This Proud Heart Read Online Free PDF

sometime,” he said.
    She and Mark had driven here two days ago to bring food and books, and to sweep and dust. She had thought, packing her books in her own room to bring them away, “Shall I take clay, or a paint box? What if I want to make something at the cabin?” No, she would not take these things on her honeymoon.
    She did not know how much she would ever want to use them again. Perhaps she would not need them any more. She had packed them not for the honeymoon, but to be taken to the house where she and Mark had chosen to live. The alcove in her old room looked empty and forlorn when she had put everything away into a big box, to be taken to the small new house. The Cupid was finished and kneeling now among the budding irises in Mrs. Fontane’s garden. Mark’s head she had carried herself down the street and set up in the new attic. The head was not finished. Something was wrong with it. She had the mouth perfectly, but the eyes were wrong under the brows. Do what she would, they continued to look like empty sockets.
    “It’s not right—it doesn’t speak,” she had said to him one day. They were in the little new house, getting it ready for this day that was now over.
    “Speak?” he had asked.
    “When I have them right I seem to hear them speaking,” she said.
    “Gosh, it looks enough like me to make me feel queer,” he said, staring at it.
    They had stood looking at the clay face and then Mark said suddenly, “I’ll look like that when I’m dead.”
    She did not answer, she could not bear to answer, because he was right. It was exactly Mark’s face, dead. She wrapped it quickly in the damp cloth.
    “It’s not finished, that’s all,” she replied. “I’ll bring it to life.” It would be the first thing she would do when they came back, when they began their real life.
    But now in the cabin without reason that silent perfect mask haunted her like the face of some dead memory. She kept thinking of it when she looked at him, while they talked, while they unpacked. They stood before each other, they kissed, and she saw not his face, but the mask she had made.
    “Aren’t we silly!” she laughed. “We’ve been longing for this moment. Here it is—and we feel odd with each other!”
    He looked down at her without a smile. “I still feel as if it were not us,” he said. In his eyes was emptiness. She—she must make the reality. His face must not be to her the clay mask she had not finished, the mask which, pathetically, humbly, was waiting until she finished it and brought it to life.
    “Come,” she said practically, “let’s unpack our bags and get our supper—then a swim by moonlight, Mark?”
    “Yes, let’s!” he assented eagerly.
    To do something together would make it all real again. They would feel they were the two who had planned these very hours, now come after so long. That was what was the matter. They had dreamed this moment so long that they could not draw it out of dreams. Though it was here, though they were in it, it seemed still to come. He followed her while she hung up their garments on nails behind a cretonne curtain, while she set the pine table for the two of them, while she broiled the beefsteak and made coffee. He could not find much to do. She was so swift in every movement, so exact. She seemed to be doing everything at the same time. He stood helpless before her certain speed.
    “You’re wonderful!” he said. “I—you make me feel useless.”
    She was putting into a clear glass of water the red roses she had worn at her belt when they left her father’s house. She was setting them on the table. But when he said, “You’re wonderful!” she flew to him and buried her face against him.
    “Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, strangled against his breast. “Don’t call me that!”
    He was astounded. “Why, I meant it!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you like to be called wonderful?”
    “No—no—no—” she cried, stifled.
    “Well!” he gasped.