On a Saturday morning Susan and Clelie, after waiting on the platform at Euston Station until the long, crowded train for Liverpool and the _Lusitania_ disappeared, went back to the lodgings in Half Moon Street with a sudden sense of the vastness of London, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke.Susan was thinking of Brent's last words:
She had said, "I'll try to deserve all the pains you've taken, Mr.Brent.""Yes, I have done a lot for you," he had replied."I've put you beyond the reach of any of the calamities of life--beyond the need of any of its consolations.Don't forget that if the steamer goes down with all on board."And then she had looked at him--and as Freddie's back was half turned, she hoped he had not seen--in fact, she was sure he had not, or she would not have dared.And Brent--had returned her look with his usual quizzical smile; but she had learned how to see through that mask.Then--she had submitted to Freddie's energetic embrace--had given her hand to Brent--"Good-by," she had said; and "Good luck," he.
Beyond the reach of _any_ of the calamities? Beyond the need of _any_ of the consolations? Yes--it was almost literally true.She felt the big interest--the career--growing up within her, and expanding, and already overstepping all other interests and emotions.
Brent had left her and Clelie more to do than could be done;thus they had no time to bother either about the absent or about themselves.Looking back in after years on the days that Freddie was away, Susan could recall that from time to time she would find her mind wandering, as if groping in the darkness of its own cellars or closets for a lost thought, a missing link in some chain of thought.This even awakened her several times in the night--made her leap from sleep into acute and painful consciousness as if she had recalled and instantly forgotten some startling and terrible thing.
And when Freddie unexpectedly came--having taken passage on the _Lusitania_ for the return voyage, after only six nights and five days in New York--she was astonished by her delight at seeing him, and by the kind of delight it was.For it rather seemed a sort of relief, as from a heavy burden of anxiety.
"Why didn't you wait and come with Brent?" asked she.
"Couldn't stand it," replied he."I've grown clear away from New York--at least from the only New York I know.I don't like the boys any more.They bore me.They--offend me.And I know if I stayed on a few days they'd begin to suspect.No, it isn't Europe.It's--you.You're responsible for the change in me."He was speaking entirely of the internal change, which indeed was great.For while he was still fond of all kinds of sporting, it was not in his former crude way; he had even become something of a connoisseur of pictures and was cultivating a respect for the purity of the English language that made him wince at Susan's and Brent's slang.But when he spoke thus frankly and feelingly of the change in him, Susan looked at him--and, not having seen him in two weeks and three days, she really saw him for the first time in many a month.
She could not think of the internal change he spoke of for noting the external change.He had grown at least fifty pounds heavier than he had been when they came abroad.In one way this was an improvement; it gave him a dignity, an air of consequence in place of the boyish good looks of the days before the automobile and before the effects of high living began to show.But it made of him a different man in Susan's eyes--a man who now seemed almost a stranger to her.
"Yes, you _have_ changed," replied she absently.And she went and examined herself in a mirror.
"You, too," said Freddie."You don't look older--as I do.
But--there's a--a--I can't describe it."
Susan could not see it."I'm just the same," she insisted.
Palmer laughed."You can't judge about yourself.But all this excitement--and studying--and thinking--and God knows what---- You're not at all the woman I came abroad with."The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they dropped it.
Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical selves--so much so that many women have no other sense of self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it.
The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of men, or to discard the sex measure of feminine self-respect as ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure.
Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it.She was, therefore, not a little surprised to find--after Freddie had been back three or four days--that he was arousing in her the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence.
It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of immorality.It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated modesty.She felt herself blushing if he came into the room when she was dressing.As soon as she awakened in the morning she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to lock it.Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was once more stirring toward life.
"What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed.
