Part 3 (1/2)

”Yes, there's no denying that. Until the war ended, if you'd not seen her for a month, you were never quite sure how you ought to address her.

Even now one's liable to make a mistake. To-day she's Maisie Lockwood; to-morrow she may be Maisie Anything--Mrs. Adair Easterday, perhaps.”

Under her willful mystifications his calmness was getting ruffled. While he listened to her, he kept comparing this day with the other day that his imagination had painted. The world was to have been so much better and kinder when the agony of the trenches was ended. It was in order that it might be better that so many men had not come back. And this was the kinder world--a world in which men, saved from the jaws of death, met the girls they had loved as strangers, in whose presence, if they were to avoid offense, they must pick their words! A world full of men like Adair, who had been honorable until others had made them safe by their sacrifice, and of women like Maisie of the many names, who forgot her yesterdays that she might seize her selfish personal happiness!

”Terry,” he spoke with a show of patience, ”do you think it's a matter about which to jest? There's your sister and her kiddies; their future's at stake. If I'm to be of any help----” He broke off, for a voice inside his brain had started talking, ”You're old. That's exactly the way in which her father speaks to her.” Was it her thoughts that he had heard?

Her face was lowered; he could see nothing but the top of her golden head. Youth radiated from her; even in his anger it intoxicated him.

”So if I'm to help,” he picked up his thread, ”you mustn't mock. It isn't decent, Terry; the situation's too serious. Let me have the facts.

How does she come by all these different names? Does she call herself something different with each new dress?”

Terry's eyes were wide and sorry. ”No, with each new husband, but----”

There came a break in her voice, ”Oh, Tabs, I can't bear that you should be cross with me. You've been disappointed in me from the moment we met.

We're not the same. And I know it's not all my fault. And----”

Her lips trembled. He was in terror lest she would give way to crying.

If it hadn't been for the table that parted them with its unromantic debris of dishes---- As it was he leant across and a.s.sured her earnestly, ”I'm not cross with you, my dearest girl. I'm---- Terry, how is it that we've drifted so apart? I keep groping after the old Terry; for a minute I think I've found her, and then she's no longer there.”

Drying her eyes, she nodded. ”It hurts most frightfully. That's what I keep doing, barking my s.h.i.+ns in the dark, trying to follow the old Tabs.

He's always going away from me----”

”I think it's the laughter that I miss most,” she said presently; ”you've grown so stern.”

”I've seen stern things happen--a kind of Judgment Day. It's remembered things that are so silencing.”

”I know what you mean. I saw some of those things in our hospital in France.” She shut her eyes as if the memory was unbearable. ”But don't be hard on people who have a right to be young and who want to forget.

It isn't that they're ungrateful.” Then she surprised him, ”People like Maisie and myself.”

”Don't couple yourself with her.” He spoke more sharply than he had intended.

”But she was with me out there,” she expostulated. ”That was how she met her second husband, Gervis. She nursed him.”

”It makes no difference how she met him; she's not in your cla.s.s--a woman who has been divorced three times.”

”But she hasn't. Whatever made you think that?” Terry shot upright on her chair, for all the world like a startled rabbit.

”You told me she'd had three husbands.” He was once more puzzled and uncertain of his ground. ”You as good as said that she wouldn't be averse to making a fourth of Adair. I therefore conjectured----”

”You conjectured all wrong,” she cut him short. ”They died for their country.”

”All of them?” He was making a rapid calculation as to how long could have elapsed between each re-marriage.

”One at a time, of course,” she added. ”She was married to the first the first week of the war.”

”Even so it was quick work. May I light a cigarette? Three husbands in four years! She must be a very alluring person!”

Terry laughed nervously. ”She is, though you mayn't think it. I can see you don't; you think she's horrid. But let me tell you it takes a smart woman to bring three men to the point of matrimony when the world's so full of unmarried girls. And they were every one of them more or less famous--the kind of men of whom any woman would be proud. You'll remember Pollock--Reggie Pollock; he was one of the earliest of our aces--the man who brought down the Zeppelin over Brussels and got killed himself a few days later, no one quite knew how. There was a mystery about his death. He was the man to whom she was first married.”

”A splendid chap! And I recall her now. Her portrait was in the ill.u.s.trated papers at the time of her third marriage. It was headed _A Conscientious War-Worker_ or something like that. And I don't forget the name the soldiers called her when they read the papers in the trenches.”