Chapter 3: The Girl Outside

Tony Adriance slipped into the habit of pausing for a few words with the girl in black whenever circumstances set them opposite each other. And that was quite often, since his home was so near the pavilion she had adopted as her place of repose. He rather avoided his friends, during the days following his futile rebellion against Lucille Masterson’s will, yet he was lonely and eager to escape thought. He could talk to the girl, he admitted to himself, because she did not know him.

They met with a casual frankness, the girl and he, like two men who find each other congenial, yet whose lives lie far apart. Their brief conversations were intimate without being inquisitively personal. She had a trick of saying things that lingered in the memory; at least, in his memory. Not that she was especially brilliant; her charm was her earnestness, at once vivid and tranquil, and the odd glamor of enchantment she threw over plain commonsense, making it no longer plain, but alluring as folly.

But she continued to wear the shabby little boots, with their optimistic bravery of blacking. They really were respectable boots, aging, not aged. The fault lay with Adriance, not them; he was too much accustomed to women “whose sandals delighted his eyes.” If her feet had been less childishly small, they might have preoccupied him less. As it was, they preoccupied him more and more.

There is no accepted way of offering a pair of shoes to a feminine acquaintance. Nevertheless, in the third week of his friendship with the girl, Adriance bought a pair of pumps for her. He had seen them in a glass case set out before a shop and stopped to gaze, astonished. They were so unmistakably hers; the size, the rounded lines, the very arch and tilt were right! They were of shining black, with Spanish heels and glinting buckles.

He took them home with him, but of course he dared not give them to her. He had an idea that he might essay the venture on the last occasion of their meeting; if she punished him with banishment, then, it would not matter. For he meant to leave New York when Lucille went to Florida. He would spend the necessary interval between the divorce and his marriage, in Canada, alone.

Meanwhile, there was the girl.

It was on the last day of October that he found her knitting instead of embroidering; a web of gay scarlet across her knees.

“A new suit for Holly’s big Teddybear,” she explained, as he sat down opposite to her. “Christmas is coming, you know. I like to have all ready in advance. Don’t you think the color should become a brown-plush bear?”

“It is not depressing.”

“It is the color of holly. And depression is not a sensation to cultivate, is it?” She paused to gaze across the river, already shadowed by approaching evening. “I believe in fighting it off with both hands; driving a spear right through the ugly thing and holding it up like Sir Sintram with that wriggly monster in the old picture.”