CHAPTER VI
READJUSTMENT
June and July passed, and the life in the De Soto house was very uneventful. As soon as the group of guests left June requested her sister to ask no more visitors for a time, and the mid-summer days filed by, unoccupied in their opulent, sun-bathed splendor.
The blow at first crushed her. Despite the warnings she had received, it had come upon her with the stunning force of the entirely unexpected. The very fact that Jerry had been attacked by scandal had lent an exalted fervor to her belief in him. Even now, had there been a possibility of her continuing in this belief, she would have persisted. Weak, loving women have an extraordinary talent for self-deception, and June combined with weakness and love an irrepressible optimism. She tried to plead for him with herself, argued his case as before a stern judge, attempted in her ignorance to find extenuating circumstances for him, and then came face to face with the damning, incontrovertible fact that he himself had admitted.
It was a blasting experience. Had she known him less well, had their acquaintance been of shorter duration, the blow would probably have killed her love. But the period of acquaintance had been long, the growth of affection gradual. By the time the truth was forced upon her, her passion had struck its roots deep into her heart, and she was not strong enough to tear it out.
In the long summer days, wandering about the deserted, glowing gardens, she began the work of reconstructing her ideal. She told herself that she would always love him, but now it was with no confidence, no proud joy in a noble and uplifting thing. With agonizing throes of rebirth, her feeling for him passed from the soft, self-surrendering worship of a girl to the protective and forgiving passion of a woman. As it changed she changed with it. The suggestion of the child that had lingered in her vanished. The freshness of her youth went for ever. The evanescent beauty that happiness had given her, which on the day of Barclay’s declaration had reached its climax, shriveled like a flower in the heat of a fire. She looked pale, pinched, and thin. Eying her image in the glass, she marveled that any man could find her attractive.
In the first period of her wretchedness she was numbed. Then, the house swept of its guests and she and Rosamund once more alone, her silence broke and she poured out her sorrows to her sister. Rosamund heard the story from the first day at Foleys to its fateful termination in the Señora Kelley’s woodland bower.
She listened with unfailing sympathy, interrupted by moments of intense surprise. The revelations of the constant meetings with Barclay, which had been so skilfully kept secret, amazed and disconcerted her. She tried to conceal her astonishment, but now and then it broke out in startled queries. It was so hard to connect the unconscious and apparently candid June of the winter with this disclosure of a June who had been so far from candid. It was nearly impossible to include them in the same perspective. The culprit, engrossed in the recital of her griefs, was oblivious of her sister’s growing state of shocked amaze, which sometimes took the form of silence, and occasionally expressed itself in gently probing questions.
“But, June,” she could not help saying in protest, “didn’t you realize something wasn’t all right when you saw he’d rather meet you outside than see you at home?”
June turned on her an eye of cold disapproval.
“No. And I don’t see now that that’s got anything to do with it.”