The talkers

Sutton, always debonair, came in gaily:

“Awfully sorry to be so late,” he said, gracefully saluting and retaining her hand. “I suppose you’ll put me out bodily, as you did before——” He checked his breezy loquacity as the lighted dining room and table caught his eye.

“Oh, Lord! I didn’t know I was that late!” he exclaimed. “Forgive me, Gilda, and let me come tomorrow——”

“No; stay, please.”

“But this is rotten of me——”

“Please stay. I hadn’t thought of your remaining to dinner, but I’d be happy if you would.”

“You charitable girl!—you really don’t want me——”

“I do.”

He hesitated; he even had the grace to blush; then he disembarrassed himself of hat and overcoat, ashamed of himself for doing it.

Gilda ran into her bath-room, selected her best towels, combed out her silver brush, dusted the powder from the toilet table, and returned to Sutton.

“I’m a beastly bore,” he said, “and you know it! Yet, now you propose to curry-comb me and feed me. Oh, Gilda!”

Her heart was blithe as she danced away to the kitchen door:

“Oh, Freda, Mr. Sutton will dine with me. There’s enough, isn’t there?”

Freda proved adequate to the emergency; a place was ready at table for Sutton when he reappeared.

There was a fragrant oyster stew, two chops and a baked potato apiece, half an artichoke with wonderful dressing, a cherry tart divided, camembert, coffee, cigarettes.

Sutton appeared to be enchanted. He had an easy way of seeming so, but he really was, this time.

Gilda was happy; her appetite had returned, and between them they ate everything.

She broke off a rose-bud and gave it to Sutton for his button-hole. Then they took their cigarettes and coffee into the living room, and sat down side by side on the wide sofa where Gilda had placed the row of prim cushions in pleasant anticipation of such an event.

Sutton was in high spirits, very sensible to the girl’s beauty, very much the opportunist in any such situation.

“Why did you eject me so suddenly the other evening?” he asked in his gay, bantering way. “First you bowled me over, Gilda, then you threw me out!”

She turned shy at that, offering no reply, and addressed herself to her Minton coffee cup.

“Didn’t I behave properly?” he insisted, laughing. But he could extract no comment from her, and her uncertain smile baffled him.

“Are you quite all right again?” he inquired. “You look so wonderfully fit that I didn’t even ask you.”

She said, diffidently, that she was perfectly recovered; and, at his request, suffered him to examine the nape of her neck.

“Amazing!” he exclaimed. “Have you heard from any of them—Pockman—Sadoul?——”

“I saw Sadoul.”

“Really! When?”

“Today.”

“Oh. What did he have to say about that rather ghastly affair?”

“He said I really died.”

Sutton shrugged. He no longer believed it. “Death is death,” he observed. “There is no remedy for death, and there never was——” Something seemed to check him; he hesitated—“Not since Christ, anyway,” he added.

“I did die,” she said in a low voice.

Her tranquil finality silenced him for a moment. He took her empty coffee cup and set it aside with his own.

“Gilda,” he said, “I’ve a lot of very friendly curiosity about you—no use pretending I haven’t. Am I impertinent?”

She remained mute, not looking at him, her slender and very white little hands clasped loosely in her lap.

He said: “The other evening you asked me to advise you in regard to investments, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Well, then,” he went on, “don’t you think I’d better tell you something about myself?”

“If you care to.”

“All right. I’m twenty-eight; I’m in the lumber business. That’s what made me so late this evening—one of our men arrived unexpectedly from up-state. I had to talk to him. We’re reforesting on a big scale—we’re driven to do it. Everybody has got to come down to cases in our business, now, because the end of the standing timber is in sight, and there’ll be no more lumber unless we lumbermen begin to grow some. But you’re not interested in that——”

“I might be. I don’t know anything about lumber.”

“It’s an interesting business, really—if you’ll let me tell you sometime. But now, in regard to any advice from me—it being your money and not mine—all I could say to you would be on old-fashioned lines: buy for investment only; buy only what is absolutely safe.”

“Is that what you would do if it were your money?”

“I’d probably speculate,” he admitted with a grin.

“I’ll do it if you advise it.”

“I don’t! Good heavens! I shouldn’t want anything like that on my conscience.... Anyway, I know nothing about your circumstances——”

She told him very frankly and simply how much money she had. He pointed out that, even in spite of the income tax, safe investments in conservative securities would give her an income adequate to the needs and even the little luxuries required by any young girl living alone in New York.

She nodded: “I’ll tell you a little more about myself. My father and mother did not live together. I grew up in boarding schools, here and in France. I never had seen my father. He wrote to me once a month. My mother sometimes visited me.... Then war came. My father suddenly sent for me and I went to London. That was the first time I ever saw him.... And the last.

“Troops were leaving; he was an officer.... I might have liked him.... But he went away.... Before he left, he made provision for me.... And that is the money I now have.”

“What else happened?” asked Sutton gently.

“My father was killed in Asia.”

“I see....”

“Mother arrived in London.... There was legal trouble.... I wanted her to have half, but my father’s solicitors would not permit it. I was trying to devise a way to divide with her when the German airships came over.... Mother was killed ... in Regent Street.... They found her gold-mesh bag.... Nothing else.”

Sutton waited gravely. Gilda sat with head lowered, her clasped hands lying loosely in her lap, her brooding gaze remote.

“What happened to you then?” he asked.

“I thought I ought to learn how to support myself in case the Germans overran the world and ruined everybody.”

“It nearly came to that,” he remarked.

“Yes.... So I hastened to learn shorthand and typing. When I was fairly efficient, there happened to be a demand in Paris for English stenographers who understood French.... So I took a position they offered with an English firm of stenographers in the rue Colchas.” ... She sat very still for a few moments, then, averting her head: “—That is all, Mr. Sutton.”

Of course it was not all; she had not spoken of Sadoul nor of the period in her life wherein he had been a factor. However, it was, evidently, all she cared to tell him about herself.

He glanced sideways at her; she sat very still, gazing straight in front of her. The pretty, childish contours seemed altered, somehow—less youthful, sharper where shadow fell, accenting a profile almost nobly traced. He watched her furtively, curiously, interested in the detached sadness of a face so young, in its pale preoccupation with things beyond his ken.

The opportunist in him, too, had become subdued in the gravity of her altered mood.

The world always accepts you as you present yourself. So Sutton now found himself inclined to view Gilda Greenway more seriously than he had ever expected to. Usually he reserved for this sort of pretty girl those gay, casual, amiable, irresponsible qualities usually expected of a man by such girls.

She had not invited them, even at Derring’s. Apparently she did not expect them.

Was she one of the impossible kind who supposed a man didn’t know the difference?... Or—was there, possibly, not as much difference as he naturally had supposed—meeting her sans façon at Derring’s—and finding her so pliant in the end——

He had, of course, placed her, generally, but not at all definitely. There seemed to be nothing specific about her—with her freshness and youth and oddly winsome shyness.

Yet, there was Derring’s anything but exclusive party; and there was Sadoul.... Certainly, he thought, there are all sorts in the world; and of new kinds there is no ending.

He was first to break the long silence with a banality: “Some day, Gilda, will you tell me more about yourself?”

She turned her head, faintly surprised: “No; I don’t think so.”

He took his snub with such unfeigned and flushed chagrin that she, also, blushed.

“I didn’t mean it unkindly,” she murmured. “It sounds so. I’m sorry.”

Her concern was so candid, so unconsciously sweet, that he recovered much too quickly. Such young men do. That’s the trouble with candour and inexperience.

He told her, impulsively, how deeply interested in her he was becoming. He took her passive little hands in his and told her again, with enough emotion in his voice to charm and trouble her.

The emotion was quite genuine. It always is in young men. The only trouble is that they have an unlimited capacity for it—if only the girl involved be fair to look upon.

But now, in hopeful recollection of an episode altogether charming, this young man was slightly surprised when Gilda’s supple body stiffened, and her firm, cool hand removed his enterprising arm.

“Please,” she said under her breath, “—I had rather not.”

“You didn’t say that at Derring’s——”

Her lips tightened and she closed her eyes more tightly still, as though chagrined at the remembrance.

“Are you really sorry, Gilda?”

“Yes.... I mean I don’t know whether I am.... I had rather you didn’t kiss me—again——”

“I won’t, if you don’t wish it——”

“No.”

He took it amiably enough—even a trifle anxiously, afraid of offending a girl who was beginning to pique his curiosity—that overwhelming symptom of masculine egotism ever latent in young men.

“Of course,” he said gaily, “it was carnival time at Derring’s.... I didn’t mistake you for a moment.... I really like you tremendously, Gilda.... You are such a lovely thing, anyway—don’t be too severe with me.”

“Not severe—with you.... No. It isn’t that.” ... She drew a deep breath, smiled uneasily at him.

“I do like you.... I want to be friends.... Will you try always to remember that?”

“Yes, you charming girl!——”

“—Because—you may not think so, sometimes.... I may do things you will not understand.... It won’t be because I don’t—don’t like you.”

She rose; he stood up, too. She said slowly:

“I want you to go, now.... Will you still believe that I like you, very much, if I—I ask you to say good-night to me?”

“Of course!... You’re the most winsome girl, Gilda—the most delightful!—I do care a lot for you——”

“Telephone me—soon.”

“Rather!” ... He had his coat on, now.... “I’ll call you tomorrow, if I may.”

She nodded and opened the door for him. He wanted her hand again and got it.

“You like me a little, don’t you, Gilda?”

Her tightly held hand began to tremble in his, and she loosened it with a sudden nervous movement.

“I want you to go,” she whispered.

There was a strange, uncontrolled note in her voice—and he looked at her green eyes in the demi-light.

“I’ll tell you—sometime,” she said breathlessly.... “I do care for you.... We must help each other—not destroy——”

“What frightens you?”

“Please go, if you care for me at all!”

He stepped back in silence; the door closed smartly, and he heard her bolt it. And, listening, he became aware of another sound in the stillness—a murmur, broken, incoherent, as though inside the door the girl were whispering to herself, and whimpering all alone.