"Good-night." The broad door swung slowly shut behind her. Even then she waited a moment, with a wild impulse to run after him. But she climbed the stairs instead and went wearily to bed, her heart aching with a sense of irreparable loss.
In the morning she was still very tired, and while she drove herself through the day's work she told herself that probably she had never really loved him. "Unless you can love as the angels may, with the breadth of heaven betwixt you," she murmured, remembering the volume of poetry she had found on a library shelf. She had thrilled over it when she read it, dreaming of him; now it seemed to her a grim and almost cynical test. Well, she might as well face a lifetime of work. Lots of women did.
She managed to do this, seeing years upon years of lonely effort, during which she would accumulate money enough to buy a little home of her own. There would be no one in it to criticise her choice of friends or say that she painted. That remark clung like a bur in her mind. Yes, she could face a lifetime in which no one would have the right to say things like that!
But when she went home she found that she could not endure an evening of loneliness. Louise and momma were going out, and she was very gay while she dressed to go with them. They said they had never seen her in better spirits.
Unaccountably, the lights, the music, the atmosphere of gaiety, did not get into her blood as usual. At intervals she had moments of depression that they did not touch. She sat isolated in the crowd, sipping her lemonade, feeling that nothing in the world was worth while.
However, she went again the next night. She began to go almost as frequently as momma and Louise, and to understand the unsatisfied restlessness which drove Mrs. Latimer and her friends. She was tired in the morning, and there were more complaints of her work at the office, but she did not care. She felt recklessly that nothing mattered, and she went back to the beach resorts as a thirsty person will tip an emptied glass in which perhaps a drop remains.
"What's the matter, little one? Got a grouch?" said Louise's American Beauty man one night He was jovial and bald; his neck bulged over the back of his collar, and he wore a huge diamond on his little finger. Helen did not like him, but it was his party. He owned the big red car in which they had come to the beach, and she felt that his impatient reproach was justified. She was not paying her way.
"Not a bit!" she laughed. "Only for some reason I feel like a cold plum-pudding."
"What you need's brandy sauce," Duddy said, appreciating his own wit.
"You mean you want me to get lit up!"