let you know? Because I want to go with you, only I think I’ve made an engagement.”
“Very well, I’ll phone you.”
“Do—about ten.”
“Try to be able to—then or any time.”
“I’ll tell you—if I can’t go to dinner with you Wednesday I can go to lunch surely.”
“All right,” he agreed. “And we’ll go to a matinée.”
They danced several times. Never by word or sign did Yanci betray more than the most cursory interest in him until just at the end, when she offered him her hand to say good-bye.
“Good-bye, Scott.”
For just the fraction of a second—not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard—she looked into his eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried away.
She took her dinner in a little tea room around the corner. It was an economical dinner which cost a dollar and a half. There was no date concerned in it at all, and no man except an elderly person in spats who tried to speak to her as she came out the door.
IX
Sitting alone in one of the magnificent moving-picture theatres—a luxury which she thought she could afford—Yanci watched Mae Murray swirl through splendidly imagined vistas, and meanwhile considered the progress of the first day. In retrospect it was a distinct success. She had given the correct impression both as to her material prosperity and as to her attitude toward Scott himself. It seemed best to avoid evening dates. Let him have the evenings to himself, to think of her, to imagine her with other men, even to spend a few lonely hours in his apartment, considering how much more cheerful it might be if—— Let time and absence work for her.
Engrossed for awhile in the moving picture, she calculated the cost of the apartment in which its heroine endured her movie wrongs. She admired its slender Italian table, occupying only one side of the large dining room and flanked by a long bench which gave it an air of medieval luxury. She rejoiced in the beauty of Mae Murray’s clothes and furs, her gorgeous hats, her short-seeming French shoes. Then after a moment her mind returned to her own drama; she wondered if Scott were already engaged, and her heart dipped at the thought. Yet it was unlikely. He had been too quick to phone her on her arrival, too lavish with his time, too responsive that afternoon.
After the picture she returned to the Ritz, where she slept deeply and happily for almost the first time in three months. The atmosphere around her no longer seemed cold. Even the floor clerk had smiled kindly and admiringly when Yanci asked for her key.
Next morning at ten Scott phoned. Yanci, who had been up for hours, pretended to be drowsy from her dissipation of the night before.
No, she could not take dinner with him on Wednesday. She was terribly sorry; she had an engagement, as she had feared. But she could have luncheon and go to a matinée if he would get her back in time for tea.
She spent the day roving the streets. On top of a bus, though not on the front seat, where Scott might possibly spy her, she sailed out Riverside Drive and back along Fifth Avenue just at the winter twilight, and her feeling for New York and its gorgeous splendors deepened and redoubled. Here she must live and be rich, be nodded to by the traffic policemen at the corners as she sat in her limousine—with a small dog—and here she must stroll on Sunday to and from a stylish church, with Scott, handsome in his cutaway and tall hat, walking devotedly at her side.
At luncheon on Wednesday she described for Scott’s benefit a fanciful two days. She told of a motoring trip up the Hudson and gave him her opinion of two plays she had seen with—it was implied—adoring gentlemen beside her. She had read up very carefully on the plays in the morning paper and chosen two concerning which she could garner the most information.
“Oh,” he said in dismay, “you’ve seen ‘Dulcy’? I have two seats for it—but you won’t want to go again.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mind,” she protested truthfully. “You see, we went late, and anyway I adored it.”
But he wouldn’t hear of her sitting through it again—besides, he had seen it himself. It was a play Yanci was mad to see, but she was compelled to watch him while he exchanged the tickets for others, and for the poor seats available at the last moment. The game seemed difficult at times.
“By the way,” he said afterwards as they drove back to the hotel in a taxi, “you’ll be going down to the Princeton prom tomorrow, won’t you?”
She started. She had not realized that it would be so soon or that he would know of it.
“Yes,” she answered coolly. “I’m going down tomorrow afternoon.”
“On the 2:20, I suppose,” Scott commented. And then, “Are you going to meet the boy who’s taking you down—at Princeton?”
For an instant she was off her guard.
“Yes, he’ll meet the train.”
“Then I’ll take you to the station,” proposed Scott. “There’ll be a crowd, and you may have trouble getting a porter.”
She could think of nothing to say, no valid objection to make. She wished she had said that she was going by automobile, but she could conceive of no graceful and plausible way of amending her first admission.
“That’s mighty sweet of you.”
“You’ll be at the Ritz when you come back?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered. “I’m going to keep my rooms.”
Her bedroom was the smallest and least expensive in the hotel.
She concluded to let him put her on the train for Princeton; in fact, she saw no alternative. Next day as she packed her suitcase after luncheon the situation had taken such hold of her imagination that she filled it with the very things she would have chosen had she really been going to the prom. Her intention was to get out at the first stop and take the train back to New York.
Scott called for her at half past one and they took a taxi to the Pennsylvania Station. The train was crowded as he had expected, but he found her a seat and stowed her grip in the rack overhead.
“I’ll call you Friday to see how you’ve behaved,” he said.
“All right. I’ll be good.”
Their eyes met and in an instant, with an inexplicable, only half-conscious rush of emotion, they were in perfect communion. When Yanci came back, the glance seemed to say, ah, then——
A voice startled her ear:
“Why, Yanci!”
Yanci looked around. To her horror she recognized a girl named Ellen Harley, one of those to whom she had phoned upon her arrival.
“Well, Yanci Bowman! You’re the last person I ever expected to see. How are you?”
Yanci introduced Scott. Her heart was beating violently.
“Are you coming to the prom? How perfectly slick!” cried Ellen. “Can I sit here with you? I’ve been wanting to see you. Who are you going with?”
“No one you know.”
“Maybe I do.”
Her words, falling like sharp claws on Yanci’s sensitive soul, were interrupted by an unintelligible outburst from the conductor. Scott bowed to Ellen, cast at Yanci one level glance and then hurried off.
The train started. As Ellen arranged her grip and threw off her fur coat Yanci looked around her. The car was gay with girls whose excited chatter filled the damp, rubbery air like smoke. Here and there sat a chaperon, a mass of decaying rock in a field of flowers, predicting with a mute and somber fatality the end of all gayety and all youth. How many times had Yanci herself been one of such a crowd, careless