“The story of my own infamy—I must put down!” She laughed hysterically. “You see, Dwightie, it’s so fun-ny—when I came offering all I had!”
When the young man had left the house, Julie slipped suddenly and insensibly to the floor.
It was dusk when she thoroughly came to herself. Her brain was clearer, and into it faintly crept the hope that Calmiden might emerge successfully out of the catastrophe. Betrayal on his part—however odious Purcell had sought to represent her—was inconceivable.
Dwight had dispatched a boy with a mountain of viands, which she barely touched. She was not hungry. This was no time for eating, when all the issues of her life were at stake. With a heart that stopped beating at every foot-fall upon the road outside, she sat unmoving among the shadows. Every minute must bring him to her need. This day could not end in this monstrous state of affairs.
But as dusk deepened into night and no sign of Calmiden appeared, a bitter frenzy of anger stirred up in the wretched girl’s heart. What kind of a man after all was he who could stand by, without offering a protest, while her enemies calumniated her? Here in her humbled pride and disgrace, she was crouched waiting for a man who had so clearly repudiated her that he did not even deign to proffer an explanation of his conduct. From the affairs of this notorious nobody—her promiscuous love affairs, and wholesale debts, he had contemptuously withdrawn himself. Calmiden, she knew, had the conventional notions about the impeccability of a woman’s name. It was her whole duty, as he expressed it, to keep it “unsullied.” He made sharp, very sharp distinctions in his standards for the sexes. All women were shooed into one corner of the universe, from which he dared them on the direst penalties to emerge, while the men gamboled in the rest of its wide areas in a fashion which he tolerantly chose to ignore. And all the while he sincerely believed himself the broadest minded man on earth. He had frequently crushed Julie in their arguments with his towering Victorian morality. Julie had attributed what she considered his charmingly archaic habit of mind to the fact that he had derived his education at West Point, a sort of Military Monastery where women were barred.
“Pooh!” Calmiden had replied to this, “girls come up there in shoals!”
“But you see them only on Dress Parade! What do you know about them in their own environment, in the real phases of life that stretch back of the Dress Parade?”
“It was nice to have them come!”
“Ah! I think that that is just a little of what is the matter with you, Kenneth. You began your life with woman coming to you!”
Julie admitted, as she sat waiting for him, that she had committed some intolerable foolishness. It was perfectly true that in order to afford herself the thrill of conquest and satisfy at the same time an errant poetic opulence in her nature, she had inconsiderately, joyously and, as she had believed, inconsequentially, permitted most of the men to make love to her. And that not singly but simultaneously—and now she had been found out. Slowly began to awaken in her mind the significance of every human act in the infinite chain of cause and effect. Every one of these men had been humanly piqued and curious. That, perhaps, accounted for their listening to Purcell. Concerning Jack Adams, Julie felt her one justifying thrill. Her comrade at arms!