At the end of an hour, her attempt to smile had become a helpless, bewildered plea. Then the smile went, as she watched the people around her. She saw that the trim, confident girls had a nasty insolence of manner when they spoke to Jim, as if they did not respect him and never had. One of them in particular, a Betty Pope, the daughter of the hostess, kept making remarks to him which Cherryl could not understand, because she could not believe that she understood them correctly.
No one had paid any attention to her, at first, except for a few astonished glances at her gown. After a while, she saw them looking at her. She heard an elderly woman ask Jim, in the anxious tone of referring to some distinguished family she had missed knowing, "Did you say Miss Brooks of Madison Square?" She saw an odd smile on Jim's face, when he answered, making his voice sound peculiarly clear, "Yes —the cosmetics counter of Raleigh's Five and Ten." Then she saw some people becoming too polite to her, and others moving away in a pointed manner, and most of them being senselessly awkward in simple bewilderment, and Jim watching silently with that odd smile.
She tried to get out of the way, out of their notice. As she slipped by, along the edge of the room, she heard some man say, with a shrug, "Well, Jim Taggart is one of the most powerful men in Washington at the moment." He did not say it respectfully.
Out on the terrace, where it was darker, she heard two men talking and wondered why she felt certain that they were talking about her.
One of them said, "Taggart can afford to do it, if he pleases" and the other said something about the horse of some Roman emperor named Caligula.
She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance—and then she thought that she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him. Whatever they were, she thought, whatever their names and their money, none of them had an achievement comparable to his, none of them had defied the whole country to build a railroad everybody thought impossible. For the first time, she saw that she did have something to offer Jim: these people were as mean and small as the people from whom she had escaped in Buffalo; he was as lonely as she had always been, and the sincerity of her feeling was the only recognition he had found.
Then she walked back into the ballroom, cutting straight through the crowd, and the only thing left of the tears she had tried to hold back in the darkness of the terrace, was the fiercely luminous sparkle of her eyes. If he wished to stand by her openly, even though she was only a shop girl, if he wished to flaunt it, if he had brought her here to face the indignation of his friends—then it was the gesture of a courageous man defying their opinion, and she was willing to match his courage by serving as the scarecrow of the occasion.
But she was glad when it was over, when she sat beside him in his car, driving home through the darkness. She felt a bleak kind of relief, Her battling defiance ebbed into a strange, desolate feeling; she tried not to give way to it. Jim said little; he sat looking sullenly out the car window; she wondered whether she had disappointed him in some manner.
On the stoop of her rooming house, she said to him forlornly, "I'm sorry if I let you down . . ."
He did not answer for a moment, and then he asked, "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?"
She looked at him, she looked around them—there was a filthy mattress hanging on somebody's window sill, a pawnshop across the street, a garbage pail at the stoop beside them—one did not ask such a question in such a place, she did not know what it meant, and she answered, "I guess I . . . I haven't any sense of humor."
"This is a proposal, my dear."
Then this was the way they reached their first kiss—with tears running down her face, tears unshed at the party, tears of shock, of happiness, of thinking that this should be happiness, and of a low, desolate voice telling her that this was not the way she would have wanted it to happen.
She had not thought about the newspapers, until the day when Jim told her to come to his apartment and she found it crowded with people who had notebooks, cameras and flash bulbs. When she saw her picture in the papers for the first time—a picture of them together, Jim's arm around her—she giggled with delight and wondered proudly whether every person in the city had seen it. After a while, the delight vanished.
They kept photographing her at the dime-store counter, in the subway, on the stoop of the tenement house, in her miserable room. She would have taken money from Jim now and run to hide in some obscure hotel for the weeks of their engagement—but he did not offer it.
He seemed to want her to remain where she was. They printed pictures of Jim at his desk, in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal, by the steps of his private railway car, at a formal banquet in Washington.
