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Flaming Youth

<h2>CHAPTER XXXIV</h2> Again Pat was happy in her engagement. She frequently and insistently assured herself that she was. Certainly she had no just complaint of Monty. He was all that a lover should be when they were together; he kept to his pact and never in any manner referred to Pat's confession. But when he was away she sometimes wished that he wouldn't write so often, or, at least, expect her to answer so regularly. His letters added nothing to his charm. They innocently bristled with I's; but it was the monotony rather than the egotism of his style that annoyed her. Her answers, at first ardent, vivid and flashing like herself, soon became mere chronicles of petty events, interspersed with protestations of love. They were temporarily genuine enough, these latter, since each time he was with her she was re-warmed in the glow of their mutual passion. But she could not stifle all misgivings. Incompetent though she was to analyse comprehensively her changeful emotions, she nevertheless had disturbing gleams of self-knowledge which added nothing to her confidence in a future whereof Monty Standish was to be a large part. Pat dimly recognised herself for that difficult and composite type of girlhood which, though imperatively sexed, will never fulfill itself through physical attraction and physical satisfactions alone. For such as she there must be the double response; if the mating be not both mentally and physically sufficient, ultimate disaster is inevitable. Brooding upon these self-suspicions she would fall into moods of silence and withdrawal puzzling to the matter-of-fact [Pg 318]lover who would sometimes grow quite petulant over her perfunctory responses to his good-humoured ineffectualities of companionship. Once when he rallied her upon this she burst into angry tears and snapped out: "I'm so dam' worn with piffle and prattle," and darted upstairs. But at their next meeting she was so prettily contrite and yielding that his vanity was quite soothed. As the wedding day drew near, Pat dismissed whatever doubts she may have had, in the excitement of fitting-out. It was on one of these shopping expeditions, when she had gone into town by train, her runabout having suffered an attack of nervous breakdown, that, crossing the station plaza she came face to face with an old but unforgotten acquaintance. She saw his keen pleasant face light up, could read in his half-dismayed expression the struggle to remember exactly who she was, and went to him, holding out her hand: "You've forgotten me, Mr. Warren Graves." He took the hand. "Indeed, I haven't! It's Pat. Little Pat." She nodded. "Better than I gave you credit for." "I'm awfully sorry, but I have forgotten the rest of it." "Pat'll do," she laughed. "No; but let me think back." "Want any help?" "It was a party, somewhere about here. A corking party. I'd had one drink that I remember and some more that I don't. A funny, delightful kiddie was floating around outside like Cinderella. She wouldn't go in and dance with me, but—let me think——" "I wouldn't think too far," urged Pat, her face tinged with pink. [Pg 319] "Ah, but I've got the name now!" he cried, triumphant and tactful at once. "Fentriss. Miss Patricia Fentriss, alias Pat, alias the Infant, alias the Demon——" "What a relieving memory you've got!" "—who stood at the bend of the stairs and said good-night so sweetly that I never quite got over it. But, I say; you have grown up." He looked at her piquant, provocative, welcoming face and continued, with a gleam of mischief in his eyes: "Now that I'm recovering from the shock I seem to recall an older sister protruding from a door most inopportunely." "Aren't you afraid you'll miss your train, Mr. Graves?" "I'm not going to the train." "You're carrying that satchel for exercise?" "I'm wishing it onto the parcels stand while I take a delightful young lady to luncheon." "Surely you must be keeping her waiting." "I'm daring to hope she'll come with me while I pry myself from this baggage. Will you, Pat?" "Oh; you're asking me to lunch with you?" "Such is my dark and deadly purpose." "I ought not to. But I want to." He laughed delightedly. "You haven't changed a bit inside and most marvellously outside. Then you'll come?" "You'd make a fortune as a mind-reader. There's a condition though." "Name it; it's agreed to." "That you'll forget all about that foolishness of ours at the party. I was only fourteen." It was his turn to flush. "You make me ashamed of myself," he said with such charming sincerity that Pat let fall a friendly and forgiving hand upon his arm for a second. "But let me tell you this. When I left your[Pg 320] house that night I was more than a little in love with you. Oh, calf-love, doubtless. But—it makes it a little better, doesn't it?" "Yes," answered Pat gravely. "It makes it a lot better—for both of us." "Then we'll forget all of it that you'd wish forgotten," said he. In her italicised moments Pat would have described the luncheon that followed as "too enticing." But Pat did not feel stressful in the company of Warren Graves; she felt quiet and attentive, and wonderfully receptive to the breath of the greater world which he brought to her. He had been in the diplomatic service since the war, in several European capitals, had read and thought and mingled with men who were making or marring not the politics alone, but the very geography of the malleable earth. After a little light talk, in which Pat was conscious that he was trying her out, the rapprochement of their minds was established and he settled down to talk with her as if she had been a woman of the international world in which he moved. Her swift, apprehensive intelligence kept him up to his best form. As the coffee was finished he said reproachfully: "You've made me chatter my head off. And I'm supposed to have rather a gift for silence. How do you work your spells?" "By being sunk in admiring interest," she answered, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. "You've given me the most delightful hour I've had for years." "But it needn't end here, need it?" he protested anxiously. "Don't you want to go to a matinée, or something?" "There aren't any. It's Friday." "So it is. But there are always the movies." [Pg 321] Pat knew that she ought not to go; there were a dozen important errands to be done. But: "Oh, very well," she said. Duties could wait. Pleasure was something you had to grab before it got away from you. The philosophy of the flapper. At the "motion picture palace" they got box seats, the chairs suggestively close together. She wondered whether he would try to hold her hand; also whether she would let him if he did. Probably she would; there was no harm in that, and it gave a pleasant sense of companionship. Most of the boys with whom she went to the theatre or movies expected it. Apparently Warren Graves didn't. He made no move in that direction. Piqued a little, nevertheless Pat liked him the better for it. Monty might perhaps have objected if he knew. And, with a start, she discovered that only just then had she thought of Monty Standish. He had been, for the time, quite forgotten in the interest of a more enlivening and demanding association. What the "serial" of the play was, Pat could hardly have told; "some hurrah about the West," she informed T. Jameson James afterward. At the conclusion of it there came a "news feature," showing scenes about the building where the League of Nations session was being held. Various noted personages appeared, walked with the knee-slung, unnatural stalk of the screen across the space, and vanished. Then it was as if a blinding flash had been projected from the square. An unforgettable figure stood out amidst the crowd, the face turned toward her, the eyes, with the faint ironic lift of the brows, looking down into her soul, arousing a tumult and a throbbing which left her hardly breath enough to gasp out: "Cary Scott!" "Do you know Scott?" asked her escort interestedly. [Pg 322] "Yes. He used to visit in Dorrisdale. Do you?" "Quite well. Everyone on the inside in Europe knows him; he's one of the men who are doing big things under the surface at the conference." "Tell me," urged Pat as they left the place. He sketched Scott's career as confidential adviser to several of the most important of the protagonists in that Titans' struggle. "He's a sort of liaison officer, knowing France and this country as he does. He's had a rather rough time of it, lately, poor chap." "Is he ill?" Pat had a struggle to control her voice. "No. A domestic smash. His wife—that was—is a demonish sort of female. However, he's got well rid of her now. To be accurate, he let her get rid of him. Over-decent of him, all things considered." "Perhaps she had cause, too." Pat hated herself as she said it. But she craved to know. "Nothing of that kind," was the positive reply. "Scott has been living like an anchorite. They say he was hard hit here in America. As to that, I don't know. Certainly he has been devoting himself to his work with no room for any other devotion. Which is more than can be said of his ex-wife." "I never met her," Pat heard her voice saying, and quite admired it for its tone of casual interest. "She didn't come to Dorrisdale." "Speaking of Dorrisdale, I'm at Washington for a while. Mayn't I run up to see you?" "No. I'm afraid not." "That's a little—disappointing." "You see, I'm going to be terribly busy until my wedding." "Wedding? Oh! All my felicitations. I didn't know." [Pg 323] "Yes. I'm to be married to Monty Standish next month." Even as her lips spoke the words her soul denied them. In the dominant depths of her, she knew that she could never marry Monty Standish now. Her thoughts, so lightly detached from her fiancé by the easy charm of Warren Graves, had been claimed, coerced, irrevocably absorbed by the swift-passing phantom presentment of her former lover. The bond created when she had given herself to him was as nothing compared to this imperative summons across the spaces. After a night of passionate struggle, succeeded by resolute thinking, she wired Monty to come on. When he came, she broke the engagement. It was ruthless, cruel, unfair. Pat had no excuses, no extenuations to offer. She simply stood firm. Monty returned to college, failed of his graduation, and let it be known among his indignant friends and relatives that Pat had ruined his career. Hot and righteous though his wrath was, he never so much as hinted at Pat's secret. Stupid, unstable, self-satisfied, spoiled; the plaster idol of an athlete-worshipping age; but nevertheless a gentleman within whom one flame of honour burned clear and constant behind its dull encasement. Pat's family variously raged, begged, and protested. Pat let them. They prophesied social ostracism for her. She shrugged away the suggestion as improbable in the first place and not worth worrying about anyway. But she would have gone away had it not been for her self-assumed responsibility to her broken brother-in-law. And it was from him that her main support came. From the first he stood by her unquestioning. "You're awfully good to me, Jimmie-jams," she said one day as she was wheeling him in the garden, having [Pg 324]dismissed the attendant. "What did you really think when I told you I wasn't going to marry Monty?" A smile of justified cleverness lighted up his pain-worn face. "I'd never thought that you would." "Cute little Jimmie! Why not?" "Too much brains. He'd never keep you interested and you found it out in time." "Not too soon," observed the girl with a grimace. "The family are still raising merry Hades about it." "Naturally. You don't think you're entitled to any Sunday-school award for good behaviour on the thing, do you?" "No. I don't," admitted Pat. But she pouted. A silence fell between them. It lasted for a full turn around the garden. Tired of pouting, Pat broke it. "Want to play bezique, Jimmie?" "No." "Want me to read to you?" "No, dear." "What the devil do you want? Oh, I'm sorry, Jimmie! I believe I've got nerves. Never knew there were such things before." "Pat, stop the chair." "What's the idea, Jimmie?" "Come around here where I can see you." "As per order." "I know the man." "What man?" "The other man." "I've been acquainted with several of 'em in my life." "So I've been given to understand. I'm talking about the man on whose account you broke your engagement." "You're seeing things, Jimmie. Monty himself is the nigger in that woodpile." [Pg 325] "What about Cary Scott?" The look with which she faced him did not waver. "Well, what about him?" "He's coming back." "Coming back? Here?" Still her eyes were steady, but there was the faintest catch in her breathing. "Well, no; he isn't. I just said that as an experiment. Though, of course, he might come if you wanted him. You do want him, don't you, Pat dear?" "Sometimes. Other times I don't. How did you know?" "When you've nothing to do but think," he explained, "you get tired of thinking about yourself by and by and begin to think about other people. I've been thinking a lot about you since we got to be pals." "You're a dear, Jimmie-jams." "I'm an old crab. But I'm fond of you. And Scott was good to me, too, when I was first laid up. When you think hard enough about people you're fond of you begin to see things about them, even things they may not see, themselves." "Even things that maybe aren't there at all," she mocked. "This is there," he asseverated. "There's no use your pretending. When we talk I'm always catching echoes of Scott's influence in what you say. You're a different Pat from what you were before you knew him. I don't think you get on so well with yourself." "You are clever, Jimmie. I don't. And it makes me furious." "At him?" "Yes. I don't know. At myself, too." "I had a letter from him last week. We've carried on a desultory correspondence since he left." Pat's eyes livened. "What does he say about me?" [Pg 326] "How do you know he says anything about you?" "Don't tease. Tell Pattie." "You ought to know Scott well enough to realise that he isn't the sort to display his feelings in a show window. But there are lines that one could read between. Have you written to him, Pat?" "No." "Aren't you going to send for him?" Her face darkened with troubled memories. "I couldn't. You don't understand. I couldn't, Jimmie." "I could write." "You shan't. You mustn't; if you do I'll hate you. Promise." "All right. I promise. But don't you really want to see him ever again?" "Sometimes I think I'll die if I don't," she said simply. "Other times—I don't know." "Why not find out? Won't you let me write?" "No; no. You've promised." "Very well. I'll keep to it. Take me inside, slave." He did not write. He cabled. <hr /> [Pg 327] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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