So Tommy stayed. The conversation was not animated. Millicent made poor progress. Presently, when the conversation reached Millicent in its usual course, she asked him whether he liked bobbed-hair. He did, on certain girls. She obviously expected to be told that she was one; if not the chief one. He told her so.
The next step would be for him to stretch his arm along the back of the couch, above her shoulders, and comment upon its fluffiness. Tommy took his cue admirably. He stirred her hair with his fingers, and he did not withdraw his arm. Millicent had drawn imperceptibly closer. The fire in the grate had burned down to a drowsy glow, leaving the room in the semi-darkness of late winter twilight. Now her head swayed toward him. The moment was propitious. Tommy knew it. He had been cast as leading man in just such a scene before. He knew that the next move was his....
And rather unexpectedly he made it. Very deliberately he got up, walked over to the table, took up a cigarette and lit it. Neither of them spoke. The silence was unnatural. A tension filled the air. There was nothing to say.
The sound of a horn on the driveway saved the situation.
“That must be Carl,” Tommy said quickly. “Sounds as if he might be in a hurry. Don’t get up; I’ll just grab my things in the hall. Good-night, Millicent—awfully good time.”
He went out, a little breathlessly, before she could speak or get up.
Millicent was furious; furious at Tommy, who had snubbed her with such ironic insolence; furious at herself, who had engineered her own humiliation. The climax of her planning had come to ignominious failure. Consuming anger filled her. For a moment she wondered whether his manner would betray anything of the breach to the rest of the crowd, on the snowshoe trip, the next day. Paul Lyle, in making up the party, had paired them as a matter of course. Millicent knew what the crowd was saying: and she would not be made ridiculous in their eyes, now. Before Tommy went back to school he must propose, and the crowd must know that he had.
She repeated that, mentally. The words were like italics on a page.
There was no perceptible difference in their attitude the next morning. The snowshoe trip to Paul Lyle’s cabin on the St. Croix River had been abandoned, because a vagary of the thermometer had brought balmy winds and a thaw, overnight.