Nancy came into the dim old drawing room behind young Cameron. It was that fact that attracted Raymond first. He recalled what Mrs. Tweksbury had said about the type being the ideal of man—or something like that—and Cameron, whom he had just met a few weeks before, had apparently got into action.
After Nancy came Doctor Martin—it was as if the male element surrounded the girl.
She was rather breath-taking and radiant. She wore a coral-pink satin gown, very short and narrow. Her pretty feet were shod in pink stockings and satin slippers. Her dainty arms and neck were white and smooth, and her glorious fair hair was held in place by a string of coral beads.
There are a good many platitudes that are really staggering facts.
"Caught on the rebound," is one.
Raymond was more open to certain emotions than he had ever been in his life. He was sore and bruised; he had lost several beliefs in himself—and was completely ignorant of the big thing that had given him new strength.
He had had the vision of passion through the wrong lens; he had been blinded by the close range, but he knew what the vision was. In that he had the advantage of poor Joan.
His youth cried out for Youth; he wanted what he had all but lost the right to have. But he in no sense just then wanted Nancy; it was what she represented. She was what Mrs. Tweksbury had said, the kind of girl that men enshrine in their souls and never replace even when they gladly accept a substitute.
"If only——" and then Raymond's eyes looked queer. He was living over the black hour which he did not realize was the hour of his soul's birth. He'd never have that battle again, he inwardly swore, but that was poor comfort.
And then, while talking to Nancy, he grew very gay and light-hearted, like someone who had made a safe passage past the siren's rocks. Not that it mattered, except that one did not want to be shipwrecked. Of course, Raymond knew, he wouldn't forget while he lived, the other thing just past, but it had not wrecked him.