Eugene speculated deeply on how he should proceed. All at once, after this night, the whole problem of his life came before him. He was married; he was highly placed socially, better than he had ever been before. He was connected closely with Colfax, so closely that he feared him, for Colfax, in spite of certain emotional vagaries of which Eugene knew, was intensely conventional. Whatever he did was managed in the most offhand way and with no intention of allowing his home life to be affected or disrupted. Winfield, whom also Mrs. Dale knew, was also conventional to outward appearances. He had a mistress, but she was held tightly in check, he understood. Eugene had seen her at the new casino, or a portion of it, the East Wing, recently erected at Blue Sea, and he had been greatly impressed with her beauty. She was smart, daring, dashing. Eugene looked at her then, wondering if the time would ever come when he could dare an intimacy of that character. So many married men did. Would he ever attempt it and succeed?
Now that he had met Suzanne, however, he had a different notion of all this, and it had come over him all at once. Heretofore in his dreams, he had fancied he might strike up an emotional relationship somewhere which would be something like Winfield’s towards Miss De Kalb, as she was known, and so satisfy the weary longing that was in him for something new and delightful in the way of a sympathetic relationship with beauty. Since seeing Suzanne, he wanted nothing of this, but only some readjustment or rearrangement of his life whereby he could have Suzanne and Suzanne only. Suzanne! Suzanne! Oh, that dream of beauty. How was he to obtain her, how free his life of all save a beautiful relationship with her? He could live with her forever and ever. He could, he could! Oh, this vision, this dream!
It was the Sunday following the dance that Suzanne and Eugene managed to devise another day together, which, though, it was one of those semi-accidental, semi-voiceless, but nevertheless not wholly thoughtless coincidences which sometimes come about without being wholly agreed upon or understood in the beginning, was nevertheless seized upon by them, accepted silently and semi-consciously, semi-unconsciously worked out together. Had they not been very strongly drawn to each other by now, this would not have happened at all. But they enjoyed it none the less. To begin with, Mrs. Dale was suffering from a sick headache the morning after. In the next place, Kinroy suggested to his friends to go for a lark to South Beach, which was one of the poorest and scrubbiest of all the beaches on Staten Island. In the next place, Mrs. Dale suggested that Suzanne be allowed to go and that perhaps Eugene would be amused. She rather trusted him as a guide and mentor.
Eugene said calmly that he did not object. He was eager to be anywhere alone with Suzanne, and he fancied that some opportunity would present itself whereby once they were there, they could be together, but he did not want to show it. Once more the car was called and they departed, being let off at one end of a silly panorama which stretched its shabby length for a mile along the shore. The chauffeur took the car back to the house, it being agreed that they could reach him by phone. The party started down the plank walk, but almost immediately, because of different interests, divided. Eugene and Suzanne stopped to shoot at a shooting gallery. Next they stopped at a cane rack to ring canes. Anything was delightful to Eugene which gave him an opportunity to observe his inamorata, to see her pretty face, her smile, and to hear her heavenly voice. She rung a cane for him. Every gesture of hers was perfection; every look a thrill of delight. He was walking in some elysian realm which had nothing to do with the tawdry evidence of life about him.
They followed the boardwalk southward, after a ride in the Devil’s Whirlpool, for by now Suzanne was caught in the persuasive subtlety of his emotion and could no more do as her honest judgment would have dictated than she could have flown. It needed some shock, some discovery to show her whither she was drifting and this was absent. They came to a new dance hall, where a few servant girls and their sweethearts were dancing, and for a lark Eugene proposed that they should enter. They danced together again, and though the surroundings were so poor and the music wretched, Eugene was in heaven.
“Let’s run away and go to the Terra-Marine,” he suggested, thinking of a hotel farther south along the shore. “It is so pleasant there. This is all so cheap.”
“Where is it?” asked Suzanne.
“Oh, about three miles south of here. We could almost walk there.”
He looked down the long hot beach, but changed his mind.
“I don’t mind this,” said Suzanne. “It’s so very bad that it’s good, you know. I like to see how these people enjoy themselves.”
“But it is so bad,” argued Eugene. “I wish I had your live, healthy attitude toward things. Still we won’t go if you don’t want to.”
Suzanne paused, thinking. Should she run away with him? The others would be looking for them. No doubt they were already wondering where they had gone. Still it didn’t make so much difference. Her mother trusted her with Eugene. They could go.
“Well,” she said finally, “I don’t care. Let’s.”
“What will the others think?” he said doubtfully.
“Oh, they won’t mind,” she said. “When they’re ready, they’ll call the car. They know that I am with you. They know that I can get the car when I want it. Mama won’t mind.”
Eugene led the way back to a train which ran to Hugenot, their destination. He was beside himself with the idea of a day all alone with Suzanne. He did not stay to consider or give ear to a thought concerning Angela at home or how Mrs. Dale would view it. Nothing would come of it. It was not an outrageous adventure. They took the train south, and in a little while were in another world, on the veranda of a hotel that overlooked the sea. There were numerous autos of idlers like themselves in a court before the hotel. There was a great grassy lawn with swings covered by striped awnings of red and blue and green, and beyond that a pier with many little white launches anchored near. The sea was as smooth as glass and great steamers rode in the distance trailing lovely plumes of smoke. The sun was blazing hot, brilliant, but here on the cool porch waiters were serving pleasure lovers with food and drink. A quartette of negroes were singing. Suzanne and Eugene seated themselves in rockers at first to view the perfect day and later went down and sat in a swing. Unthinkingly, without words, these two were gradually gravitating toward each other under some spell which had no relationship to everyday life. Suzanne looked at him in the double seated swing where they sat facing each other and they smiled or jested aimlessly, voicing nothing of all the upward welling deep that was stirring within.
“Was there ever such a day?” said Eugene finally, and in a voice that was filled with extreme yearning. “See that steamer out there. It looks like a little toy.”
“Yes,” said Suzanne with a little gasp. She inhaled her breath as she pronounced this word which gave it an airy breathlessness which had a touch of demure pathos in it. “Oh, it is perfect.”
“Your hair,” he said. “You don’t know how nice you look. You fit this scene exactly.”
“Don’t speak of me,” she pleaded. “I look so tousled. The wind in the train blew my hair so I ought to go the ladies’ dressing room and hunt up a maid.”
“Stay here,” said Eugene. “Don’t go. It is all so lovely.”
“I won’t now. I wish we might always sit here. You, just as you are there, and I here.”
“Did you ever read the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the lines ‘Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave’?”
“Yes, yes,” she answered ecstatically.
“‘Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.'”
“Don’t, don’t,” she pleaded.
He understood. The pathos of that great thought was too much for her. It hurt her as it did him. What a mind!
They rocked and swung idly, he pushing with his feet at times in which labor she joined him. They strolled up the beach and sat down on a green clump of grass overlooking the sea. Idlers approached and passed. He laid his arm to her waist and held her hand, but something in her mood stayed him from any expression. Through dinner at the hotel it was the same and on the way to the train, for she wanted to walk through the dark. Under some tall trees, though, in the rich moonlight prevailing, he pressed her hand.