She performed this rite, nodded to Gita and Elsie and swung lightly down the hall. A moment later they heard her car traveling at a reasonable pace.
Gita turned to Elsie. “Vale, Polly. But you don’t go. Not yet. You stay here until Eustace is able to leave. That’s final.”
“I feel lost and deserted myself!” exclaimed Elsie. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on you. You are a terrible devastating force, Gita. What will you do to my brother!”
And then she stared at Gita’s radiant face.
“Oh, don’t worry! Don’t worry! It won’t be as bad as you think.”
“Oh, when people are in love!” Elsie’s voice was more sarcastic than her mood.
Gita swung on her heel and stared out into the moonlight. “Better go to bed,” she said coldly. “Nothing more to say, is there?” . . .
She felt herself moving forward, felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to run out into that moonlight . . . recapture that mood so strangely compounded of exaltation and dismay, triumph and disappointment, poignant sweetness and futile resentment at the remorseless incompleteness of life. . . .
She whirled upon Elsie and, although her words tumbled out fiercely, a curious quaver of helplessness ran through them. “Oh, you both have your revenge! I should think life altogether wonderful tonight and I almost hate it. It was bad enough to have to break off—to miss—to have to wait—oh, damn honor! Damn noblesse oblige! I wish we’d been born in a different class—like some of your sophisticates—that never heard of such things—no, I don’t! I only wish things could have been different—that life didn’t always laugh at you—that life wasn’t always trying to get the best of art and generally succeeding——Life could be so wonderful and it’s just a mean chromo of art and delights in the fact and in taunting our anticipations—those lovely works of art we create and hang in the blessed spaces of the mind—taunting and shattering——
“Oh, stop staring at me as if I were a lunatic, and go to bed. I’ll be all right tomorrow. Oh, yes! Oh, yes! I’ve got to be. But at any rate I won’t go to bed. That would be a little too much!”