The Trespassers Read Online Free Page A

a moment she wished she were at home, where she could talk this out with people who would be as angry as she. Yet she had come alone all this way south partly at least to escape the political and social nervousness of New York and the people she knew. Remembering that, she got to her feet and started up along the curve of beach, along the shining spread of blue water. Her mind worked over the vast implications of the news.
    She was hailed half a dozen times, by people she had come to know in the three weeks since she had come down. Their voices, their words, showed they had not heard, or else had heard and already dismissed the news from their thoughts. That angered her, too.
    She walked on more briskly. Her body was a dark, positive brown, already impervious to the stinging sun. In the flushed dark of her tanned face, the light, clear gray of her eyes was startling and compelling. Her warmly brown hair blew about, wavy and free, springing back from the ribbon tied about her head. She was small and slim; the brief white bathing suit gave her a long-legged look that made her seem taller than she was.
    For all her regular features and gray eyes, she carried in her face somewhere a slightly foreign look, the look of Magyar or Slav or Central European. It was there in the deep socketing of the wide-set eyes, in the high cheekbones; it was in the rather large mouth and the quick mobility of her expression. She was no good at dissembling what she felt; she could not act a part with any skill whatever.
    Now as she strode along, she was disturbed and she looked disturbed. She wondered what Jasper felt when he had heard the news from Europe. It must have held a special prod for him, and a special meaning. Everything now was translated into the vigorous language of his own purpose. That was inevitable, she knew. She could imagine the very words he was saying this moment up there in New York.
    Before the quiet British voice with the Reuter’s dispatch had broken into her thoughts, she had been lying on the busy, bright beach, lazying through thoughts and memories as they came. If a vacation alone had any special merit to recommend it, it surely lay in the opportunity to think, to browse through her mind and her memories, as if she were browsing through some dim library open only to herself, where each book on every shelf was an autobiography of some phase of her own life. As she lay on the sand, thinking, this notion struck her; it pleased her and made her smile faintly.
    One such volume in this secret library was titled Jasper and I ; that was the latest, the most absorbing, though it was still unfinished and Volume II still unwritten. Another was named My Marriage and Divorce; that seemed to be bound in some meaningless gray, and was on the whole a dull, mediocre thing, rather than a tragic one. Another was My Childhood , and another, My Success Story—Don’t Make Me Laugh.
    There were many other volumes there, some short, some very long, some seemed bound in flamboyant scarlet leathers and others in the prosy cloth of schoolbooks. But one volume was missing—the restless, heated discussions of politics among her friends at home always served as a reminder of the gap. Yet this book could not be there until she herself had formulated its contents. It could never be there until she herself knew what it was she really stood for, found the continuing pattern she could live by. As yet she couldn’t even catch up this ghostly volume with any title at all, so formless was it. But someday it would be there too, and it would be a blessed book, an unquenchable book.
    Until it was there, she would have a nameless unrest and searching. Neither her marriage, nor her work, nor her love affair with Jasper had quieted the one and given answer to the other.
    She envied the positive ones, the devout Catholics, the ecstatic Communists, the untroubled devotees of any “cause.” They no longer were a-search. They knew ; they had their purpose. But