K Part 26

"Ages."

"He's awfully good-looking, isn't he?"

Sidney considered. She was not ignorant of the methods of the school. If this girl was pumping her--

"I'll have to think that over," she said, with a glint of mischief in her eyes. "When you know a person terribly well, you hardly know whether he's good-looking or not."

"I suppose," said the probationer, running the long strands of Sidney's hair through her fingers, "that when you are at home you see him often."

Sidney got off the window-sill, and, taking the probationer smilingly by the shoulders, faced her toward the door.

"You go back to the girls," she said, "and tell them to come in and see me when I am dressed, and tell them this: I don't know whether I am to walk down the aisle with Dr. Wilson, but I hope I am. I see him very often. I like him very much. I hope he likes me. And I think he's handsome."

She shoved the probationer out into the hall and locked the door behind her.

That message in its entirety reached Carlotta Harrison. Her smouldering eyes flamed. The audacity of it startled her. Sidney must be very sure of herself.

She, too, had not slept during the day. When the probationer who had brought her the report had gone out, she lay in her long white night-gown, hands clasped under her head, and stared at the vault-like ceiling of her little room.

She saw there Sidney in her white dress going down the aisle of the church; she saw the group around the altar; and, as surely as she lay there, she knew that Max Wilson's eyes would be, not on the bride, but on the girl who stood beside her.

The curious thing was that Carlotta felt that she could stop the wedding if she wanted to. She'd happened on a bit of information--many a wedding had been stopped for less. It rather obsessed her to think of stopping the wedding, so that Sidney and Max would not walk down the aisle together.

There came, at last, an hour before the wedding, a lull in the feverish activities of the previous month. Everything was ready. In the Lorenz kitchen, piles of plates, negro waiters, ice-cream freezers, and Mrs.

Rosenfeld stood in orderly array. In the attic, in the center of a sheet, before a toilet-table which had been carried upstairs for her benefit, sat, on this her day of days, the bride. All the second story had been prepared for guests and presents.

Florists were still busy in the room below. Bridesmaids were cl.u.s.tered on the little staircase, bending over at each new ring of the bell and calling reports to Christine through the closed door:--

"Another wooden box, Christine. It looks like more plates. What will you ever do with them all?"

"Good Heavens! Here's another of the neighbors who wants to see how you look. Do say you can't have any visitors now."

Christine sat alone in the center of her sheet. The bridesmaids had been sternly forbidden to come into her room.

"I haven't had a chance to think for a month," she said. "And I've got some things I've got to think out."

But, when Sidney came, she sent for her. Sidney found her sitting on a stiff chair, in her wedding gown, with her veil spread out on a small stand.

"Close the door," said Christine. And, after Sidney had kissed her:--

"I've a good mind not to do it."

"You're tired and nervous, that's all."

"I am, of course. But that isn't what's wrong with me. Throw that veil some place and sit down."

Christine was undoubtedly rouged, a very delicate touch. Sidney thought brides should be rather pale. But under her eyes were lines that Sidney had never seen there before.

"I'm not going to be foolish, Sidney. I'll go through with it, of course. It would put mamma in her grave if I made a scene now."

She suddenly turned on Sidney.

"Palmer gave his bachelor dinner at the Country Club last night. They all drank more than they should. Somebody called father up to-day and said that Palmer had emptied a bottle of wine into the piano. He hasn't been here to-day."

"He'll be along. And as for the other--perhaps it wasn't Palmer who did it."

"That's not it, Sidney. I'm frightened."

Three months before, perhaps, Sidney could not have comforted her; but three months had made a change in Sidney. The complacent sophistries of her girlhood no longer answered for truth. She put her arms around Christine's shoulders.

"A man who drinks is a broken reed," said Christine. "That's what I'm going to marry and lean on the rest of my life--a broken reed. And that isn't all!"

She got up quickly, and, trailing her long satin train across the floor, bolted the door. Then from inside her corsage she brought out and held to Sidney a letter. "Special delivery. Read it."

It was very short; Sidney read it at a glance:--

Ask your future husband if he knows a girl at 213 ---- Avenue.

Three months before, the Avenue would have meant nothing to Sidney. Now she knew. Christine, more sophisticated, had always known.

"You see," she said. "That's what I'm up against."

Quite suddenly Sidney knew who the girl at 213 ---- Avenue was. The paper she held in her hand was hospital paper with the heading torn off.

The whole sordid story lay before her: Grace Irving, with her thin face and cropped hair, and the newspaper on the floor of the ward beside her!

One of the bridesmaids thumped violently on the door outside.

"Another electric lamp," she called excitedly through the door. "And Palmer is downstairs."

"You see," Christine said drearily. "I have received another electric lamp, and Palmer is downstairs! I've got to go through with it, I suppose. The only difference between me and other brides is that I know what I'm getting. Most of them do not."

"You're going on with it?"

"It's too late to do anything else. I am not going to give this neighborhood anything to talk about."

She picked up her veil and set the coronet on her head. Sidney stood with the letter in her hands. One of K.'s answers to her hot question had been this:--

"There is no sense in looking back unless it helps us to look ahead.

What your little girl of the ward has been is not so important as what she is going to be."

"Even granting this to be true," she said to Christine slowly,--"and it may only be malicious after all, Christine,--it's surely over and done with. It's not Palmer's past that concerns you now; it's his future with you, isn't it?"

Christine had finally adjusted her veil. A band of d.u.c.h.esse lace rose like a coronet from her soft hair, and from it, sweeping to the end of her train, fell fold after fold of soft tulle. She arranged the coronet carefully with small pearl-topped pins. Then she rose and put her hands on Sidney's shoulders.

"The simple truth is," she said quietly, "that I might hold Palmer if I cared--terribly. I don't. And I'm afraid he knows it. It's my pride that's hurt, nothing else."

And thus did Christine Lorenz go down to her wedding.

Sidney stood for a moment, her eyes on the letter she held. Already, in her new philosophy, she had learned many strange things. One of them was this: that women like Grace Irving did not betray their lovers; that the code of the underworld was "death to the squealer"; that one played the game, and won or lost, and if he lost, took his medicine. If not Grace, then who? Somebody else in the hospital who knew her story, of course.