The wild night offered to those about the fire the opportunity of drawing together; but the uneasiness, the inexplicable, mutual distrust of people aware of strong cross-currents under the surface of living, separated them. Their common isolation, even their common shelter, failed to unite them.
The curiosity, careless or eager, with which they had met one another on the first evening—the interest for inexperienced personalities—had been replaced by a sharp, personal thread in the web propinquity weaves. Each was no longer a watcher of, but an actor in, a drama, and each more or less dissatisfied with the part assigned him.
Their undermined sociability was apparent in wandering eyes, shifting groups, flurries of talk running into blind alleys. Who could have helped through the interminable evening, would not. Julia refused to sing. Thair read. Longacre intrenched himself with round-cheeked Bessie Lewis against the fear of being asked to play. He was bored with his predicament, and puzzled as to why Florence had chosen to sit with Cissy and Holden.
Florence, irresolute, wretchedly at odds with herself, hated the sight of this collection of people. She was glad to get away to her room. The great sound of the wind, surging by the windows, helped to lull her struggling motives; and waking in the night to a gush of roaring rain, she felt singularly at peace, consoled by the unhesitating strength of the storm.
But the dull face of the next morning was a depressing outlook. The gray sheet of the storm blotted out dunes and sea. The close damp of the first rains, imperfectly dispersed by too lately kindled fires, filled the rooms with its vague discomfort.
The house-party displayed the hectic amiability of people whose breeding does not permit them to betray their disgust at being, for a number of days, cooped up together between the same four walls.
The youngsters’ ill-humor deplored the postponed hunting. The elders hopelessly cited instances of October rains that had cleared with the first sunset. Mrs. Budd apologized for the weather as she would have for an overdone entrée. Her guests responded in scattering chorus.
It was “jolly”—“a lark”—“just the thing for a quiet day!”—a round of deprecation that failed to leave them otherwise than chilly and damp. It was not an atmosphere that clung to them, but rather one they exhaled—one that existed in the face of the most flourishing of fires, that clouded the most amiable game of billiards, that sharpened the most friendly exchange of opinion. The out-of-doors that had offered such excellent opportunities for escaping themselves, or one another, was denied them. They were forced to face conditions that two days had created—conditions of which all understood too much to be unconcerned; of which no one knew the whole. Even Florence, who perhaps understood most, was bewildered completely on one point. But that was not Longacre’s place in the web. _His_ figure to her was clear in the foreground. His bewilderment in her sudden change; his endeavor to bridge this distance she had so suddenly forced between them, to win back what had been given and then so tacitly, so inexplicably withdrawn, made her suffer. That first day was little less than a battle between their two wills.