"We have, surely, God save you kindly," said Michael Daragh, and his face had what Jane called its stained-glass-window look.
She felt very flushed and humbled under their beaming approbation. "There's only her own courage to thank!" But she snatched up a bit of the despised decoration, her cheeks scarlet. "You know,—I'm so happy—so gorgeously, dizzily happy—I can hear that magenta-colored paper joy-bell ring a silvery chime!"
It was November when Jane made her exodus from the Vermont village and her entry into New York, and by early summer she had written and sold three one-act plays for vaudeville which yielded plump little weekly royalties and gave her a reputation quite out of proportion to her output and experience. They began to advertise her sketches as "different" and to build up a vogue. "So and So in a Jane Vail act," said a pretty billboard, and Rodney Harrison gave himself jocularly proud airs as her discoverer and sponsor.
"I see clearly," said Jane, "that I must call you my Fairy God-brother!"
"I do not seem to crave the brother effect," said Mr. Harrison deliberately, before he gave his attention to a hovering head waiter. He was distinctly what her village called "not a marrying man," but he was beginning to have his moments of meaningful look and word.
"Well, then," said Jane, after agreeing to alligator pear salad, "shall we say Fairy God-cousin? That's a gay and pleasing relationship without undue responsibilities. Will that do?"
"That will do for the present," said Mr. Harrison. He regarded her across the small table with perfectly apparent satisfaction. Nothing bucolic here; a dark and gypsy beauty which glowed and kindled beside the fainter types about them, a wholly modish smartness, an elusive something to which he could not put a name, which gave him always the sense of glad pursuit. There had been in his early attitude, as she had divined, just a trifle of the King and the Beggar Maid, the Town Mouse and the City Mouse, but that was gone now. She knew his New York very nearly as well as he did himself and with her increased activities had come decreased dependence on him. She was either so gayly busy or so busily gay that she was able to accept only one invitation in four, which made it very necessary to ask her early and often. He was a wary young man, Rodney Harrison, urban from head to heel; marriage had not entered into his calculations. Yet he was aware of his growing fondness and approval, his growing conviction that domesticity with Jane Vail need not of necessity be the curbing and cloying thing he had visioned.
It was May when he told her that his mother wanted to come to see her, and it was the following day that Jane wrote home to tell them she was coming to Vermont for the summer months. She wasn't quite ready for Rodney Harrison's mother to call on her; she wanted a little time and a little perspective, and she knew that the hour had struck for her to go back and put a firm if mournful period to the affair of Marty Wetherby. There had been constantly recurring scoldings by mail from Sarah Farraday and Nannie Slade Hunter, and, while he was the poorest and least articulate of correspondents, his stammering letters had still achieved a pathos of their own, and the thing was no longer to be shirked.
So she said good-by at the boarding house to Mrs. Hills and Emma Ellis and Michael Daragh and at the station to Rodney Harrison; and went back in smart triumph with a wardrobe trunk full of clever clothes and the latest shining model in typewriters.