“I’m afraid I am. I like things just as you do—if they’re alive. It’s a bad way to be. It’s hard to concentrate because some new beautiful thing or emotion keeps dragging you off and destroys your continuity. And in this world of earnest women—”
“You criticize yourself. You feel that you don’t measure up to the women who do things. I know. But don’t you think, Mrs. Flandon, that something’s being lost somewhere? Aren’t women losing—oh, the quality that made poets write such things about them—I don’t know, it’s partly physical—they aren’t relaxed—”
She stood, pouring her words out in unfinished phrases as if trying desperately to make a confession or ask her questions before anything interrupted, her face lit up with eagerness, its fine, unfinished beauty diffused with half-felt desires. As she stopped, Helen let her stop, only nodding.
“I know what you mean. You’re right. It’s all mixed up. It’s what is puzzling the men too. We must talk, my dear.”
Helen was quite honest about that. She meant to talk with Freda. But there was no time that afternoon. In the Library club-room, crowded with women who had come at Mrs. Thorstad’s bidding for a “fresh inspiration,” Helen found her hands full. She gave her talk, toning it up a bit because she saw that Freda was expecting things of her and so wandering off the point a little. But the charm that Margaret wanted was in action and Margaret, quickly sensing the possibilities of Mrs. Thorstad’s town, settled down to some thorough organization work.
It was after the meeting that night that Helen saw Freda again. And then not in the hall. She had noticed the girl slip out after her own talk, as Mrs. Brownley rose to “address” the meeting, and wondered where she was going. To her discomfiture she had found that she was billeted on Mrs. Watson for the night as befitted their respective social dignities, and that Margaret was to spend the night at the Thorstad house.
But it was from Mrs. Watson’s spare room window that she saw Freda.
The skating rink, a square of land, flooded with water and frozen, lay below. As she went to pull down the shade in her bed-room window—she had escaped from Mrs. Watson as promptly as possible—Helen’s eyes fell on the skaters, skimming swiftly about under arc lights which, flickering bright and then dim, made the scene beautiful. And then she saw Freda. She was wearing the red tam-o’-shanter which Mrs. Flandon had already seen and a short red mackinaw and as she flashed past under the light, it was unmistakably she—not alone. There was a young man with her.
Helen watched her come and go, hands crossed with her partner, watched the swing of her graceful body as it swayed so easily towards the man’s and was in perfect tune with it.
“That’s one way you get the alive and beautiful, is it?” thought Helen.