"Cousin Roger!" she exclaimed breathlessly. "Oh, how good of you to come!"
She gripped my hands in a candid fervor of relief and pleasure.
"I am so glad it is you," she insisted. "I was sorry the train could not be later; I wished, almost, it would never get in—and all the time it was you who were waiting for me!"
"It was, and now you are about to share an orgy," I told her. "I have your mother's permission to take you to dinner, Miss Knox."
"Here? In town? Just us?"
"Yes. And afterward we will take in any show you fancy. How does that strike you?"
She gazed up at me, absorbing the idea and my seriousness. To my dismay, she grew pale again.
"I—I really believe it will keep me from just dying."
I pretended to think that a joke. But I recognized that my little cousin was on the sloping way toward a nervous breakdown.
"No baggage?" I observed. "Good! I hope you did not eat too much luncheon. This will be an early dinner."
She waited to take off the spectacles and put them in her little bag.
"I do not need them except to study, but I didn't dare meet Mother without them," she explained. "No; I could not eat lunch, or breakfast either, Cousin Roger. Nor much dinner last night! Oh, if you knew how I dread—the grind! I should rather run away."
"So we will; for this evening."
"Yes. Where—where were you going to take me?"
We had crossed the great white hall to street level, and a taxicab was rolling up to halt before us. Surprised by the anxiety in the eyes she lifted to mine, I named the staid, quietly fastidious hotel where I usually took her when we were permitted an excursion together.
"Unless you have a choice?" I finished.
"I have." She breathed resolution. "I want to go to a restaurant with a cabaret, instead of going to the theatre. May I? Please, may I? Will you take me where I say, this one time?"
Her earnestness amazed me. I knew what her mother would say. I also knew, or thought I knew that Phillida needed the mental relaxation which comes from having one's own way. In her mood, no one else's way, however, wise or agreeable, will do it all.
"All right," I yielded. "If you will promise me, faith of a gentlewoman, to tell Aunt Caroline that I took you there and you did not know where you were going. My shoulders are broader than yours and have borne the buffeting of thirty-two years instead of nineteen. Had you chosen the place, or shall I?"
To my second surprise, she answered with the name of an uptown place where I never had been, and where I would have decidedly preferred not to take her.
"They have a skating ballet," she urged, as I hesitated. "I know it is wonderful! Please, please——?"
I gave the direction to the chauffeur and followed my cousin into the cab. It seemed a proper moment to present the chocolates from my overcoat pocket. When she proved too languid to unwrap the box, I was seriously uneasy.
"You cannot possibly know how dreadful it is to be the only child of two intellectual people who expect one to be a credit," she excused her lack of appetite, nervously twitching the gilt cord about the package. "And to be stupid and a disappointment! Yes, as long as I can remember, I have been a disappointment. If only there had been another to divide all those expectations. If only you had been my brother!"
"Heaven forbid!" I exclaimed hastily. "That is——"
"Don't bother about explaining," she smiled wanly, "I understand. But you are distinguished, and you look it. I never will be, and I am ugly. Mother expects me to be an astronomer like Father and work with him, or to go in for club life and serious writing as she does. I never can do either."
"Neither could I, Phil."
"You are clever, successful. Everybody knows your name. When we are out, and people or an orchestra play your music, Mother always says: 'A trifle of my nephew's, Roger Locke. Very original, is it not? Of course, I do not understand music, but I hear that his last light opera——' And then she leans back and just eats up all the nice things said about your work. She would never let you know it, but she does. And that is the sort of thing she wants from me. I—I want to make cookies, and I love fancywork."
The taxicab drew up with a jerk before the gaudy entrance to Silver Aisles.
I imagine Phillida had the vaguest ideas of what such places were like. When we were settled at a table in a general blaze of pink lights, beside a fountain that ran colored water, I regarded her humorously. But she seemed quite contented with her surroundings, looking about her with an air I can best describe as grave excitement. At this hour, the room was not half filled, and the jazz orchestra had withdrawn to prepare for a hard night's work.
After I had ordered our dinner, I glanced up to see her fingers busied loosening the severe lines of her brushed back hair.
"Everyone here looks so nice," she said wistfully. "I wish my hair did shine and cuddle around my face like those women's does. Do—do I look queer, Cousin? You are looking at me so——?"
"I was thinking what pretty eyes you have."
Her pale face flushed.
"Really?"
"Most truthfully. As for the hair, isn't that a matter of bottled polish and hairdressers? But you remind me of a question for you. Isn't a braid of hair this wide," I laid off the dimensions on the table, "this long, and thick, a good deal for a woman to own?"
"Show me again."
I obeyed, while she leaned forward to observe.
"Not one girl in a hundred has so much," she pronounced judgment. "Who is she? Probably it isn't all her own, anyhow!"
"It is not now, but it was," I said remorsefully.
"How could you tell? Did you measure it?"—with sarcasm. "Do you remember the maxim we used to write in copybooks? 'Measure a thousand times, and cut once?' One has to be cautious!"
"I cut it first, and then measured."
"What? Tell me."
At last she was interested and amused. There was no reason why I should not tell her of my midnight adventure. We never repeated one another's little confidences.
She listened, with many comments and exclamations, to the story of the unseen lady, the legend of the fair witch, the dagger that was a paper-knife by day and the severed tresses. She did not hear of the singular nightmare or hallucination that had been my second visitor. My reason had accounted for the experience and dismissed it. Some other part of myself avoided the memory with that deep, unreasoning sense of horror sometimes left by a morbid dream.
The dinner crowd had flowed in while we ate and talked. A burst of applause aroused me to this fact and the commencement of the first show of the evening. The orchestra had taken their places.
"They will hardly begin with their best act," I remarked, surprised by Phillida's convulsive start and rapt intentness upon the stretch of ice that formed the exhibition floor. "Your ballet on skates probably will come later."
"I did not come to see the ballet," she answered, her voice low.
"No? What, then?"
"A—man I know?"
Once when I was a little fellow, I raced headlong into the low-swinging branch of a tree, the bough striking me across the forehead so that I was bowled over backward amid a shower of apples. I felt a twin sensation, now.
"Here, Phillida?"
"Yes."
"Someone from your home town or your college town?" I essayed a casual tone.
"Neither.