WORLD'S END

The girl stayed his trembling hands. "You mustn't, Lanny. It wouldn't be safe." Then she whispered: "I'll have to go to the house first, and get something."

So they got up and walked. Lanny found his knees shaking, which perplexed him greatly. It must be what the French novelists call la grande passion! He waited some distance from the house while Rosemary went in - as it happened, there was company and no one paid any heed to her. Presently she came back, and they lost themselves in a secluded part of the garden, and there she taught him those things about which he had been so curious. At first his agitation was painful, but presently he was dissolved in a flood of bliss, which seemed to justify the theories of the "new women." If he was happy and she was happy, why should the vague and remote "world" of their elders concern itself with their affairs?

VI

It wasn't long before Lanny told his mother about this affair. Impossible not to, because she asked pointed questions, and it would have been hurting her feelings to evade. Beauty's reaction to the disclosure was a peculiar one. She had been what you might call a practicing feminist, but without any theories; she had had her own way about love, but always with the proper feeling that she was doing wrong. It was hard to explain, but that feeling seemed necessary; you knew it was wrong, and that made it right. But to assert that it was right was a shocking boldness. And when a girl was only seventeen!' "Was she virgin?" asked Beauty, and added with distaste: "Certainly she didn't act like it." Lanny didn't know and couldn't make inquiries.

Beauty couldn't altogether dislike Rosemary, but she never got over the idea that there was something alarming about her - a portent of a new world that Beauty didn't understand. The mother's feeling was that her dear little boy had been seduced, and that he was much too young. She took the problem to her husband, but failed to get him excited. "Nature knows a lot more about that than you do," said the painter, and went on painting.

Springtime again on the Riviera, to Lanny the most delightful he had ever known. The flesh of woman was revealed to him, and the discovery transfused everything else in his life. The world and every common sight to him did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Now for the first time he knew what music was about, and poetry, and dancing, not to mention the birds and the butterflies. The flowers had the colors of Rosemary, and she had their perfume. She was to him a being of magic, and when he was with her he never wanted to take his eyes from her, and when he wasn't with her he wished he was.

Of course he couldn't be with her all the time; because "what would people say?" The "world" did matter after all, it appeared. Cool and serene, Rosemary took charge. Lanny must go on with his studying, and not make her feel that she was a bad influence. When they boated and swam and played tennis, they must be with other young people, for appearance' sake; and the same in the evening-there must be some sort of pretext, a dance, a party, a sail - the young people all understood that, they all had the same desires, and would stroll away in couples, casually and innocently. They protected one another, a conspiracy of the new against the old.

Did Rosemary succeed in fooling her mother and her aunt? In those early days of the revolt of youth the old were in a peculiar state of emotional paralysis. They didn't dare to know; it was too awful to let themselves know - and yet of course they did. They would look at the young with fright in their eyes, and seldom dare to speak - for what could they say? Rosemary had given her answer in advance - she wanted to go out and earn her own living. Girls were nursing, they were; even getting jobs in munitions factories, wearing black overalls and filling shells with explosives. They were going out on the streets delivering tirades, calling on men to enlist, pinning white feathers on those who looked as if they ought to. And the things they were reading, and left around the house, careless of who might see them!

It had been prior to the outbreak of the war that Rosemary had fallen under the spell of one of those suffragettes - a teacher, it was. Still a child, with pigtails down her back, she had walked into the National Gallery with a hand ax concealed under her skirt, and at a prearranged signal had passed it to one of those notorious women who hadn't dared bring it in herself, because she was known and might be searched. And that not a crazy whim or a lark, but a means of reforming the world! Something they took up as a religion, for which they were willing to die! You might put them in jail, but they would only try to starve themselves to death; you wanted to say to the devil with them and let them do it, but you didn't dare.

VII