Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/126



happiness was effaced from the features of Jessica Pomeroy as a ragged gray cloud wipes out the sun. Gone was her little moment of forgetfulness and returned the ever-present menace. The moments of conscious happiness in the ordinary life are woefully small and few, little glowing incandescent islands entirely surrounded by cares. They are to be seized and held close for their brief stay, because when once they go it is not within the power of man to recreate, to “recapture the first fine careless rapture” that was that instant.

Something of all this dragged its way through the consciousness of Jessica as the taxicab bore her speedily back to her little flat—the flat where Ignace Teck awaited her. Happiness, then, was something to be looked at but not to be seized. It is the soap bubble of life, the will-o’-the-wisp of every day. She remembered that in “Alice in Wonderland” Alice was told that they never have jam to-day; they always have it yesterday or to-morrow—never to-day. Happiness, she decided, was close kin to that jam. Strange, too, how her thoughts of happiness were linked up with the figure of a clean-cut young man by the name of Valentine Morley, a man she had spoken to so few times she scarcely knew the sound of his voice. If he could have known. Rh