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amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the women, was inclined to despise her.
"If those women aren't beautiful," she thought, "they're nothing. They just fade out when you look at them.
They're glorified domestics. Men are the centre of every mixed group."
Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The first day's impression of an egg had been
confirmed-- an egg with a cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage that Sally
Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble. In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the
town in being innately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol "Sally," and could not be persuaded that
the double name was anything more than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening of
her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She loved "Sally Carrol"; she loathed "Sally." She
knew also that Harry's mother dispproved of her bobbed hair; and she had never dared smoke down-stairs
after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had come into the library sniffing violently.
Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again
alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon
the sofa bent over "Peer Gynt" he laughed and told her to forget what he'd said-- that it was all rot.
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And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered on the edge of a dangerously steep
quarrel. She considered that he precipitated it entirely, though the Serbia in the case was an unknown man
who had not had his trousers pressed.
They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol
scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear,
and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation.
"Look! Harry!"
"What?"
"That little girl-- did you see her face?"
"Yes, why?"
"It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!"
"Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Everybody's healthy here. We're out in
the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!"
She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed
the new red in her own cheeks that very morning.
Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of
them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression as though he
were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for
coming closer they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced by the extreme bagginess
of the man's trousers.
"Reckon that's one on us," she laughed.
"He must be a Southerner, judging by those trousers," suggested Earry mischievously.
"Why, Harry!"
Her surprised look must have irritated him.
"Those damn Southerners!"
Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.
"Don't call 'em that!"
"I'm sorry, dear," said Harry, malignantly apologetic, "but you know what I think of them. They're sort of--
sort of degenerates-- not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down there with all the
colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless."
"Hush your mouth, Harry!" she cried angrily.
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"They're not! They may be lazy-- anybody would be in that climate-- but they're my best friends, an' I don't
want to hear 'em criticised in any such sweepin' way. Some of 'em are the finest men in the world."
"Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly
lot I ever saw, a hunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!"
Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously.
"Why," continued Harry, "there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found
the true type of Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat at all -- just the son of a
Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile."
"A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now," she said evenly.
"They haven't the energy!"
"Or the somethin' else."
"I'm sorry, Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that you'd never marry-- -- "
"That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton
now, but I never made any sweepin' generalities."
They walked along in silence.
"I probably spread it on a bit thick, Sally Carrol. I'm sorry."
She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms
round him.
"Oh, Harry," she cried, her eyes brimming with tears, "let's get married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses
like that. I'm afraid, Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married."
But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.
"That'd be idiotic. We decided on March."
The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded; her expression hardened slightly.
"Very well-- I suppose I shouldn't have said that."
Harry melted.
"Dear little nut!" he cried. "Come and kiss me and let's forget."
That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orchestra played "Dixie" and Sally Carrol felt
something stronger and more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside her. She leaned
forward gripping the arms of her chair until her face grew crimson.
"Sort of get you, dear?" whispered Harry.
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 The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories
But she did not hear him. To the spirited throb of the violins and the inspiring beat of the kettledrums her own
old ghosts were marching by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed in the low encore they
seemed so nearly out of sight that she could have waved good-by.
"Away, Away,
Away down South in Dixie!
Away, away,
Away down South in Dixie!"
V
It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared the streets the day before, but now they
were traversed again with a powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy lines before the feet of the
wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist. There was no sky-- only a dark, ominous tent that
draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes-- while over it all,
chilling away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady trot
of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. It was a dismal town after all, she
thought-- dismal. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]