Young People's Pride: A Novel

by Stephen Vincent Benét

It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally—and the moment he saw her face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made together out of light and gilded cloud—he had somehow never imagined that she could be as—lustrous—as that—it gave him the sensation that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was there at all.

He gathered his wits—it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time when he hadn't been invited—it forced him into being so casually polite.

“Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance,” he said with a ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to triangular murder. “I hope I'm not—disturbing you?”

“Oh no. No,” and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act.

“Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, “Ted Billett, you know—he said he might be having dinner with you this evening—and I've got a very important letter for him—awful nuisance—don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself—but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?”

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined—and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.

“Oh Ted—” he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, “there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you—”

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

“Hello, Ollie,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get the hell out as quickly as possible.” “Mrs. Severance—” a stumble over that. “You've got a letter for me?”