The Amazing Interlude | Page 5

it was a white
fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the
wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by
the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as no
doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never
seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom.
Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his
ulster and his overshoes--he had been raised by women--and came in,
she was standing by the fire.
"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning."
Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the
throat. She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her
quietest moments there was that about her--a sort of repressed
eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that there
were times when she had a "flighty" look.
And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped
Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his
arms out.
"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!"
"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically.
"I don't know," he muttered. "You--sometimes you look as though--"
Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good to
you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek
against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear."
A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man
has stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel.
He was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed

through her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One
was of Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing
baby. The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a
battlefield and crying "Mother!"
Two sorts of maternity--one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, but
the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other
vicarious, of all the world.
"Don't you love me--that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers.
"I don't know."
"You don't know!"
It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without
seeing at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee,
glancing up, saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and
head thrust forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow
of heavy hair that marked him all man, and virile man.
She slipped her hand into his.
"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the
complete surrender of a child.
He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair
where she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he
made his simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under
her ear, and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a
great passion he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and
passivity he read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it
hers.
To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's
devotion was something more, as much more as was necessary. For in
Sara Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection,
habit, small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which

later she was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and
agonizes, she had never even dreamed.
Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and
behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing,
unsuspected, the mise en scène.

II
About the middle of January Mabel Andrews wrote to Sara Lee from
France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais.
The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the
engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into
the ring he had put every dollar of his profits--and a great love, and
gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself.
It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger,
than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious
glances for months.
"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously.
Sara Lee looked at it on her finger.
"It is lovely! It--it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his
shoulder.
Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews,
and he had a tendency to restrict