The Man from Home Part 32

LADY CREECH [with agitation]. Give me your arm, Almeric.

[They go into the hotel.]

ETHEL [to PIKE]. What have you to say to me?

[PIKE raises his hands slowly, with palms outward, and drops them.]

ETHEL. What explanation have you to make?

PIKE. None.

ETHEL. That's because you don't care what I think of you. [Bitterly.]

Indeed, you've already shown that, when you were willing to give me up to those people, and to let me pay them for taking me! You let me romanticize to you about honor and duty and sympathy--about my efforts to make that creature a man--and you pretended to sympathize with me, and you knew all the time it was only the money they were after!

PIKE [humbly]. Well, I shouldn't be surprised.

ETHEL. Didn't you have the faint little understanding of me enough to see that their asking for money, now--would horrify me? Didn't you know that your consenting to it, leaving me free to give it to them, would release me--make me free to deny everything to them?

PIKE [slowly]. Well, I shouldn't be surprised if I _had_ seen that.

ETHEL [staggered]. You mean you've been saving me again from myself, from my silliness, from my romanticism, that you've given me another revelation of the falsity, the unreality of my att.i.tude toward these people, and toward life.

PIKE [placatingly]. No, no!

ETHEL [vehemently]. You'd always say that, you'd always deny it--it's like you. You let me make a fool of myself and then you show it to me, and after that you deny it! [Angrily.] You're always exhibiting your superiority! Would you do that to the dream girl you told me of, to the girl at home who plays dream songs for you in the empty house among the beeches? Do you think _any_ girl could love a man for that? Go back to your dream girl, your lady of the picture!

PIKE [disconsolately]. She won't be there.

ETHEL [stubbornly]. She _might_ be.

PIKE. No, there ain't any chance of that. The house will still be empty.

ETHEL [almost crying]. Are you _sure_?

PIKE [sadly]. There ain't any doubt of it now.

ETHEL. You might be wrong--for once!

[She gives him a look between tears and laughter, then runs into the hotel.]

[PIKE stands sadly, his head bent, every line of his body expressing dejection; then from within the hotel come the sounds of a piano in the preliminary chords of "Sweet Genevieve." ETHEL'S voice is lifted in the song, at first faint, somewhat tremulous and quavering, then rising strongly and confidently. PIKE'S face, slowly upraised, becomes transfigured. He crosses the stage spellbound, to the hotel door with the look of a man in a dream. He falls back a step, looking in.]