For a long time Joan lay snug between the sheets, staring wide-eyed into the patch of lustrous blue morning sky framed by the window, reviewing this new and wonderful adventure of her heart from a point of view remote, detached, and critical. Thoughts recurred that in the excitement and ardour of the night had been passed over and neglected; and from them she derived a new, strange, and intoxicating sense of power.
Her first waking thought was as her last before sleeping: I am beautiful.
Her second, not I love him, but He loves me.
And her third grew out of the second: I can make him do what pleases me.
Yesterday a lowly supplicant at the shrine of love: today Love\'s very self, adored and desired by an erstwhile divinity now humbled to the level of humanity!
A fit of petulance, beauty in tears, a whispered word of passion: strange and strangely simple incantation to have turned a world upside down! How easily was man suppled to the spell!
The sense of power ran like wine through her being: she felt herself invincible, an adept of love\'s alchemy; she had surprised its secret, and now the world of man\'s heart lay open to the practices of her disastrous art. For a moment she experienced an almost terrifying intimation of empires ripe for conquest that lay beyond Matthias; but from this she withdrew her troubled gaze; nor would she look again; not yet....
She considered his mad extravagance of last night—taxicabs, champagne, tips! Was he, then, able to afford such expenditures? In her understanding they went oddly with his pretensions to decent poverty. Or had he merely lost his head under the influence of her charms? This last theory pleased her; she adopted it with reservations: the question remained one to be cleared up.
He disapproved of a career upon the stage for her?... Joan smiled indulgently: that matter would be arranged in good time. She meant to have her way....
At a tap on her door she changed suddenly from the aloof egoist to a woman athrill before the veil of portentous mysteries. She sat up in bed, called out to know who was knocking, gave permission to the chambermaid to enter, and received a note in the hand of Matthias.
"Past twelve o\'clock," she read, "and still no sign of you, sweetheart. I give you thirty minutes to dress and come to me. If you don\'t, I\'ll come for you. After breakfast, we\'ll run out of town for the day—our first day together! Matthias."
Half wild with delight, she hurried through her toilet and ran down-stairs to find her lover waiting in the hallway, watch in hand.
He closed it with a snap, and made her a quaintly ceremonious bow. "In two minutes more—!" he observed in a tone of grave menace. "But before we go out, have the kindness to step into my humble study. I have somewhat to say to you."
She appeared to hesitate, to be reluctant and preoccupied occupied.
"What about?" she demanded distantly.
But her dancing eyes betrayed her.
"Business," he said, sententious. His gesture indicated a vigilant universe of eavesdroppers. "Nobody\'s but our own!"
Nevertheless, there was none to spy upon them as he drew her gently by the waist, down the hall and into the back-parlour. She yielded with a charming diffidence.
In his embrace the sense of power slipped unheeded from her ken; returned the deep, obliterating rapture of over-night. Lips that first submitted, soon gave in return, then demanded....
She clung heavily to him, a little faint and breathless with a vague and sweet and nameless longing....
At breakfast in a neighbouring restaurant, Matthias disclosed his plans for the day, involving a motor trip down along the north shore of Long Island, dinner at Huntington, a return by moonlight. Joan, enchanted by the prospect—the sum of whose experience outside Manhattan Island was comprised in a few trips to Coney Island—consented with a strange mingling of eagerness and misgivings; the thought of the cost troubled a conscience still haunted by memories of last night\'s prodigality.
"I didn\'t know you had an automobile."
"I haven\'t; I\'m chartering one for the day."
"But ... but ... won\'t it be awf\'ly expensive?"
"Don\'t worry, dear."
"But, you know, you aren\'t—rich."
"I\'m a magnate of happiness, at all events: and today is our day, the first of our love, sweetheart. For twelve long hours we\'re going to forget everything but our two selfish selves. Why fret about tomorrow? It always does manage to take care of itself, somehow. And frankly, I don\'t care to be reminded of its existence today; for tomorrow I work...."
A day of quicksilver hours slipping ever from their jealous grasp; of hours volatile and glamorous: in Joan\'s half-dazed consciousness, a delectable pageant of scenes, sensations and emotions no sooner comprehended than displaced by others no less wonderful....
Abed long after midnight, visions besieged her bewilderingly: a length of dusty golden highway walled by green forest, with a white bridge glaring in sunlight at the bottom of a hill; the affrighting onrush of great motor-cars meeting their own, and the din and dust of their passage; the bright harbour of Huntington, blue and gold in a frame of gold and green, viewed from the marble balustrade of the Chateau des Beaux Arts; the wrinkled, kindly, comprehending face of a waiter who served them at dinner; the look in her lover\'s eyes as she repeated, on demand, guarded avowals under cover of the motor\'s rumble; the ardent face of a boy who had seemed unable to cease staring at her in the restaurant; silver and purple of the road by night; wheeling ranks of lights dotting the desolation of suburban Brooklyn; the high-flung span of Queensboro\' Bridge, a web of steel and concrete strung with opalescent globes; the glare of the city\'s painted sky; the endless pulsing of the motor; their last caress on parting at the foot of the stairs....
On the morrow she went back to her typewriter like Cinderella to her kitchen. But what work Matthias was able to invent for her was neither arduous nor urgent; she was able to take her time on it, and wasted many an hour in dreaming. Her mind was, indeed, more engaged with thoughts of new frocks than with the circumstances of her love or her services to her lover.
She was to receive thenceforward twenty-five instead of ten dollars a week. Matthias had experienced little difficulty in over-ruling her faint protestations: they were to be together a great deal, he argued, and she must be able to dress at least neatly; moreover, by requiring her promise to marry him at some future time when his fortunes would permit, he had in a measure made her dependent upon him; she couldn\'t reasonably be asked to wait for long on a bare pittance.
His arguments were reinforced by one he knew nothing of, a maxim culled from the wisdom of Miss Maizie Dean: It was up to a girl to look out for herself first, last, and all the time. The platitude had made an ineffaceable impression upon Joan\'s sense of self-preservation. And if Matthias were able to afford nightly dinners for two at good restaurants, in addition to theater tickets several times a week, he ought to be able to afford a decent compensation to his stenographer; especially when it was his wish that she refrain from attempting to earn more money on the stage.
It was, however, true that no offer had come to Joan of other theatrical work, and that the issue of her ambition remained in abeyance, a subject which she didn\'t care to raise and which Matthias, since that first night, had considered settled.
Customarily they met each evening about half-past six at some distance from their lodgings: a precaution against gossip on the part of the other inmates of the Maison Duprat. Thence they would go to dine at some favourite restaurant, where food was good and evening dress not obligatory—the café of their first supper by preference, or else the Lafayette, in University Place, the Brevoort House, or one of a few minor French establishments upon which Matthias had conferred the approval of a discriminating taste. Thereafter, if he meant to work, they would take a taxicab for a brief whirl through Central Park or up Riverside Drive to Grant\'s Tomb and back. Or if he considered attendance upon some first representation important enough to interfere with his work, as forming part of the education of a student of contemporaneous drama, they would go to a theatre, where he always contrived to have good but inconspicuous seats.
In all, Joan must have attended with him eight or nine first-nights; and since Matthias refused to waste his time on musical comedy, they witnessed for the most part plays dealing with one phase or another of social life in either London or New York. From these Joan derived an amount of benefit which would have surprised anyone ignorant of the quickness of perception and intelligent adaptability characteristic of the American girl, however humble her origin. The poorest plays furnished her with material for self-criticism and improvement. As plays, indeed, she was but vaguely interested in them, but as schools of deportment, they held her breathlessly attentive. She never took her gaze from the stage so long as there remained upon it an actress portraying, however indifferently, a woman of any degree of cultivation whatever. Gestures, postures, vocal inflections, the character of their gowns and the manner in which they contrived to impart to them something of their wearer\'s personality, the management of a tea-cup or a fashion of shaking hands: all these were registered and stored away in the girl\'s memory, to be recalled when alone, reviewed, dissected, modified to fit her individually, practised, and eventually to be adopted with varying discretion and success.
She who was to be the wife of a man of position, was determined that his friends and associates should find little to censure in her manners. For long Helena Tankerville figured to Joan as an impeccable model of tact, distinction, taste, and gentlewomanliness. To become as Helena was, summed up the dearest aspirations of the girl. She began to be very guarded in her use of English, eschewed as far as her means permitted the uniform style of costume to which New York women are largely prone, dressed her hair differently and upon no superstructure other than its own, and spent long hours manicuring and observing the minor niceties of the feminine toilet.
Paradoxically, with the obtuseness characteristic of a certain type of imaginative man, Matthias appreciated and was grateful for the improvement in his fiancée without realizing it objectively; what pleased his sensitive tastes, he accepted as normal expressions of innate good-breeding; what jarred, he glossed with charity. It was inconceivable that he should love any woman but one instinctively fine: he endowed Joan with many a grace and many a virtue that she did not possess; and this implicit assertion of his, that she was all............