Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/62

52 hands at the fires of life." We trifled with older men. We flirted, as it were, with our fathers.

My débutante party turned out a revel. I have often wondered if my mother was frightened. I don't know what went on in the other girls' brains, but mine were seared with the old-world recklessness—"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." We die!

I had a lover—a boy lover. His name was Gordon. He was twenty-one years old, and he had courted me with boyish seriousness for three years. Mother had always pooh-poohed his love-story and said: "Wait, wait. Why, my daughter isn't even out yet. Wait till she's out."

And Gordon had narrowed his near-sighted eyes ominously and shut his lips tight. "Very well," he had answered, "I will wait till she is out—but no longer."

He was rich, he was handsome, he was well-born, he was strong, but more than all that he held my fancy with a certain thrilling tenacity that frightened me while it lured me. And I had always looked forward to my débutante party on my eighteenth birthday with the tingling realization, half joy, half fear, that on that day I should have to settle once and forever with—man.

I had often wondered how Gordon would propose. He was a proud, high-strung boy. If he was humble, and pleaded and pleaded with the hurt look in his eyes that I knew so well, I thought I would accept him; and if we could get to mother in the crowd, perhaps we could announce the engagement at supper-time. It seemed to me that it would be a very wonderful thing to be engaged on one's eighteenth birthday. So many girls were not engaged till nineteen or even twenty. But if he was masterful and high-step- ping, as he knew so well how to be, I had decided to refuse him scornfully with a toss of my head and a laugh. I could break his heart with the sort of laugh I had practised before my mirror.

It is a terrible thing to have a long-anticipated event finally overtake you. It is the most terrible thing of all to have to settle once and forever with man.

Gordon came for me at eleven o'clock. I was flirting airily at the time with our village Beau Brummel, who was old enough to be my grandfather.

Gordon slipped my little hand through his arm and carried me off to a lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful relief to be out of the noise and the glare—and alone with Gordon. But instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the evening reacted suddenly on me.

"What's the matter with you to-night?" asked Gordon, a little sternly. "What makes you so wild?" he persisted, with a grim little attempt at a laugh.

At his words, my heart seemed to turn over within me and settle heavily. It was before the days when we discussed life's tragedies with our best men friends. Indeed, it was so long before that I sickened and grew faint at the very thought of the sorrowful knowledge which I kept secret from him.

Again he repeated, "What's the matter with you?" but I could find no answer. I just sat shivering, with my lace scarf drawn close across my bare shoulders.

Gordon took hold of a white ruffle on my gown and began to fidget with it. I could see the fine thoughts go flitting through his eyes, but when he spoke again it was quite commonplacely.

"Will you do me a favor?" he asked. "Will you do me the favor of marrying me?" And he laughed. Good God! he laughed!

"A favor" to marry him! And he asked it as he might have asked for a posie or a dance. So flippantly—with a laugh. "A favor"! And Dolly Leonard lay dead of her favor!

I jumped to my feet—I was half mad with fear and sex and sorrow and excitement. Something in my brain snapped. And I struck Gordon—struck him across the face with my open hand. And he turned as white as the dead Dolly Leonard, and went away—oh, very far away.

Then I ran back alone to the hall and stumbled into my father's arms.

"Are you having a good time?" asked my father, pointing playfully at my blazing cheeks.

I went to my answer like an arrow to its mark. "I am having the most wonderful time in the world," I cried; "I have settled with man."