CHAPTER IV
Cinderella
Nancy shut the door of her apartment behind her, and slipped out into the dimly lit corridor. From her sitting-room came a burst of concerted laughter, the sound of Betty’s sweet, high pitched voice raised in sudden protest, and then the echo of some sort of a physical struggle; and Caroline took the piano and began to improvise.
“They won’t miss me,” Nancy said to herself, “I must have air.” She drew a long breath with a hand against her breast, apparently to relieve the pressure there. “I can’t stay shut up in a room,” she kept repeating as if she were stating the most reasonable of premises, and turning, fled down the two flights of stairs that led to the outside door of the building.
The breath of the night was refreshingly cool upon her hot cheeks, and she smiled into the darkness gratefully. Across the way a row of brownstone houses, implacably boarded up for the summer, presented dull and dimly defined 50 surfaces that reflected nothing, not even the lights of the street, or the shadow of a passing straggler. Nancy turned her face toward the avenue. The nostalgia that was her inheritance from her father, and through him from a long line of ancestors that followed the sea whither it might lead them, was upon her this night, although she did not understand it as such. She only thought vaguely of a strip of white beach with a whiter moon hung high above it, and the long silver line of the tide,—drawing out.
“I wish I had a hat on,” she said. There was a night light in the chemist’s shop at the corner, and the panel of mirror obligingly placed for the convenience of the passing crowd, at the left of the big window, showed her reflection quite plainly. She was suddenly inspired to take the soft taffeta girdle from the waist of her dark blue muslin gown, and bind it turban-wise about her head. The effect was pleasingly modish and conventional, and she quickened her steps—satisfied. There was a tingle in the air that set her blood pleasantly in motion, and she established a rhythm of pace that made her feel almost as if she were walking to music. Insensibly her mind took up its responsibilities 51 again as the blood, stimulated from its temporary inactivity, began to course naturally through her veins.
“There is plenty of beer and ginger ale in the ice-box,” she thought, “and I’ve done this before, so they won’t be unnaturally disturbed about me. Billy wanted to take Caroline home early, and Dick can go on up-town with Betty, without making her feel that she ought to leave him alone with me for a last tête-à-tête. It will hurt Dick’s feelings, but he understands really. He has a most blessed understandingness, Dick has.”
She had the avenue almost entirely to herself, a silent gleaming thoroughfare with the gracious emptiness that a much lived in street sometimes acquires, of a Sunday at the end of an adventurous season. It was early July, the beginning of the actual summer season in New York. Nancy had never before been in town so late in the year, nor for that matter had Caroline or Betty, but Betty’s interest in the affairs of the Inn was keeping her at Nancy’s side, while Caroline had just accepted a secretarial position in one of the big Industrial Leagues recently organized by women for women, that 52 would keep her in town all summer. Billy and Dick, by virtue of their respective occupations, were never away from New York for longer than the customary two weeks’ vacation.
“My soul smoothed itself out, a long cramped scroll,”—her conscience placated on the score of her deserted guests, Nancy was quoting Browning to herself, as she widened the distance between herself and them. “I wonder why I have this irresistible tendency to shake the people I love best in the world at intervals. I am such a really well-balanced and rational individual, I don’t understand it in myself. I thought the Inn was going to take all the nonsense out of me, but it hasn’t, it appears,” she sighed; “but then, I think it is going to take the nonsense out of a lot of people that are only erratic because they have never been properly fed. I guess I’ll go and have a look at the old place in its Sunday evening calm. Already it seems queer not to be there at nine o’clock in the evening, but I don’t really think there are people enough in New York now on Sundays to make it an object.”
Nancy’s feet turned mechanically toward the arena of her most serious activities. Like most 53 of us who run away, she was following by instinct the logical periphery of her responsibilities.