How fortunate that he had been able to obtain a section! At least he would have air!
There had been a wild season, according to her own admissions or boastings—he could never quite tell which—extending over six or seven months, during which time Idelle had pretended to her mother, so she said, to prefer to live with her girl friend rather than return home. She had had, according to her, her machine, her servants, clothes without end, and what-not—a dream-world of luxury and freedom which he had provided and from which she never expected to wake, and her mother totally ignorant of it all the while! There had been everything she wished at her finger tips—hectic afternoons, evenings and midnights; affairs at country clubs or hotel grills, where the young bloods of the city and their girls congregated; wild rides in automobiles; visits to the nearest smartest watering-places, and the like. Or was she lying? He could scarcely think so, judging by her career with him and others since.
Ah, what a comfort to fix oneself this way and rest, looking at the shadowy moonlit landscape passing by!
Idelle had often admitted or boasted that she had been wildly happy—that was the worst of it—that she had not quite realized what she was doing, but that she had no remorse either, even now—that she had lived! (And why should she have, perhaps? Weren’t all people really selfish at bottom—or were they?) Only, owing to her almost insatiable pagan nature, there were other complications right then and there—think of that!—an older rival millionaire, if you please, richer by far than Coulstone, and more influential locally ... and younger ones, too, who sought her but really did not win her, she having no time or plan for them. As it happened, the older one, having been worsted in the contest but being partially tolerated by her, had become frantically jealous and envious, although “he had no right,” as she said, and had finally set about making trouble for the real possessor, and succeeded to the extent of exposing him and eventually driving him out of the great concern with which he was connected and out of Pittsburgh, too, if you please, on moral grounds (?), although he himself was trying to follow in Coulstone’s footsteps! And all for the love or possession of a nineteen-year-old girl, a petticoat, a female ne’er-do-well! How little the world in general knew of such things—and it was a blessed thing, too, by George! Where would things be if everybody went on like that?
The rhythmic clack of these wheels and trucks over these sleeper joints—a poetic beat, of sorts!
But Idelle was so naïve about all this now, or pretended to be, so careless of what he or any one else might think in case they ever found out. She did not seem to guess how much he might suffer by her telling him all this, or how much pain thinking about it afterward might cause him. She was too selfish intellectually. She didn’t even guess, apparently, what his mood might be toward all this, loving her as he did. No—she really didn’t care for him, or any one else—couldn’t, or she couldn’t have done anything like that. She would have lied to him rather. She had been, and was—although now semi-reformed—a heartless, careless wastrel, thinking of no one but herself. She had not cared about the wives of either of those two men who were pursuing her in B——, or what became of them, or what became of any of the others who had pursued her since. All she wanted was to be danced attendance on, to be happy, free, never bored. The other fellow never counted with Idelle much. In this case the wife of the younger lover, Coulstone, had been informed, the conservatives of the city appealed to, as it were. Coulstone, seeing the storm and being infatuated with his conquest, suggested Paris or a few years on the Riviera, but, strangely enough, Idelle would have none of it, or him, then. She wouldn’t agree to be tied down for so long! She had suffered a reversal of conscience or mood—even—or so she said,—went to a priest, went into retirement here in G——, having fled her various evil pursuers.
How impressive the outlying slopes of these mountains they were just entering!
And yet he could understand that, too, in some people, anyhow,—the one decent thing in her life maybe, a timely revolt against a too great and unbroken excess. But, alas, it had been complicated with the fact that she wasn’t ready to leave her mother or to do anything but stay in America. Besides things were becoming rather complicated. The war on J—— C—— threatened to expose her. Worse yet,—and so like her, life had won her back. Her beauty, her disposition, youth and age pursuing her—one slight concession to indulgence or pleasure after another and the new mood or bent toward religiosity was entirely done away with. Her sensual sex nature had conquered, of course.
That little cabin on that slope, showing a lone lamp in the dark!
And then—then—