Jerry shrugged her shoulders again. Having made her appeal, she evidently did not intend either to repeat or reinforce it. There was a brief silence between the two, broken by Joy, who suddenly found that she must pour forth the story of the week-end just passed; such glowing wonder could not be bottled up within her. Jerry listened, first smoking at her usual gait, but as the story wore on sitting with a fresh cigarette unlit between her teeth. When Joy’s narration finally came to an end, she bit into the cigarette.
“Well?” said Joy. It was the first time she had ever approached Jerry with a serious matter, the first time men had entered their conversation as anything but incidentals to a good time, and she did not know how a hint of permanency would hit her.
“Well?” Jerry repeated. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say?” Joy’s look of breathless bliss crumbled as a toy balloon under a pin prick. “Why—why, nothing, if you don’t want to. I’m sorry—if I bored you about it. But you see—I owe him to you, in a way. Because I never would have met Packy if I hadn’t come here, and I never would have met him if it hadn’t been for Packy—I didn’t mean to bore you.”
Jerry lit another cigarette. “Look here, Joy, I don’t want to be a thrill-dispeller or anything, but I can’t put on a quiver I don’t feel. This thing may turn out all right, but at present quoting it sounds to me like a bad case of beach and moon. The whole thing has dusted along with that summer swiftness we all read about.”
“Oh, we realize it’s been swift,” said Joy, “and just to test ourselves, we’re not going to see each other until Wednesday, when I am going to meet him at the Copley for dinner.”
“Wednesday,” Joy murmured. “And to-day’s Monday. Oh, well, absence at this stage of the game only makes you keener—you should have stayed down there a week!”
“Bon soir—a week down there! I couldn’t stand that—not with his mother!”
“I gather from what you said that his mother is a riot. Is he anything like her?”
“Of course not—” Joy began indignantly, but the rise of recollection checked denial. Grant ossifying at the idea of Paragon Park on Sunday. . . . But anyone might do that. She rose, gathering conviction about her as a Shakespearean actor whips his cloak about him before an exit on a sounding phrase. “I can’t talk about it any more, Jerry. But when you know, you know.”