CHAPTER VIII
ADVENTURE
I
ALL the time, under that motivating anger and determination not to go back, ran the two threads of thought—one quickly sifting the practicalities of a situation for a bare headed young girl in the streets of a city at two o’clock in the morning, the other analyzing, jeering at the melodrama of her position.
“It’s a warm night,” she thought, “I’ll probably get nothing but a terrific cold in my head if I do sit in Lincoln Park all night. That young devil! She planned all that. She deliberately didn’t tell Ted they were not coming straight home. There’s no way of proving it. I’d like to bring her to her knees. I’ll probably meet some fool policeman. How it will embarrass mother if this gets about. It’s an ugly mess if I don’t do things right. Nice ending to this visit. I knew the whole thing was bound to be disastrous. It was all a fake trip. That girl hated me from the start. As if I wanted that young fool.”
She was walking in the direction of the park, past the long iron fences, the smooth sloping terraces which characterized the Brownley part of the city. The street was absolutely quiet. Street lamps seemed very bright as she passed them. Here and there a light gleamed in a house, a night light behind an iron grilled door. Her footsteps seemed to resound with disastrous noise. She felt the sound of her walking was a disturbance of the peace, an affront to the quiet of everything about her. She hurried, trying to feel as if she were called out by illness, imagining what she would say if accosted, a little cooler of anger and beginning to be enthralled and intrigued by her own adventure.
Angry as she was, there was a thrill in the circumstances. She was sure she would not go back to the Brownley house and that resolve was backed perhaps by her interest in what might happen—what adventure might be awaiting her. Quite fearless and untroubled by any physical nervousness, her only anxiety was that she was not quite sure of how to meet any eventuality. But the night was hers. For a few hours she was thrown upon its mercy, and it exhilarated her, as if she had been released from annoying restraints. In her rush from the Brownley house she had satisfied a host of petty feelings which had been accumulating for weeks. It was as if she had broken through a horde of petty conventions which had been gaining a hold on her. She felt more herself than she had yet felt in the city. As she went along she almost forgot Barbara.
The park was still. The iron benches had long ago been deserted by even the last of the romantic couples. The policeman had evidently left the park for the night. Freda sat on a bench under a tree and tucked her feet under her to keep warm.
“Good thing mother insisted on an interlining in this coat,” she said to herself.
She heard the clock in Trinity High School sound half past two, after what seemed a long time. She was already chilled and cramped. Then she heard a sound of voices and looked up to see two men on the far side of the park, half a block away. It made her a little apprehensive. She suddenly felt a little unable to cope with two of them. Two had no romantic possibilities. If it had been one wanderer—
Hurriedly getting up, she slipped through the shadows and cleared the park, thankful that her coat was dark.