Part 17

I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did, and I prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no hurry, and I had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to the slowness of theirs.

“Won’t you take my arm, Miss Gage?” he asked as they moved on.

“It’s so very dark,” she answered, and I knew she had taken it. “I can hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses—I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in the dark.”

“He’s very young in his feelings,” said the girl; “he puts me in mind of my own father.”

“He’s very young in his thoughts,” said Kendricks; “and that’s much more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does.”

“Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don’t you think? I wonder how soon they begin to feel old?”

“Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It’s a good deal in temperament. I don’t suppose that either of them realises yet that they’re old, and they must be nearly fifty.”

“How strange it must be,” said the girl, “fifty years old! Twenty seems old enough, goodness knows.”

“How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?” Kendricks asked, and she laughed at his joke.

“I don’t suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man.”

I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened on.

But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment, and then he said soberly, “There’s something fine in this isolation the dark gives you, isn’t there? You’re as remote in it from our own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary space.”

“I suppose we are doing that all the time—on the earth,” she suggested.

“Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now. Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from one flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger on some vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What,” he asked, with no relevancy that I could perceive, “was the strangest feeling you ever had?” I remembered asking girls such questions when I was young, and their not apparently thinking it at all odd.

“I don’t know,” she returned thoughtfully. “There was one time when I was little, and it had sleeted, and the sun came out just before it set, and seemed to set all the woods on fire. I thought the world was burning up.”

“It must have been very weird,” said Kendricks; and I thought, “Oh, good heavens! Has he got to talking of weird things?”

“It’s strange,” he added, “how we all have that belief when we are children that the world is going to burn up! I don’t suppose any child escapes it. Do you remember that poem of Thompson’s—the City of Dreadful Night man—where he describes the end of the world?”

“No, I never read it.”

“Well, merely, he says when the conflagration began the little flames looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever happened I fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps you don’t like gloomy poetry?”

“Yes, yes, I do. It’s the only kind that I care about.”

“Then you hate funny poetry?”

“I think it’s disgusting. Papa is always cutting it out of the papers and wanting to send it to me, and we have the greatest times!”

“I suppose,” said Kendricks, “it expresses some moods, though.”

“Oh yes; it expresses some moods; and sometimes it makes me laugh in spite of myself, and ashamed of anything serious.”

“That’s always the effect of a farce with me.”

“But then I’m ashamed of being ashamed afterward,” said the girl. “I suppose you go to the theatre a great deal in New York.”

“It’s a school of life,” said Kendricks. “I mean the audience.”