A Rose for Emily Read Online Free PDF Page B

brief greeting, she went to the door of a butler's pantry and pushing it open called: "You can serve dinner, Martha." He had rather expected that a butler would announce dinner, that there would be a cocktail. Then he put these thoughts behind him as they sat down side by side on a lounge and looked at each other.

    "Father and mother won't be here," she said thoughtfully.

    He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and he was glad the parents were not to be here to-night--they might wonder who he was.
    He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles farther north, and he always gave Keeble as his home instead of Black Bear Village.
    Country towns were well enough to come from if they weren't inconveniently in sight and used as footstools by fashionable lakes.

    They talked of his university, which she had visited frequently during the past two years, and of the near-by city which supplied Sherry Island with its patrons, and whither Dexter would return next day to his prospering laundries.

    During dinner she slipped into a moody depression which gave Dexter a feeling of uneasiness. Whatever petulance she uttered in her throaty voice worried him. Whatever she smiled at--at him, at a chicken liver, at nothing--it disturbed him that her smile could have no root in mirth, or even in amusement. When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.

    Then, after dinner, she led him out on the dark sun-porch and deliberately changed the atmosphere.

    "Do you mind if I weep a little?" she said.

    "I'm afraid I'm boring you," he responded quickly.

    "You're not. I like you. But I've just had a terrible afternoon. There was a man I cared about, and this afternoon he told me out of a clear sky that he was poor as a church-mouse. He'd never even hinted it before. Does this sound horribly mundane?"

    "Perhaps he was afraid to tell you."

    "Suppose he was," she answered. "He didn't start right. You see, if I'd thought of him as poor--well, I've been mad about loads of poor men, and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I hadn't thought of him that way, and my interest in him wasn't strong enough to survive the shock. As if a girl calmly informed her fianc_ that she was a widow. He might not object to widows, but----

    "Let's start right," she interrupted herself suddenly. "Who are you, anyhow?"

    For a moment Dexter hesitated. Then:

    "I'm nobody," he announced. "My career is largely a matter of futures."

    "Are you poor?"

    "No," he said frankly, "I'm probably making more money than any man my age in the Northwest. I know that's an obnoxious remark, but you advised me to start right."

    There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter's throat, and he waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw--
    she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit . . .
    kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.

    It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.

IV
    IT BEGAN like that--and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on such a note right up to the d_nouement. Dexter surrendered a part of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects--there was a very little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her physical