The Dark Star

He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white

night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced

with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And

again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and

tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood

looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the

moment, he had gone back and kissed her---At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.

How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!

And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl

who had greeted him at the Paris terminal--this charming embodiment of

all that is fresh and sweet and fearless--in her perfect hat and gown

of mondaine youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled

him.

Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!

Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so

amazingly revealed to him.

Out of what, in heaven's name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of

a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles

in Brookhollow?

Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in

her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose

mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?

Out of what had she been evolved--this young girl whom he had left

just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naïa's arm

around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who

had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark

stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair,

crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with

two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure

buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a

thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?

And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm

extended--from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently

fell to the floor.

He thought to himself: "She is absolutely beautiful; there's no denying that. It's not her

clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she

moves, or how she looks at a man; it's the whole business. And the

whole bally business is a miracle, that's all. Good Lord! And to think

I ever had the nerve--the nerve!"

He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into space for a few

moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a

cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.

That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their

deepest thinking.