LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

train began to move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;" but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her. Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the number on her Pullman ticket.

      Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her neck.

      Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness; later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.

      She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge, well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....

      "Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know. There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and——"

      He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.

      "I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that, she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the chair in front—her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she saw the number on the panel—when he put out a determinedly detaining hand.

      "Don't make me feel such a disgraceful nuisance, I beg of you," he said with an earnestness that was out of keeping with his twinkling eyes. "One chair is as good as another—better, in fact, when one already has possession of it. This bag is my only gear. You'll keep the seat, won't you? That's immensely kind of you," as Louise resumed the chair. "I wouldn't have had you move for——"

      "Of course," she interrupted him with a quietly frank laugh, "I hadn't the slightest intention of moving. It is more than good of you to suppose that I meant to be so agreeable."

      "That," he pronounced, again with his liberal smile, "is probably a neat, quickly-conceived way of letting me down easily, for which I am nevertheless grateful;" and, bowing, he took the chair in front of her, dug into his bag and quickly became immersed in a batch of formidable looking documents. Louise, again leaning back in her chair, decided that the rear of his head was decidedly shapely.

      The excessive warmth of the car was making her sleepy, and she closed her eyes and surrendered herself to dozing reflections. She was dubious as to the reception her mother would give her. She had not heard from her mother since writing the letter in which she had calmly announced, as something settled and therefore not open to debate, that she was through with school and would not return to Miss Mayhew's after the holidays. Laura had been only partly right as to Louise's reason for quitting school. Louise, it was true, was glad enough to escape the nightmare of "commencement exercises" by leaving half a year in advance of her graduation. But she had a far deeper reason for quitting the school without consultation with her mother. She wanted to be at home; any sort of a home. She had no very pleasurable recollections of the places—there had been many of them, and they had not been homes—in which she had lived with her mother before being sent to the finishing school in central New York. Her young girlhood had been a period of aimless drifting, at seashore and mountain resorts in summer, and in tiny but by no means snug apartments in New York in the winter; her mother's restlessness and her frequently expressed dislike of "smug domesticity" had combined against her ever establishing anything even approximating a genuine home for herself and her daughter. Louise only vaguely remembered her father; the separation, followed by a divorce, had taken place when she was only nine years old. At fifteen she had been trundled off to the up-State finishing school; and the school had been the only home she had known for close upon four years. Her mother had visited her twice a year, taking her to the seaside for a week or so during the summer vacation and to Lakewood for a brief stay during the holidays. Her mother had always been provided with some sort of an excuse for not taking Louise to her home—Louise knew that she must have some sort of a home—in New York. The place was being overhauled, guests had unexpectedly swooped upon her, she was about to start upon a journey; Louise had listened, mystified, so often to these reasons her mother gave for not having her daughter with her in the city at times when nearly all the other girls were leaving the school for home visits that she at length came to believe that her mother was treating her with somewhat humiliating disingenuousness. This feeling, however, aroused less resentment in the girl than it did a feeling of distress; she could not avoid, as she grew older, the conviction that she was being neglected. The feeling became intensified when, year after year, she was shunted, as she considered, on visits to the homes of her schoolgirl friends. It was natural enough, when she observed how cherished the other girls were in their homes, how the arms of strong affection constantly were thrown around them, that she should compare her own thrust-aside state with theirs and that she should develop the intense longing of a normal, affectionate young woman for similar love and protection.

      She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was

Скачать книгу