that.
At once I saw she had a different line. The modulations of pride, the vocal hints that she knew the secrets of a brighter, finer ante-bellum day, were gone from her voice; there was no time for them now. We went to a party at the house of some young married people, and she was the nervous, glowing center of it. After all, she wasn’t eighteen, and she was as attractive in her rôle of reckless clown as she had ever been in her life.
“Have you heard anything from Earl Schoen?” I asked her the second night, on our way to the country-club dance.
“No.” She was serious for a moment. “I often think of him. He was the – ” She hesitated.
“Go on.”
“I was going to say the man I loved most, but that wouldn’t be true. I never exactly loved him, or I’d have married him anyhow, wouldn’t I?” She looked at me questioningly. “At least I wouldn’t have treated him like that.”
“It was impossible.”
“Of course,” she agreed uncertainly. Her mood changed; she became flippant: “How the Yankees did deceive us poor little Southern girls. Ah, me!”
When we reached the country club she melted like a chameleon into the – to me – unfamiliar crowd. There was a new generation upon the floor, with less dignity than the ones I had known, but none of them were more a part of its lazy, feverish essence than Ailie. Possibly she had realized that in her initial longing to escape from Tarleton’s provincialism she had been walking alone. Just where she lost the battle, waged behind the white pillars of her veranda, I don’t know.
I left her house, as I had so often left it that vanished June, in a mood of vague dissatisfaction. It was hours later, tossing about my bed in the hotel, that I realized what was the matter, what had always been the matter – I was deeply and incurably in love with her. In spite of every incompatibility, she was still, she would always be to me, the most attractive girl I had ever known. I told her so next afternoon. It was one of those hot days I knew so well, and Ailie sat beside me on a couch in the darkened library.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t marry you,” she said, almost frightened; “I don’t love you that way at all. I never did. And you don’t love me. I didn’t mean to tell you now, but next month I’m going to marry another man. We’re not even announcing it, because I’ve done that twice before.” Suddenly it occurred to her that I might be hurt: “Andy, you just had a silly idea, didn’t you? You know I couldn’t ever marry a Northern man.”
“Who is he?” I demanded.
“A man from Savannah.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Of course I am.” We both smiled. “Of course I am! What are you trying to make me say?”
There were no doubts, as there had been with other men. She couldn’t afford to let herself have doubts. I knew this because she had long ago stopped making any pretensions with me. This very naturalness, I realized, was because she didn’t consider me as an admirer. She couldn’t believe that anyone not taken in to the point of uncritical worship could really love her. That was what she called being “sincere”; she felt most security with men like Canby and Earl Schoen, who were incapable of passing judgments on the ostensibly aristocratic heart.[45]
“All right,” I said, as if she had asked my permission to marry. “Now, would you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Ride out to camp.”
“But there’s nothing left there, honey.”
“I don’t care.”
We walked downtown. The taxi driver in front of the hotel repeated her objection: “Nothing there now, cap.”
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