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Updated: June 22, 2025
He kicked the door shut behind him and lolled against it while he lit a cigarette. Gila's laugh rang harshly in the room again, following some low-toned remark, and the man laughed coarsely in reply. Then, suddenly, she looked up and saw Courtland standing sternly there with folded arms, regarding her steadily, and her eyes grew wide with horror. It was Courtland's great disillusionment.
"Hand me those towels," commanded Courtland, and saw the look of disgust upon Gila's face as she reluctantly picked her way across the blood-stains. It struck him that they were the color of her frock. The stain of the crushed berry. He moistened his dry lips. At least the stain was not upon his lips. He had escaped. Yet by how narrow a margin.
Courtland enjoyed sending that telegram. He enjoyed it so much that he sent another along with it on his own account, which read: Three cheers for the best mother in the United States! She's coming and you ought to see her eyes shine! It was on the way back to the university that he happened to remember Gila's letter.
Perhaps she had taken offense and misconstrued Gila's intended kindness! Well, the main thing was that Bonnie was gone and must be hunted up. It wouldn't do to leave her without friends, sick and weak, this cold night. She had, of course, gone home to her room. He could easily find her.
Both looked forward to the week that Tennelly had promised to spend with them. But instead of Tennelly came a letter. Gila's plans interfered and he could not come. He wrote joyously that he was sorry, but he couldn't possibly make it. It shone between every line that Tennelly was overwhelmingly happy.
He mailed the letter that night and then studied hard till three o'clock in the morning. The next morning's mail brought him a dainty little note from Gila's mother, inviting him to a quiet family dinner with them on Friday evening. He frowned when he read it. He didn't care for the large, painted person, but perhaps there was more good in her than he knew. He would have to go and find out.
He sighed and thought how strange it was that he should almost resent it, coming as it did in contrast with Gila's falseness. Gila who had professed to love him so deeply, and then had so easily laid that love aside and put on another. Perhaps all girls were the same. Perhaps this Bonnie, too, would do the same if a man turned out not to have her ideals.
She held up a tattered blue net adorned with straggling, crushed, artificial rosebuds, its sole pretension to a waist being a couple of straps of silver tissue attached to a couple of rags of blue net. It looked for all the world like a draggled butterfly. "It's torn in one or two places," pursued Gila's ready tongue, "but it's easily mended. I wore it to a dance and somebody stepped on the hem.
He had arranged it in his mind that she was a sweet and lovely girl, one in every way similar to Solveig the innocent, and he did not care to change it. He tried to remember Gila's conventional upbringing, and realize that she had no conception of a girl out of her own social circle other than as a menial to whom to condescend.
Two soft, pink spots of color began to bloom out in her cheeks, and her eyes took on a twinkle of amusement. She was watching the visitor as if she were a passing Punch-and-Judy show come in to play for a moment for her entertainment. She lay and regarded her and her tawdry display of finery with a quiet, disinterested aloofness that was beginning to get on Gila's nerves.
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