Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XXIX

"Some kind of internal explosion has taken place in our little family, dear one (wrote Robert Osterhout to his dead love); and is still taking place, which is rather a deliberate method for an explosion. They are keeping me out of it; even Pat will not confide in me. Therefore I infer that it is not so much her trouble as the others'. Con's baby is now six months old; she had a bad time of it but the son is a lusty creature. About the time of his birth there was a quarrel between Con and Pat not wholly made up yet. But while Con was so ill, Pat stood by, a tower of strength. From the way in which she gave up everything to look after Con and her household, I was almost ready to suspect a touch of remorse. But what about? There was the contemporaneous phenomenon of Cary Scott going away so abruptly, quite without explanation. I ask myself whether it is possible that the old fire flamed up between Con and him and Pat was in some way involved. A tangled skein!

"Dee troubles me, too. She has grown so subdued and inert. Her devotion to James would explain it, to a casual observer. It isn't enough for me. There is something else. She withdraws from me, too; but she has always given me less of her confidence than the others. It is a sort of shyness, and at times it hurts. I so long to help her. But you can't help another person who lives in a fourth dimension by herself.

"Pat is back in the rush and whirl of things, going faster than ever, but she does not seem to be getting as much fun out of it as of old. She is as little comprehensible as ever."

[Pg 277]
To Pat herself, her mental processes were difficult of comprehension. It was now six months since she and Cary Scott had so strangely and inconsequentially parted and he had gone back to Europe. On the whole, she did very well without him; but that there was a gap she could not deny to herself. Being uncompromisingly what she was, she filled it with other masculine interests. Rather to her surprise she did not find herself specially tempted to venture upon forbidden ground with any other man. The barriers once down, she had supposed that self-control would be more difficult. But curiosity is an important component part of sex-attraction to the untried, and her curiosity was appeased. Perhaps, too, Scott had been right in imputing to her an instinctive quality of virginity, constantly at war against but not incompatible with her passionate temperament.

Certainly the substitute interests seemed dull and insufficient as compared with her association with Scott. At times she missed intolerably that unique understanding and companionship which he had given her, and these times became more instead of less frequent as the weeks lengthened out, which was both unexpected and perturbing. She was seriously annoyed with him, too, because he had respected religiously her injunction against writing, and when, three months after his departure, she herself had written lifting the embargo, he had returned, after a long silence, a single sentence:

"When you send for me I will come; but you must be ready to accept all and give all."

Choosing to interpret this as an attempt to bully her she was properly wrathful. By way of logical reprisal (though how it was to affect him she would have found it difficult to say) she "stepped on the gas," as she would[Pg 278] have put it, and speeded up an already sufficient pace. Local eruptions followed.

"All the old cats are squalling their heads off at me," she complained to Osterhout.

"What would you expect?" said the philosophical doctor.

"Of course you'd take that side," retorted the aggrieved Pat. "Why should they?"

"For one item, the broken Vandegrift-Mercer engagement."

"I didn't do it!" disclaimed Pat. But she dimpled a little.

"You're popularly credited with having had a hand in it, not to say a face."