"Then let's walk this afternoon, do! Shall I come for you?"
"How nice of you! I'd like to so much."
On which the girl was gone, stepping on light feet down the side street. In the momentary lapse of talk, Charles's eye went after her. He saw something mysteriously withdrawn in that gray figure, something set forever apart.
And then, while he and his friend walked on six steps in silence, the young man wondered, with a sudden fierce annoyance, what Mary thought she was doing exactly.
Of Miss Trevenna he knew only what the world knew, which was little enough. One of several daughters of a prosperous family, she had been known as a reserved, and somewhat dreamy girl, indifferent to social life, and much addicted to curling up at home with books of poetry; Shelley's poetry or some such bewildering stuff; altogether a queer person. She even wrote poetry herself, it was damagingly alleged after the crash, and it was recalled that in women's meetings she had sometimes risen and expressed, in the quietest sort of way, ideas which disconcerted even the Hodgers of her day. Duly there had come to town the entirely typical dashing stranger: Robert McKittrick, this one was, an architect in government employ, who came with excellent letters. Mr. McKittrick was seen in public, a time or two, with Mr. Trevenna's quietly peculiar daughter; it was known that a sane and sound Mrs. McKittrick existed in Philadelphia, or some such place; there may have been a little mild talk, but it was very little and very mild. And then one fine day, the town was startled with the news that these two had taken the great jump together, by the last night mail train north.
It was the sort of thing you read about in every novel nowadays, especially if written by an Englishman. But this time, unluckily, it had really happened, and in a community not too large for a homogeneous public opinion. Moreover, life does differ just a little from the novels, in that it possesses no invisible author to shut the book splendidly, the moment the case is proved. Life did not leave Mr. McKittrick and Miss Trevenna forever singing in the honeymoon heyday. It merely kept them in the back of the town's mind for two years, a tidbit or a terrible warning, according as you looked at it, and then it brought Miss Trevenna back to us again, alone.
It might have seemed the oldest and the vulgarest story in the world. The weak, trusting maiden, the handsome, promissory villain, the flight, the rude awakening and Conviction of Sin, and then the piteous Return (Act III, Curtain) to Forgiveness, a black shawl, Quick Decline, and Death: these things have wrung the gallery's scalding tears from farther back than we can remember. But well Charles Garrott understood that Miss Trevenna's "case" had nothing to do with this cheap business. He thought it right enough, of course (theoretically speaking), that Mary Wing should sympathize with a sister in distress. And yet.... Well, no one, certainly, had "deceived" or "betrayed" Miss Trevenna. Quite probably she had proposed the excursion herself, like one of the glorious heroines at the moment educating British maidenhood. Miss Trevenna had gone with her lover because she had a Right to Her Happiness; she had gone to fulfil the Unwritten Law of Her Being; she had gone to Strike a Blow for Freedom. It was absurd to look for remorse in a black shawl here.
And still, glancing after that oddly cloistral figure, the young man felt that the net effect was not so different from the sorry old melodrama, after all.
He spoke suddenly, with a manner proving that he did not pride himself on wearing a mask for nothing:—
"Did you know that a woman's occipital condyles are less voluminous than a man's,—yes, considerably so,—while her zygomatic arches are more regular? Well, then, take my word for it, for they are."