The Penalty

Excerpt

THE PENALTY

I

The number of love affairs which intervened between Barbara Ferris's first one, when she was eleven, and her twenty-second birthday could not have been counted on the fingers of her two hands. Many boys, many men, had seemed wonderfully attractive to her. She did not know why. She knew only that the attraction seemed strong and eternal while it lasted, and that it never lasted long. She was sixteen before she began to consider herself a heartless, flirtatious, unstable, jilting sort of a girl. When she made this discovery, she was terribly ashamed, and for one long depressing year fell in love with nobody, became very shy, and hated herself. It was during this year that she had her first, last, and only touch of mania. It lasted only a little while and was not acute. She got the idea that she was being watched, spied on, and followed. But she was too strong in body and mind to give in for long to so silly an hallucination. And when she had dismissed the second man and her maid, who had particularly excited her suspicions, the mania left her, as a dream leaves at waking.

In her seventeenth year she was presented to society, and became an immense favorite. There were excellent reasons for this: she was lovely to look at, she would inherit a great deal of money, she had charming natural manners, and she was sweet-tempered.

During her second season she had an unpleasant experience. She had almost reached an understanding with a certain young man with whom she fancied herself in love. They were spending a Saturday to Monday at a great place on Long Island. On Sunday night, her host, a man old enough to be her father, invited her to see his rose garden by moonlight. She accepted this invitation as a matter of course. Pacing down a path between tall privet hedges, her host, who for some minutes seemed to have lost the use of his tongue, made her a sudden impassioned declaration of love, seized her in his arms, and kissed her wherever he could with a kind of dreadful fury. For half a minute she stood still as a statue. Then, crimson with shame and anger, she wrenched free, and struck him heavy blows on the face and head with her strong young fists. She beat him, not indeed to insensibility, but to his senses. They returned to the house after a time, and entered the drawing-room talking in lazy, natural voices and praising the beauty of the night and of the garden. Not even Barbara's lover suspected that anything out of the common had happened.

Barbara, having played half a dozen rubbers of bridge with the great skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she had never been born.

It seemed terrible to her that she could at once be in love with one man and enjoy the kisses of another....