long will you be here?” he asked.
“Well, two weeks, off and on. I’m going down to Princeton for the February prom and then up to a house party in Westchester County for a few days. Are you shocked at me for going out so soon? Father would have wanted me to, you know. He was very modern in all his ideas.”
She had debated this remark on the train. She was not going to a house party. She was not invited to the Princeton prom. Such things, nevertheless, were necessary to create the illusion. That was everything—the illusion.
“And then,” she continued, smiling, “two of my old beaus are in town, which makes it nice for me.”
She saw Scott blink and she knew that he appreciated the significance of this.
“What are your plans for this winter?” he demanded. “Are you going back West?”
“No. You see, my aunt returns from India this week. She’s going to open her Florida house, and we’ll stay there until the middle of March. Then we’ll come up to Hot Springs and we may go to Europe for the summer.”
This was all the sheerest fiction. Her first letter to her aunt, which had given the bare details of Tom Bowman’s death, had at last reached its destination. Her aunt had replied with a note of conventional sympathy and the announcement that she would be back in America within two years if she didn’t decide to live in Italy.
“But you’ll let me see something of you while you’re here,” urged Scott, after attending to this impressive program. “If you can’t take dinner with me tonight, how about Wednesday—that’s the day after tomorrow?”
“Wednesday? Let’s see.” Yanci’s brow was knit with imitation thought. “I think I have a date for Wednesday, but I don’t know for certain. How about phoning me tomorrow, and I’ll let you know? Because I want to go with you, only I think I’ve made an engagement.”
“Very well, I’ll phone you.”
“Do—about ten.”
“Try to be able to—then or any time.”
“I’ll tell you—if I can’t go to dinner with you Wednesday I can go to lunch surely.”
“All right,” he agreed. “And we’ll go to a matinée.”
They danced several times. Never by word or sign did Yanci betray more than the most cursory interest in him until just at the end, when she offered him her hand to say good-bye.
“Good-bye, Scott.”
For just the fraction of a second—not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard—she looked into his eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried away.
She took her dinner in a little tea room around the corner. It was an economical dinner which cost a dollar and a half. There was no date concerned in it at all, and no man except an elderly person in spats who tried to speak to her as she came out the door.
IX
Sitting alone in one of the magnificent moving-picture theatres—a luxury which she thought she could afford—Yanci watched Mae Murray swirl through splendidly imagined vistas, and meanwhile considered the progress of the first day. In retrospect it was a distinct success. She had given the correct impression both as to her material prosperity and as to her attitude toward Scott himself. It seemed best to avoid evening dates. Let him have the evenings to himself, to think of her, to imagine her with other men, even to spend a few lonely hours in his apartment, considering how much more cheerful it might be if—— Let time and absence work for her.
Engrossed for awhile in the moving picture, she calculated the cost of the apartment in which its heroine endured her movie wrongs. She admired its slender Italian table, occupying only one side of the large dining room and flanked by a long bench which gave it an air of medieval luxury. She rejoiced in the beauty of Mae Murray’s clothes and furs, her gorgeous hats, her short-seeming French shoes. Then after a moment her mind returned to her own drama; she wondered if Scott were already engaged, and her heart dipped at the thought. Yet it was unlikely. He had been too quick to phone her on her arrival, too lavish with his time, too responsive that afternoon.
After the picture she returned to the Ritz, where she slept deeply and happily for almost the first time in three months. The atmosphere around her no longer seemed cold. Even the floor clerk had smiled kindly and admiringly when Yanci asked for her key.
Next morning at ten Scott phoned. Yanci, who had been up for hours, pretended to be drowsy from her dissipation of the night before.
No, she could not take dinner with him on Wednesday. She was terribly sorry; she had an engagement, as she had feared. But she could have luncheon and go to a matinée if he would get her back in time for tea.
She spent the day roving the streets. On top of a bus, though not on the front seat, where Scott might possibly spy her, she sailed out Riverside Drive and back along Fifth Avenue just at the winter twilight, and her feeling for New York and its gorgeous splendors deepened and redoubled. Here she must live and be rich, be nodded to by the traffic policemen at the corners as she sat in her limousine—with a small dog—and here she must stroll on Sunday to and from a stylish church, with Scott, handsome in his cutaway and tall hat, walking devotedly at her side.
At luncheon on Wednesday she described for Scott’s benefit a fanciful two days. She told of a motoring trip up the Hudson and gave him her opinion of two plays she had seen with—it was implied—adoring gentlemen beside her. She had read up very carefully on the plays in the morning paper and chosen two concerning which she could garner the most information.
“Oh,” he said in dismay, “you’ve seen ‘Dulcy’? I have two seats for it—but you won’t want to go again.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mind,” she protested truthfully. “You see, we went late, and anyway I adored it.”
But he wouldn’t hear of her sitting through it again—besides, he had seen it himself. It was a play Yanci was mad to see, but she was compelled to watch him while he exchanged the tickets for others, and for the poor seats available at the last moment. The game seemed difficult at times.
“By the way,” he said afterwards as they drove back to the hotel in a taxi, “you’ll be going down to the Princeton prom tomorrow, won’t you?”
She started. She had not realized that it would be so soon or that he would know of it.
“Yes,” she answered coolly. “I’m going down tomorrow afternoon.”
“On the 2:20, I suppose,” Scott commented. And then, “Are you going to meet the boy who’s taking you down—at Princeton?”
For an instant she was off her guard.
“Yes, he’ll meet the train.”
“Then I’ll take you to the station,” proposed Scott. “There’ll be a crowd, and you may have trouble getting a porter.”
She could think of nothing to say, no valid objection to make. She
