I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there.Who cares?" And she laughed once more, and ran her hand over her hair as though waving all these thoughts away, and shut the windows and turned out the lights and went upstairs to her bedroom."I'm a selfish, self-willed little devil, crazy about myself, thinking of nothing but having a good time," she added inwardly."I know it, all of you, as well as you do, but give me time.Give me my head for a bit.When I must begin to pay, I'll pay with all I've got."But presently, all ready for bed, she put on a dressing gown and left her room and padded along the passage in heelless slippers to Martin's room.He might have been asleep all this time.How silly not to have thought of that! She would wake him for one of their talks.It seemed an age since they had sat on the hill together among the young buds, and she had conjured up the high-reaching buildings of New York against the blue sky, like a mirage.
She had begun to think again.Alice and Gilbert between them had set her brain working--and she couldn't stop it.What if the time had come already when she must pull herself together and face facts and play what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said, she would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "Icare" with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen.Idon't know quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty.I'm still not much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed, fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid.I know all about that as well as they do.I'm making no pretense to be anything different.Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself.
But it's only a phase.Why not let me get over it and live it down?
If there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out sooner or later.Why not let me go through it my own way? A few months to play the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know what it means to be old?"She hadn't been along that passage before.It was Martin's side of the house.She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of anything.She tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the button that would turn the light on and found it.It was a large and usefully fitted dressing room with a hanging cupboard that ran all along one wall, with several doors.Two old shiny-faced English tallboys were separated by a boot rack.Between the two windows was a shaving glass over a basin.There was a bookcase on each side of the fire-place and a table conveniently near a deep armchair with a tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes.Every available space of wall was crammed with framed photographs of college groups, some showing men with the whiskered faces and the strange garments of the early Victorian period, others of the clean-shaven men of the day, but all of them fit and eager and care-free, caught in their happiest hours.It was a man's room, arranged by one, now used by another.
Joan went through into the bedroom.The light followed her.There was no Martin.It was all strangely tidy.Its owner might have been away for weeks.
With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went back to the dressing room.She wanted Martin.If Martin had been there, she would have had it all out with him, freely and frankly.
Somehow she couldn't wave away the idea any longer that the time had come for her to cross another bridge.Thank God she would still be young, but the kid of her would be left on the other side.If Martin had been there, she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away among her toys.
Alice and Gilbert Palgrave,--curious that it should have been those two,--had shaken her individualism, as well as something else, vague and untranslatable, that she couldn't quite grasp, that eluded her hand.She sat down in the deep chair and with a little smile took up one of Martin's pipes and looked at it.The good tobaccoey scent of it took her back to the hill on the edge of the woods, and in her mind's eye there was a picture of two clean eyes with laughter-lines coming and going, a strong young face that had already caught the sun, square shoulders and a broad chest, and a pair of reliable hands with spatulate fingers clasped round a knee.She could hear birds calling.Spring was in the air.
Where was Martin?