When next, ensconced under a red-and-white awning among the array of
cool flannels and summery dresses, he sought her, she was seriously
intent on Hieher game, a little frown on her young forehead, her lips
rebelliously set, the swirling white silk collar open at the browned
throat, the sleeve rolled up above the firm slender forearm. She moved
lightly as a young animal in slow, well calculated tripping movements or
in rapid shifting springs. Her partner, a younger brother of Skeeter's,
home on vacation, gathered in the balls and offered them to her with a
solicitude that was quite evident. Bojo felt an instinctive antipathy
watching their laughing intimacy. It seemed to him that they excluded
him, that she was still a child unable to distinguish between a
stripling and a man, still without need of any deeper emotions than a
light-hearted romping comradeship.
With the ending of the set, greetings could no longer be avoided. As
she came to him directly, holding out her hand in the most natural way,
he felt as though he were going red to the ears, that every one must
perceive his embarrassment before this girl still in her teens. He said
stupidly, pretending amazement,
"You here? Well, this is a surprise!"
"Yes, isn't it?" she said with seeming unconsciousness.
That was all. The next moment she was in some new group, arranging
another match. Short and circumstantial as her greeting had been, it
left him with a sinking despair. He had hurt her irrevocably, she
resented his presence--that was evident. His whole coming had been a
dreadful mistake. Depressed, he turned to Gladys Stone to attempt the
concealment from strange eyes of the disorder within himself. He was yet
too inexperienced in the ways of the women of the world to even suspect
the depth of resentment that could lie in her tortured heart.
"I'm awfully glad to see you--awfully," he said, committing the blunder
of giving to his voice a note of discreet sympathy. It had been his
distressing duty to bring her personally the little baggage of her
sentimental voyage--letters, a token or two, several photographs--to
witness with clouding eyes the spectacle of her complete breakdown.
She drew a little away at his words, straightening up and looking from
him.
"Have you heard the date of the wedding, Doris's wedding?" she said
coldly.
It was his time to wince, but he was incapable of returning the feminine
attack.
"You should know better than I," he said quietly.
She looked at him with a perfect simulation of ignorance:
"You were rather well interested, weren't you?"
"More than that, as you know, Gladys," he said, looking directly in her
eyes. A certain look she saw there caused her to make a sudden retreat
into banality--
"Do you play?"
"Sometimes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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