“Oh, let us start, soon—soon,” she begged. “I want to go with you.”
“Yes—soon,” answered Langley. His head was high and his face the face of a young man. “Soon—my darling—wife.”
CHAPTER XI
AND then suddenly came one of those swift unexpected tragedies which knock the heart out of life for those who see and must witness them. This came on Horatia like a thunderbolt. Life was magnificently clean about Horatia—clean and beautiful—and then it was sullied by a contact.
She had told Grace Walsh that she was to spend the night with Maud and then she changed her mind. Going home from the office late and entering quietly so as not to wake Grace, she heard voices. It was midnight and she wondered. The voices were from Grace’s room, not from the sitting-room, and Horatia stood weakly still in the dark and heard them. One was a man’s and the other was Grace’s and they were saying things, half-laughing things which turned Horatia weak and sick. Somehow she stumbled out of the room—somehow got quietly down the stairs and out of the building. She walked to Maud’s blindly and when Harvey let her in said that she was very dizzy and must go straight to her room. Not to sleep. To listen to what Grace had said and the man had said and to see things of horror. Life was like that, was it? Foul—ugly? Was that love too? They had used the word—that word—her word! No, no, no, she cried to her tortured brain—not love. But Grace. Why should Grace be like that? Had she always been? Grace who was fond of her. She was agonized not by the facts as much as by her vision, her hearing of them. Abstractly her brain tried to argue. Argue modern things she had heard. Suddenly she understood many things that had puzzled her about Grace—understood conversations which they had had together. She tried to get Grace’s view of this, tried desperately. Grace had a right to live—to be herself, to act as she pleased. But her senses, her heart kept denying that—kept suffering its denial.
Harvey told her flatly at breakfast that she must cut out the night work if she didn’t want to ruin her health—and her looks. He took her downtown in his car and left her at the office for Jim to worry over. Her white face and her shocked eyes told Jim that something had happened. But she could not tell him. She worked mechanically, facing the time when she would have to see Grace.
At six o’clock she took advantage of Jim’s absence to slip out and go over to the apartment. Grace was there. She was paring potatoes in the kitchenette. Sometimes they got their own supper.
Horatia did not take her hat off. She stood and watched the knife scrape the skin from the potatoes. Grace looked at her.
Horatia’s knees were weak and queer. She felt herself apt to faint if she were not very, very slow and precise in what she said.