XVII

About which time Nancy had finished crying--raging at herself all the time, she hated to cry so--and was sitting up straight on the couch looking at the door which Oliver had shut as if by looking it very hard indeed she could make it turn into Oliver.

It _couldn't_ end this way. If it did it just meant that all the last year wasn't real--hadn't any more part in reality than charity theatricals. And they'd both of them been so sure that it was the chief reality that they had ever known.

He wasn't _reasonable_. She hadn't wanted the darned old job, she'd wanted to marry him, but as long as they hadn't seemed to get very far in the last eight months when he'd been trying to work it--why couldn't _she_ try----

Then 'Oh Nancy, be honest!' to herself. No, that wasn't true.

She'd wanted the job, wanted to get it, hadn't thought about Oliver particularly when she'd tried for it except to be a little impatient with him for not using more judgment when he picked out his job. Did that mean that she didn't love him? Oh Lord, it was all so mixed up.

Starting out so clearly at first and everything being so perfect--and then the last four months and both getting tireder and tireder and all the useless little misunderstandings that made you wonder how could you if you really cared. And now this.

For an instant of mere relief from strain Nancy saw herself in Paris, studying as she had always wanted to study, doing some real work, all Paris hers to play with like a big gray stone toy, never having to worry about loving, about being loved, about people you loved. Being free.

Like taking off your hot, hot clothes and lying in water when you were too hot and tired even to think of sleeping. Oliver too--she'd leave him free--he'd really work better without her--without having her to take care of and make money for and worry about always----

The mind turned the other way. But what would doing anything be like with Oliver out of it when doing things together had been all that mattered all the last year?

They couldn't decide things like this on a p.r.i.c.kly hot August night when both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn't _real_. Even after Oliver had shut the door she'd been sure he'd come back, though she hoped he wouldn't just while she was crying; she never had been, she thought viciously, one of those happy people who look like rain-G.o.ddesses when they cry.

He must come back. She shut her eyes and told him to as hard as she could. But he didn't.

All very well to be proud and dignified when both of you lived near each other. But Oliver was going back to New York tomorrow--and if he went back while they were still like this--She knew his train--the ten seven.

She tried being proud in a dozen different expressive att.i.tudes for ten minutes or so: Then she suddenly relaxed and went over to the telephone, smiling rather ashamedly at herself.

"Hotel Rosario?"

"Yes."

"Can I speak to Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is staying there isn't he?"

A pause full of little jingling sounds.

"Yes, he's staying here but he hasn't come in yet this evening. Do you wish to leave a message?"

Nancy hesitates.

"N-no." That would be just a little too humble.

"Or the name of the party calling?" He will know, of course. Still, had she better say? Then she remembers the need of punishing him just a little. After all--it is hardly fair she should go all the way toward making up when he hasn't even started.

"No--no name. But tell him somebody called, please."

"Very well."

And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back to the hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of sackcloth. She hopes he _will_ come before mother and father get back.

But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying something about "'Sturbance of the peace" to the desk-sergeant, and Oliver is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.

XVIII

"You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling,"

says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. "Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present. Why your father and myself used to have--ahem--our little times over _trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _" and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the pa.s.sive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day of her engagement, "If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again." But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.

"If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not--well Nancy, my little girl," she adds hieroglyphically "there are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed."

Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.

"Cheer up, Chick," he says kindly. "Always sun somewhere you know, so don't treat the poor boy too hard," and he shuffles rapidly away before his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit in his sentence.

"It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy, darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers" proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in her most cryptically perfect tones. "Oliver is a man--he must apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs.

Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in early youth."

All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he will call--he will come--and the clock hands are marching on toward ten-seven and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is talking, talking--

"Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such first youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked back upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that should seem to injure the choice of my daughter's heart--but when young men cannot provide even Hovels for their _fiancees_ a reasonable time having been given, it is only just that they should release them and you looking like death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own daughter should act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is the Test in such matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is best they should end and no one can deny that the young man talks very queerly and was often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that was joking but it would not have been joking in my day and young men with queer nervous eyes and hands I never have nor will quite trust--"

But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white when she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted her to put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet when she was unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy after they'd quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why the very last letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever stopped loving him he knew he'd die.

"And when things are ended it is better that such things should be though doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet since G.o.d in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best.

And with such a splendid position opening before her it would be only dignified to bring the young man to his senses for it would not be right to let unreasonable young men stand in the way of advantages offered by Foreign Travel and study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear, and if nervous young men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in the wrong when only engaged what kind of husbands will they make when married forever? And is not a broken engagement better than lifelong unhappiness when there are so many too many sinful people divorcing each other every day and all men who write for their living use stimulants, my dear, such is literary history and my dearest have your cry out on mother's shoulder."

The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly--it is up to her waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher.

Very soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only hitched himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving Nancy, the sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it like a calm body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking kisses on the soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified Nancy, a sensible Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be successful, a Nancy who, sooner or later will marry "Some good, clean man."

A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy that was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping, hoping. If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the telephone an hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's self-respect and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all the correct and common-sensible people hug close and worship because they hurt.

She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and his face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he was your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have begun talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman--no, that isn't worthy, he wouldn't--but oh Ollie, Ollie!

Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast dishes--her hands jump as she hears it--a slippery plate slops back into the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new water is much too hot.

"What _is_ it, mother?" For an instant the Nancy who has no real self-respect is talking again.

"Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to her?"

"Oh."

Then----

"Not right now. When I'm through with these. But will you ask her if she's going to be in this afternoon--I want to tell her about my taking the New York job."