“You need not say any more. I never want to speak to him again!” said Dosia, strangling. She swept her things from the table and rushed up to her own room in a whirlwind of indignation and shame, scathed by the imputation in Lois’ tone. The bubble of her imagining of Lawson was pricked for the moment by it; it is hard to idealize what another despises. She felt herself as false to her own estimate of him as she had hitherto been to the public one.
She threw herself upon the bed face downward. Something that she had been unconsciously dreading had come upon her—the notice of her little world. Before it had been voiced to her by Lois she had persistently considered herself unseen. She cried out now that there was no occasion for her being “spoken to,” yet she knew with a deep acknowledgment that she had not been quite true to her highest instincts.
The exquisitely sensitive perception which is an inherent part of innocence was hers. The Dosia who at twelve could not be induced to enter a room when a certain man was in it, because she “did not like the way he looked at her,” had as unerring an instinct now as then; it was an instinct so deep, so interwoven with every pulse of her nature, that to deny it ever so little was a spiritual hurt. She could not have told why certain subjects, certain joking expressions even, revolted her so that she shrank from them involuntarily. She could not have told why she knew there was something about Lawson different from the other men she had been accustomed to. Dosia not only knew nothing of the practice of evil, she knew nothing of life nor the laws of it; but it could never be said of her that she did not know when right bordered on wrong. She knew—and it would have been impossible for her not to have known—her slightest deviation from that shining road which can only be followed by white feet. Her first quick idea of Lawson as not the kind of man that she would ever want to marry still held good. Back of all this was the image of the true prince.
There are people whose natures we always feel electrically, a sensation which depends neither on liking nor on disliking, and which often partakes of both. When we meet them there is always a slight shock, a psychic tingling, a displacement of values, that makes us uncertain of our pathway; the colors seen in this artificial light are different from those seen by day. Barr affected Dosia thus. If he came into a room, she knew it at once; dancing or walking or talking with others, she felt his eyes upon her, disquieting her and making her conscious of his presence, so that she could not get up or sit down naturally. When he was not there, everything was flat and uninteresting in the withdrawal of this exciting disquietude. If she met his remarks cleverly, it gave her a delighted occupation for hours in recalling them; if she failed in repartee, and was “thick” and school-girlish, her cheeks would burn and the taste for life would leave her; she could hardly wait to see him again to retrieve herself. She was not in love with Barr, she was not even in love with love,—a fairly healthful process,—but she was in love with the excitement of his presence.
She had been shy of him at first, waiting for him to seek her. After the night of the bazaar and that wondrous waltz, she had felt that he must fly to speak to her at the nearest opportunity, and tell her that he had played for her, and her alone; and in return she had longed to assure him of her divining sympathy. But he did not come. She invented many excuses for this, but it gave her a sharp disappointment of which he was necessarily unconscious. As she met him casually at different places,—with the old quizzical gleam in his eye, and that peculiar manner,—his lightest word became fraught with deep meaning, over which she pondered, refusing to believe that the world she lived in was entirely of her own creation. In these last two months she had always an undercurrent of thought for him, whether she was practicing or sewing, or chaffing with Billy, or receiving the gallant but somewhat heavy attentions of Mr. Sutton. With Lawson’s avoidance of her had come a childish, uncalculating’ impulse to attract. Dosia had not told the truth when she said that she could not help his speaking to her; she knew very well the morning he would have passed her by in the train, as usual, if her eyes had not met his. Barr never presumed,—he knew the place allotted to him,—but he accepted permission. When he sat down by her, she swiftly wished him away again; yet her heart beat under his cool glance—a glance which seemed to read her every thought. These interviews, in which the conversations were of the lightest, yet in which she felt subtle intimations, were a delicious and stinging pleasure, like eating ice.
There had been a fitful burst of suburban gayety about Christmas-time and after—a delightful flare that burned up red and glowing, only to sink back gradually into the darkness of monotony. There was that fall into a hum-drum condition of living, instigated by bad weather, which shuts up each household into itself; the men were kept later down-town, and the women had the usual influx of winter colds and minor maladies which interfere with planned festivities. The younger sort had engagements, individually and collectively, for “things in town,” either coming out on the last train or staying comfortably overnight with friends. An assembly dance planned for Shrove Tuesday had fallen through.
The fairy glamour was already gone for Dosia. The personal note which she had missed at first was everything, and she found it nowhere but in Lawson. If she could have poured out her thoughts and feelings to Lois,—“talked things over,” girl-fashion,—if Lois had been her friend and lover—But Lois had no room for her; Dosia had learned to feel all the bitterness of the alien. And she was shy with the pleasant but self-sufficient women whom she met socially, and who were so intimate with one another; Dosia merely sat on the edge of conversations, so to speak, and smiled. She could not learn this assured fluency. The very children were hedged in from her by restrictions. To give up those little incidental meetings with Lawson was to give up the one silver string on which hung happiness, and yet—and yet—Dosia felt the sting of Lois’ matter-of-fact contempt for him; it lowered him indescribably. All women look down upon a man who will allow himself to be despised. She had cherished an ideal of him as a man lonely, misunderstood, terribly handicapped by opinion, by his own nature even, and yet capable of good and noble things. She had thought——
“Dosia?”
“Well?”
“Will you shut your door? The light streams down here and keeps Reginald from going to sleep. He waked when you went up-stairs.”