dry on the woodwork Billy had cleared away the wreckage of mortar, boxes and discarded scaffolds and left the house standing trim and solid between the sentinel pines, unmistakably new, but looking as though it had grown there. The next day Ruth’s aunt, accompanied by a capable charwoman and a truck load of boxes, known in the housewife’s vernacular as chests, decorously chaperoned her niece to her future home to arrange furniture and hang curtains and give the last touches toward making it sufficiently habitable to begin with. The aunt wasn’t just sure that it was the proper thing for a girl to visit her fiancee’s house before she was married. She didn’t know that Ruth had rope-walked the naked joists in the moonlight with Billy many times while the building was in progress; that they had measured the windows for curtains by the gleam of a flashlight a month before, else how could they have planned every last chair and hanging. The next night they came home to the house together.