“I think, after all, you are frightened!”
“Terribly.”
“A little danger adds to the zest of things.
You know what Nietzsche says about that.”
“I am not fond of Nietzsche.” Then,
with an effort: “What does he say?”
“Two things are wanted by the true man—danger
and play. Therefore he seeketh woman as the most
dangerous of toys.”
“Women are dangerous only when you think of
them as toys. When a man finds that a woman
can reason,—do anything but feel,—he
regards her as a menace. But the reasoning woman
is really less dangerous than the other sort.”
This was more like the real thing. To talk careful
abstractions like this, with beneath each abstraction
its concealed personal application, to talk of woman
and look in her eyes, to discuss new philosophies with
their freedoms, to discard old creeds and old moralities—that
was his game. Wilson became content, interested
again. The girl was nimble-minded. She
challenged his philosophy and gave him a chance to
defend it. With the conviction, as their meal
went on, that Le Moyne and his companion must surely
have gone, she gained ease.
It was only by wild driving that she got back to the
hospital by ten o’clock.
Wilson left her at the corner, well content with himself.
He had had the rest he needed in congenial company.
The girl stimulated his interest. She was mental,
but not too mental. And he approved of his own
attitude. He had been discreet. Even if
she talked, there was nothing to tell. But he
felt confident that she would not talk.
As he drove up the Street, he glanced across at the
Page house. Sidney was there on the doorstep,
talking to a tall man who stood below and looked up
at her. Wilson settled his tie, in the darkness.
Sidney was a mighty pretty girl. The June night
was in his blood. He was sorry he had not kissed
Carlotta good-night. He rather thought, now he
looked back, she had expected it.
As he got out of his car at the curb, a young man
who had been standing in the shadow of the tree-box
moved quickly away.
Wilson smiled after him in the darkness.
“That you, Joe?” he called.
But the boy went on.
Sidney entered the hospital as a probationer early
in August. Christine was to be married in September
to Palmer Howe, and, with Harriet and K. in the house,
she felt that she could safely leave her mother.
The balcony outside the parlor was already under way.
On the night before she went away, Sidney took chairs
out there and sat with her mother until the dew drove
Anna to the lamp in the sewing-room and her “Daily
Thoughts” reading.
Sidney sat alone and viewed her world from this new
and pleasant angle. She could see the garden
and the whitewashed fence with its morning-glories,
and at the same time, by turning her head, view the
Wilson house across the Street. She looked mostly
at the Wilson house.
