His Second Wife | Page 3

but gaily she let her fancy go and pictured herself on the stage. . . . This image passed and was replaced by a platform in an immense auditorium crowded with cheering women and girls. Suffrage banners were all about, and she was speaking to the crowd. Her voice rang clear and resolute. . . . There were other dreams and pictures--of dances in New York cafés, of theatre parties, trips to Paris, hosts of friends. And the vague thought flashed into her mind:
"What possibilities for life--in me--me--Ethel Knight!"
She went on listening, building. She took in fragments of what Amy said and mingled them with things she had read and pictures she'd seen in books, magazines and Sunday papers; or with things that she had heard in the long discussions in her club of high school girls, over suffrage, marriage, Bernard Shaw. She thought of the opera, concerts, plays. She saw Fifth Avenue at night agleam with countless motors, torrents of tempestuous life--and numberless shop windows, hats and dainty gowns and shoes. She pictured herself at dinners and balls, men noticing her everywhere. "As they are doing now," she thought, "this very minute in this car!" Out of all the pictures rose one of a church wedding. And then this picture faded, and changed to that of her father's funeral in the old frame yellow church. She frowned, her brown eyes saddened and suddenly grew wet with a deep homesick tenderness. But in a few moments she smiled again; once more her pulse-beat quickened. For Amy was talking good-humouredly. And Ethel's eyes, now curious, now plainly thrilled, now quizzical, amused and pleased, kept watching her, and she asked herself:
"Shall I ever be like that?"
The picture she had of her sister grew each moment more warm and desirable. Eagerly she explored it by the quick questions she threw out.
They were coming into the city now, in a dusk rich with twinkling lights. In the car the passengers were stirring. Amy stood up to be brushed--sleek and alluring, worldly wise--and the fat man in the chair behind her opened wide his heavy eyes. Then Ethel stood up--and in the poise of her figure, slim and lithe with its lovely lines, in her carriage, in her slender neck, in her dark face with its features clear, her lips a little parted, and in the look in her brown eyes--there was something which made glances turn from all down the softly lighted car. There was even a brief silence. And Ethel drew a sudden breath, as from close behind her the soft voice of the darky porter drawled:
"Yes'm--yes'm--dis is New York. We's comin' right into de station now."
CHAPTER II
"Well, Ethel my love, we're here at last! . . . It must be after midnight. I wonder when I'll get to sleep? . . . Not that I care especially. What a quaint habit sleeping is."
She had formed the habit long ago of holding these inner conversations. Her father had been a silent man, and often as she faced him at meals Ethel had talked and talked to herself in quite as animated a way as though she were saying it all aloud. Now she sat up suddenly in bed and turned on the light just over her head, and amiably she surveyed her room. It was a pretty, fresh, little room with flowered curtains, a blue rug, a luxurious chaise longue and a small French dressing table. Very cheerful, very empty. "It looks," she decided, "just like the bed feels. I'm the first fellow who has been here.
"No," she corrected herself in a moment, "that's very ignorant of you, my dear. This is a New York apartment, you know. All kinds of other fellows have been in this room ahead of me; and they've lain awake by the hour here, planning how to get married or divorced, or getting ready to write a great book or make a million dollars, or sing in grand opera or murder their child. All the things in the newspapers have been arranged in this spot where I lie! Now I'll turn out the light," she added, "and sink quietly to rest!"
But in the dark she lay listening to the strange low hub-hub from outside. And it made her think of what she had seen an hour before, when at the open window, resting her elbows on the sill, she had begun to make her acquaintance with her backyard--a yawning abyss of brick and cement which went down and down to cement below, and up and up to a strip of blue sky, and to right and to left went stretching away with rows and rows of windows. And now as the murmurs and quick low cries, piano music, a baritone voice and a sudden burst of laughter, came