The Governor’s Mansion.
Forty rooms.
Alone.
Alone.
“You’re going to be a lawyer,” said Laura, “and you’re going everywhere in the world, and I’m to wait for you, and never get married.
You poor kid!”
She laughed softly.
“You don’t know what you’re going to do.”
He turned a face of misery on her; brightness dropped from the sun.
“You don’t care?” he choked.
“You don’t care?”
He bent his head to hide his wet eyes.
“Oh, my dear,” she said,
“I do care.
But people don’t live like that.
It’s like a story.
Don’t you know that I’m a grown woman?
At my age, dear, most girls have begun to think of getting married.
What — what if I had begun to think of it, too?”
“Married!”
The word came from him in a huge gasp of horror as if she had mentioned the abominable, proposed the unspeakable.
Then, having heard the monstrous suggestion, he immediately accepted it as a fact.
He was like that.
“So! That’s it!” he said furiously.
“You’re going to get married, eh?
You have fellows, have you?
You go out with them, do you?
You’ve known it all the time, and you’ve tried to fool me.”
Nakedly, with breast bare to horror, he scourged himself, knowing in the moment that the nightmare cruelty of life is not in the remote and fantastic, but in the probable — the horror of love, loss, marriage, the ninety seconds treason in the dark.
“You have fellows — you let them feel you.
They feel your legs, they play with your breasts, they —” His voice became inaudible through strangulation.
“No.
No, my dear.
I haven’t said so,” she rose swiftly to a sitting position, taking his hands.
“But there’s nothing unusual about getting married, you know.
Most people do. Oh, my dear!
Don’t look like that!
Nothing has happened.
Nothing!
Nothing!”
He seized her fiercely, unable to speak.
Then he buried his face in her neck.
“Laura!
My dear!
My sweet!
Don’t leave me alone!
I’ve been alone!
I’ve always been alone!”
“It’s what you want, dear.
It’s what you’ll always want.