STREETS AND HOUSES
189
face,
to
escape unseen. For in a flash she realized that no matter what
she had told herself she had never got over Sally, that the fact of their
intimacy as girls had never been reconciled in her mind with the fact
of their really strange and venomous parting. Nor had her affection
for Sally ever been reconciled with her dismay at a perversity that
had always, even during the height of their confidences in each other,
kept Sally a hair's breadth the wrong side of honesty and had, after
their parting, caused her resentment of it to flare: up into fury. She
had felt taken in- since she herself was perhaps too completely honest
she felt her good faith abused by Sally's disingenuousness.
If
disinge–
nuousness had been all she would have hidden her face gladly, but it
was no more all of Sally than hatred had been all of their old friend–
ship. And suddenly in the midst of all this she found in herself also
excitement and an uneasy anticipation.
Now Sally had turned and was coming down the aisle, looking
(crisply blonde and blue-eyed still) , walking, closing her bag with a
snap, lifting her chin exactly as she did as a
girl,
and quick, impatient,
straining, even in a walk down the aisle of a streetcar, to get away
somewhere, with the same restless dissatisfaction Margaret remem–
bered so well. "Sally, Sally!" Margaret called, her tone low but
pointed nevertheless with intensity and an amazed laugh, and she
put out her hand to Sally's arm.
Sally looked down, startled, as the hand reached out to her arm
and touched it. Then she recognized the upturned, brilliant face,
radiantly excited. "Margaret!" she cried, vexation making her jerk
her arm away. But after vexation came a burst of joy as she thought–
why not be friends again? Both showed in her face, and Margaret,
having just experienced them herself, laughed, and Sally laughed too.
"What in the world are you doing here? ... " Sally asked, bending
down.
Margaret said almost ecstatically, "Visiting ... " and looked into
her face as
if
she would never look away again.
Margaret's candid admission to being moved affected Sally deep–
ly, but at the same time she
~retted
at the clumsiness of their situation
as she stood by Margaret's side, feeling ridiculous because there were
still a few empty seats. But as she saw that Margaret was equally
unwilling to be an object of interest in the streetcar, Sally preferred
for an instant to accentuate the awkwardness by shrugging satirically,
seizing Margaret's hand and squeezing it, bending exaggeratedly for–
ward to allow a gentleman to get by, before she would join with Mar–
garet
in
a silent beaming as the best form of greeting they could
manage. (They were so circumspect, she saw, that only the woman
