He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white
night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced
with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And
again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and
tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood
looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the
moment, he had gone back and kissed her---At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.
How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!
And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl
who had greeted him at the Paris terminal--this charming embodiment of
all that is fresh and sweet and fearless--in her perfect hat and gown
of mondaine youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled
him.
Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!
Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so
amazingly revealed to him.
Out of what, in heaven's name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of
a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles
in Brookhollow?
Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in
her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose
mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?
Out of what had she been evolved--this young girl whom he had left
just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naïa's arm
around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who
had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark
stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair,
crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with
two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure
buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a
thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?
And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm
extended--from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently
fell to the floor.
He thought to himself: "She is absolutely beautiful; there's no denying that. It's not her
clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she
moves, or how she looks at a man; it's the whole business. And the
whole bally business is a miracle, that's all. Good Lord! And to think
I ever had the nerve--the nerve!"
He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into space for a few
moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a
cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.
That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their
deepest thinking.