“Don’t you like me?” he persisted.
“Yes, I do.” She was very uncomfortable.
“Well, then, there’s no more to be said.” His 190 lips sought hers and pressed them. His breath came heavily, with little irregular catches in it.
She pushed him away and turned into the house.
“Don’t be angry, Eleanor,” he pleaded, trying to snatch at her hand.
“I’m not angry,” she said, her voice breaking, “I just wish you hadn’t, that’s all.”
There was no reference to this incident in the private diary, but, with an instinct which would have formed an indissoluble bond between herself and her Uncle Jimmie, she avoided dimly lit porches and boys with mischievous eyes and broad tweed covered shoulders.
For her guardians too, this year was comparatively smooth running and colorless. Beulah’s militant spirit sought the assuagement of a fierce expenditure of energy on the work that came to her hand through her new interest in suffrage. Gertrude flung herself into her sculpturing. She had been hurt as only the young can be hurt when their first delicate desires come to naught. She was very warm-blooded and eager under her cool veneer, and she had spent four years of hard work and hungry yearning for the fulness of a life she was too constrained to get any emotional hold on. 191 Her fancy for Jimmie she believed was quite over and done with.
Margaret, warmed by secret fires and nourished by the stuff that dreams are made of, flourished strangely in her attic chamber, and learned the wisdom of life by some curious method of her own of apprehending its dangers and delights. The only experiences she had that year were two proposals of marriage, one from a timid professor of the romance languages and the other from a young society man, already losing his waist line, whose sensuous spirit had been stirred by the ethereal grace of hers; but these things interested her very little. She was the princess, spinning fine dreams and waiting for the dawning of the golden day when the prince should come for her. Neither she nor Gertrude ever gave a serious thought to the five-year-old vow of celibacy, which was to Beulah as real and as binding as it had seemed on the first day she took it.
Peter and David and Jimmie went their own way after the fashion of men, all of them identified with the quickening romance of New York business life. David in Wall Street was proving to be something of a financier to his mother’s surprise 192 and amazement; and the pressure relaxed, he showed some slight initiative in social matters. In fact, two mothers, who were on Mrs. Bolling’s list as suitable parents-in-law, took heart of grace and began angling for him adroitly, while their daughters served him tea and made unabashed, modern-débutante eyes at him.