“I’m leaving early in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” he countered.
“There’s no need.”
“However, I’m going.”
“Well, if you insist on being ridiculous——”
“Oh, don’t put it that way,” he objected.
“—just because I won’t let you kiss me. Do you think——”
“Now, Isabelle,” he interrupted, “you know it’s not that—even suppose it is.
We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to kiss—or—or—nothing.
It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral grounds.”
She hesitated.
“I really don’t know what to think about you,” she began, in a feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. “You’re so funny.”
“How?”
“Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that; remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you wanted, or get anything you wanted?”
Amory flushed.
He had told her a lot of things.
“Yes.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident to-night.
Maybe you’re just plain conceited.”
“No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton——”
“Oh, you and Princeton!
You’d think that was the world, the way you talk!
Perhaps you can write better than anybody else on your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen do think you’re important——”
“You don’t understand——”
“Yes, I do,” she interrupted.
“I do, because you’re always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”
“Have I to-night?”
“That’s just the point,” insisted Isabelle.
“You got all upset tonight.
You just sat and watched my eyes.
Besides, I have to think all the time I’m talking to you—you’re so critical.”
“I make you think, do I?” Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.
“You’re a nervous strain”—this emphatically—“and when you analyze every little emotion and instinct I just don’t have ’em.”
“I know.” Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.
“Let’s go.” She stood up.
He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.
“What train can I get?”
“There’s one about 9:11 if you really must go.”
“Yes, I’ve got to go, really.
Good night.”
“Good night.”
They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent in her face.
He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.
When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness.
The early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the wall opposite.
Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him.
He was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the house before he saw Isabelle.
What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax.
He was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window ; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought.