第31章

"You are going home?"

"Yes," said Joan, "without the shadow of a doubt.""Which means that I'd better tell the chauffeur to drive round to the One-o'clock, eh?""I'll drop you there if you like.I'm really truly going home.""All right."

Joan began to sing as the car bowled up Fifth Avenue.Movement always made her sing, and the effect of things slipping behind her.

But she stopped suddenly as an expression of Alice's flicked across her memory."You'll catch Alice up, if you go straight back," she said.

"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! I wonder why it is the really good woman is never appreciated by a man until he's obliged to sit on the other side of the fireplace? I wish we were driving away out into the country.I have an unusual hankering to stand on the bank of a huge lake and watch the moonlight on the water."Joan was singing again.The trees in the Park were bespattered with young leaves.

Palgrave controlled an ardent desire to touch with his lips that cool white shoulder from which the cloak had slipped.It was extraordinary how this mere girl inflamed him.Alice--Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire! She seemed oddly like some other man's wife, these days.

"Suppose I tell your man to drive out of the city beyond this rabble of bricks and mortar?"But Joan went on singing.Spring was in her blood.How fast the car was moving, and those young clouds.

Palgrave helped her out with a hot hand.

She opened the door with her latch-key."Thank you, Gilbert," she said."Good night."But Palgrave followed her in."Don't you think I've earned the right to one cigarette?" He threw his coat into a chair in the hall and hung his hat on the longest point of an antler.It was a new thing for this much flattered man to ask for favors.This young thing's exultant youth made him feel old and rather humble.

"There are sandwiches in the dining room and various things to drink," said Joan, waving her hand toward it.

"No, no.Let's go up to the drawing-room--that is, unless you--"But Joan was already on the stairs, with the chorus of her song.She didn't feel in the least like sleep with its escape from life.It was so good to be awake, to be vital, to be tingling with the current of electricity like a telegraph wire.She flung back the curtains, raised all the windows, opened her arms to the air, spilled her cloak on the floor, sat at the piano and ragged "The Spring Song.""I am a kid," she said, speaking above the sound, and going on with her argument to Alice."I am and I will be, I will be.And I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there!"Palgrave had picked up the cloak and was holding it unconsciously against his immaculate shirt.It was the sentimental act of a virtuoso in the art of pleasing women--who are so easily pleased.At the moment he had achieved forgetfulness of boudoir trickery and so retained almost all his usual assumption of dignity.Even Joan, with her quick eye for the ridiculous, failed to detect the bathos of his attitude, and merely thought that he was trying to be funny and not succeeding.

It so happened that over Palgrave's shoulder she could see the bold crayon drawing of Martin, brown and healthy and muscular, without an ounce of affectation, an unmistakable man with his nice irregular features and clean, merry eyes.There was strength and capability stamped all over him, and there was, as well, a pleasing sense of reliability which gained immediate confidence.With the sort of shock one gets on going into the fresh air from a steam-heated room, she realized the contrast between these two.

There is always something as unreal about handsome men as there is about Japanese gardens.Palgrave's hair was so scrupulously sleek and wiglike, his features so well-balanced and well-chosen, his wide-set eyes so large and long-lashed, and his fair, soft mustache so miraculously precise.His clothes, too, were a degree more than perfect.They were so right as to be a little freakish because they attracted as much attention as if they were badly cut.He was born for tea fights and winter resorts, to listen with a distrait half-smile to the gushing adulation of the oh-my-dear type of women.

He attracted Joan.She admired his assurance and polish and manners.

With these three things even a man with a broken nose and a head bald as an egg can carry a beautiful woman to the altar.He was something new to her, too, and she found much to amuse her in his way of expressing himself.He observed, and sometimes crystallized his observations with a certain neatness.Also, and she made no bones about owning to it, his obvious attention flattered her.All the same, she was in the mood just then for Martin.He went better with the time of year, and there was something awfully companionable about his sudden laugh.She would have hailed his appearance at that moment with an outdoor cry.

It was bad luck for Palgrave, because he now knew definitely that in Joan he had found the girl who was to give him the great emotion.

She broke away from "The Spring Song" and swung into "D'ye Ken John Peel with His Coat So Gay?" It was Martin's favorite air.How often she had heard him shout it among the trees on his way to meet her out there on the edge of the woods where they had found each other.

It was curious how her thoughts turned to Martin that night.

She left the piano in the middle of a bar."One cigarette," she said, and held out a silver box.

Palgrave's hand closed tightly over her slim white arm.In his throat his heart was pumping.He spoke incoherently, like a man.