The Strange Attraction/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
I
B ob was generously astonished with what had been accomplished in his absence. When Valerie walked in at nine he sprang out of his chair with enthusiasm.
“Val, you are a brick. That job for Townshend is a stroke. Benton will be awfully pleased. Looks as if he might be on our side. And that leader of yours on the fire is one of the best things I ever saw. Mrs. Benton read it to us last night.”
“It was a good leader, wasn’t it? But I didn’t write it.” She turned to the hook where she hung her hat and coat.
“You didn’t! Why, Val, it wasn’t quoted,” he said, and his tone implied that she had made a blunder.
“It didn’t have to be, Bob. Mr. Barrington wrote it for me.” She was sorry to see that heavy frown form over his eyes.
“Barrington wrote it! How the devil did he come to write it? Look here, Val, I don’t want him to have anything to do with this paper, if you don’t mind.” He dropped down into his chair.
“Well, you can’t stop him bringing in news, Bob. He’s a friend of Benton’s. He came in on Thursday night with that stuff about Lord Reaver’s son and the fortune just as I was trying to write the leader, and I was most beastly ill with a headache, and he stayed and did it for me. Rather decent, I thought.”
Bob was a bit ashamed of his reaction. Valerie sat down easily at her desk. “Did you have a good week?” she went on amiably.
“Oh, I suppose so.”
But it was the middle of the day before he had recovered sufficient detachment to talk to her about it. He never made any reference later to the copies he saw of Dane’s leader in other papers. Nor did Valerie mention them. She was above thinking that pin pricks serve any useful purpose in human relations.
A few evenings later she had to work in the office till nearly seven. Bob had left an hour before. When she entered the dining-room she saw there was no one at her table and only one man, a stranger, eating at that end of the room. She turned her head and saw that Dane was with Mac at the other end. To her surprise the big Irishman beckoned to her. As she approached his table she thought Dane’s unmoved face a bit of unnecessary tact. But as she smiled at him she was surprised to catch no answering glimmer of responsiveness in his miserable eyes. The look in them chilled her before she could think.
“Come and have some pheasant,” growled Mac hospitably. “I think you know Barrington.” But there was nothing significant in his tone to suggest that he suspected there was something between them.
“I do. Yes, I’d love to,” she said in one breath, trying to smile at Mac and look enquiringly at Dane at the same time. As she sat down opposite them her spirits rose a little at the sight of the steaming pheasants and the bottles of wine. As Michael brought extra service he smiled at her as if he were in a conspiracy with her.
She watched Mac carving deftly with his great red hands. She tried to appear as oblivious as he was of the frozen manner of the man beside him, but she wondered what on earth had happened to the gay spirit who had made a feast of his crumbs in the tent, but could not now smile at the prospect of pheasant and champagne. He did not even look at her, but sat smoking a cigarette and staring at a corner of the table, his head a little bent, his shoulders hunched in an attitude of profound dejection.
Mac handed her a luscious plate of the best portions of a bird with potatoes and little onions, and Michael poured her out a glass of wine.
“Go ahead, eat,” commanded Mac.
Then Dane looked at her, a faint glimmer of interest appearing at the back of his desperate eyes. He raised his glass to her and drank deeply.
She began to eat, for she was hungry, and she meant to pay Mac the compliment of enjoying his meal. “This is grand. I love pheasant high like this. Is there much game up this way?”
“Yes, about Kaihu. Can you shoot?”
“At a target, yes. But I don’t like killing anything except rats.”
Mac handed a plate to Dane and filled his own and began to gobble audibly. Then he looked at the other man who made no attempt to eat.
“Cheer up, D. B.,” he said gruffly. “Heard of the accident?” He turned to Valerie.
“No. What is it?” Her eyes widened, and she looked from him to Dane.
“Duffield. Englishman. They brought him down from Townshend’s mill an hour ago. Back broken.” Mac said it as laconically as he would have said “He’s got a cold.”
Valerie put down her knife and fork while something caught her throat. “How rotten!” she exploded.
“Yes.” Mac went on with his mouth full of food. “Bloody hard luck. Good sport. He’s done.”
She looked into her glass and without thinking drank it empty.
“That’s it,” said Dane bitterly, speaking for the first time. “That’s the only answer.” And he finished his own glass and refilled it.
“You knew him?” She turned her sorry eyes upon him.
“Yes, knew him well,” he said irritably, and looked away from her.
“He’s gone to the hospital, I suppose,” she said to Mac.
“Yes. Lorrimer went too, with Doc Steele.”
They all ate in silence for some minutes. Valerie felt depressed herself now. “I can never get used to accidents,” she said gloomily. “Such a waste of human material.”
“Plenty more to take its place, don’t worry.” Mac continued to eat with superb indifference.
Dane beckoned to Michael and ordered more wine. When it came he reached for her glass.
“Oh, please, not any more for me,” she said quickly.
He shot a look at her. The champagne was working in him. “Be a sport. Of course you will have some more.” He filled her glass.
Mac raised his, drinking for the first time. “Here’s long life to you both,” he said. It sounded as if he were proposing a matrimonial toast. Valerie compressed her lips, and a flicker of amusement crossed Dane’s eyes.
“Not long life, Mac, but full life, eh, Miss Freedom?” And for the first time he looked at Valerie as if he really saw her.
She nodded, smiling at him as if she would make him forget.
Then Dane began to eat a little and to talk, and the despair went from his face. He became alive, and she saw why her father had called him one of the finest table talkers he had ever met. As the wine got hold of him he grew more brilliant. He got on to reminiscences of the gold field rushes in Australia, to the tragedies and comedies of fever-stricken men and women. She listened astonished and fascinated, but chilled to think that he had to be a little drunk to be like that. But he had forgotten Duffield. At least she was glad of that.
Mac grew a little more lively too. He broke in with grunts and comments, and he forgot Valerie occasionally and let slip words with unpleasant connotations. Then she was surprised to see that Dane had not lost his awareness of her, for he silenced Mac with a commanding Sh! Interested though she was, she thought she had better leave them to it. She stood up and thanked Mac with a little bow. He grinned broadly at her.
Dane looked up at her with a subconscious appeal in his eyes, now softened and a little slumbrous. “Oh, don’t go, don’t go,” he pleaded.
She did not want to. She had drunk just enough to make her reckless. But something told her she could not stay there and drink with them.
“I must go. I have to work,” she said, and went off wondering if she were walking steadily. Unaccustomed to champagne she felt so fuddled when she got to her room that she lay down on her bed and fell asleep and did not wake till after midnight.
II
The next evening as she walked with Bob to the office after dinner he told her that Dane Barrington had been drunk the night before and was still in bed in the hotel.
“I thought he probably was,” she said sweetly. “I had dinner with him and Mac last night, and the fourth bottle was coming in as I left, or perhaps it was the fifth. I got a bit shickered myself and had to go to bed.”
Bob stopped suddenly in the middle of the path, and then strode on belligerently.
“Out with it,” she said calmly.
“I have nothing to say.” But it was the tone of a man who could have talked all night on the subject.
“Really! You began by telling me something you suspected I would not like to know. Why be squeamish about the rest of it?”
“Val, if you are going to be associated with that man I’m going to leave Dargaville.”
“That’s not necessary, Bob. Sack me instead.”
“Don’t talk rot.”
“Look here, Bob, calm down. The trouble is that you do not know me at all. Years ago you set up some vision and called it Valerie Carr. It never was Valerie Carr, and it never will be, and why on earth you want to keep on calling it Valerie Carr passes my comprehension. I’ve done my best as kindly as I could to show you I am not that vision. I did think I loved you and could marry you. I don’t know what happened to make me see I couldn’t. But I know something did. I’m willing to take the whole blame for that three months. I have never blamed you. But I couldn’t go on, Bob. And one can never go back and begin again in the same way. You want something entirely different from me. You want a woman who will go your own road.”
They had reached the office. He unlocked the door and they went in. Valerie did not take off her things. She sat on the edge of her desk looking at Bob, who had sat down and thrown his hat on to a pile of papers.
She struggled with something in her mind for a few minutes, then she went on quietly.
“Bob, we cannot work here with friction between us. You can have my resignation here and now, or you can play the game and shut up about what I do.”
He turned fiercely on her. “You know as well as I do we can’t bust up the job now. We’ve got to go on with it.”
“It isn’t any use telling me I have to go on with a thing. I tell you I will stay on one condition, and one only. And it was the one on which I came up. Are you going to keep it or not?”
“Oh, of course, I have to keep it. I always have to do everything.”
“No, you don’t. You simply have to choose between having me go or stay. And if I stay I’ll never hurt your feelings by mentioning things I know you won’t like to hear. If you think back over this conversation you will see you began that business. And you know quite well that when people hit me I can hit them back, and I’m always going to hit them back. I’m no meek and mild angel. But I do try not to give the first blow. The world is hard enough for all of us without that first blow.”
As usual, Bob felt ashamed of himself. And he hated her awful fairness, her incorruptible strength, her fatal gift of hitting back in the sorest spot. He would have felt better if only he had known some weakness of hers he could make a dent in.
“Of course you must stay, and you can go to hell for all I care,” he retorted savagely.
“Now that’s the proper spirit. If only we would all let each other go pleasantly to hell the world would be quite a nice place to live in.”
“All right. See that you let Barrington go pleasantly to hell if you get shook on him.”
“Hell! Bob! Are you in a conspiracy to throw that man at me or what?” He had thrust better than he knew.
He was astonished to see her turn and go out of the office. He sat staring blankly at the wall in front of him for some minutes. Did she really care for that man? Up till now it had only been the fear that she might come to do so that had been in his mind. And if she did what was he to do? He dropped his head in his hands and thought back. And he knew he had no choice.
Valerie walked almost to the centre of the town in a rage against Bob. She told herself he had no business to hang on to a former relation in this manner. That was the kind of weakness that she loathed. Why could he not accept the inevitable? Just because she had never let him see how painful, how frought with struggle and indecision the thing had been for her he had supposed she had not felt about it. And then that remark about Dane. She told herself she was not in love with Dane. He was not in love with her, and she detested this anticipatory settlement of her affairs.
She turned up Queen Street and walked to the fringe of the town and a little way on along the coast road. It was a cool windy night. But she found she was too upset to calm down all at once. She did wish Dane had not been so drunk as to be still in bed. She could not see how he could be any more sensitive than she to the tragedy in life. Much of her positive manner was due to the fact that she had to set her teeth on life or she could not have endured it herself. She stopped in the road and looked up at a black cloud that blotted out a part of the Milky Way. Then hardly knowing why she swung round and went back to the hotel.
She had not been in her room two minutes before there came a knock on her door. Michael stood there.
“Miss Carr,” he began, with his ready sentimental smile, “there’s a man in the house who would like you to play to him.” He had the manner of a person who was continuously performing deeds that had to be disguised or hidden, and he infused a perfectly innocent proceeding with an air of furtive wickedness.
“Oh, is there? Then I shall be very glad to play.” She tried to keep her voice casual.
She closed the door of the sitting-room behind her wondering if Dane were in one of the rooms next it. She knew one was Mac’s. She knew afterwards that she had played deliberately, or that she had started deliberately to get hold of the man who was listening to her. Once lost in the music she forgot him, and he existed only as a subconscious stimulus. At the end of two hours she felt herself running down. She stopped and sat still on the piano stool half expecting some sign from him. But she heard nothing, and disappointed went back to her room. Under her door she found a note in a sealed envelope. In the middle of the folded piece of paper was written, “Thanks, Miss Freedom, for a golden hour in a leaden day.”
It was one of those fragments in the development of a human relation that have a significance invisible to the casual eye. Valerie could not have torn it up or put it in the waste-paper basket. On the other hand she had not reached the exuberant stage when she wished to kiss it or put it in a scented sachet. She studied the nervous writing for a minute, and then folded it up and put it in a little tin box with a copy of her will, some receipts, some old photos of herself and Bob and her father on the yacht, and other miscellaneous things which for one reason and another she wished to keep.
Then she sat down on her bed and stayed very still for some time. She recognized some kind of crisis in her life. It had come to her in the office when she offered her resignation to Bob. Something inside her said “Now or never.” And she wondered how many people in the history of relationships acted on the “Now.”
III
“Have you had a hard week? You seem tired.” Father Ryan looked solicitously at Valerie as she sat down to dinner.
“I’m more cross than tired. I haven’t slept well the last night or two. And life makes me so cross sometimes. There’s poor Duffield still alive. Why, why, when he has to die? Why is nature so brutal?”
The little priest waved his soft hands. “We have to leave all that.”
“I’ve noticed that most of us do leave it,” she retorted.
“What are you going to do to-night?” he asked after a minute’s silence.
“Nothing in particular. That is, I was going for a ride.”
“Would you like to come with me to the hospital and play to the patients? I have to see a man there who is very ill with pneumonia. There is a piano there seldom used. I think they’d like some music.”
“Yes indeed I will. Will the matron let me play at night?”
“Yes, I’m sure it will be all right. It’s in the accident ward.”
Valerie had never been in a public hospital, and when she walked into the long ward with the night nurse she got a funny gulp in her throat, and a sense of the vast areas of human experience that had so far been unknown lands to her. She was struck silent by the piteousness of the two rows of white cots and the shapeless lumps that lay under the white quilts. The ward was always full, for this was the only hospital on the river. There were all kinds of heads and faces projected sharply against the pillows. Some turned as they walked in and others, gripped by a benumbing indifference to the things of earth, lay still. She saw that three beds had screens round them, and wondered what stricken things lay there to be hidden away from the rest. She was glad she was to sit with her back to them. She felt she could never have played if she had had to face them.
She dug out of her memory the things she thought her varied audience would like, cheerful things, happy songs and dances, and a little sentimental music to stir the pulses of the dreamers. She had asked the nurse to stop her when it was advisable, but no one stayed her hand. At last her mood began to break. Something began to distract her. She finished rather abruptly a waltz by Brahms and turned on her stool. Half-way down the ward, sitting with the nurse, she saw Dane Barrington. She stood up and they came towards her.
“Oh, will you sing?” she said impulsively to Dane.
He gave her a black look. “Sing! Good God! How could I sing here?”
She felt chilled at once at the pain in his eyes. But she resented his suffering.
The nurse thanked her eloquently and moved off to a man who had beckoned to her.
“Are you riding?” asked Dane.
“Yes. I came up with Father Ryan.”
“Oh. Do you have to go back with him?”
“I don’t have to, no.”
They looked at each other. Something came out of him and clutched at her.
“Then I’ll tell him I’m taking you back.”
“All right, but I have to have supper with Miss Addison first.”
“Well, that’s all right. I’ve only just come. I’m going to sit with Duffield for a while. I’ll wait for you at the stable.” He moved off with the air of a man who dreads with every nerve in his body what he is about to do, and disappeared behind one of the screens.
The hospital superintendent, Miss Addison, thought Valerie rather absent-minded as they took supper in her pleasant little sitting-room. And Valerie, on her side, was staggered at the apparent calmness with which the matron told her that there were three people in the building who could not possibly live a week.
IV
Dane was pacing back and forth beside the stable when she went out. He stood still when he saw her and waited for her to come up to him. He felt her life and vitality and sympathy reaching out to him. It enfolded him like a warm and gracious garment on a cold day. He made an impulsive movement and seized her hands.
“Oh, man, how can you live if you suffer like this about people?” she said, and in spite of herself a shade of criticism crept into her tone.
His raw nerves recoiled from it at once.
“Good God! You go and sit by that man and look into his eyes as I have been doing. He can’t talk except with his eyes, and he is putting the despairing questions of ages into them. I tell you if you looked at them long you’d go mad. If it is easy for you to forget the God-damned mess and mystery of all this it isn’t for me.” He flung her hands away and stamped off to the stable.
Valerie bit her lips and looked up at the impotent stars so brilliant in the clear May night that they silvered the river running below. For the first time in her life she had not the faintest idea what she was going to say next, what she could say next to comfort this man. It was all very well for her to feel deep within herself that the only answer to him was to antidote tragedy with beauty, death with life. How was she to say it and not be cheap and banal? She was feeling strained and uncertain when Dane led the horses out.
“I’m sorry I was rude, Miss Carr,” he said, as he stopped before her.
She had a wild impulse to throw her arms about him as he stood with his head a little on one side looking at her.
“You were not rude,” she said softly.
She let him help her to mount, and she put her hand on his shoulder with a significant pressure. They rode in silence out of the hospital grounds and along the road by the river. She stole looks at him as he kept his horse abreast of hers. He had a tweed cap tilted back on his head that gave him a curiously rakish look as it pressed his hair out round his white face. She wondered why he wanted her company for he did not seem aware of her at all. But she had no desire to clutch at his reserves. She looked up at the stars and tried to think her own thoughts.
About a mile from the hospital he pulled up his horse. He looked up a scrub-covered slope to their left. He seemed to find something.
“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.
“No.”
“There’s a track off here to the coast. Will you ride out there? I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Of course I will.”
He led the way up a rough incline covered with low ti-tree and broken by small washouts. Then they came out upon the plain where there was a maze of old tracks partly overgrown and often treacherous. They went slowly, for he missed the way every now and then and they had to go back and pick it up again. The air was keen and salty, with a light night wind rustling about the bushes. The sound of the surf advanced and receded as they twisted and turned.
Valerie lost the sense of her own identity, and it was not till Dane pulled his horse up at the head of the ravine, and she saw the dull line of the surf below, that she came back to herself and him.
He had been lost too, groping in a great blankness of pain and despair, but instinctively feeling his way to a little glimmer of light, impulsively following its little flicker, thinking of the moment when he might get to it.
“Shall we go down?” he asked, turning to look at her, as she sat straight and tense on her horse.
“Of course, if you’d like to.”
She wondered if he still had the tent. They trusted to their horses to steer them safely through the Cimmerian darkness of the gully, for they could see nothing till the dull white shadow of the cottages showed through the trees on the open lower level. When they came opposite the Bentons’, which was nearest to the beach, Dane stopped again.
“Would it be too cold for you to sit out a while? I have coats and things in the tent.”
“No, I never catch cold.”
As he led the horses to Roger’s stable she remembered that it must be after midnight. But the next day was Sunday. And then her morality had never been regulated by the position of bits of steel on a clock’s face.
He came back to her and led the way into the tent and lit a candle.
He took a warm coat off his pole and helped her into it, and put on his red sweater, and pulled a rug off his cot. He led the way to a hollow half-way up the side of the cliff where they could look down upon the surf. He sat down beside her and wrapped the rug about their feet and knees, took out his pipe and began to smoke. He forgot to offer her a cigarette.
She waited a little and then asked him for one. He came to her out of a far-away mood and looked at her almost in surprise. Then he was smitten with a quick remorse for his discourtesy.
“Lord! I’m sorry. Miss Carr, I’m behaving very badly. Why, I forgot you were there, that is, I knew you were there, but hang it, how can I say it?” His tone showed that he was less tragic than he had been when they started out from the hospital.
“You don’t have to say it. I understand,” she said eloquently. “You are really paying me a great compliment.”
He held up the rug enclosing them in an intimate snugness while she lit her cigarette. But his suffering had gone much too deep to be lightened all at once. As he smoked on he retreated from her into his own thoughts.
Valerie leaned back a little against a thick clump of rushes so that she could look at his figure bent forward, his hands clasped about his knees, his face turned from her sometimes staring straight out over the black sea, and sometimes raised to the sky. There was something about the way he sat, about the forlorn droop of his shoulders, the set of his head upon them, that made her mad to throw her arms about him and pull him back into a live warm world. She relentlessly fought these impulses, the most powerful she had ever known, because she was so uncertain about him. She had not the faintest idea how far, if at all, he had committed his feeling to her.
Suddenly he swung round to her, taking his pipe from his mouth. He adjusted the rug which he had disarranged.
“You know, I was just wondering how far the human race might have got without words. Individuals can get on quite well without them. I got an amusing picture of everybody going about in a great silence, smiling, pointing, making signs, very restful, eh?”
“Why”—she was dislocated out of her own mood, “we shouldn’t have got very far with art, invention, all that we call civilization, should we?”
“We might have developed some other kind of civilization, a better kind. We haven’t done so much after all. We’ve learned a lot about comfort, something of beauty. We have learned to save life from some of its diseases, and words have been instrumental in spreading information about those things, yes.” He looked up at the sky a moment and went on as if he were talking to himself. “How little we have done after all. We can’t make a fine human being, the test, the real test. Nobody knows what will produce a Confucius or a Cæsar. They just happen. Our great men are accidents, produced by so frail a chance that it is astonishing to contemplate it. The moods and senses, forced or spontaneous, of a couple of people with no notion of producing a hero, a fortuitous collaboration of passion and circumstance and a fragment of life force, and behold! a great man results. What a joke! And not a person in all history has ever contributed a practical idea as to the making of him. Some people think health does it, some think education, some think the Bible, some think matching a tall fair man with a short dark woman, some think breeding, some think free love. And what is the result of all those theories? The same uncertainty everywhere. And often with the more breeding there is the poorest result, and with the more chance the better. Out of nowhere comes a Lincoln and out of aristocrats an idiot!”
He dropped his head on to his knees a moment.
“And then when you get the best that we can do, it is a specimen tragically fragile and incomplete, so easily maimed and broken, and so pathetically helpless with his own kind. Numbers of our cleverest men can do wonders with anything but themselves. Men who can paint splendid pictures are often dirty, offensive, bedraggled human beings eternally suffering from indigestion, men who can compose glorious music are half mad and full of childish vanity, men who can write great books are mean-spirited, nervous persons who fly into a rage at the sight of one man’s adverse opinion, men who can lead armies to victory are afraid of their mothers-in-law, men who can build magnificent bridges and govern empires are putty in the hands of their mistresses ———”
Valerie laughed out, throwing up her head.
“Well, isn’t it a spectacle?” he demanded, almost fiercely.
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you think there’s any system at the back of it all?”
“I feel there ought to be. But I don’t know.”
“I get so tired thinking about it,” he said, drooping again.
She put out her hand and buried her fingers in the hair on the back of his bowed head.
He turned to her at once, and throwing an arm about her, grasped hers on the further side of him with a hot and nervous clutch. He nosed his face into her neck so that his hair tickled her cheek. And then he lay still, like a tired child, sure of its resting place.
Valerie drew a long breath and then exerted all her will power to drive back the excitement that heaved up inside her. She knew that Dane was not at that moment thinking of her as a woman at all. She had no illusions as to the possibility of his being a blazing and imperious lover when he was moved. But he was not a perennial dribbler of sensation, and something, she could not tell what, was holding him back.
So she sat very still herself, keeping her free hand away from his head, and trying to give him just the comfort of a presence that she felt he wanted. She tried to hold on to the sensation that the nestling of his head in her neck gave her. After a while he sat up suddenly, ran his hands through his hair, and looked for his pipe which he had put down in the sand.
Then he turned to her. “I say, I haven’t any business to be keeping you out like this. It must be very late. I’m very selfish.”
She felt an intense irritation, what at she did not know, and then she felt cold.
“Why, I’m not a child,” she said, with just a touch of sharpness in her tone. She sat up conscious again of a sense of frustration.
He filled his pipe slowly and began to smoke. It had grown cold and feeling it now she shivered. Dane got to his feet and held out his hands to her. She felt he was conscious of her drifting experimental mood, and that for some reason he was fighting it and managing it. It embarrassed her and made her feel crude and undignified. And that made her angry at him. He walked ahead of her to the tent and threw in the rug. Then he helped her off with his coat and after pulling off his own sweater looked at his watch.
“Good Lord! It’s two o’clock! How will you get into the hotel? I’ll go there with you and ———”
“You don’t have to, my dear man. What kind of babe do you think I am? I’ll knock on Michael’s window. Mac told me to.”
He peered curiously at her in the starlight.
“Of course,” she said. “I asked him what I would do if I was out after midnight.”
Then she saw his face light up against the dull white tent wall.
“You are very nice and unafraid, Miss Freedom, aren’t you?” he said softly, and turned along the path to Roger’s stable.
They rode in silence through the ravine and for some way along the flat above. They were more uncomfortable with each other than they had ever been. Valerie knew that she had intended Dane to kiss her down there, and the fact that he had not done so made her look foolish in her own eyes. But the thing that disturbed her much more was the fear that he had sensed her intention. This fear froze her into a complete detachment from him as she rode beside him.
At the borders of Dargaville he stopped.
“You have been very kind to me to-night, Miss Carr, very kind. Now are you sure you’re all right?”
She was absurdly hurt again all at once. “Oh, I haven’t been kind,” she said impatiently, “and I’m quite all right, thank you.” She held out her hand.
As he took it and gripped it firmly he looked at her and seemed about to speak. But instead he leaned down over her hand and pressed a kiss upon it, and swinging his horse away from her, rode off.
Valerie could not have told whether it was a town or a forest she rode on through, for she saw nothing of it. A fierce excitement burned through her, making her a little sick with the stress of it.
When she reached her room she threw up her window at the bottom, drew her chair to it, and sat down. Her thoughts swirled about in her mind for some time, and out of the swirl emerged a few well-defined certainties. She had wanted Dane to kiss her. She was falling in love with him. She wanted to fall in love with him. She wanted him to love her. But he drank. Perhaps he took morphia. He was a strange and difficult person. She did not understand him. And then the question, What was she going to do about it? And the questions, Did he care for her? If not, could she make him care? What was it that halted him every now and then?
She had not found any answer when at last she fell asleep.