Daphne Deane Read Online Free PDF

mistake to come down amid the old association again. It had upset him, brought back his sorrow and loss. Better to have stayed in New York and had it out with Anne Casper. After all, she belonged to the modern age, and he had to live his life in the present, not the past. He must shake off this strange sentimentality that had him in its grasp. It must be that girl, Daphne, who had reminded him so much of his mother! The girl, and her talk of other days!
    He was almost glad to get out of the car and enter the ornate Avery mansion, with its air of sophistication, its ostentatious luxury, and rouse to the immediate present.
    Back he was at once in the world he was learning to know as his life now--cocktails and free, careless conversation, daring attire and startling makeup.
    They welcomed him noisily, the guests who had already arrived; they claimed an intimacy he had never felt with any of them and plied him with jokes that were not to his taste. He had been out in the modern world for several years, both at home and abroad, and had grown quite used to its life, quite a part of it at times, but somehow he had not expected to find it here in his old hometown. Suddenly it seemed an impertinence here so near to the old home. It almost seemed as if he were seeing it with his mother's disapproving eyes.
    He stood a little apart from the rest, holding a glass from which he had not tasted, which somehow he was strangely reluctant to taste. He watched his former schoolmates as they flocked in now, boisterously, each one with a noisy greeting. They were the same people. He could recognize them, in spite of their disguises of modern garments. Yet they seemed to have changed indefinably, to have coarsened and cheapened themselves, to have grown brazen and hard. It wasn't just that they were older--the makeup of the girls had hidden age to a certain extent--it was that they seemed to have lost illusions, to be without that eager look of youth with its natural hopefulness. They were not old enough to have lost those things. It was almost as if they had lost joy or all hope of it. He had seen that look on men and women of the world, but these who had lived in the hometown and grown up with him, these ought not to have it, not yet anyway--not so soon. Why, in some cases it almost seemed as if they were wildly unhappy and were trying to keep the world from finding it out, as if their very laughter were hollow with pain!
    And yet, they were Anne Casper's kind! He could not deny that! And Anne Casper was very lovely. Was it possible that under her beautiful veneer Anne Casper was hard like this and disappointed and selfish, and he had not seen it?
    That girl on the grandstand that afternoon had not had that look! How was it?
    Yet all these would laugh at her, despise her, perhaps. Certainly Evelyn had.
    The evening was hilarious and Keith Morrell was weary. This was just the thing he had run away from in New York. At least, he had run away from the thought of Anne Casper, slim and willowy with her sleek black hair, long curly lashes, and her great dark eyes that could intrigue at one time and be so hard at another. Anne Casper, who had laughingly but utterly refused to comply with his request, and who had, moreover, insisted that he ought to give up his lifework, which had been planned for him through the years by his father and mother and himself, and go into some gigantic financial speculation with her father, be rich and independent, and be free most of the time to play around the earth with her and her friends and give himself up to amusing her. Those were the conditions she had made for continuing their friendship, an ultimatum, in fact, though she hadn't exactly put it in so many words. He had been very angry when he went away, but he had not let her see how angry he was. He had only been stern and white and had rejected her suggestions gravely, quietly, and gone.
    He had thought when he left her that his heart was probably broken. That he