“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Betty’s experience off Green Island with the big guns and the seaplane might prove to be a part of the drama, though how I can’t see.”
A sound from off the bay reminded her of the great dark seaplane Pearl had seen off Monhegan.
“Monhegan and the girl I saved from the sea,” she said to herself. “How do they work in? Well, perhaps they don’t. As life is built up, some stones must be thrown aside.
“Life,” she said quite suddenly, “life is a joke.”
Somehow the words did not seem to ring true. She was tempted to wonder how she had come to believe that at all.
“It was the way that boy said it, I suppose,” she told herself. “Some people have a way about them. They are hard to resist.”
Stepping to the chest of drawers in one corner of her room, she took out the figured taffeta dress. It was a very attractive dress—pink roses over a background of pale gray. She had never worn it. To wear it would be to declare to her little world that she believed life was a joke. At least that was the way she felt about it. So, as yet, she did not feel ready to put it on.
Spreading it out on the bed, she looked at it for a long time. Then, carefully folding it up again, she put it back in the drawer.
After that, with all the realization of what to-morrow might bring forth, she did something she had not done since she was a little child. She dropped on her knees beside her humble bed, and placed her palms together in prayer.