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Dorothy Donnell
"no," said the girl, quietly, ''so ^ that is the way men love."
The book slid from pulsing fingers into her lap. She made no motion to regain it, fearing to break the spell its golden words had woven about her. She felt them in every fiber of her being now, in every throb of her startled heart. It was almost painful, this fierce surprise of emotion, like the birth of a new self within her. Love! The little word, like a subtle chemical dropped into a peaceful beaker of liquid, had dissolved her world into a chaos of unfamiliar sights and sounds. So that was the way men loved! "What a puny, schoolgirl conception she had had of it before — a thing made up of blushes and raptures and cocked-hat notes and diamond rings !
And now a few lines of print from an unknown author had found an undreamed doorway within her soul and flung it wide. She was dizzied at the promise and possibilities within: the thoughts she was capable of thinking • the joys and the griefs that she might — God willing — know. "With sudden fierceness, she longed for her fulfillment, for the bitter-sweet draught of the love that he sang — this Norman MacPherson, who spoke from the nowhere and nothingness of strangerhood so clearly and so surely to her soul.
"Meta, Meta, dear!"
With the sweet reasonableness that was so much a part of her, the girl
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rose to her feet, brushing back the dreams and closing the door strongly on that terrible and holy sanctuary in her soul. She would never be quite the same Meta again, but no one else would understand that, much less this beloved summoner.
' ' Yes, Grandmother Van — right here in the pergola."
The white-haired little woman, in the coquettish dress of a girl, ran lightly toward her thru the lacy shadows. Quick words bubbled to her lips, outstripping her eager feet and extended hands. Mrs. Vandeveer dressed and lived according to the age of her head, which was as young as a child -s.
"Meta, dear, you'd never guess! I've got a husband for you up at the house this minute!"
' • Mercy ! It 's so sudden ! ' ' laughed the girl. Yet a chill swept over her, quenching the exaltation of a moment ago. It was the feeling of a novice who hears her saint profaned. "I suspect that means that the great and wonderful grandson has at last arrived?"
"George — ten minutes ago, in a taxi, looking like Lord Byron, my child. If I were a girl, I'd lose my heart in a moment. And he's taking us into town to a Bohemian restaurant where they eat soup with a French accent, and to a play afterwards "
Meta Dandridge followed the ebullient little figure thru the grave,