“Then you’d better be hurrying home. I wouldn’t for worlds interfere with your career.”
She felt quite grandmotherly as she said it. She did not look it, though, and as he stole a glance at her beauty, all demure and moonlike in the moon, he sighed: “But I can’t bear to leave you just as I’m beginning to—” he wanted to say “to love you,” but he had not prepared for the word, so he said, “to get acquainted with you.”
She understood his unspoken phrase and it saddened her. But she continued to be very old and extremely sage. “It’s too bad; but we’ll meet again, perhaps.”
“That’s so, I suppose. Well, all right, we’ll be sensible.”
And so, like two extremely good children, they put away temptation and closed the door of the jam-closet. Who can be solemner than youth at this frivolous age? What can solemnize solemnity like putting off till to-morrow the temptation of to-day?
The moment Sheila and Winfield sealed up love in a preserve-jar and labeled it, “Not to be opened till Christmas,” and shelved it, that love became unutterably desirable.
Nothing that they could have resolved, nothing that any one else could have advised them, could have mutually endeared them so instantly and so pathetically as their earnest decision that they must not let themselves grow dear to each other.
They finished their ride back in silence, leaving behind them a moon that seemed to drag at their flying shoulders with silver grappling-hooks. The air was humming forbidden music in their ears and the locked-up houses seemed to order them to remain abroad.
But he drew up at her little apartment-hotel and took her to the door, where a sleepy night-clerk-plus-elevator-boy opened the locked door for her and went back to sleep.
Sheila and Winfield defied the counsel of the night by primly shaking hands. Sheila spoke as if she were leaving a formal reception.