The Common Law

"Have you?"

"Really."

"Well, I'll admit I've missed you."

"Really?"

Sure thing! I wish to heaven I were in town now. We would go somewhere."

"Oh, I wish so, too."

"Isn't it the limit!"

"It is, Kelly. Can't you be a real god for a moment and come floating into my room in a golden cloud?"

"Shall I try?"

"Please do."

"All right. I'll do my god-like best. And anyway I'll call you up at one. Good night."

"Good night."

He went back to the girl waiting for him in the starlight.

"Well," she said, smiling at his altered expression, "you certainly have recovered your spirits."

He laughed and took her unreluctant fingers and kissed them—a boyishly impulsive expression of the gay spirits which might have perplexed him or worried him to account for if he had tried to analyse them. But he didn't; he was merely conscious of a sudden inrush of high spirits—of a warm feeling for all the world—this star-set world, so still and sweet-scented.

"Stephanie, dear," he said, smiling, "you know perfectly well that I think—always have thought—that there was nobody like you. You know that, don't you?"

She laughed, but her pulses quickened a little.

"Well, then," he went on. "I take it for granted that our understanding is as delightfully thorough as it has always been—a warm, cordial intimacy which leaves us perfectly unembarrassed—perfectly free to express our affection for each other without fear of being misunderstood."

The girl lifted her blue eyes: "Of course."

"That's what I told Lily," he nodded, delighted. I told her that you and I understood each other—that it was silly of her to suspect anything sentimental in our comradeship; that whenever the real thing put in an appearance and came tagging down the pike after you, you'd sink the gaff into him—"

"The—what?"

"Rope him and paste your monogram all over him."

"I certainly will," she said, laughing. Eyes and lips and voice were steady; but the tumult in her brain confused her.

"That is exactly what I told Lily," he said. "She seems to think that if two people frankly enjoy each other's society they want to marry each other. All married women are that way. Like clever decoys they take genuine pleasure in bringing the passing string under the guns."

He laughed and kissed her pretty fingers again:

"Don't you listen to my sister. Freedom's a good thing; and people are selfish when happy; they don't set up a racket to attract others into their private paradise."

"Oh, Louis, that is really horrid of you. Don't you think Lily is happy?"

"Sure—in a way. You can't have a perfectly good husband and baby, and have the fun of being courted by other aspirants, too. Of course married women are happy; but they give up a lot. And sometimes it slightly irritates them to remember it when they see the unmarried innocently frisking as they once frisked. And it's their instinct to call out 'Come in! Matrimony's fine! You don't know what you are missing!'"

Stephanie laughed and lay back in her steamer chair, her hand abandoned to him. And when her mirth had passed a slight sense of fatigue left her silent, inert, staring at nothing.

When the time came to say adieu he kissed her as he sometimes did, with a smiling and impersonal tenderness—not conscious of the source of all this happy, demonstrative, half impatient animation which seemed to possess him in every fibre.

"Good-bye, you dear girl," he said, as the lights of the motor lit up the drive. "I've had a bully time, and I'll see you soon again."

"Come when you can, Louis. There is no man I would rather see."

"And no girl I would rather go to," he said, warmly, scarcely thinking what he was saying.

Their clasped hands relaxed, fell apart. He went in to take leave of Lily and Gordon and their guests, then emerged hastily and sprang into the car.

Overhead the June stars watched him as he sped through the fragrant darkness. But with him, time lagged; even the train crawled as he timed it to the ticking seconds of his opened watch.

In the city a taxi swallowed him and his haste; and it seemed as though he would never get to his studio and to the telephone; but at last he heard her voice—a demure, laughing little voice:

"I didn't think you'd be brute enough to do it!"

"But you said I might call you—"

"There are many things that a girl says from which she expects a man to infer, tactfully and mercifully, the contrary."

"Did I wake you, Valerie? I'm terribly sorry—"

"If you are sorry I'll retire to my pillow—"

"I'll ring you up again!"

"Oh, if you employ threats I think I'd better listen to you. What have you to say to me?"

"What were you doing when I rang you up?"

"I Wish I could say that I was asleep. But I can't. And if I tell the truth I've got to flatter you. So I refuse to answer."

"You were not waiting up for—"

"Kelly! I refuse to answer! Anyway you didn't keep your word to me."

"How do you mean?"

"You promised to appear in a golden cloud!"

"Something went wrong with the Olympian machinery," he explained, "and I was obliged to take the train…. What are you doing there, anyway?"