The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

comes along and everybody in the whole house has entered into a conspiracy against me. They’re all making coffee. Smell it? Good ole coffee. June, get up and make my moral support.”

June looked at her watch and found that it was almost eleven. “But I’ve got to run up and see Dick,” she protested when she came out of the bath.

“You little idiot,” Billy sat up in bed in indignation. “Let him come down here after you. He went off in a huff. He isn’t tired of you yet. You can tell that by the way he acts. How long have you been with him?”

“Since the first of September and now it’s December. But I was really with him all summer in the hospital. We spent all our days together.” June wanted to cry but she took a swallow of hot coffee instead. It tasted so good that she decided to take Billy’s advice.

Later in the afternoon when her resolution wavered, she realized it was too late. He would not be there if she went home, and there she could not get in if he was not. She could only hope that he would meet her in the café where she often joined him after the theatre. It was a forlorn hope to feed upon. Until then, she could only sit in Billy’s dim studio and read. Now that the hard winter sun had gone down and the lamps were being lit along the street, her surroundings seemed very tawdry. She hid her face against the cushions of the sofa where she was curled up and repeated his name over and over. “God, how I want him,” was the cry she kept making.

They had a pickup supper in the room and afterward while June cleared up Billy continued the pen and ink illustration which she was making for a magazine.

But although June sat around with the “old” crowd in the café that night as she had done before she entered the hospital, Dick didn’t appear on the scene.

She went to see him the next morning when she knew he would be home.

“Did you come for your things?” he asked her brutally. He was sitting by the window as he had been that first night she had come to him and although she sat on his knee and twined her arms around his neck he did not stop filing his fingernails.

“I’ve beastly manners, haven’t I?” he asked her grinning. “Well, you can kiss me if you want to.”

But he met her more than halfway in the kiss and they were swept away by it. She could feel him trembling as he picked her up and carried her into the next room.

“I do love you,” he told her later, “but I can get along without you too. Better run along now. I’m going out pretty soon.”

She hated him desperately while she packed her things. But she refused to hate herself. “I don’t care. I’d sacrifice everything in the world for him,” and then stopped her packing. “I don’t see why I should take my things,” she said aloud.⁠ ⁠… “I won’t.” She hurled her suitcase back in the closet.

“You’ve got to go,” he reminded her gently, but she knew he meant it.

“I’m going to sit and wait in that café,” she informed him stubbornly as she stood by the door, pulling on her gloves, “from the time it opens in the morning until it closes at night. So you’ll know where to find me.”

Tony, the waiter, was a good friend of hers. “What are you doing around here so early in the morning?” he asked her the next day.

“I’m going to sit in here from eleven in the morning until one at night for three days,” said June, pleasantly. “I have a special purpose.”

“It’s a good enough place to sit and you’ll have plenty of company. So far as I can see, that gang of artists or whatever they call themselves hang out around here all the time. Will you tell me when they work? I ask you now.”

June couldn’t tell him, but she was relieved to find out that the “crowd” made up of reporters and young writers and artists who were out of a job and never tried to get one, still clung to the old place. She had been there seldom in the last eighteen months, and in the last four, only after eleven o’clock at night with Dick.

At least she wouldn’t be conspicuous in keeping her vigil. And keep it she would.

Billy and Bryant dropped in several times that day and evening and Bryant, unwittingly, was the cause of further mischief.

He presented her with a volume of Zuleika Dobson to while away the time with, and placed her name and his inside the cover. He had a large library and had often given her books in the two years she had known him.

But Dick came in late that night and took a seat by her side. “How are you, child?” She was suddenly made lighthearted and gay by the affection in his voice.

But he reached over to look at the book which she was reading and noticed her name with “from Bryant” under it. He looked at her a moment with lifted eyebrows and then getting up casually, sauntered out. Fortunately, Billy and Ivan and several others whom June did not know were sitting with her, so she had to resist the temptation to scream. Pure rage choked her. But it did not keep her from loving Dick desperately.

Dick joined the table the next night again, and spoke to her cheerfully. He was trying to torment her, she thought. But rather endure this agony of his casual presence than watch the doors and listen for the telephone bell to ring.

Billy had told her she was a fool. So she was. A line of Scripture flashed through her mind, “We are all fools for Christ’s sake.” She laughed suddenly and Dick took hold of her hand which was hanging