“Oh, this is worth coming back for.”
He rose and went to Tom’s room. He returned, a little doubtfully, with the manuscript. “I want to say first of all that there is nothing intentionally shocking about this chapter. It simply aims to tell how people really behave under circumstances usually glossed over with romantic phrases.”
At any rate, Gloria would understand; so why should he hesitate?
He began to read. From the first page, he was aware of a transformation in the atmosphere of the occasion. Gloria, who had been leaning forward with dramatic eagerness, became rigid in her attitude, and her humorous smile seemed to have become tensely frozen in its place. Madge had picked up a magazine, opened it to a picture, and continued to look at the picture while listening alertly, with an air of being at a key-hole. Tom continued gravely smoking his pipe, apparently oblivious of any constraint upon the others. After a little, Gloria carefully relaxed her attitude, and leaned back, looking above Felix’s head, with an impassive face and arms straight at her sides. Felix defiantly read on.
He knew there was nothing really shocking about the chapter—at least, to an enlightened and adult mind such as Gloria’s. It did not occur to him that in its local colour and middle-western psychology, there was something—not present in the most highly flavoured French romance—to disturb the pretences and awake the painful and ashamed memories of a middle-western mind: something sufficiently near to the unromantic truth of Gloria’s own secret life, perhaps, to evoke in her an hysterical disgust.... He only knew that the situation was becoming uncomfortable, and that he was sorry he had ever got into it.
He finished the chapter. There ensued a painful silence.
“Very remarkable writing indeed, Mr. Fay,” was all the comment the young woman back from abroad had to offer. Evidently what was delightfully daring in Paris was something else in Port Royal on the Mississippi....
Felix, not knowing quite what to think, went to put his manuscript away. Surely Gloria could not have been really shocked!... When he returned, they were all talking with animation about something else.... Presently it was time for the girls to leave. “I hear you’re going to Chicago soon,” Gloria said sweetly to Felix. “Bon voyage!”
“I have made a fool of myself again,” Felix said to himself bitterly.