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

“Let’s go home,” he was saying.

“What? For the night?” she asked bitterly, knowing nevertheless that she would go.

“Come and see,” and she got up with him and went out, too dazed with her recovered happiness to say goodbye to Billy.

“Look!” And he showed her a bouquet of deep red roses. “They are a little withered, see? I cleaned up the house and bought them for you yesterday and then I saw that book and just couldn’t bring you home. What did you do with it?” he asked7 suspiciously.

“I threw it in the nearest ash can when I went over to Billy’s that night,” June said, but she didn’t add that she had finished it after he had left.

Spring came and with it that tormenting song, “The Missouri Waltz.” Played on hand organs, on neighboring phonographs, hummed by the two little girls who lived upstairs and who played in the back garden under June’s window all day long. The strains of it colored that season for her.

There was not very much to write about her now. She felt no longer that life was complicated. She no longer wondered and worried about herself and what she was going to do with her life. In fact she scarcely thought at all. She never thought about the Flame or the Clarion. It was by chance that she noticed that the editors of the magazine had finally been brought to trial after many delays, and dismissed. She read the notice in the paper with indifference. She heard that Hugh and Kenneth had both married and she was not interested enough to call on them to meet their wives.

Billy wrote to her that Terry Wode was going to China and that Ivan was leaving for Monte Carlo and asking her if she would not like to attend their going-away parties. “What is the matter with you,” Billy underlined the words heavily. “Are you dead or something?”

June would admit that there was something the matter with her. But she did not take the trouble to answer the letter. She was in love. That was all there was to it. When you were in love you couldn’t be anything else. When Dick was with her, she felt alive and completely satisfied. When he was away from her, she went around in a dream, living only with the image of him which was constantly with her.

One can understand how authors leave their heroines in the arms of her lover on the last page of the last chapter. There is so little you can say⁠—that is, until the two have incorporated their dream into their daily life and woven the spell of it through everything.

June probably could have written about herself and her lover, day after day and page after page without ever realizing that she was repeating herself.

The trouble was, she did not take her love affair and Dick as something she could incorporate into her life. He was not hers and this love was not hers. She had just come upon it by chance and snatched it to her. She knew she would not have it very long. Dick’s rather mocking attitude of casualness constantly reminded her of that. None of his plans for the future included her. At present he was working in the publicity department of a moving picture company, but he planned to act in the same capacity in the fall for a circus which had offered him the work when it made its southern tour.

“I love you, June, I love you more than anything else in the world, today. But I can’t say how I’ll feel tomorrow. It was my very good fortune to have been chucked out of that Furman Street saloon and into the hospital where you were. I have never loved anyone before and I never shall again probably. It’s just as well. It’s a very wearing emotion. Won’t you be glad to be free of it?”

“I only wish that with every kiss I give you a little of my life would leave me. It would be a lovely way to die, providing I could arrange it with God that my death would coincide with the moment you stopped loving me.”

“You nasty little thing. And think what a nuisance it would be for me. How’d I raise enough money to pay for a funeral?

“Anyway, I intend to leave you long before I stop loving you. I’d rather do it abruptly and go through the agony of parting from you than have my passion die out slowly. Unfortunately, you can’t stop loving as suddenly as you begin. Besides I want to see you for the last time when all the glamour of my affection is still there. You probably have no idea how beautiful and mysterious you are to me. It’s a continual torment to live with you.

“You are not beautiful but you appeal so to the imagination that I think all the poems in the world were written about you.

“And while I’m living with you, I’m not just living with you alone. When I hold you in my arms at night, you’re not June. I’m kissing a little street girl from Montmartre whom I’m keeping with me for the night; or you’re an eastern woman capable of any viciousness and with a knowledge of all the secret sins. Or I like to imagine you as cold and chaste, passively yielding to me because I’m stronger than you. You’ve taken the place to me of all the women in all books whom I thought I could have loved.”

The summer passed and the winter came again. Dick and June continued to live as though every day would be their last together. It added a delight to their relationship that was often indistinguishable from the keenest pain.

June often rebelled against it and there were afternoons when she walked the streets, or took bus rides, watching the women shopping on Fifth Avenue, looking at the homes of all