I've Married Marjorie Part 16

"Yes. All the values are changed. At least they are for me and most of the men I came across. I don't think the women are so different; you see, the American women didn't have anything much to change them, except the ones who went over. We were in such a little while it didn't have time to go deep."

He meant no disparagement, but Marjorie flared up.

"You mean me--and Lucille--and all the rest!" she accused him. "You're quite wrong. That was just what I was telling Lucille's grandchildren.

We are different. Why, do you think I would have thought I owed you anything--owed it to you to stay up here and drudge--before the war? I never thought about being good, particularly, or honorable, or owing things to people. Oh, I suppose I did, in a way, because I'd always been brought up to play fair. But never with the top of my mind. You know yourself, all anybody wanted was a good time. If anybody had told me, when I was seventeen--I was seventeen when the war started, wasn't I?--that I'd care more about standards than about fun, I'd have just thought they were lying, or they didn't know. And right and wrong have come to matter in the most curious way."

"I think perhaps," he answered her--they had quite forgotten that they were enemies by now--"that the war was in the air. Maybe the world felt that there wouldn't be much chance for good times for it--for our generation--again, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at it. You know, for a good many years things won't be the same, even for us in America, who suffered less, perhaps, than any other nation in the world. Life's harder, and it will be."

"Oh, always?" demanded Marjorie. "You know, Francis, I always wanted good times worse than anything in the world, but that isn't saying I had them. I didn't. Won't I ever have any more? That few weeks when I raced around with you and Billy and Lucille was really the first time I'd been free and had fun with people I liked, ever since I'd been born. And--and I suppose it went to my head a little bit."

She looked up at him like a child who has been naughty and is sorry, and he looked over at her, his face going tense, as it did when he felt things.

"I don't think we were exactly free agents," he said musingly.

"Something was pushing us. I'm not sorry . . . except that it was hardly fair to you----"

She leaned toward him impulsively, holding out her hand. He bent toward her, flushing. They were nearer than they had been since that day when his summons to war came. And then Fate--as Mr. Logan might have said--knocked at the door.

CHAPTER IX

The two on the balcony moved a little away from each other. Then Marjorie, coloring for no reason whatsoever, stepped down the toy stairs that wound like a doll's-house staircase, and went to the door.

It was Peggy O'Mara, no more and no less, but what a Peggy! She looked like an avenging G.o.ddess. But it was not at Marjorie that her vengeance was directed, it was plainly to be seen, for she swept the smaller girl to her bosom with one strong and emotional arm, and said, "You poor abused little lamb! I've come to tell you that I know all about it!"

Marjorie jerked herself away in surprise. For one thing, she had been very much interested in the conversation she had been carrying on with Francis, and had entirely forgotten that she might ever have had any claim to feel abused. For another thing, Peggy knew more than she should, if Logan had kept his promise.

"Won't--won't you come in?" she asked inadequately. "And please tell me what you mean."

"Mean! I mean I know all about it!" said Peggy, who was sixteen only, in spite of her G.o.ddess-build, and romantic.

She came in, nevertheless, holding tight to Marjorie as if she might faint, unaided; guided her to the downstairs couch, and sat down with her, holding tight to her still.

"Yes," said Marjorie, with a certain amount of coldness, considering that she was being regarded as an abused lamb, "you said that before.

And now please tell me what it is that you know all about."

"Well, if that's the way you take being defended," said Peggy with a certain amount of temper, "I'll just go back the way I came!"

"But, Peggy, I don't know anything about it!" she pleaded. "Please tell me everything."

"There's nothing much to tell," said Peggy, quite chilly in her turn.

But now she had more to face than Marjorie. Francis, militant and stern, strode down the steps and planted himself before the girls. He fixed his eye on Peggy in a way that she clearly was not used to stand up under, and said, "Out with it, Peggy!"

So Peggy, under his masculine eye, "made her soul."

"It's nothing that concerns you, Francis Ellison!" she began. "It's simply that I've learned how a man can treat a woman. And you--you that I've known since I was a child! And telling me fairy-tales of bold kidnapers and cruel husbands and all, and I never knowing that you were going to grow up and be one!"

Marjorie laughed--she couldn't help it, Peggy was so severe. Francis looked at her again in some surprise, and Peggy was plainly annoyed.

"I should say," said Francis with perfect calm, "that our honorable friend Mr. Logan had been confiding in you. His att.i.tude is a little biased; however, let that pa.s.s. Just what did he say?"

"Just nothing at all, except that you were a charming young man, and he wished that he were as able to face the world and its problems as you,"

Peggy answered spiritedly. "None of your insinuations about his honor, please. And shame on you to malign a sick man!"

"Oh, is Mr. Logan sick?" asked Marjorie, forgetting other interests.

She turned to Francis, forgetting their feud again, in a common and inexcusable curiosity. "Francis! Now we'll know what it really was that ailed him--the nervous spells, you know? I always _told_ you it wasn't fits!"

"How do you know it isn't?" said Francis. "Peggy hasn't said."

"She wouldn't be so interested if it was," said Marjorie triumphantly.

"It takes an old and dear wife to stand _that_ in a man."

They had no business to be deflected from Peggy and her temper by any such consideration; but it was a point which had occupied their letters for a year, off and on, and there had been bets upon it.

"Let me see, I suppose those wagers stand--was it candy, or a Hun helmet?" said Francis.

"Candy," said Marjorie. "But it was really the principle of the thing.

Ask her."

Francis turned back to Peggy, who was becoming angrier and angrier; for when you start forth to rescue any one, it is annoying, even as Logan found it, to have the rescue act as if it were nothing to her whether she was rescued or not.

"Now, what really does ail him, Pegeen?" he asked affectionately. "Did you see him, or don't you know?"

"Of course I saw him--am I not nursing him? And of course I know!

Poor man, the journey up here nearly killed him."

"How? It seemed like a nice journey to me," said Marjorie thoughtlessly.

"There's no use pretending you're happy," said Peggy relentlessly. "I know you're not. It's very brave, but useless."

"But has he fits?" demanded Marjorie with unmistakable intensity.

"He has not," said Peggy scornfully. "I don't know where you'd get the idea. He fainted this morning when he tried to get up. He didn't come down to breakfast, and we thought him tired out, and let him lie. But after awhile, perhaps at nine or so, we thought it unnatural that any one should be asleep so long. So I tiptoed up, because when you're as fat as mother it does wear you to climb more stairs than are needful.

And there was the poor man, all dressed beautifully, even to his gla.s.ses with the black ribbon, lying across the bed, in a faint."

"Are you sure it was a faint?" the Ellisons demanded with one voice.

Peggy looked more scornful, if possible, than she had for some time.

"We had to bring him to with aromatic spirits of ammonia, and slapping his hands. And the doctor says it's his heart. That is, it isn't really his heart, but his nerves are so bad that they make some sort of a condition that it's just as bad as if he had heart-trouble really.

Simulated heart-trouble, the doctor called it. You understand, he doesn't pretend, himself; his heart makes his nerves pretend, as well as I can make it out. Sure it must be dreadful to have nerves that act that way to you. I wonder what nerves feel like, anyway."

Peggy herself was getting off the topic, through her interest in the subject.

"But how did you find out that I was beating Marjorie?" inquired Francis calmly, pulling her back.

She shot a furious glance at him.