“I may never see you again—I have darned hard luck sometimes.” He was leaning away from her on the other arm of the lounge, but she could see his black eyes plainly in the dark.
“You’ll see me again—silly.” There was just the slightest emphasis on the last word—so that it became almost a term of endearment. He continued a bit huskily:
“I’ve fallen for a lot of people—girls—and I guess you have too—boys, I mean, but honestly you—” he broke off suddenly and leaned forward, chin on his hands, a favorite and studied gesture. “Oh what’s the use, you’ll go your way and I suppose I’ll go mine.”
Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred—she wound her handkerchief into a tight ball and, by the faint light that streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their hands touched for an instant but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano. After the usual preliminary of “Chopsticks,” one of them started “Babes in the Woods” and a light tenor carried the words into the den—
Give me your hand
I’ll understand
We’re off to slumberland.
Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Kenneth’s hand close over hers.
“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You do give a darn about me.”
“Yes.”
“How much do you care—do you like anyone better?”
“No.” He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that he felt her breath against his cheek.
“Isabelle, we’re going back to school for six long months and why shouldn’t we—if I could only just have one thing to remember you by—”
“Close the door.” Her voice had just stirred so that he half wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he swung the door softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside.
Moonlight is bright
Kiss me good-night.
What a wonderful song, she thought—everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unended succession of scenes like this, under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees—only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.
“Isabelle!” His whisper blended in the music and they seemed to float nearer together. Her breath came faster. “Can’t I kiss you Isabelle—Isabelle?” Lips half parted, she turned her head to him in the dark. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running footsteps surged toward them. Like a flash Kenneth reached up and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys, the wrathy and dance-craving Peter among them, rushed in, he was turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat, without moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly and she felt somehow as if she had been deprived.
It was evidently over. There was a clamour for a dance; there was a glance that passed between them, on his side, despair, on hers, regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux and the eternal cutting-in.
At quarter to twelve Kenneth shook hands with her gravely, in a crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an instant he lost his poise, and she felt slightly foolish when a satirical voice from a concealed wit on the edge of the company cried:
“Take her outside, Kenneth!” As he took her hand he pressed it a little and she returned the pressure as she had done to twenty hands that evening—that was all.
At two o’clock upstairs Elaine asked her if she and Kenneth had had a “time” in the den. Isabelle turned to her quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams.
“No!” she answered. “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore—he asked me to but I said ‘No.’”
As she crept into bed she wondered what he’d say in his special delivery tomorrow. He had such a good-looking mouth—would she ever—?
“Fourteen angels were watching over them,” sang Elaine sleepily from the next room.
“Damn!” muttered Isabelle and punched the pillow into a luxurious lump—“Damn!”
— ◆ —
Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge.
Nassau Literary Magazine (June 1917)
I
This story has no moral value. It is about a man who had fought for two years and how he came back to England for two days, and then how he went away again. It is unfortunately one of those stories which must start at the beginning, and the beginning consists merely of a few details. There were two brothers (two sons of Lord Blachford) who sailed to Europe with the first hundred thousand. Lieutenant Richard Harrington Syneforth, the elder, was killed in some forgotten raid; the younger, Lieutenant Clayton Harrington Syneforth, is the hero of this story. He was now a Captain in the Seventeenth Sussex and the immoral thing in the story happens to him. The important part to remember is that when his father met him at Paddington Station and drove him uptown in his motor, he hadn’t been in England for two years—and this was in the early spring of 1917. Various circumstances had brought this about, wounds, advancement, meeting his family in Paris, and mostly being twenty-two and anxious to show his company an example of indefatigable energy. Besides, most of his friends were dead and he had rather a horror of seeing the gaps they’d leave in his England. And here is the story.
He sat at dinner and thought himself rather stupid and unnecessarily moody as his sister’s light chatter amused the table. Lord and Lady Blachford, himself and two unsullied aunts. In the first place he was rather doubtful about his sister’s new manner. She seemed, well, perhaps a bit loud and theatrical; and she was certainly pretty enough not to need so much paint. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, and paint—it seemed so useless. Of course he was used to it in his mother, would have been shocked had she appeared in her unrouged furrowedness, but on Clara it merely accentuated her youth. Altogether he had never seen such obvious paint, and, as they had always been a shockingly frank family, he told her so.
“You’ve got too much stuff on your face.” He tried to speak casually and his sister, nothing wroth, jumped up and ran to a mirror.
“No, I haven’t,” she said, calmly returning.
“I thought,” he continued, rather annoyed, “that the criterion of how much paint to put on was whether men were sure you’d used any or not.”
His sister and mother exchanged glances and both spoke at once.
“Not now, Clay, you know—” began Clara.
“Really, Clay,” interrupted his mother, “you don’t know exactly what the standards
