Dangerous Days

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.