“I’m not going to marry him at all, Chris.”
Upstairs, K.’s door slammed. It was one
of his failings that he always slammed doors.
Harriet used to be quite disagreeable about it.
Sidney slid from the railing.
“There he is now.”
Perhaps, in all her frivolous, selfish life, Christine
had never had a bigger moment than the one that followed.
She could have said nothing, and, in the queer way
that life goes, K. might have gone away from the Street
as empty of heart as he had come to it.
“Be very good to him, Sidney,” she said
unsteadily. “He cares so much.”
K. was being very dense. For so long had he
considered Sidney as unattainable that now his masculine
mind, a little weary with much wretchedness, refused
to move from its old attitude.
“It was glamour, that was all, K.,” said
Sidney bravely.
“But, perhaps,” said K., “it’s
just because of that miserable incident with Carlotta.
That wasn’t the right thing, of course, but
Max has told me the story. It was really quite
innocent. She fainted in the yard, and—”
Sidney was exasperated.
“Do you want me to marry him, K.?”
K. looked straight ahead.
“I want you to be happy, dear.”
They were on the terrace of the White Springs Hotel
again. K. had ordered dinner, making a great
to-do about getting the dishes they both liked.
But now that it was there, they were not eating.
K. had placed his chair so that his profile was turned
toward her. He had worn the duster religiously
until nightfall, and then had discarded it. It
hung limp and dejected on the back of his chair.
Past K.’s profile Sidney could see the magnolia
tree shaped like a heart.
“It seems to me,” said Sidney suddenly,
“that you are kind to every one but me, K.”
He fairly stammered his astonishment:—
“Why, what on earth have I done?”
“You are trying to make me marry Max, aren’t
you?”
She was very properly ashamed of that, and, when he
failed of reply out of sheer inability to think of
one that would not say too much, she went hastily
to something else:
“It is hard for me to realize that you—that
you lived a life of your own, a busy life, doing useful
things, before you came to us. I wish you would
tell me something about yourself. If we’re
to be friends when you go away,”—she
had to stop there, for the lump in her throat—“I’ll
want to know how to think of you,—who your
friends are,—all that.”
He made an effort. He was thinking, of course,
that he would be visualizing her, in the hospital,
in the little house on its side street, as she looked
just then, her eyes like stars, her lips just parted,
her hands folded before her on the table.
“I shall be working,” he said at last.
“So will you.”
