and Gilbert between them had set
her brain working--and she couldn't stop it. What if the time had come
already when she must pull herself together and face facts and play
what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply
couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said, she
would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "I care"
with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen. I don't know
quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty. I'm still not
much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed,
fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid. I know all
about that as well as they do. I'm making no pretense to be anything
different. Heaven knows, I'm frank enough about it--even to myself. But
it's only a phase. Why not let me get over it and live it down? If
there's anything good in me, and there is, it will come out sooner or
later. Why not let me go through it my own way? A few months to play
the fool in--it isn't much to ask, and don't I know what it means to be
old?"

She hadn't been along that passage before. It was Martin's side of the
house. She hadn't given much thought to Martin's side of anything. She
tried a door and opened it, fumbled for the button that would turn the
light on and found it. It was a large and usefully fitted dressing room
with a hanging cupboard that ran all along one wall, with several
doors. Two old shiny-faced English tallboys were separated by a boot
rack. Between the two windows was a shaving glass over a basin. There
was a bookcase on each side of the fire-place and a table conveniently
near a deep armchair with a tobacco jar, pipes and a box of cigarettes.
Every available space of wall was crammed with framed photographs of
college groups, some showing men with the whiskered faces and the
strange garments of the early Victorian period, others of the
clean-shaven men of the day, but all of them fit and eager and
care-free, caught in their happiest hours. It was a man's room,
arranged by one, now used by another.

Joan went through into the bedroom. The light followed her. There was
no Martin. It was all strangely tidy. Its owner might have been away
for weeks.

With a sense of chill and a feeling of queer loneliness, she went back
to the dressing room. She wanted Martin. If Martin had been there, she
would have had it all out with him, freely and frankly. Somehow she
couldn't wave away the idea any long