The Vehement Flame Part 27

"Why, don't you remember the time I saw her, with that blue-eyed baby?

She was just going into a house on Maple Street."

It was at this moment that the gentlemen entered, so there was no further talk of painted ladies; and, besides, Maurice was alert to catch Eleanor's eye, and go home! "Edith is capable of saying anything!" he was thinking, desperately.

However, Edith said nothing alarming, and Maurice was able to get her safely away from the powder magazine in the shape of the amiable doctor, who, following them a few minutes later, was saying to himself: "How scared he was! Yet he looks like a good fellow at bottom. A rum world--a rum world!"

The "good fellow" hurried his womenkind down the street in angry preoccupation. As soon as he and Eleanor were alone, he said, "When does Edith graduate?"

"She has two years more."

"Oh, _Lord_!" Maurice said, despairingly; "has she got to be around for two years?" Eleanor's face lightened, but Maurice was instantly repentant. "I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying that! Edith's fine; and she has brains; but--"

"She monopolized the conversation to-night," Eleanor said; "Maurice, it is very improper for her to keep talking all the time about that horrid woman!"

The sharpness of his agreement made her look at him in surprise. "She _mustn't_ talk about Mrs. Dale!" he said, angrily.

"Dale? Is that her name?" said Eleanor.

"I don't know. I think so; didn't Edith call her that? Well, anyway, she mustn't keep talking about her!"

His irritation was so marked, that Eleanor's heart warmed; but she said, wearily, "I'll be glad myself when she graduates."

CHAPTER XVII

Edith, reflecting upon her first dinner party, wished Johnny had seen her, all dressed up. Then she pondered the possibilities of her allowance: If she was "going out," oughtn't she to have a real evening dress? But this daring thought faded very soon, for there didn't seem to be any dinner parties ahead. Mrs. Newbolt's supper table was, as Maurice said, sarcastically, the extent of the "Curtises' social whirl"--a fact which did not trouble him in the least! He had his own social whirl. He had made a man-circle for himself; some of the fellows in the office were his sort, he told Edith, and it was evident that their bachelor habits appealed to him, for he dined out frequently; and when he did, he was careful not to tell Eleanor where he was going, because once or twice, when he had told her, she had called up the club or house on the telephone about midnight to inquire if "Mr. Curtis had started home?" ... "I was worried about you, it was so late," she defended herself against his irritated mortification. He used to report these stag parties to Edith, telling her some of the stories he had heard; it didn't occur to him to tell any stories to Eleanor, because, as Henry Houghton had once said, Maurice and his wife didn't "have the same taste in jokes." When Edith chuckled over this or that witticism (or frowned at any opinion contrary to Maurice's opinion!) Eleanor sat in unsmiling silence. It was about this time Maurice fell into the way of saying "we"

to Edith: "We" will have tea in the garden; "we" will put in a lot of bulbs on each side of the brick path; "we" will go down to the square and hear the election returns. Occasionally he remembered to say, "Why don't you come along, Eleanor?"

"No, thank you," she said; and sometimes, to herself, she added, "He keeps me out." The jealous woman always says this, never realizing the deeper truth, which is that she keeps herself out! Maurice did not notice how, all that winter, Eleanor was keeping herself out. She was steadily retreating into some inner solitude of her own. No one noticed it, except Mrs. O'Brien--and perhaps fat, elderly, snarling Bingo, who must sometimes, when his small pink tongue lapped her cheek, have tasted tears. By another year, Eleanor's mind had so utterly diverged from Maurice's that not even his remorse (which he had grown used to, as one grows used to some encysted thing) could achieve for them any unity of living. She bored him, and he hurt her; she loved him and tried to please him; he didn't love her, but tried to be polite; he was not often angry with her, he wasn't fond enough of her to be angry! So, forgetful of that security of the Stars--Truth!--to which he had once aspired, he grew dully used to the arid safety of untruth,--though sometimes he swore softly to himself at the tiresome irony of the office nickname which, with an occasional gilt hatchet, still persisted. He would remember that evening of panic at the Mortons', and think, lazily, "She can't possibly get on Lily's track!" So Lily lived in anxious thriftiness at 16 Maple Street; and Maurice, no longer acutely afraid of her, and only seeing her two or three times a year, was more or less able to forget her, in his growing pleasure in Edith's presence in his house--a pleasure quite obvious to Eleanor.

As for Edith, she used to wonder, sometimes, why Eleanor was so "up stage"? (that was her latest slang); but it did not trouble her much, for she was too generous to put two and two together. "Eleanor has nervous prostration," she used to tell herself, with good-natured excuse for some especial coldness; and she even tried, once in a while, "to make things pleasant for poor old Eleanor!" "I lug her in," she told Johnny.

"She's a dose," said Johnny.

"Yes," Edith agreed; "she's stupid. But I'm going to pull off a picnic, some Sunday, to cheer her up. 'Course you needn't come, if you don't want to."

Johnny, looking properly bored, said, briefly, "I don't mind."

This was in mid-September. "Are you game for it, Eleanor?" Edith said one night at dinner; "we can find some pleasant place by the river--"

"I know a bully place," Maurice said, "in the Medfield meadows; remember, Eleanor? We went there on our trolley wedding trip," he informed Edith.

Eleanor, struggling between the pleasure of Maurice's "remember," and antagonism at sharing that sacred remembering with Edith, objected; "It may rain."

"Oh, come on," Edith rallied her: "be a sport! It won't kill you if it does rain!"

But Maurice, after his impulsive recollection of the "bully place,"

remembered that the trolley car which would take them out to the river, must pa.s.s Lily's door; "I hope it will rain," he thought, uneasily.

However, on that serene September Sunday a week later, it didn't rain; and Maurice fell into the spirit of Edith's plans; for, after all, even if the car did pa.s.s Lily's ugly little house, it wouldn't mean anything to anybody! "I'll sit with my back to that side of the street," he told himself. "It's safe enough! And it will give Buster a good time." He didn't realize that he rather hankered for a good time himself; to be sure, he felt a hundred years old! But money was no longer a very keen anxiety (he had pa.s.sed his twenty-fifth birthday); and the day was glittering with sunshine, and Edith would make coffee, and Eleanor would sing. Yes! Edith should have a good time!

They went clanging gayly along over the bridge, down Maple Street, and through the suburbs of Medfield until they came to the end of the car line, where they piled out, with all their impediments, and started for the river and the big locust.

"You'll sing, Nelly," Maurice said--Eleanor's face lighted with pleasure;--"and I'll tell Edith how a girl ought to behave on her wedding trip, and you can instruct Johnny how to elope."

Then, with little Bingo springing joyously, but rather stiffly, ahead of them, they tramped across the yellowing stubble of the mowed field, talking of their coffee, and whether there would be too much wind for their fire--and all the while Maurice was aware of Lily at No. 16; and Eleanor was remembering her hope of a time when she and Maurice would be coming here, and it would not be "just us"! and Johnny was thinking that Edith was intelligent--for a woman; and Edith was telling herself that _this_ kind of thing was some sense!

Eleanor, sitting down under the old locust, watched the three young people. She wondered when Maurice would tell her to sing. "The river is a lovely accompaniment, isn't it?" she hinted. No one replied.

"I'm going in wading after dinner," Edith announced; "what do you say, boys? Let's take off our shoes and stockings, and walk down to the second bridge. Eleanor can sit here and guard our things."

"I'm with you!" Maurice said; and Johnny said he didn't mind; but Eleanor protested.

"You'll get your skirts wringing wet, Edith. And--I thought we were to sit here and sing?"

"Oh, you can sing any old time," Edith said, lifting the lid of the coffee pot and stirring the brown froth with a convenient stick.

"And I'm just to look on?" Eleanor said.

"Why, wade, if you want to," her husband said; "It's safe enough to leave Edith's things here."

After that he was too much absorbed in shooing ants off the marmalade to give any thought to his wife. The luncheon (except to her) was the usual delightful discomfort of balancing coffee cups on uncertain knees, and waving off wasps, and upsetting gla.s.ses of water. Maurice talked about the ball game, and Edith gossiped darkly of her teachers, and Johnny Bennett ate enormously and looked at Edith.

Eleanor neither ate nor gossiped; but she, too, watched Edith--and listened. Bingo, in his mistress's lap, had snarled at Johnny when he took Eleanor's empty cup away, which led Edith to say that he was jealous.

"I don't call it 'jealous,'" Eleanor said, "to be fond of a person."

"You can't _really_ be fond of anybody, and be jealous," Edith announced; "or if you are, it is just Bingoism."

This brought a quick protest from Eleanor, which was followed by the inevitable discussion; Edith began it by quoting, "'Love forgets self, and jealousy remembers self.'"

Maurice grinned and said nothing--it was enough for him to see Eleanor hit, _hard_! But Johnny protested:

"If your girl monkeys round with another fellow," he said, "you have a right to be jealous."

"Of course," said Eleanor.

"No, sir!" said Edith. "You have a right to be _unhappy._ If the other fellow's nicer than you--I mean if he has something that attracts her that you haven't, of course you'd be unhappy! (though you could get busy and _be_ nice yourself.) Or, if he's not as nice as you, you'd be unhappy, because you'd be so awfully disappointed in her. But there's no jealousy about _that_ kind of thing! Jealousy is hogging all the love for yourself. Like Bingo! And _I_ call it plain garden selfishness--and no sense, either, because you don't gain anything by it. Do you think you do, Maurice? ... For Heaven's sake, hand me the sandwiches!"

Maurice didn't express his thoughts; he just roared with laughter.

Eleanor reddened; Johnny, handing the sandwiches, said that, though Edith generally could reason pretty well--for a woman--in this particular matter she was 'way off.

"You are long on logic, Edith," Maurice agreed; "but short on human nature; (she hasn't an idea how the shoe fits!)."

"The reason I'm so up on jealousy," Edith explained, complacently, "is because yesterday, in English Lit., our professor worked off a lot of quotations on us. Listen to this (only I can't say just exactly the words!): '_Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes by fire, yet jealousy_'--oh, what does come next? Oh yes; I know--'_yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother flames_.'"