On the last day of February Audrey came home from her shorthand class
and stood wearily by the window, too discouraged even to remove her hat.
The shorthand was a failure; the whole course was a failure. She had not
the instinct for plodding, for the meticulous attention to detail that
those absurd, irrational lines and hooks and curves demanded.
She could not even spell! And an idiot of an instructor had found
fault with the large square band she wrote, as being uncommercial.
Uncommercial! Of course it was. So was she uncommercial. She had dreamed
a dream of usefulness, but after all, why was she doing it? We would
never fight. Here we were, saying to Germany that we had ceased to be
friends and letting it go at that.
She might go to England. They needed women there. But not untrained
women. Not, she thought contemptuously, women whose only ability lay in
playing bridge, or singing French chansons with no particular voice.
After all, the only world that was open to her was her old world.
It liked her. It even understood her. It stretched out a tolerant,
pleasure-beckoning hand to her.
"I'm a fool," she reflected bitterly. "I'm not happy, and I'm not
useful. I might as well play. It's all I can do."
But her real hunger was for news of Clayton. Quite suddenly he had
stopped dropping in on his way up-town. He had made himself the most
vital element in her life, and then taken himself out of it. At first
she had thought he might be ill. It seemed too cruel otherwise. But she
saw his name with increasing frequency in the newspapers. It seemed to
her that every relief organization in the country was using his name and
his services. So he was not ill.
He had tired of her, probably. She had nothing to give, had no right to
give anything. And, of course, he could not know how much he had meant
to her, of courage to carry on. How the memory of his big, solid,
dependable figure had helped her through the bad hours when the thought
of Chris's defection had left her crushed and abject.
She told herself that the reason she wanted to see Natalie was because
she had neglected her shamefully. Perhaps that was what was wrong with
Clay; perhaps he felt that, by avoiding Natalie, she was putting their
friendship on a wrong basis. Actually, she had reached that point all
loving women reach, when even to hear a beloved name, coming out of a
long silence, was both torture and necessity.