Читать книгу The White Kami - Edward Alden Jewell - Страница 9

Alone in the street car, Stella brooded it all miserably. “How unhappy I am,” she thought. And then she faltered: “I didn’t realize....” Yet she asked herself, too, what could be left unsaid if the scene were to be played over—“except, maybe, the actual breaking off...?” Everything she had said was quite true, yet her heart was not at rest. “I don’t seem to know which way to turn any more,” she told herself darkly, almost in tears.

Meanwhile Jerome, continuing home on foot, argued that what had occurred was no great matter. She had succeeded really in arousing him, and his mood was surprisingly energetic.

“Well, if she feels that way....” He muttered the opening phrases of many very vigorous statements designed to cover his feelings; but for the most part they were destined to an eternal suspension. “I guess I’m not quite so hopeless....” Well, the thing had happened, and there was an end of it. There would be no longer any special reason why he should vividly picture her in his mind when they were apart; yet, curiously enough, now their ways were sundered, he found himself picturing her with singular vividness. “A fine thing,” he thought, “to keep at a fellow about!” Perhaps there was more to be got out of life, but had she given any hint as to how it was to be managed? She had not! He bolstered his outraged ego the whole of the way.

Arrived at his own house, Jerome went at once to his room. He washed in a desultory manner, then proceeded to plaster his hair down very slick, even dipping the brush into the water pitcher to facilitate the process. His evening toilet completed, the young man sat down in a straight chair, tipped himself rakishly back against the wall, knocked the caked ashes out of his jaunty little pipe, filled it with tobacco from a tumbler supposed to hold his toothbrush, and began pulling away in a comfortable, dignified fashion. He flattered himself he didn’t exactly resemble the traditional conception of a man who has just passed through the ordeal of a broken engagement, and tried to persuade himself that Stella would be the heavier loser of the two.