So it seemed that all men were much alike. Joan knew but two types, the man who lived by his brains and the man who lived by his wits, but had no more hesitation in generalizing from these upon masculine society as a whole than a scientist has in constructing a thesis upon the habits of prehistoric mammalia from the skull of a pterodactyl and the thigh-bone of an ichthyosaurus....
They were all much alike: if you knew how to get round one kind, you knew how to win over the other; there was a merely negligible difference in the mode of attack. You appealed to their sympathies, or to their sentiments, or their appetites, and if these failed you appealed to their pride in their self-assumed r?le of the protectors.
It was no great trick, once you had made yourself mistress of it.
By this route Joan achieved the feat of looking down on Matthias; and that was not wholesome for the girl, leaving her world destitute of a single human soul that commanded her respect.
She had needed only to stir up his jealousy of Marbridge and his innate chivalry....
As if she didn\'t know what Arlington\'s companies were like! The facts were notorious; nobody troubled to blink them; Arlington\'s employees least of all. It wasn\'t their business to blink the facts; a girl without following had as little chance of securing a place in one of his choruses as a girl without a pretty figure.
But, of course, a handsome girl with a good figure....
Joan glanced in a shop window, en passant; but she saw nothing of the display of wares. The plate glass made a darkling mirror for the passers-by: Joan could see that her refurbished travelling suit fitted her becomingly, even though it was a trifle passé.
She hurried home and changed it, and hurried forth again to keep an appointment with Hubert Fowey.
They dined at a pretentious hotel, in an "Orange Garden" whose false moonlight and tinkling, artificial fountain manufactured an alluring simulacrum of romantic night, despite the incessant activities of a ragtime-bitten orchestra and the inability of the ventilating system to infuse a hint of coolness into the heavy, superheated air.
Joan had little appetite—the day had been too over-poweringly hot—but she was very thirsty; and Fowey provided a brand of champagne less sweet and heady than she would have chosen, and consequently more insinuative.
During the meal Billy Salute appeared at a table across the room and invisible to Fowey, whose back was toward it, but still not far enough removed to prevent Joan from recognizing that look in the dancer\'s eyes which she resented so angrily. She didn\'t once look at the man; but she never quite lost sight of him, and was well aware that he was ridiculing Fowey to his companion—an actor, by many an indication, but a stranger to Joan.
Provoked, she demonstrated her contempt of Salute by flirting outrageously with Fowey. Unconscious of her motive, that aspiring little dramatic author lost his head to some extent. Now and again his voice trembled when he spoke to her, and once he mumbled something about marriage, but checked at discretion, and let his words trail off inarticulately.
Joan was not to be denied.
"What did you say?" she demanded, with her most distracting smile.
"Oh, nothing of any importance," muttered Fowey, his face reddening.
"But you did say something. I only caught part of it. Hubert, I want to know!"
It was the first time she had used his given name.
"I—I only wondered if you were married," he stammered. "You talk so cursed little about yourself!"
"Does it matter?" she parried, surrender in her eyes.
He choked and gulped on his champagne.
"But you\'re not, are you?" he persisted.
"What\'s that to you?"
He hesitated and changed the subject, fearful lest his tongue compromise him.
"What shall we do now? Don\'t say a roof garden. Let\'s get out of this infernal smother. I vote for a taxi ride to Manhattan Beach."
Joan assented.
Leaving, they passed Salute\'s table. Joan gave the dancer a distant and chilling greeting, and swept haughtily past, ignoring his offer to rise. The insolent irony of his eyes was incredibly offensive to her. They said: "I am waiting, I am patient, I make no effort, I am inevitable."
She swore in her soul that she would prove them wrong.
In the taxicab Fowey made some slighting reference to the dancer.
"He\'s the devil!" Joan declared with profound conviction.
But she wouldn\'t explain her reasons for so naming him.
When occasion offered, in the more shadowed stretches of their course to the sea, Fowey attempted to kiss her. But she would have none of him then, fending him off by main strength and raillery; and she was pleased with the discovery that she was stronger than he. Yet another evidence of the inferiority of man!
At the beach, Fowey ordered a claret cup. Joan demanded an ice and drank sparingly; but when again in the motor-car, homeward-bound, she was abruptly smitten with amazement to find herself in Fowey\'s arms, submitting to his kisses if not returning them.
For a time she remained so and let him talk love to her.
It was pleasant, to be—wanted....
Arrived at the little flat, she had to prevent Fowey\'s following her in, again by main strength, slamming the door in his face.
Bolting the door, she turned to a mirror "to see what a fright she must have looked." But it seemed a radiant vision that smiled back at her.
She thought hazily of Hubert Fowey.
"That kid!" she murmured, not altogether in contempt, but almost compassionately.
It was a shame to tease him so....
Not until the next day, that dawned upon her consciousness amid the thunders of a splitting headache, did she appreciate how far the affair had gone.
Penitent, she vowed reformation. She wasn\'t going to let any man think he could make a fool of her, much less that conceited little whippersnapper.
As it happened, she didn\'t see the amateur dramatist again for some days. He, too, had vowed reformation, and on much the same moral grounds.
Her appointment with Matthias, for Wednesday at four, Joan failed to keep. And since that was her own affair, and since she had not left him her address, Matthias kept to himself the word that he had for her and, in accordance with his original intention, boarded the Bar Harbor Express that same evening, and forgot New York for upwards of ten weeks.
It had rained all day Tuesday, and Wednesday was overcast but dry and, by contrast with what had been, cool. Dressing for her interview with Matthias, Joan donned a summery gown of lawn, liberally inset with lacework over her shoulders and bosom: a frock for the country-house or the seashore, never for the Broadway pavements. None the less it was quite too pretty to be wasted on Matthias alone. She set out to keep her appointment with an hour to spare, purposing to employ the interval by running, at leisure, the gauntlet of masculine admiration on Broadway as far south as Thirty-eighth Street. For this expedition she would have preferred company; but Hattie, having looked her over, announced that she couldn\'t dress up to Joan\'s style, didn\'t mean to try, and didn\'t care to be used as a foil; furthermore, it was much more sensible to loaf round the flat in little or no clothing at all, and read up on Pinero.
From the Astor Theatre corner Joan struck across Broadway to the eastern sidewalk, chiefly to avoid the throng of loungers in front of the Bryant Building: it is good to be admired, but Joan had little taste for the form of admiration that becomes vocal at once intimately and publicly.
Half-way down the New York Theatre Building block, she turned abruptly and scuttled like a frightened quail into the lobby, from the back of which, turning, she was able to see, without being seen by, Quard.
Brief as the term of their dissociation was, in mere point of elapsed time, Joan had so completely divorced herself from her husband that she was actually beginning to forget him; physically no less than mentally she was beginning to forget him. An outcast from her life, he no longer had any real existence in her world. By some curious freak of sophistry she had even managed to persuade herself she was never to see him again. Thus it seemed the most staggering shock she had ever experienced, to recognize the man\'s head and ............