"Poor Francis!" she said softly, smiling a little. "After all, he isn't so terribly much older than I am." She felt suddenly motherly toward him, and like being very kind. That maltreated pillow was so funny and boylike. "It isn't a bit like the storybooks," she mused. "In them you get all thrilled because a man is so masterful. Well," Marjorie tried to be truthful, even when she was alone with herself and the couch, "I guess I was thrilled, a little, when he carried me off that way. I certainly couldn't have gone if I'd known about the housework business. But now, the only part of him I like is when he isn't sitting on me. . . . I wonder if I'll ever be the same person, after all this?"
She never would. But, though she wondered, she did not really think that she was changing or would change. As a matter of fact, she had made more decisions, gone through more emotions, and become more of a woman in the little time since Francis had carried her off than in all her life before. The Marjorie of a year ago would not have answered the challenge of her husband to prove herself an honorable woman by taking over a long, hard, uncongenial task. She would have picked up her skirts and fled back to New York with Logan.
"I suppose it's the war," said Marjorie uncomfortably. "Dear me, I did think that when the war was over it would be over. And everything seems so real yet. I wonder if when I'm an old, old lady talking to Lucille's grandchildren I shall tell them, 'Ah, yes, my dears, your Grand-aunt Marjorie was a very different person in the days before the war! In those days you didn't have to be in earnest about anything. You didn't even to have any principles that showed. Life wasn't real and earnest a bit. People just went to tea-dances and talked flippantly, and some of the men had drinks. And everybody laughed a great deal, and it was decadent, and the end of an era, and a lot of shocking things—but it wasn't half as hard as living now, because there weren't standards, except when they were had by aunts and employers and such people. Ah, them was the days!' And the grand-nieces, or whatever relation they'll be to me, will look shocked, because they'll be children of their time, and it will still be fashionable to be earnest, and they'll say, 'Dear me, what a terrible time to have lived in!' And they'll be a little bit envious. And they'll say, 'And were even you frivolous?' And I'll sigh, and say, 'Yes, indeed, my dears! I married a worthy young man (as young men went then) in a thoughtless moment, and then when he came back I wouldn't stay married to him. But by that time the war was over, and we'd all stopped being flippant and frivolous. So I washed dishes for him three months before I went and left him.' And they'll commend me faintly for doing that much, and go away secretly shocked."
Marjorie was so cheered up by her own fervent imaginings by this time that she stopped to sit down on the arm of a chair, all by herself, and laugh out loud. And so Francis saw her, as he came in for something, and looked up, guided by her laugh. He had scarcely heard her laugh before for some time. She was perched birdlike on the arm of the chair at the foot of his couch, just to be glimpsed between the draperies of the balcony. She looked, to his eyes, like something too fragile and lovely to be real. And she was laughing! That did not seem real, either. She might have been pleasant, even cheerful, but this sprite, swinging there and laughing at nothing whatever, almost frightened him. For an awful moment he wondered if he had driven Marjorie mad. . . . He had been unkind to her—hard on her, he knew.
Before he could stop himself he had rushed up the stairs to the little balcony.
"Marjorie—Marjorie! What were you laughing about?" he demanded in what seemed to her a very surprising way.
"Why, don't you want me to laugh?" she demanded in her turn, very naturally.
"I—why—yes! But you frightened me, laughing all by yourself that way."
"Oh, I see!" said Marjorie, looking a little embarrassed. "People often look surprised when I forget, and do it on the street. I think about things, and then when they seem funny to me I laugh. Don't you ever have thoughts all by yourself that you laugh over, when you're alone?"
Francis shook his head. He had a good mind, and a quick one, but he did not use it as something to amuse himself with, as Marjorie did with hers. He used it to work with.