An Epitaph and a Ghost
GERTRUDE'S smile was quick, bright, straight. Darcy lifted his hat. And they passed, each with a flush of good-will toward the other. He looked even unusually small and ugly and depressed, she thought, with ever instant compassion.
And he—Nice girl that! He always had that cordial feeling with her, though, away, nothing seemed drawing him strongly to look her up. None of the men liked especially to be seen with her; she was apt to look so—Well, notice her belt now! Jolly nice girl, though, good company, and game about having to work when the others needn't.
Still warmed by the impersonal human pleasantness of the encounter, Gertrude swung up the home stairs and dropped the pile of books from her cramped arm with a thump of cheerful relief. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror—hat crooked, scolding-locks stringing, tie proclaiming the usual morning rush! Suddenly she realized how tired she was, how creepy the chalk made her fingers, what a stack of papers there was to mark.
She flung herself across the bed. What did it all come to? Forty-two dollars a month during the session; for the year, with vacations and absences, hardly four hundred all told toward the general family poverty. And in time, a thousand a year perhaps, when she had her correspondence degrees, and had worked up over marriages, deaths, droppings, super-annuations,—unless she herself lost-out in the mean time. And not even fun along the way! He was going to see Mabel or Frances or some of the others, of course, like everybody else. Not that he mattered individually. Not that she wanted to marry,—only a chance to refuse; or what value in her boast that she chose the dignity of independence until—unless just He came?
She could not bring herself to work or read, even in her favorite pleasantness of the vine-covered front porch. Her mind would slip its moorings, and go drifting, drifting. The One Man! The Only Man! What would he be like? Good to look at—at least in a big, forceful way—all the things she was not: a man she could admire: her kind of man. How would it feel to be, to some one, the dearest, most important thing in life, and, if only therefore, pretty?
Across her vision blurred with dreams she grew dimly aware of Darcy returning up the street. Her thoughts were so far from him that he had almost passed before the dejection of his carriage penetrated to her like a call in a fog. "Oh, is it so bad as that?" she said aloud, involuntarily; and instantly she was on her feet, wide awake to reality.
Her voice turned him, his eyes as dumbly hurt as a child's, too injured to cry. She put out both hands impulsively, and that living kindness drew him like a magnet to drop on the step below her chair. Her hand on his shoulder for a moment gave the full sympathy of the human touch. There was silence before she said, "If you don't want to talk, you needn't say a word; but if it would help you . . ."
The instant breaking of the ice-gorge gratified her as no spoken compliment could have done. It seemed that his little book of verse had been finding no publisher; and Frances Vastine, who had been its critic, and in large part inspiration, had told him to-day, just when he most needed her sympathy, that she thought he ought to be told she was engaged! He had protested against the desecration of her marrying an ordinary man; and she had said, in that bored way that was spoiling her lately, that it was absurd, of course, but she really preferred an ordinary man! Yes, it was quite unmistakable. Oh, to be misrepresented by an undersized body and sallow
