The Grain of Dust Part 13

"Oh, he'll talk freely--to anyone. He talks only the one subject. He never thinks of anything else."

She was resting her crossed arms on the back of her chair and, with her chin upon them, was looking at him--a childlike pose and a childlike expression. He said: "You are _sure_ you are twenty?"

She smiled gayly. "Nearly twenty-one."

"Old enough to be in love."

She lifted her head and laughed. She had charming white teeth--small and sharp and with enough irregularity to carry out her general suggestion of variability. "Yes, I shall like that, when it comes," she said; "But the chances are against it just now."

"There's Tetlow."

She was much amused. "Oh, he's far too old and serious."

Norman felt depressed. "Why, he's only thirty-five."

"But I'm not twenty-one," she reminded him. "I'd want some one of my own age. I'm tired of being so solemn. If I had love, I'd expect it to change all that."

Evidently a forlorn and foolish person--and doubtless thinking of him, two years the senior of Tetlow and far more serious, as an elderly person, in the same cla.s.s with her father. "But you like biology?" he said. The way to a cure was to make her talk on.

"I don't know anything about it," said she, looking as frivolous as a b.u.t.terfly or a breeze-bobbed blossom. "I listen to father, but it's all beyond me."

Yes--a light-weight. They could have nothing in common. She was a mere surface--a thrillingly beautiful surface, but not a full-fledged woman.

So little did conversation with him interest her, she had taken advantage of the short pause to resume her work. No, she had not the faintest interest in him. It wasn't a trick of coquetry; it was genuine.

He whom women had always bowed before was unable to arouse in her a spark of interest. She cared neither for what he had nor for what he was, in himself. This offended and wounded him. He struggled sulkily with his papers for half an hour. Then he fell to watching her again and----

"You must not neglect to give me your address," he said. "Write it on a slip of paper after you finish. I might forget it."

"Very well," she replied, but did not turn round.

"Why, do you think, did Tetlow come to see you?" he asked. He felt cheapened in his own eyes--he, the great man, the arrived man, the fiance of Josephine Burroughs, engaged in this halting and sneaking flirtation! But he could not restrain himself.

She turned to answer. "Mr. Tetlow works very hard and has few friends.

He had heard of my father and wanted to meet him--just like you."

"Naturally," murmured Norman, in confusion. "I thought--perhaps--he was interested in _you_."

She laughed outright--and he had an entrancing view of the clean rosy interior of her mouth. "In _me_?--Mr. Tetlow? Why, he's too serious and important for a girl like me."

"Then he bored you?"

"Oh, no. I like him. He is a good man--thoroughly good."

This pleased Norman immensely. It may be fine to be good, but to be called good--that is somehow a different matter. It removes a man at once from the jealousy-provoking cla.s.s. "Good exactly describes him,"

said Norman. "He wouldn't harm a fly. In love he'd be ridiculous."

"Not with a woman of his own age and kind," protested she. "But I'm neglecting my work."

And she returned to it with a resolute manner that made him ashamed to interrupt again--especially after the unconscious savage rebukes she had administered. He sat there fighting against the impulse to watch her--denouncing himself--appealing to pride, to shame, to prudence--to his love for Josephine--to the sense of decency that restrains a hunter from aiming at a harmless tame song bird. But all in vain. He concentrated upon her at last, stared miserably at her, filled with longing and dread and shame--and longing, and yet more longing.

When she finished and stood at the other side of the desk, waiting for him to pa.s.s upon her work, she must have thought he was in a profound abstraction. He did not speak, made a slight motion with his hand to indicate that she was to go. Shut in alone, he buried his face in his arms. "What madness!" he groaned. "If I loved her, there'd be some excuse for me. But I don't. I couldn't. Yet I seem ready to ruin everything, merely to gratify a selfish whim--an insane whim."

On top of the papers she had left he saw a separate slip. He drew it toward him, spread it out before him. Her address. An unknown street in Jersey City!

"I'll not go," he said aloud, pushing the slip away. Go? Certainly not.

He had never really meant to go. He would, of course, keep his engagement with Josephine. "And I'll not come down town until she has taken another job and has caught Tetlow. I'll stop this idiocy of trying to make an impression on a person not worth impressing. What weak vanity--to be piqued by this girl's lack of interest!"

Nevertheless--he at six o'clock telephoned to the Burroughs' house that he was detained down town. He sent away his motor, dined alone in the station restaurant in Jersey City. And at half past seven he set out in a cab in search of--what? He did not dare answer that interrogation.

VI

Like many another chance explorer from New York, Norman was surprised to discover that, within a few minutes of leaving the railway station, his cab was moving through a not unattractive city. He expected to find the Hallowells in a tenement in some more or less squalid street overhung with railway smoke and bedaubed with railway grime. He was delighted when the driver a.s.sured him that there was no mistake, that the comfortable little cottage across the width of the sidewalk and a small front yard was the sought-for destination.

"Wait, please," he said to the cabman. "Or, if you like, you can go to that corner saloon down there. I'll know where to find you." And he gave him half a dollar.

The cabman hesitated between two theories of this conduct--whether it was the generosity it seemed or was a ruse to "side step" payment.

He--or his thirst--decided for the decency of human nature; he drove confidingly away. Norman went up the tiny stoop and rang. The sound of a piano, in the room on the ground floor where there was light, abruptly ceased. The door opened and Miss Hallowell stood before him. She was throughout a different person from the girl of the office. She had changed to a tight-fitting pale-blue linen dress made all in one piece.

Norman could now have not an instant's doubt about the genuineness, the bewitching actuality, of her beauty. The wonder was how she could contrive to conceal so much of it for the purposes of business. It was a peculiar kind of beauty--not the radiant kind, but that which shines with a soft glow and gives him who sees it the delightful sense of being its original and sole discoverer. An artistic eye--or an eye that discriminates in and responds to feminine loveliness--would have been captivated, as it searched in vain for flaw.

If Norman antic.i.p.ated that she would be nervous before the task of receiving in her humbleness so distinguished a visitor, he must have been straightway disappointed. Whether from a natural lack of that sense of social differences which is developed to the most pitiful sn.o.bbishness in New York or from her youth and inexperience, she received him as if he had been one of the neighbors dropping in after supper. And it was Norman who was ill at ease. Nothing is more disconcerting to a man accustomed to be received with due respect to his importance than to find himself put upon the common human level and compelled to "make good" all over again from the beginning. He felt--he knew--that he was an humble candidate for her favor--a candidate with the chances perhaps against him.

The tiny parlor had little in it beside the upright piano because there was no s.p.a.ce. But the paper, the carpet and curtains, the few pieces of furniture, showed no evidence of bad taste, of painful failure at the effort to "make a front." He was in the home of poor people, but they were obviously people who made a highly satisfactory best of their poverty. And in the midst of it all the girl shone like the one evening star in the mystic opalescence of twilight.

"We weren't sure you were coming," said she. "I'll call father. . . .

No, I'll take you back to his workshop. He's easier to get acquainted with there."

"Won't you play something for me first? Or--perhaps you sing?"

"A very little," she admitted. "Not worth hearing."

"I'm sure I'd like it. I want to get used to my surroundings before I tackle the--the biology."

Without either hesitation or shyness, she seated herself at the piano.

"I'll sing the song I've just learned." And she began. Norman moved to the chair that gave him a view of her in profile. For the next five minutes he was witness to one of those rare, altogether charming visions that linger in the memory in freshness and fragrance until memory itself fades away. She sat very straight at the piano, and the position brought out all the long lines of her figure--the long, round white neck and throat, the long back and bosom, the long arms and legs--a series of lovely curves. It has been scientifically demonstrated that pale blue is pre-eminently the s.e.x color. It certainly was pre-eminently _her_ color, setting off each and every one of her charms and suggesting the roundness and softness and whiteness her drapery concealed. She was one of those rare beings whose every pose is instinct with grace. And her voice--It was small, rather high, at times almost shrill. But in every note of its register there sounded a mysterious, melancholy-sweet call to the responding nerves of man.

Before she got halfway through the song Norman was fighting against the same mad impulse that had all but overwhelmed him as he watched her in the afternoon. And when her last note rose, swelled, slowly faded into silence, it seemed to him that had she kept on for one note more he would have disclosed to her amazed eyes the insanity raging within him.

She turned on the piano stool, her hands dropped listlessly in her lap.

"Aren't those words beautiful?" she said in a dreamy voice. She was not looking at him. Evidently she was hardly aware of his presence.

He had not heard a word. He was in no mood for mere words. "I've never liked anything so well," he said. And he lowered his eyes that she might not see what they must be revealing.

She rose. He made a gesture of protest. "Won't you sing another?" he asked.

"Not after that," she said. "It's the best I know. It has put me out of the mood for the ordinary songs."