Don't Pick Me

CHAPTER IX

Jane's emotions, as she turned her attention to Isabelle, were compounded of amusement and sympathy for Jerry. She sensed how he, of all men, would hate being made ridiculous. She was destined to hear the whole story before she went to sleep, for Isabelle's pent passion had reached a climax where a confidante was a necessity.

She described the yachting party most cleverly. She enlarged on Mrs. Brendon's attempts to isolate Althea and Jerry, with her own introduction into the picture. She described her growing love for the hero, her determination to join him when he came north. She even admitted that she had wired the head mistress of the school not to meet them, because she thought that Jerry would then have to marry her to "protect her good name."

Jane struggled not to laugh; it was so poignant to the girl, and so absurd to her. She tried to soothe her, to change the subject, but in vain.

"Do you think he will marry me?" she demanded.

"I doubt it."

"Don't you think he loves me?"

"I'm afraid you're too young for this kind of thing."

"I'm not young. I'm nearly seventeen, and lots of girls love and marry before that."

"Lots of other women are in love with Mr. Paxton, too," said Jane.

"You just say that to scare me!" cried Isabelle, and followed it up with much weeping.

Poor Jane endured a bad night, but as is the way with afflictions, it was finally over. Jerry arrived at nine, full of thanks to her, and carried the enfant terrible off to her school.

Jane hurried home, for this was to be a momentous day to her. Martin Christiansen had written that he was coming to see her at three o'clock in the afternoon, to talk over her work.

"Let me come to you in your own quarters, where you write and live, will you, my friend?" he had written her.

She had sent for him to come, and this was the day. She was not ashamed of the little room in the tenement house, where she had spent so many hours. She looked about it as she let herself in, trying to see it with his eyes—eyes used to beauty and comfort.

It was a square room, on the corner with two windows, west and south, hung with white curtains. It was small, but not cramped. The walls were calcimined white. The bed and dresser were white, as were the few chairs. A table, by one window, had on it a student lamp and neat piles of manuscript, while a dozen books were supported by book ends, against the wall. The rug was inexpensive, but dull in colour. It was scrupulously clean, and its bareness suggested deliberate asceticism rather than poverty.

"We aren't ashamed of it, Milly," she said to the cat. "It certainly is not beautiful, but it's clean, and sort of self-respecting, and those are the virtues of our class. He will understand that. I do hope you will like him, Milly," she added.

She hurried with her luncheon, gave Milly a bath, made a careful toilet herself. The same dark dress to be sure, but little fine collars and cuffs were added, to take away its austerity. She let her hair coil itself loosely instead of screwing it back as she usually did. She made these preparations, not at the dictation of vanity, for she was singularly free from it, but from an instinct to make herself fit for what she felt to be a crisis in her life. Whether Martin Christiansen said good or bad really did not matter so much as the fact that she had come to this point of testing—this day of judgment.

While she waited for his coming she let her mind return to Jerry and his latest difficulty. She laughed aloud at the memory of the girl's passionate absurdity. She thought back to her own first romance, a mad infatuation for the little town beau, to whom she never spoke. Yet how he had filled her dreams, how she had planned her marriage to him, under romantic circumstances, just as Isabelle had planned hers with Jerry. Artist-like, she appraised this self-revelation of youth, in its pitiful, lovable folly, and made it her own. As for poor Jerry, he was evidently doomed to stumble from one love affair to another, until death withered his charms. Too much love; too little love; so life goes grinding on, like an endless film of the sated and the hungry.