Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/199

 "I've got it all fixed," he told her. "We're going to the Pelham. Nothing's too good for us the next few days." And when she only smiled. "Pretty tired, aren't you?"

"I feel a little crowded."

"You'll get over that. They're a fine lot; the best ever. And these girls are on the square, too," he added. "Don't you get any wrong ideas about them."

"You would like to stay on, wouldn't you?"

"It's the way I'm making a living. We've got to eat, you know."

She winced, but he did not notice it.

And she felt, when he finally went away, that she had been ridiculously cold to him. For him, the people around did not exist; for her, they formed a barrier she could not pass. If they could only have been alone together somewhere, anywhere, she felt that the barrier would have been swept away. But not alone in his sense of the word, in a hotel bedroom somewhere. Everything that was fastidious in her revolted at what seemed to her to amount to an assignation. But to be together, quite privately, in some quiet distant place, and there to make their readjustments, she craved that passionately that night.

The long train of yellow cars, with the flats carrying the great wagons protected by canvas, the animal cars, the crowded, cluttered sleeping coaches, got slowly under way. She lay back on her hard pillow, and after a while she reached into her dressing bag and found a cigarette. She thought it might quiet her. But the girl across, a kimono thrown casually over her shoulders while she mended a stocking, looked over quickly and then looked away again, with a shocked expression on her face.

It was indeed a new world.

Tom, too, was late in getting to sleep. He lay, his long body diagonally in the berth, his arms under his head, and tried to think out his new problem. He loved Kay; he felt now that he had always loved her. Mixed with that, however, was a sense of triumph over Herbert, over the Dowlings, over that mysterious life of hers which she had abandoned for him. He had no subtleties. He was physically