Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/532

450 really cashier in a dairy, as she said, and she really had come from Seattle.

"That's a long way," he remarked, smiling. "Aren't you ever homesick?"

Again her thin face grew scarlet. He wouldn't have asked that if he had known what her home or her life there had been.

"Well it was lovely there,” she said, and, so that he should not suspect, she invented still more wildly, an impossible past existence; she tried to make him see a delicately brought-up young girl leaving a home of marvellous luxury—

"Because I—I wanted to be independent," she said.

"Quite right!" said he, absently. Didn't she know that all her history was written plain on her haggard little face? Weren't there thousands like her, everywhere, no mystery to any man? Independent! Perhaps a ball in flight from one careless hand to another might feel independent for a little moment, in mid-air.

Later on, when she fancied she had made the favourable impression she intended to make, she grew more candid.

"I haven't got on so very well," she admitted. "I learned millinery back home, and I thought I'd do fine with that. But—" She paused. "I don't know," she said, with a sigh. "I seem to have just sort of drifted."

A bit of flotsam, he reflected, helplessly adrift on a swift and most merciless tide. Looking back, she could no longer see the ship from whence she had come; looking forward, not discern the shore toward which she was being carried; no use for her to struggle.

"If her life's flotsam," he thought, "mine is jetsam—something that's been deliberately thrown overboard. Anyhow we're in the same current, and bound for the same rocks in the end."

He pursued the fancy while she talked.

"I could swim back and climb on board the ship again, if I wanted. But I don't. I'd be one of the crew, helping to take her into God knows what port. Nobody'd care where I wanted to go. I'd rather float along alone."

It was a pain to watch her, for beneath her uneasily dainty manners, her nervous little laugh, her strained vivacity, he could perceive an immeasurable lassitude. She had given up; even her vanity was gone, her finger nails neglected, her hair uncurled. She was anxious enough to please—not as a woman, only as a comrade.