Daphne Deane Read Online Free PDF Page B

would never believe in women again. For he hadn't been able to think, until she made a point of it, that she was really as money-minded as this. He could not believe it even yet when he recalled her loveliness. Surely in a day or two she would recall him. Of course, he had not yet actually asked her in so many words to marry him, but it had been well understood between them that such was his intention, his desire. Her beauty and her grace, her professions of interest in him, all that marvelous startling experience of meeting her and being drawn into her friendship in spite of the environment that surrounded her, an environment that was not natural to him; it could not be that that had not been real! All the way down on the train he had reasoned thus, had stared unseeing out of the window and told himself that if she did not retract what she had said, life was done for him, happiness was no more!
    But now as he sat at the long-drawn-out dinner that reminded him of many he had attended with Anne Casper, he suddenly realized that, notwithstanding his supposed unhappiness, he had not thought of her once all the afternoon. He stared at the thought with startled interest while he listened to Evelyn's empty drawl of old times and really heard very little of what she said.
    The thought puzzled him. He did not like to think of himself as vacillating, as easily throwing off and forgetting a love of which he had fully persuaded himself. No, he wasn't like that. If there was ever one thing his mother had drilled into him, it was to be serious about falling in love, not to be impetuous but deliberate, to be entirely sure he had chosen the right one and then to abide by it, be loyal to it, come what might.
    But his mother would never have approved a woman who would test his love by a demand that he should go into a questionable business and throw aside all his preparations for life. And when he came to face it honestly, had he ever been quite sure that Anne Casper was the true mate of his heart? Hadn't he just been deliberately trying to make himself believe that her beauty was real and not merely of the flesh?
    He had got so far in his thoughts when the general hilarity interrupted them. Some silly tale one of the men was addressing to him noisily. Keith had only toyed with his wineglass, but the others had drunk freely, and high spirits was the keynote of the hour.
    Suddenly, as he saw what the outcome of the story was to be, its utter silliness and sordidness palled upon him. Was this the thing he was letting himself in for by accepting Evelyn's invitation? Just a return to the atmosphere he had so wearied of in New York? And not even Anne Casper to relieve the situation! It was not his native element. It was hers, and he had stood for it that he might have her, telling himself that when she was his he would wean her away from it. But could he do that? Wasn't it too much a part of her, and without it for a background would she have the glamour?
    Somehow at this distance, he wasn't so sure of Anne Casper. And perhaps he wasn't so heartbroken as he had thought! What was it that had got him? The coming back here to his old home, where he could remember his sweet, simple life with his father and mother, his absorbing school and play, his ambitions for the future?
    And suddenly he knew what it was, the picture of himself kneeling by his mother's knee, with the firelight flickering over his mother's face! It was the girl, Daphne Deane, and her story of how she had watched as a play his own life, that had got him. Foolish, of course, child's play, not a thing that should influence a man grown. But somehow a great disgust for the thing he was doing now filled his soul. He wanted to get away from this lighted room and these silly made-up, half-drunken former comrades of his, out into the coolness and darkness of the night.
    "He's frightfully solemn, isn't he?" whispered Nell Harbison to Evelyn across her partner, with lifted eyes toward Keith.