For three days, and then three other days, she kept this joy secret. Not to her mother, not to her grandfather, could she let the slightest sign of it escape. For they, of course, could never understand how she felt. They would think that she hoped to be happy, when all she wanted was to love in vain and for ever, to feel this longing hidden safe away in her heart. For her feeling had altered once more. After six days of waiting for nothing, of passionate silence, all the bitterness was drained out of her thoughts. He might tease her now; he might mock her as much as he pleased, if only he would come back.
But he did not come back for another week, and when he came, she did not see him alone. Though the General brought news of him or of Mrs. Birdsong every day, George came to the house only for a few minutes before or after his game of golf. He was always either just going out to the club, or just going home to change before dinner. Then, at last, he dropped in quite casually one Sunday evening and asked Mrs. Archbald if he might stay to supper. Jenny Blair was wearing her prettiest summer dress. At the first sound of his voice in the hall, she had flown upstairs to her room; she had seized her rose-coloured chiffon from the closet; she had shaken the flounces until they were smooth; she had slipped them over her head; she had wrapped the sash of blue ribbon round her waist and knotted it in a flowing bow at her left side. In five minutes, scarcely more, she was down again in the drawing-room, with her hair as lustrous as satin and her face glowing like a carnation. Her heart was beating all over her body. Not only in her bosom and in her ears, but everywhere. The drumming was so loud that it frightened her. Suppose her mother, who missed so little, should ask her what was the matter. Then, she felt, she should die. She could not live if she were dragged out into the light and her agitation exposed.
But nobody noticed. Nobody heard her heart, though it sounded, she thought, as relentless as the breaking of waves on a beach. Though she shivered in the heat when George, who was fresh and bronzed and ruddy, said carelessly, "Why, Jenny Blair, you look like a doll," she was able to toss back flippantly, "Not in this old thing. I've had it for ages."
"But it is one of your new dresses," her mother corrected.
"Well, it feels old. I put it on because it is cool."
"It's a nice colour," her grandfather observed, peering over his glasses with a puzzled expression. "Those thin, frilly dresses are very becoming."
At last they went in to supper, and afterwards (how had she been able to live through it?) George had talked to her grandfather for the rest of the evening. Even on the back porch in the moonlight (which was so living and savage that it stole into her mind, and made her more unhappy than she had ever been in her life) he still talked to her mother and her grandfather. They spoke of politics (all were Democrats but they disapproved of both parties and agreed that there was nothing to be done about them); they spoke of foreign affairs, of Austria and Servia, of the Liberals in England, who were not so very liberal, after all, and of the Irish question, which was becoming more and more Irish; they spoke of the suffragettes in other places and the suffragists in Queenborough (though George was inclined to make fun of them, Grandfather felt that the easiest way to avoid trouble was to give women what they wanted whenever they wanted it); they spoke of the heat wave, which they called the worst of the summer, and George insisted it was better to pay no attention to it, while Grandfather and Mamma believed that one should stop eating meat and move about as little as possible. Then, at last, after hours of misery, they began, just as George was leaving, to speak of that evil odour, and to wonder if it would end by driving them out of the neighbourhood, which, Mamma declared, was rapidly becoming impossible.
"You don't notice it to-night," George said. "There's not a whiff of it out here. The scent of mimosa is delicious."
"It doesn't bother us often," Mrs. Archbald admitted. "Weeks go by, and nobody but Etta complains of it. Then something happens, either the wind turns or they are careless down at the plant, and the smell is quite disagreeable."
"I've never been positive," the General insisted, "that it isn't mere imagination, or the emptying of garbage cans somewhere in the alley. I've tried my best, and I'm never able to detect it. Not more than once or twice, anyway, and then only for a minute or so."
"That was when it was very strong, Father."
"Maybe you're right, my dear, and my senses are less keen than they used to be."
"Oh, I didn't mean that, dear Father," Mrs. Archbald put her hand on his arm with an affectionate pressure, "I didn't mean that."
"Well, it would be funny if it drove us all out of the neighbourhood." George could no more help smoothing things over, Jenny Blair knew, than he could help the sanguine tone of his voice. That was his charming way, and she asked herself vehemently if any man in the world could compare with him. "It would be funny," he repeated, standing there in the moonlight, with the open door at his back, "if, after having lived most of our lives here, we should be driven away at last by a smell."
"I shall hold my ground a little longer," the General declared, "in the hope that Cora's idealism, which John insists I share also, may pretend the nuisance away."
"It's amazing, isn't it, how the town, or our part of it, has run off and left us? A few more years, and industrialism will have swallowed us whole. Nothing can stop it, except another war, and that isn't likely. Not for us at least. It wouldn't surprise me any day if Ulster were to begin fighting in earnest, and trouble may come, though I doubt that, of this affair on the Continent. But we aren't apt to go far enough out of our way to start fighting in Europe."
He was going without a glance at her; he had said, "Goodnight!" in his usual light-hearted voice; he had turned at the front door and smiled at the three of them, with an impartial wave of his hand. Now he was gone and the evening was over. Never had she suffered like this! Never before had she known how much easier it was to give him up than to be given up by him!
"Are you sleepy, Jenny Blair?" her mother asked. "You were so quiet."
"Yes, I'm sleepy. I'm so sleepy I can scarcely hold my eyes open."
"Then run straight upstairs. I suppose it was dull for you." Mrs. Archbald paused to bolt the front door. "I wish you would ask some nice boys to Sunday supper."
"I don't want to ask any boys. I despise boys," Jenny Blair replied fretfully, for she was on the point of tears. Yes, it was true, she had never, in all her seventeen years and ten months, been so unhappy. As she went slowly upstairs, after kissing her mother and her grandfather, she felt that savage loneliness stealing like moonlight into her mind. And downstairs in the hall her grandfather was saying cheerfully, "Time to turn in, William. I hope we'll get a breeze later on." "Why is it," she asked herself, with tragic intensity, "that only young people are ever really unhappy?"
A week went by, then a fortnight, and she was still asking this question. Why did she have to suffer such anguish when she expected nothing? Nothing but that glow, that flame, that ecstasy, which beat over her in waves whenever she looked into his eyes, whenever she heard his voice, whenever she stole into the cupboard and buried her flushed face in the brown wool. "It isn't my fault," she thought resentfully. "Nobody could wish to suffer like this. I didn't want to fall in love with him. I didn't want him to kiss me."
And now, after more than ten days of longing, of vacancy, of parching thirst for the sight of him, her mother inquired, in a tone of anxious tenderness, if she felt a pain anywhere.