“Perhaps. But I am not always free. I shall have to pick a time. Now, you go back, please. I must go on. But wait—I—I want to thank you for that faith. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever known. It would not be hard to learn to love such a—boy.” She smiled divinely. “Goodbye!” One of them looked back, after the parting. The psychologists know which. Chapter IV Chapter IV FOUR days of suffering registered on the Southerner. In the hours when he should have been sleeping, he picked at the meshes that held him. It was true that he seemed to have always been conscious of this girl whose vivid beauty now enslaved him. (These artists have wider worlds than the common run of humans.) But what fact had she in mind which, if revealed, would make his love impossible? Who and what was she? He gathered the threads of evidence: her time was not her own; she was, by her own admission, or so he construed it, penniless; he had met her when offices were discharging stenographers for the day, and shop girls were beginning to start homeward; when she left him, she went in the direction of the theater district. But why shouldn’t he marry a stenographer, or an actress, or a shop girl? Or even a model or manicurist or a lady’s maid, if she were square? What had her occupation to do with his happiness? King was younger than his years, as are most Southerners, but he was sensitive to delicate influences. Without analysis, he knew that this girl had touched an atmosphere of refinement and was educated. And she had traveled. But what was so poor a girl doing in Charleston and Savannah and Macon? It sounded like a theatrical route. One day, on impulse, he consulted a theatrical agency and learned that “Naughty Marietta” had been in Macon on the 23d of December and Jacksonville on the 24th. He knew the opera and had seen its array of beauties and yet he could not figure out why, being of the Marietta company should keep her from marrying him. But—and there came the devil’s hand in his affairs—but these theater girls marry so recklessly! King sat up in bed when this thought arrived and uttered a word he had learned from his grandfather’s overseer. It was not a nice word. And yet—and here a gentler voice intervened—and yet, don’t you know the girl isn’t married? Don’t you know? Of course he knew, the girl was not married!
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