“Won’t you have some tea? You must be tired,” said Miss Van Arsdale politely.
CHAPTER VII
Somewhere within the soul of civilized woman burns a craving for that higher power of sensation which we dub sensationalism. Girls of Io Welland’s upbringing live in an atmosphere which fosters it. To outshine their rivals in the startling things which they do, always within accepted limits, is an important and exciting phase of existence. Io had run away to marry the future Duke of Carfax, partly through the charm which a reckless, headlong, and romantic personality imposed upon her, but largely for the excitement of a reckless, headlong, and romantic escapade. The tragic interposition of the wreck seemed to her present consciousness, cooled and sobered by the spacious peace of the desert, to have been providential.
Despite her disclaimer made to Banneker she felt, deep within the placid acceptances of subconsciousness, that the destruction of a train was not too much for a considerate Providence to undertake on behalf of her petted and important self. She clearly realized that she had had a narrow escape from Holmesley; that his attraction for her was transient and unsubstantial, a surface magnetism without real value or promise.
In her revulsion of feeling she thought affectionately of Delavan Eyre. There lay the safe basis of habitude, common interests, settled liking. True, he bored her at times with his unimpeachable good-nature, his easy self-assurance that everything was and always would be “all right,” and nothing “worth bothering over.”
If he knew of her escapade, that would at least shake him out of his soft and well-lined rut. Indeed, Io was frank enough with herself to admit that a perverse desire to explode a bomb under her imperturbable and too-assured suitor had been an element in her projected elopement. Never would that bomb explode. It would not even fizzle enough to alarm Eyre or her family. For not a soul knew of the frustrated scheme, except Holmesley and the reliable friend in Paradiso whom she was to visit; not her father, Sims Welland, traveling in Europe on business, nor her aunt, Mrs. Thatcher Forbes, in whose charge she had been left. Ostensibly she had been going to visit the Westerleys, that was all: Mrs. Forbes’s misgivings as to a twenty-year-old girl crossing the continent alone had been unavailing against Io’s calm willfulness.
Well, she would go back and marry Del Eyre, and be comfortable ever after. After all, liking and comprehension were a sounder foundation for matrimony than the perishable glamour of an attraction like Holmesley’s. Any sensible person would know that. She wished that she had some older and more experienced woman to talk it out with. Miss Van Arsdale, if only she knew her a little better....
Camilla Van Arsdale, even on so casual an acquaintance, would have told Io, reckoning with the slumbering fire in her eyes, and the sensitive and passionate turn of the lips, but still more with the subtle and significant emanation of a femininity as yet unawakened to itself, that for her to marry on the pallid expectancies of mere liking would be to invite disaster and challenge ruin.