She would be glad to see him, however; the difficulty was just to find an evening free. She counted over her engagements, beginning at the end of the week and working back, and decided she could give him the next evening. He came away from the interview grateful, but unhappy. Two things troubled him. When she could be so charmingly cordial, why did she ever assume that tantalizing aloofness which made a man wonder how much discomfort his attention was giving her? And why, when she must have known who he was, did she pretend to have forgotten? To
his simple standards of honesty it was disappointing. Then he reflected that he didn’t understand girls—that, of course, a girl of her popularity must be bored to death with cases like his own and had a right to use her own methods of defence.
It was a maid in uniform who admitted Billy to the Evison home and ushered him into a parlor to wait for Miss Marjorie. As it was his first experience with this formality he was a little embarrassed. The room itself was not just fashioned to put any one at ease. He didn’t know much about house furnishings, but he judged from its fantastic twistings and carvings that this was copied from some antique historic period. He knew also that it must have cost about as much as he would have to spend in equipping a whole house. A level shaft of warm, yellow light from the sunset came through the curtain and touched a vase of long-stemmed jonquils, but the highly cut points of the glass caught the light and splintered it into a dazzling spectrum, leaving the delicate beauty of the flowers pale and lifeless.
Somehow the picture remained strangely in his mind when Marjorie came. There was something dazzling about her, just as there had been when she played a local magnet in the college ballroom, and it seemed to outshine the natural girlish sweetness which by reason of his own
ideals and his lover’s interpretation of a few of her passing moods had grown into his thoughts of her. She greeted him with the assured graciousness cultivated of constant social experience that he knew nothing about. He was frankly embarrassed and he didn’t care. Weighed against her cool indifference, it seemed to save a remnant of reality in his dream.
The April evening out of doors was inviting. The night air was sweet with the perfume of budding orchards, the roads for miles around were smooth and damp, and the Department of Agriculture car was at their service. Billy considered her dress, doubtfully; very pretty it was, sheer and white, with little blue flowers sprinkled over it; very short, like a little girl’s, showing white silk stockings dotted with the same blue flowers.
“I just wondered,” he ventured, “if you’d care to wrap up and come for a drive?”
Her composure left her instantly. She drew in her breath in childish anticipation.
“Down to the city?” she asked. “I haven’t been there for ages. They’re playing The Follies to-night. Do you think we’d be in time if we hurried?”
A few minutes later she ran downstairs in her motoring outfit, followed by her mother. She was very proud of her mother, because, impressed by the striking resemblance, people always