XVI

That telephone conversation with Noel was in September, 1927.

On a November afternoon in 1928, I was having tea and muffins with him, in front of his fireplace.

The Republicans had run Hoover against Al Smith, and the old-fashioned Americans who had been troubled by the possibility that Al might invite the Pope to Sunday morning breakfast in the White House, were sleeping again at night.

When we finished tea, Noel put on his overcoat. He said: “I shall be back in two hours or so. I have two or three rapid ‘good-byes’ to say to people. Then we’ll go to dinner wherever you like.”

“You have finished packing, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Yes. When you take the papers in the desk to my safe deposit vault, be sure to take that tin box on the bookcase with them. It has all your letters in it. When I come back, I shall need them to comfort my declining years.”

We smiled at each other. “Do you mind if I put your letters to me in the same vault, darling darling,” I said. “It is as near as we are likely to come to sharing the same grave.”

“Don’t, Patricia,” he said. He was not talking about the letters.

“I’m sorry, Noel. It’s all right. After all, we have had so much more than most people ever dream of having.”

“Sit by the fire, until I come back, Pat—and look over your letters. They won’t distress you.”

(Dear Noel—he knew the letters would remind me of gay evenings we had shared, and that was the best he could do for me, at the moment.)

He reconsidered, just before he went out. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps you had better read the ‘Mercury.’ ”

“No,” I said. “I want to find out if I ever managed to write you that you were the nicest person in the world.”

He went to say “good-bye” to people, and I made myself fresh tea. Before I looked at my letters to Noel I went upstairs and got his from a drawer in my dressing table. Noel and I had had apartments in the same house for nearly a year.

My suggestion that I store his letters with mine had been made on impulse, but I felt that it was sensible enough. I did not want to destroy his letters—neither did I want to keep them about to read and re-read when I was lonely—to find, possibly, in each re-reading, a little warmth gone from them.

I was twenty-seven. More than a thousand crowded days intervened between myself and that younger woman who believed she could not live without Peter. When, rarely, now, I was reminded of the Peter I had known, I thought of him kindly, as someone with whom I had shared a painful post-adolescence, someone who no doubt had been as bewildered as I about most things. He and I were married and had a child and separated, before either of us grew up.

I had lived to discover that after First Love one can love again—as much—more, for one knows more. I believed that I would love Noel for ever, perhaps. But I knew also that I could live without Noel; and that, as Time changed me, I should not even miss him, often, or very badly.

I opened the box that held my letters to him. There were a good many, for I had written him daily, whenever he was on out-of-town stories.

He had all the letters packed neatly, in the order in which I had written them—and I found that infinitely touching, because Noel was the sort of man who had to search through four drawers to discover shirt studs or handkerchiefs or a fountain pen or collar buttons.

The first letter was to his New York address.

“Noel Dear,

“I remember telling you, some weeks ago, that I never stayed with the same man twice, in the years since Peter, because I never liked any of them after I had stayed with them. Therefore this—to state specifically that I liked you twenty times as much this morning at breakfast, as last night at dinner-time.”

I wrote that letter two months after the late September evening when Noel telephoned. In those two months I decided that his hair was the shade of burnished bronze (and complained to him that he kept it clipped too closely—but never, to the last day that I knew him, did he wear it any longer.) I decided that I loved his voice and his smile, and the shape of his eyebrows (they exactly matched his hair) and the things he said, and the way he laughed, and the fact that he believed in taking exercise.

I knew that he was supposed to be brilliant. I heard a story about him: that several city editors, dining together, made separate lists of the five best newspapermen in New York and that his was the only name that appeared on all the lists. But I had known so many people who were supposed to be brilliant. I liked Noel better because he was so obviously sane, and stable, and well-balanced. It gave me a feeling of great steadiness to be with him.

And I had found someone to whom I could talk, after years when I had just made conversation.

I saw him nearly every evening, and saw no one else—except Nathaniel and Bill. I knew them well enough to say, “I shall be able to have dinner, but I must get home by quarter to ten. Is that all right?”

Noel worked on a morning newspaper, and got through at ten or eleven at night. We walked, danced, went to supper. We talked about politics, disarmament, the War (he had a combat decoration, but he did not tell me that, someone else did), newspapers, advertising, books, operas. We talked about his childhood, my childhood, people he had known, people I had known. We flung the patterns of our lives at each other.

I was worried, at the beginning, lest someone tell him I was supposed to be promiscuous. I thought he would not like me any more. I was sure that I loved him, when I had seen him three times, but I saw no reason that he should ever love me. I was just a woman whose own husband had found her impossible. With other men, I had not felt as humble, but that was because I did not care whether they ever loved me or not.

I decided to tell Noel, myself. If the knowledge that I had been promiscuous was to make him stop seeing me, that would hurt less, immediately, than later. So, one October evening, when we were walking along lower Fifth Avenue, I said abruptly:

“Look here. Don’t have any illusions about me. I have slept with more men than I can remember.” That was exaggeration, but I had to exaggerate, lest I should understate.

He did not look disgusted or shocked or even surprised. He said, “That’s interesting. What were you doing—trying to use sex as an anaesthetic for something-or-other? That can’t be managed, usually.”

I said, “You needn’t be polite about it. If you think I am an awful person, say so.”

He said, “You darling imbecile—I think you are the nicest person I have ever known. Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result.”

I said, “Oh.” I said, “Do you mean it—you aren’t just being sorry for me?”

He said, “God, no. I mean it.”

Something in me that had hurt horribly at odd moments, for a long, long time, stopped hurting for ever.

I slipped my arm through his. “I am glad you don’t mind, but anyway I stopped.”

He laughed at me. He was so friendly that I laughed, too. “There must be thousands of bitterly disappointed men in New York, Pat. You don’t mind being ragged about it, do you? . . . I promise never to ask you to stay with me, if I can help it.” The tone of his voice changed. “For various reasons, I don’t stay with women for whom I would be likely to care. It seems somewhat unfair.”

He had never referred to his marriage before.

“I know about your marriage, Noel,” I said. “Kenneth told me.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Noel, let’s stop at Childs and have coffee and buttercakes. I am hungry.”

Afterwards, we talked about our marriages too, as just among the things that had happened to us.

Noel did not kiss me for another month. Once, in the interval, he did put his arms ’round me—as we were crossing Madison Square Park—because I said that, given the choice of staying with Gene Tunney or Jack Dempsey, I would choose Dempsey, joyously.

Then, on an evening when we had talked, before his fire, for hours and hours, I said, reluctantly, that I supposed it was five in the morning, or some-such hour, and he had better get my coat. He went to get it instantly. He held it for me to put on. Then suddenly he put both arms around my shoulders, and I turned and put my arms around his neck, and held up my face to be kissed.

I knew in that instant that I was to stay, and I was glad.

Very soon afterward, he was sent to Boston to cover a naval inquiry into a submarine disaster. I felt half-alive while he was gone, but used my leisure to solve the first problem in our relationship: how I was to get any sleep. I worked from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon: and Noel worked from two in the afternoon, until eleven, or thereabouts, most nights, and then we wandered about the city until four or five in the morning.

So I got myself a new job, as advertising manager of a specialty shop—where no one cared if I did not appear before noon, provided I worked until seven or eight at night.

During the week that I remained at my old office, after my resignation, the wide-eyed little girl who had been an ambitious copy-writer, until she decided to marry, came to see me. She was looking shabby, and harassed. It appeared that her husband was not getting any of the salary increases upon which they had counted so confidently, and she had persuaded him to let her go back to work.

She wanted to know if I had heard of any vacancies, anywhere. So she did inherit my job, as I had anticipated long before.

My new one paid less money, but I planned to make that up by doing more free-lance advertising—it left me leisure to breakfast with Noel, which was more important.

Noel wrote me a letter from Boston—the first I had from him.

(I turned to his letters to find that. It was written in pencil, on a series of Western Union Special Blanks for Newspaper Correspondents.)

It began:

“The admiral of the battle fleet sits up very straight in the centre chair on the opposite side of the long table—listening, with a dark, long, weary, brooding face. A rear-admiral is reading one message after another in a huge wad, that represents the mobilization orders of the navy rescue force, after the submarine went down.

“So far, it appears these orders mobilized only ships, equipment, and crews—but not intelligence. I have come to understand that a few men design machines and a great many use them—and all seem very intelligent until an accident happens. Then the user stands helpless at the machine and waits for someone who understands it, like a banker who has dropped his Swiss watch.

“The rear-admiral reads on. . . . And it occurs to me how nice it would be if Patricia managed to turn up in Boston for a week-end.”

Of course I managed it.

Noel did not leave New York again until Springtime—except for his semi-monthly visits to his wife.

He had told me during a long conversation about mutual fidelity—a conversation that I had been stupid enough to begin—that on these visits he stayed with his wife.

He said then: “I don’t know, Patricia, whether she hates me—I could not blame her if she did—or is fond of me, as one might be fond of a keeper when one serves a life sentence. I mean, that I am her only remaining contact with life. She hates to go about, because of that disfigurement, and she sees no one but her sister and the maid month after month. Sometimes she makes scenes if she hears that I have been about with any particular woman. Her sister usually manages to find out.”

I said: “It must be difficult, Noel. I understand though. It was nice of you to tell me.”

I did understand, but that did not comfort me very much. I was older than I had been. I realized that there were women before me, in his life. I could understand even, in some day that I hoped was distant, there might be women after me. But I wished that I might have had him awhile to myself.

Sometimes I thought of his wife—as a somewhat fantastic, altogether tragic figure, hanging on the outskirts of Noel’s life. In moods when I knew that I was looking particularly pretty, and feeling altogether gala, I pitied her; because Ken had said that she was very pretty, once. Less often, in moods when I wanted very badly to marry Noel and have a red-headed baby, and forget everything in my life before I had known him, I resented her.

On nights when I knew that Noel was with her, I walked up and down, telling myself to be civilized, telling myself that he carried responsibilities from his past, into his present—telling myself that it was far better to have whatever of himself a first rate man had to give, than to possess a second rate man wholly. I believed all that, but I could not sleep at all, on the nights when he was with her. Finally, I bought myself a long book, on every Saturday that he went to visit her, and read it until morning. Then I slept, Sundays.

Or, on some of those week-ends, I visited Lucia, who was back from Europe, finding suburban luxury pleasant. (It had turned out to be luxury in Westchester, not Long Island.) Lucia had met Noel again. All she said to me, was: “It’s not sensible of you, darling, but if it makes you happy, why not? You’re looking younger than you’ve looked in years.”

There was a vacant apartment upstairs in the house where Noel lived. Once, when I had to go home, because I could not appear at my office next morning in evening dress, he said that he wished I lived upstairs. I said I would move. From that beginning, we became involved in a long debate on conventionalities. Noel insisted it would still be particularly inconvenient for a woman to be compromised by a man who could not marry her.

I did not care in the least, to what degree I was “compromised.” Of course I wished that I could marry him—I wanted status and stability and a baby. But at least I did have happiness on a day-to-day basis. That was so much more than I had hoped to find, ever again, that I managed to be philosophical (most of the time) about lack of status.

A few days after Noel said that he wished I lived in his house, I had lunch with the girl who had been an eager copy-writer, when I was assistant advertising manager—the girl who now held my old job.

She was looking completely forlorn. “I am going to leave my husband,” she said. “We quarrel every day, because I make more money. He says that proves the materialism of America. Or sometimes he says that I don’t understand his character.” She shed a few inconspicuous tears. “Now he spends five evenings a week with a girl who’s supposed to understand him better. So I thought if I left him, for a while, he might be glad to have me back.”

“He might,” I said. “Where are you going to live?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might know of some girl with whom I could share an apartment. My furniture is in storage—we have been living in hotels since I went back to work.”

So I took the child to meet Helena, who was touched by her helpless-kitten attitude, as I had thought Helena would be. In a week, the child moved into the apartment which Lucia had shared with me, and I with Helena.

Helena said, “Well, Pat, I enjoyed living with you. For heaven’s sake, come to see me often; and if anything goes wrong with your Great Love, come on back. Meanwhile, I’ll teach the blue-eyed infant you wished on me, her way around the city.”

On a Saturday, when Noel was out of town, I moved into his house. When he came back, he scolded me for being so reckless, but he was so pleased that he could not stop grinning while he scolded me.

In the Spring, he went to Albany, to attend the trial of a woman politician accused of mis-use of public funds. He came to New York week-ends, and I began my career as a daily letter-writer.

I took the letters I had written to him at Albany from the box, and looked through them.

“Dearest—

“I shall be so glad to see you when you do get back that I shan’t be able to talk, shan’t be garrulous at all, for at least five minutes, anyway.

“I see by all the afternoon papers that your lady politician’s case is due to go to the jury tomorrow, but I believe the jury will deliberate ninety-eight hours; then they will disagree, all but one for conviction. The one juror will hold out for acquittal because the defendant looked like HIS MOTHER, who was a good old-fashioned female who couldn’t read or write . . . or manage funds, either. Then the case will be re-tried; that will take until election time; the defendant will be convicted by Christmas. People will point you out as the oldest resident of Albany, by then. The defendant will appeal; there will be long arguments; the case will be re-tried. By then, you will be growing grey haired; and myself, sedate. After fifteen more years the defendant will die, and the feminists will work miracles of check post-dating over her grave. There will be a legend about you, too, who followed her faithfully forty years; I shall be long dead, of waiting for a telegram saying you are coming home. . . .”

After a week-end:

“Belovedest—

“I was so happy, walking down the street this morning after two whole days with you, that when I passed two truck drivers one of them said to the other: ‘Jes’, look at that girl smile.’ And I didn’t have the grace to be embarrassed.

“If you are permanently resurrected from Albany by the week-end, I shall just go completely joyous, and have to be restrained from singing in speakeasies, or otherwise behaving in an undignified manner.

“Noel, am I undignified? Oh darling, please am I not dignified, always or occasionally, or ever? Please, please dearest will you teach me to be dignified? All my life I’ve wanted to be dignified. I never thought of it until five minutes ago, though.”

He was sent to Wisconsin in June, to cover President Coolidge at the Summer White House, and I saw him off at the Pennsylvania station, behaving well enough until he was gone, and then sobbing so hard in a taxi, on my way home, that the driver spoke to me when I was paying the fare. He said: “Listen, kid, I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, don’t take it that way, kid.”

After three weeks, when we corresponded between New York and Superior, Wisconsin, by telegraph and telephone, we decided it was not to be borne, and I arranged a leave, and went out to spend a month with Noel, living in Duluth, twenty miles away, and wandering about its main streets, contentedly, all day, while he was busy.

It appears that Noel sat down, the night I left Wisconsin for New York, and wrote to his wife, asking her if she would not be just as happy, if she divorced him. His wife did not want a divorce, however, and sent her sister to New York to inquire among mutual acquaintances of hers and Noel’s, as to any new reason he might have for asking for freedom.

The sister found out all the facts there were to find, concerning Noel and me. It was much more my fault than his that the facts were so easily accessible. Noel’s wife did not tell him, at that time, that she knew of my existence. She just wrote him that she could not bear the thought of being a divorcée.

After I came back from Duluth, I wrote to Noel: “Consider that I have put both arms around your neck, and my head happily against your shoulder, and have said that I believe remembrance of the lights of Lake Superior, will glow happily in my heart for all my life.”

And, when I was making an effort to write a gay letter:

“I have thought of a career. Plan to open a speakeasy for tired business women, where they can go alone, and have liquid dinners, without being stared at for drinking alone. . . . Come into partnership with me, my darling.”

Once for three days in succession, I did not hear from him. So I wired, “How are you?” He explained later that there was no language to describe how damnably uncomfortable he was, so he did not answer the wire for a day.

By then, I had decided that he did not love me any more. By the day’s end—it had been a hot day, and I had to work very hard—I was contemplating suicide. I wrote him:

“This is a love letter for Noel and nothing else but . . . it will probably turn out full of profanity, but I can’t help that. I don’t know when the thought first came, to add to general hellishness of New York in the humidity, that you were annoyed with me. I suggested in my telegram that you wire me. What you should say, I don’t know. ‘It is cool here, I am working hard,’ maybe. Well, you would take it for granted that I knew that.

“However, the thought that you were annoyed, grew beautifully, grew through ‘He thinks I am just bingeing about with Nat and Bill and whoever turns up, very pleased with myself until I thought there must be a Wisconsin Wench. And I hope she drowns in Lake Superior and goes from there to hell, but I do hope she appreciates him, in the meantime.’ Is that my maternal instinct?

“Then I tried to be philosophical, and steady. The Philosophical Effort may entertain you. It amounted to this:

“In a friendship, affaire or whatever inadequate label one affixes to the things you and I share, a greater trust of the other person is implicit than in marriage, or any arrangement where one can lean on organized status.

“In the Love-Outside-Marriage that is so commonplace, now, what with new freedom and old divorce laws, there are no fences to enclose two people, and very few cushions against shocks. That’s all right. I don’t mind. We have discussed that.

“Candour has to do, instead of fences and cushions. If you were annoyed with me, if your feeling toward me changed, I believe that you would let me know, specifically and immediately.

“Generalities. . . . Adult women who try to ‘understand’ men, make no effort to enclose them. But women (in love) can put up with being enclosed, well enough. If you said to me, ‘Sorry but it makes me dismal to think of other people holding your hand, and what-not, and would you mind not going out with other men at all?’, I would stay at home.

“You won’t say that, though. You believe in this freedom more than I do. I just believe in it for men. Nevertheless, I do accept dinner dates, don’t I? . . . Not as I used . . . I don’t ever try to acquire any new men. . . . But I did go out with three people this week, and two of them made love to me. (The other was just a couple of lunch dates.)

“My grandmother would have mourned your absence—I mean your grandfather’s—in tears over her embroidery, perhaps. I bet I mourn yours more violently, in a cab with the wrong person, or in a speakeasy over a drink that I’m not having with you.

“I go to dinner, and I try to be amusing . . . sing for my supper, why not? And if there is a dreadful instant, when I think, ‘I wish I would find a telephone message from him on the switchboard when I get home,’ I am more likely to say, ‘yes, I’ll have another, thank you,’ than to look bored and sleepy. There is nothing to go home for—no message will be on the switchboard.

“As for the rest—on its merits. I don’t row if I get kissed once in the course of the evening, or so. I don’t invite it, and I make it obvious that I’m damn well not reciprocating.

“The only person I want to kiss is wandering around the Great Northwest—and I wish Coolidge would get nostalgia for the sight of the dome of the White House.

“Footnote to all this. . . . You said once that you thought incidental necking was awfully boring. So do I. But that is one of the things about which you are extraordinary. Most men do seem to feel they’ve achieved something, in a minor way, if they succeed in touching their lips to a woman’s chin or thereabouts, a couple of times in an evening. It makes me feel slightly like riding in a crowded Subway, but it’s nothing to make a scene about. Just part of all this damn freedom.

“Finally, about the possibility of your Wisconsin Wench. I hope not, but I don’t care except with those instincts that can’t be helped. Shan’t ask, want you always to do what you want. But, any Wisconsin Wench will have to be just miraculous, to be half as good, or nice-tempered or angelic to you as I plan to be when you come home at last.”

That night, an hour after I posted that letter, Noel telephoned from Wisconsin, and we spent ten extravagant minutes talking gay nonsense. I told him I had written an outstandingly dumb letter that he might as well tear up unread.

But he answered the letter, this way:

“Patricia—

“I miss you steadily. I have not taken to wenching. I have sat around talking politics with the old men or listening to young men (the photographers) talk of their probably fictitious dealings with the local virgins. I have a memory of you that seems undiminished in warmth, with which I go tranquilly to sleep, alone.

“This summer will end. And, darling, darling (as you say in your ’cello voice) I am closer to you at two thousand miles distance, than I could be to any other woman in my arms.”

I wrote him, later:

“When you come back, pack me in a suitcase, and haul me off to Vienna or Buenos Aires or Leningrad, and whenever you want conversation you can take me out of the suitcase and sit me on a chair and we’ll talk very merrily. When you want solitude I’ll fold myself in the suitcase uncomplainingly, for days at a time. And we’ll never be bored or hurried or under pressure to do anything ever, we’ll just be gaily disreputable until we die. Except that you will get famous, and women will make pilgrimages to see you, ’specially after they have learned you are handsome. I won’t let any of ’em in, except the very loveliest ones . . . I’ll let those in so that you will admire my taste.

“I send you a kiss-at-great-length.”

He wrote me apologetically, that if it weren’t too much trouble, he would like me to send a heavier overcoat, and some other things, to him. I wrote:

“You must know that I adore doing small things for you. It damn well isn’t modern, but I damn well can’t help it . . . so I shan’t pose about it . . . don’t have to pose with you about things.”

He sent me some Scotch from Canada, via a photographer who came back to New York.

“Noel angel,

“I shall save the Scotch to revive me, when I finally see a newspaper headline reading ‘President Returns to Washington.’ I expect to be found clutching the newspaper, muttering things about our chief. You’ve led the paper with your Kellogg treaty stories, three days in succession. Did you know it? Such a bright young man.”

He was coming home in two weeks! I wrote:

“Noel: When you come back I shall telephone you . . . and suggest we go swimming; I shall telephone you, and ask to be taken to dinner . . . I shall telephone you, and demand to be taken for walks. I shall invent excuses to telephone you. I shall telephone you daily, hourly, incessantly. Will you mind?

“I feel that all sorts of lovely things will happen instantly, as soon as you’re home, and that you and I shall spend our old ages happily (over drinks) in front of the same fireplace, regarding a long row of books, written by you. And the old ages are so nice and far off.

“I’m looking handsome, what with sunburn turning brown, and I hope you’ll be pleased with the effect. I remember how you look in all sorts of moods. I have a whole collection of snapshots of you, inside my head. One of the nicest is Himself, asleep, with a pleased expression, looking ten years old or so.

“You wired—when a letter of mine missed a mail two or three days ago, asking if I had taken up with a blonde. Of course not—blondes are an adolescent taste.

“I had a ’orrible thought . . . you might have to stay in Washington, covering the President, until election. . . . Noel, a nice old-fashioned female (meaning myself) would then go modern. Nice old-fashioned what-nots don’t ever pursue a man, they guard their reputations . . . they are patient for ever. But if you get stuck in Washington, I go to Washington and get a job waiting on table in a restaurant, and the only thing that separates us, hereafter, is your wish to be by yourself.

“I want to know (if I met you in Washington as you suggest), if you’ll take me to see the Washington Monument, and give me highballs, and talk to me hours and hours and hours about politics and the Kellogg Treaty. I don’t care what you talk about. I just want to hear your voice. And will you pick me up and carry me about the room, but not muss my hair, and take me for a little walk about Washington. And if I’m very well-behaved will you kiss me once or twice?”

He answered that by wire.

“I shan’t mind being telephoned at twenty minute intervals stop will take you up Monument stop don’t guarantee about your hair stop yes yes yes.”

I wrote him once more, to Wisconsin.

“After my shameless correspondence, I shall probably be so shy that I’ll insist on sitting eight feet away from you, staring at you with an imbecilic look of content. . . . Let’s go for a week-end to the shore where I can fall asleep on the sand in the sun with my head on your shoulder. I shall feel that I’ve reached Ultimate Truth, like a Russian at the end of seventy-two hours conversation.”

He wired:

“Arranged going straight through to New York stop expect to enter city shouting love love nonstop reach Penn Station seven five p. m. Wednesday stop might I be met.”

He was met.

We had days and weeks of high felicity. Sometimes, as I walked along the street, remembrance of years when I had been unhappy, came to me; and they seemed an infinite distance away, and altogether unreal, like stories one hears about a friend of a friend of a friend.

He had a rather extraordinary offer made to him—to go to Yokohama as head of a Far East news bureau. He would have liked to go. He had been a foreign correspondent on the Continent, and he spoke Russian, which would be useful in the Far East post, but he had never been to Asia.

He broached the project to his wife. Part of the terms on which they had arranged their lives was that he was not to take a post outside New York, because it would be too embarrassing for her to travel. She refused to hear of the Asiatic scheme.

He spoke of it to me, and I was entirely willing to fling the advertising business overboard, and go. We had often talked about the places we’d see, and how I would occupy myself learning Japanese, while he covered Chinese wars and Indian border uprisings. But neither Noel nor I took the project very seriously. We did not expect that his wife would let him go.

During the conversation, when he told her that it was an extraordinary opportunity, and that he wanted very much to go, she told him that she knew all about me. He was startled—and even more surprised to discover that she had nothing more to say than that she knew about me.

He asked her to reconsider agreeing to let him go to Asia. (He had three months in which to make up his mind—someone was filling out a term of office in the meantime.) She said she would not agree to it, but that he could ask her again in a few weeks, if he chose.

Noel was growing a little restless on the “Times.” He felt that, on the New York staff, he’d gone about as far as he was likely to go, and he didn’t contemplate with much joy, the probability that he would spend the next twenty years, doing the same sort of stories, over and over.

Most of the time that we were together, though, we were too pleased with the world in general to worry about things like that. I did have one acute attack of wanting-to-be-made-an-honest-woman, and wrote him about it, when he was upstate covering the campaign tour of a governor.

“Noel Dearest—

“The preface to this letter is—I am as binged as I ever was. First time in a year. Nat and I fell off the wagon with the loudest splash imaginable—that acquaintance of yours, Tony, who has had the unreciprocated ‘glad’ on me for so long, caused it.

“Nat telephoned me to ask me to dine at seven, (You know he’s been having an attack of wanting-to-get-away-from-it-all for months. Poor child.) At ten to seven the bell rang. It was that fool Tony. His yellow hair was combed four ways at once, as usual; and he was drunk as usual, too. He had a flask, and I had a drink. Then Nat came. He was tight, too, which is extraordinary. It seems he’d just seen his father through one of his attacks. So we all had more drinks.

“We went to Delano’s bar, and began drinking Manhattans. A wild rainstorm developed outside, and no cabs were to be had, so we had more drinks, and the bartenders cooked us eggs and things.

“I was feeling low, because I was tired—and Tony and Nat are a God-awful combination, although they seem to go out together frequently. I mean, Nat’s likely to get dismal, and Tony amorous, simultaneously.

“They both got tighter and tighter on their drinks.

“Then Tony said to Nat: ‘You’re the boy Pat’ll marry in the end, of course. One day she’ll look at herself in a mirror and know she’s not going to be an apparently-sophisticated-twenty-two eternally. Then she’ll marry you, and make you a swell wife, that’s the funny part of it. I’ll send you a wedding present.’

“I said, ‘I don’t want to marry anybody.’

“Tony said: ‘You’ll get sense some day.’

“We had two more rounds of drinks, and I talked about the Paramount Building.

“Then Tony said: ‘I shall “make” Pat, one day . . . not for a couple of years, one day when she’s tired.’

“Nat said: ‘The hell you will. I’ll marry her some day when she’s tired. You’re right . . . she ought to be married . . . women need stability . . . I don’t care how she occupies herself in the meantime.’

“I said, ‘Stop talking about me as if I were a car that must be parked somewhere ultimately. If you want to know, I’m perfectly happy at the moment.’

“They said, jointly: ‘Sure, but he can never marry you.’

“I said, ‘Talk about something else, please.’

“It’s all right, Noel, I probably wouldn’t write you about it, if I weren’t tight myself. It was a pretty disgusting evening—but not extraordinary. We are an unmannerly generation. The best-brought up man you know is likely at any moment to start shouting his sexual ambitions in a speakeasy. It doesn’t mean anything.

“This means something, though. It’s damnably true that I shall some day look at myself in a mirror, and know that—not in the scarlet frock I wore tonight, or any other, shall I look like twenty-two, any more. And wish that I had stability, meaning a husband to pay for facial massages through all my middle-age. But I shan’t take such a husband. It would be too great a waste of you and me and dreams and love.

“I’m asking something of you, though. I probably wouldn’t ask it if sober. Because the thought of growing old, alone, frightens me, would you write me a letter and say, ‘I would marry you if I could.’ I know you never can . . . but to have a two-line note that said you would have married me, had things been otherwise, would comfort me.

“Your affection for me is the loveliest thing I ever found, you know, in a world-full of second rate solutions for everything, and I should rather have the off-chance of permanence with you, than nineteen gold-framed marriage certificates with anyone else. Can you understand though, that a two-line note would be comforting, because it was a dismal evening?”

He wrote me a long letter. I looked for it among the other letters he had written me. I read it, and put it aside. That would be the only letter I would keep, because I didn’t believe the warmth could ever go from it. It ended: “The thing that all men look for, I have found, with you.”

I recovered from that mood of aching-to-be-a-wife.

Noel and I went about through October evenings, and were as happy as we had ever been—happier, for we grew more and more at ease with each other, and closer to each other in understanding. He said that we were getting like the two ancient philosophers who sat, contentedly, and listened to each other think.

One day, I was getting ready to leave the office, and thinking that I would have time to go to gymnasium for an hour before I went home to dress for dinner with Noel, when my little assistant-secretary came in and said that a lady wanted to see me.

“Who is it, Doris?”

“She wouldn’t give her name. She said it was personal. I thought you might know her. She has a black patch covering the whole left side of her face.”

“Oh,” I said, “Send her in Doris. . . . And you may go home. I shan’t need you again tonight.”

There was an instant in which I thought, “I should have refused to see her—she wasn’t ever real to me, while I did not see her.” But I knew that I could not have sent her away, really. I could not have done that, to Noel.

I said: “How do you do. Won’t you sit down?”

She said: “I am Noel’s wife. I have been wanting to talk to you for some time.” She sat in the armchair beside my desk.

Light from the wall lamp opposite, fell across her. She was a rather tall woman—with a figure that might have been good, had she chosen her clothes carefully. She wore the sort of good, country tweeds that women select for practicality, for durability, without reference to the nuances of style.

Under her tan felt sports’ hat, golden hair outcropped, with an effect of untidiness, that might, once, have been an effect of splendour. Over the left side of her face—a black patch concealed what lay beneath, from hat-brim to chin. The right side of her face was composed of a large eye, of violet-blue, a graceful brown eyebrow, clear white skin and half a mouth that once, obviously, the men who knew her said was “rosebud.”

Well, I should have known that Noel’s taste was all right. War bride married-in-haste, she might have been—she must have been composite of cream and roses then.

She said: “I feel this is an intrusion and that I should apologize. Something has happened that makes it necessary.”

Yes, it was a well-bred voice. Curiously unformed, though, like the voice of a very young girl.

“That’s quite all right. I have so much admiration for Noel that I’m delighted to meet his wife.”

(Being civilized means that one keeps one’s words unrelated to one’s thoughts, when necessary.)

She said: “It will be easier for me—I am not used to talking to people—if you will let me say what I have to say—first.”

I said, “As you wish.”

“I don’t like Noel, usually. If you had driven, when you were twenty, with a man who got drunk, and wrecked his car, and your face, so that you went about like a cripple, all the rest of your life, you would not like him.”

I said, “Perhaps not.”

She said: “I have had weeks and months and years to think. I have had nothing else to do, since the summer of 1919. Sometimes I think I have spoiled Noel’s life. But he finished mine.”

I said, “No doubt that’s true. I met him years after all that. Can you tell me what it has to do with me?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m getting to all that. Granted that I loved someone else, when Noel came back from the war. He ended that for me, too.”

I said, “Yes, quite.”

“He is the only person I still know,” she said, “who is going on in the world where things happen. . . . My sister is a tired old maid.”

“I have understood that, a little,” I said. “You may have heard a good deal about Noel and me. I have never tried to take what you have kept.”

“I know,” she said, “I have nothing against you. I used to quarrel with Noel, because he met younger, beautiful women, while not a man this side of hell will look at me, again. But I’ve got reconciled to that. Only—now it’s different.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because Noel and I are going to have a baby, in seven months or so.”

I held on to the edge of my desk. The sharp corners cut into my hands. Noel’s wife became part of a picture—the office walls and ceiling—and the view of Manhattan lights outside. The picture swung, and swung, crazily.

I said to myself: “You have been rarely privileged, Patricia. You have been The Wife, and The Other Woman. You have played ball on both sides of that net, and been privileged to lose on both. That’s a rare experience.”

I said to myself: “This finishes you, Patricia . . . that wife that was a vague fantastic figure on the outskirts of his life—owns him now for all time. Poor Noel, poor Noel—he’ll never go to Yokohama, he can never leave New York. He’ll live and die where he is, tied to that half-masked figure, and the red-haired baby I wanted, that woman will have.”

I said to myself: “No, one doesn’t go insane, one doesn’t scream—one remembers that the years taught one something. But what, after all, did they teach? Oh, yes, I remember—that all things pass—that all things pass.”

I said, “Are you glad that you and Noel are having a baby?”

Noel’s wife said: “Yes. He used to talk about having one—ten or eleven years ago, when he loved me. After my accident I never wanted one, for years, because I thought a child would be frightened by a face like mine—and I didn’t want a baby that would be afraid of me. But—this last year or so” (this last year or so—all the time I’d known Noel), “I’ve thought that a baby wouldn’t mind, if I was good to it. I have wanted one for a year—it didn’t happen before.”

I said: “I think it’s very nice for you.”

She said: “I came to see you, because I know you are Noel’s mistress. I haven’t needed him, or wanted him, often, all these years. I did not have anything to talk to him about. But now, I want him as the father of my child.”

(God—that was a phrase they used in movie captions.)

“I have not told Noel,” that unformed, girlish voice went on. “I wanted to see you first. I wanted to ask you to stop seeing him. I plan to live in a suburb close to New York now, and have him live with me, or at least come to see me every other day or so—so he will grow fond of his child. . . . Noel used to want a child once, when we were young . . . I hope this child is a son. . . . And I’m asking you to do this, because you are a young and handsome woman. . . . There will be other men for you. I have only Noel . . . and this child, who will give me something to live for.”

I managed to say: “I understand how you must feel about it.”

(She had called me Noel’s “mistress.” Ugly word, “mistress.” He and I had loved each other so . . . Noel would want a son . . . he had wanted one of mine . . . Noel to grow old, to be bound forever . . . to end up on a newspaper copy desk, when he was tired—and through. Noel was honourable. I had so loved that in him. Noel would stick to his disfigured wife . . . who was with child.)

I said: “I had a child once, I remember. It died.”

Something of animation, of sympathy, even, stirred in that half-face. She said: “I am sorry. Was it a boy or a girl? How old would it be?”

I said: “It was a son. I forget how old he would have been. Almost four, I think.”

She said: “Well, will you give Noel up, so that I can have him to be a father for my child? . . . Some weeks ago he wanted to go to Asia . . . I wasn’t sure about this then. . . . He won’t mind not going to Asia, now.”

I thought: “How little she knows Noel, nowadays.”

I looked out, at the dark New York skyline, with the lights of other offices, shining. I wondered what the people, sitting in those offices, after hours, were discussing. I thought: “This finishes me . . . but it finishes Noel, for ever, and he is a more valuable person than I.”

She said: “Don’t blame me, Patricia . . . may I call you Patricia? I have always heard of you, as that. I held Noel back from Asia . . . but think of the things his careless driving of that automobile has held me from, through nine years. . . . And I’ll try to make it up to him by having a child.”

I said: “I am thinking.” And a most curious idea came . . . and warmed me who had felt for ten minutes, as if nothing in life could warm me again.

And I thought: “Yes—if I can manage it.” (And when in some speakeasy someone who dislikes me says, ‘By the way, Patricia, what happened to your beautiful red-headed boyfriend?’, I shall answer, ‘Oh, didn’t you hear? I gave him the air—and the continent of Asia.’ I shan’t make that answer, though. If I manage this, I shall never tell anyone, except perhaps Lucia . . . and Helena.)

I said: “Why don’t you pack up and go to Asia with Noel? Start life over, with your child?”

She said: “I will show you.” She took the black mask off her face. I looked. There was a sightless red blotch, where there had been contours that men—Noel, no doubt—had ten years ago found desirable to kiss. There was a congealed horror. . . . Whatever of hate, or resentment, I had had against that woman, died. Had I suffered that, what sort of woman would I have been, after?

She covered that twisted red scar that had been half a face. I heard her voice, saying “If you were I, would you travel among strangers, with this?”

I did not pity her, actually. One does not pity fate, when it intervenes between one’s self and what one wanted most of all in the world.

I said, “No” at first “I wouldn’t travel.” Then I thought of Noel . . . who loved the beauty of women, and the beauty of strange places, and I said, “No, but—there are things that you could do.”

“What?” she said. “After the war, I went to various facial surgeons. They could do nothing for me. . . . There was not enough left, on which to re-build.”

Then, suddenly, she began to cry, out of her one violet-blue eye. And I said: “Don’t cry. I am thinking about you—and Noel whom I loved so much. You don’t mind hearing me say that I loved Noel so much.”

She said: “No. He is, in a way, a good man. I don’t exactly remember loving him. I was only nineteen then, you see. But as much as he could be, he was good to me through these years. I have often been bitter—and blamed him. I suppose no one was to blame.”

I thought: “And there are no villains in the piece. I knew that before. If there is a God, among things so badly managed—if there is One, let Him please remember that, in this, I did the best I could. Because of a baby . . . a baby with long dark lashes that curled over his white skin . . . a baby who died long ago . . . and because of Noel who healed everything that had hurt me . . . and who thought me a generous woman, in this I shall do the best I can.”

I said to her: “Noel wants to go to Asia. You go with him. If you stay around here, I don’t promise to keep out of his life. I don’t know that I can. If you go, you have him for all time . . . and he has the work he wants.”

She began to speak. I said: “Wait a minute . . . I have a friend . . . a painter . . . a girl who paints masks . . . theatrical masks, mostly. But she did three for a girl who was going South—a girl with an especially delicate skin that couldn’t stand sunburn—and that girl wore them all the time, outdoors, during the daytime. I’ll get this painter to make some masks for you. They aren’t obvious masks, fifteen feet away. And you can tell people whom you meet travelling that you—hurt—your face recently, and are just wearing a mask until it gets better.”

It was dreadful, to watch what waked in that half of a white, cold face. “Do you mean it?” she said. “Do you mean that I could go and see the Coast, and go on a ship to Japan, and not be pointed out, and have people shudder and turn away? . . . My sister is so tiresome; it would be such relief to see new places. And you don’t think Noel would be ashamed of me?”

(I said to myself, “Since you have to do it, Patricia, do it in the grand manner. Hope that that may be some comfort to you—through all the years when nothing else will be much comfort.)

“Your name is Beatrice, isn’t it?” I said. “I am going to call you Beatrice—if you don’t stand in the way of Noel’s career, he will become very fond of you, I’m sure. And he will love the baby . . . I’m going to take you to see Helena, now. She is the girl who makes the masks. She should get them finished for you in a week or so. Then you could come to town again, to try them on—and if you like, I’ll take you about to various smart wholesale clothing houses—where you can buy quantities of things for travelling.

“You have a lovely figure—and, after the child is born, you can use these things in the East. . . . In a good many places you might find it intriguing to wear a veil, as if you were a Mohammedan woman. Let your yellow hair show, and everyone will find the effect piquant as can be.”

She was shaking with excitement. “You make it seem so real.” She said. “I like you. I thought I should hate you. I think I am sorry . . . that I am taking Noel away from you.”

Years of practice in flippancy were a wall against my back. “Oh, don’t mind that,” I said. “I shall get over it. I have got over a good many things, first and last.”

I telephoned Helena: “I have some rush work for you . . . client’s a friend of mine . . . it’s masks . . . I’ll explain in detail when I see you. . . . May I bring her up, now?”

She said: “Sure. Why does your voice sound so queer? Lucia’s here, visiting. Shall I tell her to wait?”

I said, “For God’s sake, do, Helena. I shan’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

“Come on,” I said to Noel’s wife.

In the taxi, on the way to Helena’s, she said: “Will she have to look at my face?”

“You won’t mind, Beatrice. It’s just as if she were a surgeon. She’ll just want to know the proportions.”

When we climbed the stairs to Helena’s apartment I thought of divers other times I had climbed them—feeling happy, feeling sad, feeling tired. Now, for the moment at least, I felt—nothing.

Lucia was sitting, being very decorative, in a warm brown frock and furs, on the little couch. Helena was finishing a fashion drawing. They both looked at me sharply. I said: “This is Noel’s wife . . . you both have met Noel. . . . He is going to take the Yokohama job I mentioned to you, and Beatrice is going with him. . . . She had an accident, long time ago. . . . And she wants Helena to make her some masks, so that she won’t be embarrassed travelling.”

Lucia said: “Why, that’s a marvellous idea. Helena’s masks are so decorative.”

Helena said: “I should love to make her half a dozen masks . . . blend the skin tones with her gorgeous hair. She has the most beautiful hair I have seen in years.”

Beatrice hesitated a moment, and then took off her hat. Her hair was lovely. She arranged it badly, but I could take her to a hair-dresser next time she came to town.

I walked across the room, and dropped my coat and hat on Helena’s daybed.

“That’s a lovely violet frock you have, Pat,” Lucia said from across the room.

Helena followed me, without being obvious about it. “There’s a bottle of Scotch under the washstand in the bath,” she said, in an undertone. “For God’s sake go pour yourself a couple of drinks. You look as if you were going to faint.”

“What’s Noel’s wife’s first name, Pat?” she asked aloud. “I always call my models by their first names.”

I said, “Beatrice.”

“Beatrice,” said Helena, “I want to make a mould of your face . . . it won’t take long. . . . Have you time?”

“Yes. . . . My train doesn’t leave until eight-thirty.”

“I’ll leave you for five minutes,” I said.

Lucia followed me into the bath. My hands shook, when I began to pour the Scotch. Lucia took the bottle away from me, and poured me a large drink.

She lighted two cigarettes; gave one to me, and said nothing, until I had finished the Scotch.

Then, “You are behaving damn well, Pat, but what is it all about?”

“Noel’s wife is going to present him with a child,” I said. “He has always wanted one. Isn’t it an extraordinary world?”

Lucia put her arms around my shoulders, and for a dreadful instant I clung to her . . . trying not to sob, lest the sobs be heard in the room outside.

“Steady,” Lucia said. I remembered that she, or someone else, had said that to me long ago.

“It’s quite all right,” I said. “Noel and I did manage a year.”

“God,” said Lucia, to the shower bath and Helena’s array of face lotions. “There are certain women, under the present system who should take up professional card playing for a living. They certainly have no luck in love.”

I laughed.

Lucia said: “You are wiser than you were . . . you could hold on, this time, and he’d love you a while and then hate you . . . because you would stand between him and his concept of himself as a decent person . . . I repeat, that you are behaving well.”

I had cold creamed my face. Now I was putting rouge on. I said: “Well, I doubt that it’ll be much satisfaction to me in the years when Noel has Asia to console him . . . I don’t know though. I never tried it before . . . but maybe the only satisfaction in anything, in the end, is the consciousness of having behaved well.”

Lucia said, “The Victorians expressed that as ‘doing one’s duty as one saw it.’ ”

I said: “Some of the duties we see would just make a Victorian cock-eyed.” I arranged my lipstick, as if I felt the effect important.

“By the way, does Noel know how you’ve settled his destiny between you?”

“Hell, no. Beatrice plans to tell him over the week-end—but I shall tell him, at dinner, tonight.”

Lucia put a little unnecessary powder on her lovely nose.

“Better spend the week-end with Sam and me, Pat.”

“All right,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I must go outside,” she said. “Noel’s wife will begin to suspect a conference. I see why you are doing it, Patricia. Whatever minor hells you and I have visited—that girl’s lived in a major one.”

“I know,” I said.

Lucia kissed me, for perhaps the second time since we had known each other. “Is there anything I can do for you, child, before I go?” she asked.

“Yes, stop at a drug store and telephone Noel. Tell him I’ll meet him at Dante’s at ten for dinner, and that he is not to call for me. I’ll have just time to dress, after I put her on her train.”

Lucia put her hand on the door, and then turned back to me. “Patricia, I mean this seriously. . . . Most things have to come to an end. You know that, by now, as well as I. My candid opinion is that you and Noel might have come to a much worse end than this . . .”

I said: “Thank you, Lucia. I’ll see you for the week-end.” And I wiped powder off my eyebrows.

Helena had been managing Beatrice dextrously. . . . It was an excited, an almost happy, woman that I put on the train.

She chattered. She said: “That Helena girl says she’ll make me masks to wear in sunlight, and rain, and electric light—and moonlight, even. She is most kind . . . I haven’t been so interested in anything in years. . . . And you don’t mind about Noel, do you? I mean, you’ll find a successor to him . . . you are so pretty. Did anyone ever tell you you had a spiritual face?”

I thought: “It’s got spiritual by traversing a good many beds, first and last. . . . No, Noel did that for it, if it is spiritual.”

I said: “There are men for whom one finds substitutes, but not successors. But don’t you worry about that. . . . You think of seeing Fujiyama, you know, the always snow-capped mountain of Japan?”

She said, “I hope you see it one day, yourself.” I didn’t mind—I was the first woman whom she had had a chance to patronize in ten years, probably.

I went home, and dressed, and dined with Noel.

After dinner, we went to his apartment. I said to him: “Go mix yourself a highball. . . . There is something that I want to tell you, and I want you to look out the windows, and think of time and space and relativity, while I tell it, and not interrupt until I finish.”

I began: “You can go to Asia, after all.”

When I was done, he came and put his arms around me; and I ran my fingers through his hair, and we did not talk, for a long long time. Thereafter, we had some debate as to details . . . but no man of his type is very eager to yield adventure even for a woman.

Noel was to have Asia. He suffered a good deal, I believe, at the thought of losing me. He might suffer more, as Asia grew commonplace; but, meanwhile, Asia was his other Great Desire.

We lived through a week in which we lived as if all things between us had lasted since the beginning of Time, and were to last for ever. Then I had a wire from Beatrice, who wanted to know what time on Thursday she should arrive, to go clothes-buying among the fashionable wholesalers.

I arranged to take Thursday afternoon off . . . and since her sentence to wearing a black patch was so nearly ended, we went without embarrassment to various wholesale clothing places and bought tweeds, and evening frocks, and sweaters-and-skirts, and jersey ensembles, and hats to wear with them all. (Even a silver turban for dancing.)

We ended the afternoon at a shoe-shop, and I discovered with some amusement that, though she was a taller woman, her shoes were a smaller size than mine.

There was more enthusiasm in her voice than there had been the week before. She told the shoe-clerk gaily that she was travelling to Chicago, to see her mother whom she hadn’t visited in ten years.

(Noel was to join her in Chicago. He was leaving New York, a day or two later than she.)

Helena could not see us before six-thirty. Beatrice asked me to go to tea with her, to fill in the interval. I said: “Well, I was thinking of going to a speakeasy. I know a nice one, on Fifty-Second Street, where women without escorts are not conspicuous.”

Her voice was like the voice of a sub-debutante invited to an important college prom. “Oh, could we go to a speakeasy?” she said. “You know, my accident was in 1919, before Prohibition, and I have never seen a speakeasy.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I have wasted my youth in so many of them.” We went to Fifty-Second Street. Beatrice was stirred by the fact that she could put her foot on a brass rail at the bar. She had read about brass rails but never seen one. We had two Alexanders, and they did not seem to disturb her, unduly.

I thought, simultaneously, that this girl was only a year or two older than myself and that, except for one thing and another, she would have been much prettier than I.

(And would have held Noel for ever, perhaps? . . . The chances that determine people’s lives. Well, no sense considering them at any length. One accepted them. It was easier.)

Helena had made six masks for Beatrice. They were lovely things—she must have worked until dawn, several nights in succession, to finish them. Across the width of her apartment they were amazingly life-like. Even viewed closely there was nothing in the least grotesque about them, because they were so decorative.

There were full-face masks for evening wear, and a full-face mask for wear with sports’ clothes. There were half-masks, too. “And how do I eat, wearing them?” Beatrice asked.

Helena explained that the half-masks were designed for that. . . . “They are cut out, a little, around the mouth. The explanation of it is intricate, but you eat a cookie, and see how simple it is.”

If a woman with half a face could glow, Beatrice glowed when she tried them on. Her hands (which were well-shaped, graceful hands) looked excited.

“They are wonderful,” she said. “So light, and so comfortable, and pretty. How much should I pay you for them?”

Helena said: “Nothing. Patricia is an old friend of mine.”

Something—something vaguely familiar in the expression of the mouth and chin on the full-face masks, disturbed me. I could not think why.

Lucia drifted in, to admire—and Beatrice tried each mask on, again, for her. Then Beatrice showed all her new clothes (she had insisted on bringing them along, in a cab) to Helena; and Lucia and I went into the bathroom for a drink of Scotch.

Lucia said: “Do you feel all right?”

I said, “Yes. She is leaving in the middle of next week, you know, and Noel is going at the end of it.”

I said, “Those masks are extraordinary, aren’t they. They are not only decorative—they have a definite individuality, even a definite charm.”

Lucia said: “Helena always liked you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Honestly, don’t you know, Pat? Was there nothing about the lower part of the face, in the full masks, that you recognized?”

“Something, vaguely, but I don’t know what.”

Lucia smiled—her all-comprehending smile.

“Ever see your face, Pat, when you were looking tranquil, and well pleased with life? . . . Helena has a sardonic humour. . . . She’s copied that grave smile of yours, to follow Noel, all over Asia.”

On the way to Beatrice’s suburban train, she and I had a short conversation. “Maybe you dislike me,” she said, “but I hope not . . . I feel that I owe you a good deal, and I thought . . . if my child were a girl I might name her for you.”

I lighted a cigarette. “God is an ironist,” I said, but that seemed beyond Beatrice’s comprehension.

She said: “Anyway. I wanted to tell you . . . that I mean to be good to Noel. I know that he will have to leave me by myself, much of the time, in the Far East” (—the words conjured up pictures of the places Noel and I might have seen, together . . . the sounds and colours of bazaars, I would never know them, now. I drew a long breath) “but I shan’t object” she said . . . “Now that he is going to be my husband, really officially, I mean to give him as much liberty as can be managed. After all, I shall have the baby.”

“That’s sensible, Beatrice,” I said. “And, if he should have a brief romance with a Geisha girl, don’t curse him out for it. He’ll come back, to see the baby, and to get himself a clean shirt. That’s marriage.”

“I’ll behave, Patricia,” she said. . . . Her train was leaving in three minutes. She stopped by the train-gate. “Tell me you don’t hate me,” she said.

“I don’t hate you. I hope you work it out, Beatrice.” After two minutes, now, I would never see her again. For that at least, I could be grateful.

“Beatrice—they say there are splendid British surgeons in the East, and facial surgery has been elaborated, since the War. . . . Perhaps, something may be managed for you, there.”

She smiled half a smile, and she found a good exit line. (Peter, who was almost forgotten now, had asked me to find one, once.) Beatrice said: “Meanwhile there are the masks . . . you wear them, too, don’t you?” She ran, not ungracefully, to catch her train.

I hurried home, to dine with Noel.

And the infinite time that he and I had felt destined for us, together, was determined now as ten days. They were not unhappy days. We talked to each other as if all the years we had lived were stable behind our comprehension of each other—and as if all the years ahead were ours to share.

Only once, I spoke to him, of the little time remaining. I said: “I understand better now, about the French aristos, who died serenely on the guillotine. I don’t believe they suffered at the last. . . . Relieved from all concern with the day after tomorrow—they were serene. Kenneth felt like that, do you remember?”

He said, “Yes. . . . The only problem is whether one adds life to one’s years or years to one’s life. . . . Or did you tell me that, concerning something else, Pat?”

I said, “Concerning an Ex-wife, perhaps. . . . Noel, your hair is a colour destined to shine in my soul.”

But he was thinking of Asiatic cities, where he would live his life—and I let him talk, about the possibility of learning Chinese, in five years.

“It is a five-year contract, Pat—with option of renewal for the same length of time. When I come back—I may be forty-five years old.”

(In ten years, I shall be thirty-seven—and whatever I am spared—I begged to be spared, meeting Noel next, when I am thirty-seven.)

Noel was still working on the “Times.” On one of his last days, there, he went to Lakehurst, to do an aviation story. I wrote him a letter—because I had written him always, when he was on an out-of-town assignment. (We had agreed, that I was not to write him to Yokohama. There would be no return-from-Yokohama, in which I would be concerned. He was to write me only in the stories . . . that the “Times” would run, about how the years went, in Asia.)

I wrote him, to Lakehurst:

“Please don’t decide that I care very little—because I am taking this so calmly. I have wrung my hands over it, a good bit, first and last.

“You-and-I apparently come to an end. The commonplace and possessive and exacting and stupid relationships, into which people drift, come to bad ends soon or late. But what has that to do with you and me? We may yet be sitting before a fireplace, when you are eighty-seven and I am seventy-nine, discussing flavours of wines, and of adventures. Why not?”

I believed that, too, for five or ten minutes.

That was my last letter to Noel.

I put it back in the tin box, with the others, and put the rest of his letters to me, unread, in the box, too.

I went upstairs to change my dress.

And thought, not for the first time, that vanity is so great a blessing to women that it should be listed among the major virtues. Recollection that the last time Noel ever saw me, I was wearing a bright red dress from Paris, with a hat that matched it precisely, and a brand-new grey Krimmer coat, would be some comfort to me, always. That might be absurd. It was none the less profoundly true.

I went back to his apartment, and put fresh logs on the fire. He came in.

“You’re looking very lovely, Pat,” he said. “Have you decided where you’d like to dine?”

“Dante’s, I think.”

“Grand idea . . . and we’ll have crabmeat ravigotte and filet mignon and Chianti and crêpes Suzette. . . .”

We had an evening, and a night, and a morning, left to spend. We spent them as gaily as we had spent a hundred others. We pretended to each other that this evening and night and morning, were just like all the others.

We pretended so successfully, that, on the way to his train I felt that I was just seeing Noel off on another out-of-town assignment.

As always, he took me through the train-gates, at the Grand Central (although non-passengers are supposed to make their parting speeches outside the gates) so that we could talk a little longer. As always, I watched the porter arrange his baggage. As always, we walked out onto the platform, and Noel gave me a cigarette.

But I found that I couldn’t hold my cigarette, steadily, beside this train. So I threw it away, and Noel threw his away.

I said: “How much time is there?”

He said: “Two or three minutes.”

I said: “I don’t want to be casual. I want to tell you that I shall love you for ever and ever, whatever that means . . .”

“Whatever it means, Pat, I shall, too.”

He took off his hat. He was a young man with red hair that was the shade of bright-burnished bronze, and a nice chin, that almost had a dimple in it, and a grey tweed overcoat, and a grey muffler I had given him. I wanted to remember exactly how he looked . . . I wanted to think of some words that would be significant—that would make him happy to remember.

A silly inappropriate tag from Virgil came into my head: “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”—“And perhaps some day even this will be pleasant to remember.” He had taken my hand, and was holding it so tightly that an old emerald ring—a ring I wore because Noel had admired it—hurt my finger. I tried to remember where the emerald ring came from.

Noel said: “I must go, now, Patricia. . . . Could you manage a smile in the face of a transcontinental express?” I smiled; he smiled at me.

Someone was shouting “all aboard.” Noel’s lips were brushing against my face, he had let go of my hand, he had gone, I couldn’t see him, inside the train. I ran along, looking for him. He was there, smiling, with his face close to the train window, and his hand against the windowpane. I put my hand, on the outside of the pane against his on the inside.

He was looking unhappy, but he was smiling. He was saying something to me, but there was a noise—I could not hear. The train made too much noise starting . . . and the windowpane pulled from under my hand, and was gone and Noel’s face was gone. There were other faces, all blurred together, passing, behind train windows. There was the noise of a train gathering speed. Then there was an empty track where a train had been.

It seemed very quiet.

I walked back along the platform, and upstairs, through the station, and out onto the street. There were crowds of people hurrying about as if they had somewhere important to go. I wished that I had somewhere important to go.

I had the day to myself—I might go call on Helena, and the blue-eyed child who had just discovered Broadway first nights. The child had told me, in a pleased way, last time I had seen her that she had to hurry home to dress for an “important” first night.

I did not want to go see Helena, or her. I wanted to think of somewhere important to go myself. I began to laugh at all the people running around.

I passed a newsstand, and remembered that from the day I had first met Noel, I had read every single one of his stories.

Then I was pleased with myself, because I had thought of somewhere important, to go. . . . I walked across town, to the “Times,” and bought a five-year subscription.