Seed on the Wind

Lora kept her job till the middle of October. She did not give it up then because of physical discomfort or inconvenience, for she experienced very little of either. Indeed she felt uncommonly well; her face was blooming with health, her eyes shone fresh and clear, and the feel of her muscles took on a new and sharper pleasure. For the first time she was fully aware of the sweetness of her body, and she loved all its trivial and commonplace joys: the joy of sitting down, of getting up again, of feeling her strong young legs swing, at their leisure, as she walked along the street in her own rhythm, of moving her pretty white arm, now down pressing, now up with a free swing, as she brushed her hair at night.

She quit her job because Miss Goff began to look at her. Not at her face, either, nor at her feet, but at a point midway between. Partly it was merely an annoyance, resulting from her own self-consciousness as much as from the other’s impertinence; but it was also a real danger, for Miss Goff might say something to Mr. Graham, and Mr. Graham to Mrs. Ranley, and Mrs. Ranley was an old friend of Cecelia’s mother, down home... So on a crisp autumn morning Lora went to Mr. Graham’s private office and told him that after the following Saturday she would not return. He timidly and nervously pulled at his little grey moustache and expressed his regrets and his best wishes for a happy and successful career, offering no objection after he had learned that she intended to resume her piano lessons. Which of course she didn’t.

Cecelia knew. Around the middle of July, only a week after Pete’s departure, she had gone home for a brief summer visit; and Lora, after long consideration of all the chances and probabilities, had gone with her. On the train on the way down the need for an ally and confidant had become suddenly overwhelming. Cecelia had of course been aware for some time of the nature of her relations with Pete; it had been the cause of many strained and uncomfortable silences and two or three hot debates between them; now she learned that one of the direst of her various dire predictions had come true. She claimed to have already discovered it for herself, but Lora doubted that, for she herself had difficulty detecting any objective difference even when she was naked. At any rate, Cecelia knew it now, and for the last three hours of the trip, as the train sped through the lazy fat summer fields and the factories and houses of villages and towns, she offered a voluble mixture of sympathy, advice, compassion, suggestion, and vows of loyalty and silence. She had taken it for granted, she said, that Lora would resort to abortion; her voice was shrill and her eyes gleamed with excitement as she said abortion. But she was even more excited by the news that Lora meant to go through with it. This was where the suggestions mainly entered; she offered a dozen different plans in astonishing elaboration of detail, and was willing to help with any of them. She would not breathe a word, not a word to a living soul.

Lora pressed her hand. “If you love me, Cece.”

“I won’t, don’t you worry. I can keep my mouth shut.”

Apparently she did, for Lora detected no whisper during their two weeks’ stay. Her mother, paler and more tearful than ever, obviously saw nothing to arouse her suspicions, and her father was scarcely curious enough to ask about her progress with the piano lessons. He was more aloof than ever; it appeared to have become habitual with him to spend practically all of his evenings away from home, at the lodge perhaps, or the movies, or the library — Mrs. Winter professed to know nothing about it and he vouchsafed nothing. Only on the train on the way back to Chicago did Lora realize how little she had seen of him.