The Readjustment Part 20

"And you'll find that she's furthest from you in those moods--it's in them that she's least herself."

"This general girl proposition is a tough one," commented Bertram.

"All right. You know the dope."

"You poor, perplexed boy!"

"Say, isn't it time you began confiding?"

"Oh, you caught it--the letter I mean--There are few things those eyes of yours don't see!"

"Man?" he continued, ignoring the compliment.

"Yes. It's a dreadful perplexity."

"Tell your old uncle!"

"Perhaps."

"You're in love?"

"I--I was. You see--ah, it's gone past the place where it should have ended!"

"Then why don't you break it off?"

"That's all very well to say, but he's a good man, and he says he's crazy about me. Do I seem happy to you?"

"Middling."

"I am--sometimes. Then something like to-day comes, and it puts me clear down in the heart. I have to keep up laughing and being gay when I'm all torn to pieces. I feel that I oughtn't to keep him in suspense this way. He's young, he's fairly rich--if that counted. When he's here, I often think I do--love him. When he writes, I know I don't."

"Poor little girl!" said Bert, catching sympathetically at the half-sob in her voice.

"Thank you," answered Kate on an indrawn breath. And then, "What would you do? I'm only a girl after all, am I not? Here I'm leaning on you, asking for advice."

Bertram did not answer for a time. Then:

"Sure you don't love him?"

"Not--not entirely. I might if he made me."

Bertram was looking straight down on her. His mouth was pursed up.

"Suppose he made you--and after you'd married him you got to feeling again as you do now. That wouldn't be square to him, would it?"

"I--perhaps not. But oh, it would hurt him so!"

"I guess he could live through it. They usually do, and don't lose many meals at that. I think he's running a bluff, myself."

Kate drew slightly away from him.

"That's a poor compliment."

Bertram studied her meaning.

"What?"

"To say that a man _couldn't_ get crazy over me."

"Oh! Not on your life. Sure thing no. I don't know a girl anywhere that a man has more license to get crazy over. You're a beauty and you're just about the best fellow I know."

"I suppose you _had_ to say that!"

"I figure that I wanted to. If I haven't said it before, it's because--" he stopped; Kate, as though it were an actual presence, could see the figure of Eleanor rising between them.

"Yes, I know--" she said quickly. "You do think I'm attractive then--cross your heart."

"Cross my heart, you're a beaut."

"But that doesn't get me any further with my troubles."

"What are his bad points that make you hold off?"

"Nothing more than a feeling, I suppose. No, it's more than that--something definite. It's--I find this thing hard to say. Not exactly weakness in him--more a lack of proved strength. He inherited his money; he's had the regular Eastern education. He's at work, managing his properties. But I'd feel so much more secure of his strength if he had made it for himself. That is the thing I could admire most in a man; more even than kindness. To have him succeed from nothing because his strength was in it. I don't care how unfinished he might be--that would show he was a man!"

Bertram was still pausing on this, when Kate touched his arm.

"I'm afraid," she said, "that we must join the others. They'll be talking about us if we don't, and we mustn't have that--for Eleanor's sake if for no other!" They hurried ahead, therefore, and walked beside Mr. and Mrs. Masters all the way in.

At the studio door, Kate declined a half-accepted invitation to remain for the night.

"Mother isn't wholly well," she said, "and I can be fearfully domestic in emergency! It's only a step to the Valencia Street cars, and Mr.

Bertram will get me home."

It was still too early for the theatre crowd; they found themselves alone on the outer seat of a "dummy" car, one of those rapid transit conveyances by which San Francisco of old let the pa.s.senger decide whether that amorphic climate was summer or winter.

He had, it seemed, to shake her back into the story of her love-affair. Three times he approached the subject, and each time she fended it off. They had pa.s.sed clear into the Mission, were more than three-quarters of the way home, before he launched one of his frontal a.s.saults.

"You might give me some more work at my job of confidant," he said.

She began again, then; a story without detail; more a sentimental exposure of her feelings. The thing was growing like a canker; she fought it, but the decision, the feeling of his unhappiness should she give him final rejection, roosted on her pillow. It had never come to an engagement; it had been only an understanding; but she thought of dreadful things, even of his possible suicide, whenever she contemplated giving him the final blow.

The old-fashioned Waddington house stood on a big Spanish lot far out in the Mission. There was ground to spare; enough so that its original owners had room to plant trees without shading light from the windows.

As they walked into the deep shadows, her voice took on an intonation like a suppressed sob.

"It is a comfort now to have said it, and it's a new life to have you for support. Oh, Bertram, what a big, strong friend you are! Be good to me, won't you?"

She had stopped; in the shadows the clouded moon of her face looked up into his.