The Joys of Love Read Free Page B

bound to be something bad or she wouldn’t call.” Elizabeth frowned and tried to imagine what particular bad thing might be responsible for the call.
    â€œNow, don’t go brooding, Liz,” Jane told her severely. “John Peter says you worry too much about things, and he’s right.”
    Elizabeth sat down in Mr. Price’s swivel chair. “Aunt Harriet hated having me come here this summer. She’d do anything in the world to get me back. She thinks, as I believe I have told you before, that the theatre is an invention of Satan.”
    â€œWhat gets me,” Jane said, sitting on a corner of the desk and resting her delicate feet on the edge of the big tin wastepaper
basket, “is if she hates the theatre so, why did she let you come here in the first place? She gives you the twenty a week room and board, doesn’t she?”
    â€œI wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Elizabeth picked up a glass paperweight that had a snowman in it, and shook it to set up a cloud of snowflakes falling inside. She watched it intently. “Father didn’t have a penny when he died. Teachers don’t make much money, as you know, and Father didn’t even teach in a university—he taught at a boys’ school—and he didn’t have any sense about money anyhow. Aunt Harriet took me because it was her Christian duty, and not because she wanted me. Please, Jane, if you ever see me doing anything because it’s my Christian duty, stop me.”
    â€œYou aren’t apt to,” Jane said. “You’re too good a Christian.”
    Elizabeth smiled at her, then looked at the snow that was still falling, very gently now, inside the glass globe. “It was kind of a bet. Aunt Harriet doesn’t make bets, of course, but that’s what it was.”
    â€œWhat was the bet?” Jane asked, upsetting the wastepaper basket and spilling papers all over the floor. “Darn,” she said, and got down on her hands and knees to clean up the mess. It always amazed Elizabeth that in positions that would make anybody else look awkward, Jane still managed to be graceful.
    â€œShe said that if I’d major in chemistry at Smith instead of dramatic arts, and if I graduated with honors, she’d let me go to a summer theatre.” Elizabeth, too, was now down on her hands and knees, helping Jane cram papers back into the basket. “I guess she thought if I majored in chemistry I might forget about the theatre. Well, I didn’t forget about the theatre
and it was kind of a challenge, so I just managed to squeak through with honors, no magna or summa cum laude, just plain cum laude, but anyhow it was honors and she hadn’t specified. She made a fuss and tried to get out of it but I’d already got my scholarship here so I threw a scene about her word being no good and how hard I’d worked and how little twenty dollars is to her and all that. I was really stinking, Jane. I feel terribly ashamed whenever I think about it. But I had to do it, and no matter how guilty I feel I know I’d do it again.”
    â€œYes, I know,” Jane said, sitting down on the floor and leaning back against the wall. “I’ve never seen anyone look more determined than you did last spring in Price’s office.”
    Â 
    That day in Mr. Price’s office in New York, Elizabeth thought now, had been the turning point of her whole life. If it had not been for that day last spring, none of the summer—working in the theatre, getting to know Kurt, beginning a completely new life—would have been possible.
    Even then she had been aware of it. Sitting in the anteroom of Mr. Price’s office, she had thought, How strange to know that the whole course of my life can be changed today in this dingy office.
    But it was true. It was so frighteningly true that her hands had felt cold with fear and her heart had beat so fast that for a moment she was afraid that