“Everything and nothing, David dear. I’m a little bit tired of being one, that’s all, and I want to go home.” 206
“She wants to go home when she’s being so truly delightful and cryptic,” David said. “Have you been seeing visions, Margaret, in my hearth fire? Your eyes look as if you had.”
“I thought I did for a minute.” She rose and stood absently fitting her gloves to her fingers. “I don’t know exactly what it was I saw, but it was something that made me uncomfortable. It gives me the creeps to talk about being a woman. David, do you know sometimes I have a kind of queer hunch about Eleanor? I love her, you know, dearly, dearly. I think that she is a very successful kind of Frankenstein; but there are moments when I have the feeling that she’s going to be a storm center and bring some queer trouble upon us. I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, David.”
As David tucked her in the car—he had arrived at the dignity of owning one now—and watched her sweet silhouette disappear, he, too, had his moment of clairvoyance. He felt that he was letting something very precious slip out of sight, as if some radiant and delicate gift had been laid lightly within his grasp and as lightly withdrawn again. As if when the door closed on his friend 207 Margaret some stranger, more silent creature who was dear to him had gone with her. As soon as he was dressed for dinner he called Margaret on the telephone to know if she had arrived home safely, and was informed not only that she had, but that she was very wroth at him for getting her down three flights of stairs in the midst of her own dinner toilet.
“I had a kind of hunch, too,” he told her, “and I felt as if I wanted to hear your voice speaking.”
But she only scoffed at him.
“If that’s the way you feel about your chauffeur,” she said, “you ought to discharge him, but he brought me home beautifully.”
The difference between a man’s moments of prescience and a woman’s, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of foresight. David tried to see Margaret once or twice during that week but failed to find her in when he called or telephoned, and the special impulse to seek her alone again died naturally.
One Saturday a few weeks later Eleanor telegraphed 208 him that she wished to come to New York for the week-end to do some shopping.
He went to the train to meet her, and when the slender chic figure in the most correct of tailor made suits appeared at the gateway, with an obsequious porter bearing her smart bag and ulster, he gave a sudden gasp of surprise at the picture. He had been aware for some time of the increase in her inches and the charm of the pure cameo-cut profile, but he regarded her still as a child histrionically assuming the airs and graces of womanhood, as small girl children masquerade in the trailing skirts of their elders. He was accustomed to the idea that she was growing up rapidly, but the fact that she was already grown had never actually dawned on him until this moment.