I

Nevertheless, seven days later, as Jane stood on the platform of the Bay State Limited in the Boston South Station, waving goodbye to Stephen and the children and Miss Parrot, she felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. She was always absurd over partings. That very morning, on the front porch at Gull Rocks, when she was saying goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Carver and Uncle Stephen and Aunt Marie, she had felt a sudden surge of emotion. They were all over sixty. She wouldn’t see them for another ten months. They had been awfully good to her. The congenital peculiarities of Carvers already seemed harmless. Jane had embraced her relatives-in-law with ardour.

And now, at the sight of the little smiling, waving group on the dingy platform, Jane had an almost irresistible impulse to jump off the New York train and return to the West with her family at half-after two that afternoon.

“Mumsy!” shouted Cicily, hanging on Stephen’s arm. “Can I order the meals ’til you get home?”

“Don’t you let her!” cried Jenny, tripping over the cocker-spaniel puppy’s leash in her excitement. “She’d forget and we’d starve!”

“Now, don’t worry about anything, Mrs. Carver,” called Miss Parrot, almost losing her balance as little Steve tugged at her hand. He was on his knees on the platform, peering under the train.

“I want to see the air brakes!” he cried.

“Have a whirl with Agnes,” smiled Stephen. “Don’t let that husband cramp your style!”

“I won’t,” said Jane. “But I know I’ll hate him.”

The train jerked into motion. Jane pushed by the porter to the step of the car.

“Kiss me again, Stephen!” she cried. Stephen jumped to the step beside her. She raised her lips to his. Suddenly he realized that she was crying.

“Goodbye, goose!” he said tenderly. As the train gathered speed, he swung back on the platform.

“Don’t worry!” called Miss Parrot again, dragging little Steve to his feet. The children were all waving wildly. Stephen threw a last kiss.

The porter led Jane firmly back into the vestibule and closed the train doors. She couldn’t see the family any longer. She hoped Miss Parrot would hold little Steve’s hand until they were out of the train-shed. It would be just like him to run out on the tracks. But she would, of course. She was very responsible.

Jane made her way slowly back through the narrow Pullman corridor to her seat in the parlour car. She was really off. She had not been in New York since she came home from Europe, eight years before. It would be fun to see Agnes again. The children would be perfectly safe with Miss Parrot. And she would be home in a week.

II

The heat of the September day still pervaded the city streets as Jane descended from the top of the Fifth Avenue bus and turned, a trifle uncertainly, under the arch, to walk south and west across Washington Square. Jane had had very little experience in looking after herself and she always felt a trifle uncertain when wandering alone in strange places. Earlier that very afternoon, in emerging from the Bay State Limited, she had found the congested turmoil of the Grand Central Station a little overwhelming. It had seemed quite an adventure to choose a black porter and follow him as he threaded his way through the crowded concourse and out past the swinging doors through the traffic of Forty-Second Street to the lobby of the Belmont Hotel.

Jane had felt just a little queer, as she stood alone at the desk, her luggage at her feet, signing the register and asking for a single room and bath for the night. It was perfectly ridiculous⁠—she was thirty-six years old⁠—but Jane really couldn’t remember ever having spent a night alone at a hotel before. She was very glad that Flora and Mr. Furness would join her at noon next day and greatly relieved to discover that a letter from Agnes was waiting for her, confirming her invitation to dinner and containing explicit directions as to how to reach the Greenwich Village flat.

“Come at six,” Agnes had written. “I get out of Macy’s at five-thirty and I’ll be there before you.”

She was perhaps a trifle early, reflected Jane, as she paused in the path to reassure herself as to just which direction was west. She had allowed too much time for the bus ride through the afternoon traffic. She had been glad to get out of her hotel bedroom. Once her bag was unpacked, there was nothing to do there but stare through the dingy lace curtain, which had seemed at once curiously starched and soiled, at the taxis and streetcars that congested Forty-Second Street and the crowds of suburbanites who were pouring into the entrance of the Grand Central Station. She had watched the station clock for fifteen minutes and when the hands pointed to five she had left the room.

Washington Square, thought Jane, gazing curiously about her, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It didn’t look like the cradle from which a city’s aristocracy had sprung. There was a nice old row of redbrick houses at the north end, but many of them seemed rather gone to seed and dilapidated, and the grass in the Square was worn down to hard-caked mud and the elm trees were leafless, and the shirt-sleeved men and shawled women on the benches and the dirty little dark-eyed children who were playing marbles and hopscotch on the path were the kind that you would only see “west of Clark Street” at home.

Jane left the Square at the southwest corner and, referring once more to the written directions that Agnes had given her, plunged into the congestion of the city streets. This was a funny place to choose to live in, thought Jane, as she pushed through a group of pale-faced little girls, skipping rope on the sidewalk. It was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child. A group of shabby young men, hanging about the entrance of a corner saloon, commented favourably on her appearance as she approached them. Jane held her chin high and passed on in disdain. The green baize door swung open to admit an elderly hobo and Jane caught a whiff, across the stale heat of the pavement, of the acrid damp odour of beer. She thought the disreputable bar looked rather cool and dark and inviting from the glare of the city street. She could quite understand why the group of shabby young men liked to linger there.

At the next corner she stood amazed and delighted at the sight that met her eye. A curving vista of narrow street, flanked by tall redbrick houses trellised with iron fire escapes. The fire escapes were festooned with varicoloured washing and all the windows were wide open and the windowsills were hung with bedding. From nearly every window a dark-haired woman and a couple of children were hanging out, leaning on the bedding and gazing down at the street beneath them. The street itself was crowded with push carts and fruit stands. Great piles of golden oranges and yellow bananas were displayed for sale. Clothing hung fluttering from improvised frame scaffolds. A fish vendor was crying his wares at her elbow. The front steps of all the houses were crowded with people laughing and talking together and shouting to the purchasers that clustered about the open-air booths. The dingy store on the corner had a sign in its dirty window, “Ice⁠—kindling⁠—coal and charcoal.” A little olive-faced girl came out of it balancing an old peach basket on her head. It contained a melting lump of ice. She skipped gaily down the street and vanished into a basement entrance. The store on the opposite corner had a foreign sign in the doorway. “Ravioli. Qui si vende Pasta Caruso. Speciahtà in Pasta Fresca.” Jane was suddenly enchanted with Greenwich Village. Still⁠—it was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child.

Presently she came to Agnes’s corner. Charlton Street was quite broad and paved with cobblestones. A car-track ran down the centre of the street. The houses on both sides were built of red brick, with white frame doorways. Nice white-panelled front doors with fanlights above them and brass knobs and knockers, some brightly polished. The windows were all square-paned and many of the houses had green window-boxes. The plants in them were drab and shrivelled, however, in the city heat. Jane did not see a single flower.

Agnes’s house was in the centre of the block. It looked just like all the others. There was a sign in the downstairs front window, “Furnished Room. Gents Preferred.” Jane mounted the front steps and regarded the empty hole, where a doorbell had once hung, for a moment in perplexity. Then she pushed open the front door. She found herself in a small white-panelled vestibule, carpeted with yellow linoleum. Three mailboxes met her eye and on the middle one a card, “Mr. and Mrs. James Trent.” She pushed the electric bell beneath the mailbox and, after a minute or two in which absolutely nothing happened, she opened the inner door. The odour of cooking cabbage instantly assailed her nostrils. The entrance to the first apartment was on her left hand. A white-panelled door, soiled with countless fingerprints. A straight, steep staircase, with uncarpeted wooden treads, led to the upper floors. Jane slowly ascended the stairs into comparative darkness. The odour of cooking cabbage grew fainter. At the front end of the upper corridor was a second white-panelled door. Jane knocked at it tentatively. She heard, immediately, the sound of masculine footsteps and the airy notes of a masculine whistle, a fragment of “La Donna e mobile” from Rigoletto. The door was suddenly opened by a young man. He stood smiling at her on the threshold. A rather charming young man, with tousled dark hair and an open collar, who looked, Jane thought from the dusk of the corridor, with his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun.

“Come in,” he said pleasantly.

“I⁠—I’m looking for Mrs. James Trent,” said Jane.

“Come in,” the young man repeated. Jane stepped, a little hesitantly, over the threshold. “You must be Jane.” His smile deepened into a grin of appreciation. “You don’t look at all as I thought you would. Come in and sit down. Agnes will be home any minute.” Then, as she continued to stare at him in perplexity, “I’m Jimmy.”

Jane’s eyes widened with astonishment. This boy, Jimmy⁠—Agnes’s husband? He did not look a day over twenty-five. Jane knew he was thirty-four, however.

“Oh⁠—how do you do?” she said. “Yes⁠—I’m Jane.”

Agnes’s living-room was pleasantly old-fashioned. The ceiling was high and was decorated with a rococo design in plaster that looked, Jane thought, like the top of a wedding cake. A charming Victorian mantel of white marble dominated one end of the room. It was adorned with a bas-relief of cupids holding horns of plenty in their chubby arms. The cupids were dusty and the hearth was discoloured and the fireplace was filled with sheets of musical manuscript, torn in twain. Two tall chintz-hung windows looked over Charlton Street and a battered davenport sofa was placed beneath them. The sofa was strewn with other sheets of music, and a violin lay on a pile of disordered cushions in one corner. The top of the mantelpiece was piled with books, and a high white bookcase, filled with heterogeneous volumes, occupied one end of the room. A small gate-legged table, covered with a clean linen cloth, stood near the hearth, with an armchair on one side of it and a child’s Shaker rocker on the other. Through the half-open folding-doors across from the fireplace Jane caught a glimpse of a little room that was evidently a nursery. The floor was strewn with toys and a white iron crib stood near the window.

“Sit down,” said Jimmy, throwing an armful of music from the sofa to the floor. “Hot as hell, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I’m very early,” said Jane, sitting down in the armchair.

“No. Agnes is late,” said Jimmy. He was standing before the Victorian mantel, still regarding her with an appreciative grin. “You look as cool as a cucumber in that blue silk. Maybe I ought to put on my coat.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane politely. She hadn’t noticed his shirtsleeves until that moment.

“Well, anyway, a necktie,” persisted Jimmy engagingly, fingering his open collar.

“You look very nice and Byronic as you are,” smiled Jane.

“I know I do,” said Jimmy rather surprisingly. “I get away with a lot of that Byron stuff. But just the same I think I owe that French frock a cravat.” He walked across the room as he spoke and, opening a door, disappeared into the inner recesses of the apartment.

Jane, left to herself, began to inspect the room once more without rising from her chair. Her eyes wandered to the high bookcase. She recognized some old Bryn Mawr books that had adorned, for two years, the walls of her Pembroke study. The two small blue volumes of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The green Globe editions of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The Buxton Forman Keats and Shelley. The Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists. And the long dark red line of Matthew Arnold and Pater.

The sound of running water from the interior of the apartment distracted her attention. Jimmy was a great surprise. She had never thought that he would be like that. She glanced at the sheets of music on the sofa. The one on top of the pile was half-filled with pencilled notations. He must have been writing music. Evidently he was a composer on the side. Agnes had never mentioned that.

The door to the inner rooms opened suddenly and Jimmy reappeared, freshly washed and brushed, his collar rebut-toned, and a soft blue necktie bringing out the colour in his smiling eyes. He picked up his coat from the back of the sofa and put it on with a sigh.

“What men do for women!” he murmured as he adjusted his collar.

“What women do for men!” laughed Jane. “This dress is French, but it’s fearfully hot.”

“I bet you didn’t put it on for me!” grinned Jimmy. Jane’s blush acknowledged the home thrust. “You just wanted to show Agnes how well you’d withstood the assaults of time.”

Jane had thought Agnes might think the dress was pretty. Not that Agnes ever noticed clothes, of course.

“You must have been an infant prodigy,” went on Jimmy. He was sitting on the sofa now, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed flatteringly on her face.

“Why?” asked Jane unguardedly.

“To have been Agnes’s classmate,” said Jimmy promptly.

Jane frowned. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all. That was no way for Agnes’s husband to speak of Agnes.

“I wish she’d come home,” she said with severity.

“Do you?” smiled Jimmy. “Well, she will soon. She stops at the Play School every evening to bring home the child. It began again last week, thank God! Another day of vacation and I should have committed infanticide.”

Jane did not reply to this sally. She continued to look, very seriously, at Jimmy. But he rattled on, ignoring her silence.

“A Play School is a wonderful invention. It takes children off their parents’ hands for nine hours a day. I call it immoral⁠—but very convenient. So much immorality is merely convenience, isn’t it? We resort to it, faute de mieux. Saloons and play schools and brothels⁠—they’re all cheap compromises, forced on us by civilization. In an ideal Utopia I suppose we’d all drink and love and bring up our children at home. Do it and like it⁠—though that seems rather a contradiction in terms. Progressive education is really only one of many symptoms of decadence. It’s a sign of the fall of the empire.” He paused abruptly and looked charmingly over at Jane, as if waiting for her applause. Jane felt an inexplicable impulse not to applaud him.

“That’s all very clever,” she said quickly. “But of course it isn’t true.”

Jimmy burst into amiable laughter.

“So you are a pricker of bubbles, are you, Jane?” he asked amusedly. “You certainly don’t look it. Are you a defender of the truth and no lover of dialectic for dialectic’s sake? Do beautiful rainbow-coloured bubbles, all made up of watery ideas and soapy vocabulary, floating airily, without foundation, in the void, mean nothing in your life?”

“Very little,” said Jane severely. “I’m a very practical person.”

“I seem to be a creature of one idea this afternoon,” said Jimmy lightly, “but I can only repeat⁠—you don’t look it! The picture you present, as you sit in that armchair, Jane, is far from practical⁠—”

As he spoke, Jane heard with relief the sound of a latchkey in the outer door.

“That’s Agnes!” she cried, springing to her feet.

“It must be,” said Jimmy, rising reluctantly to his.

The door opened quickly, and Agnes, hand in hand with her five-year-old daughter, stood beaming on the threshold. Just the same old Agnes, with her funny freckled face and her clever cheerful smile! No⁠—somehow a slightly plumper, rather more solid Agnes, with a certain maturity of gesture and authority of eye! Jane clasped her in her arms. It was not until the embrace was over that she noticed how grey Agnes’s hair had grown. It showed quite plainly under her broad hat-brim. Jane sank on her knees before the child. She looked a little pale and peaked, Jane thought, but she was Agnes all o’er again⁠—the little Agnes that Jane had known in the first grades of Miss Milgrim’s School! How preposterous⁠—how ridiculous⁠—to see that little Agnes once more in the flesh! How absurdly touching! Jane clasped the child gently in her arms.

“Agnes!” she cried. “She’s precious! She’s just like you!”

“Unfortunately,” remarked Agnes with mock criticism. “When she might have favoured her fascinating father! Whatever you may say against Jimmy, Jane, you have to admit he has looks. In six years of matrimony they’ve never palled on me.”

“Don’t talk like that, Agnes,” remonstrated Jimmy promptly. “You make me feel superficial. I’ve much more than looks. I’ve all the social graces. I’ve been exhibiting them for Jane’s benefit for the last twenty minutes and I leave it to her if my face is my fortune! I’ve many more important assets.”

“How about it, Jane?” said Agnes, smiling. “Did he make the grade?” Behind the smile Jane detected a gleam of real concern in Agnes’s glance. She suddenly recalled that winter afternoon, sixteen years ago, when she had first displayed Stephen to Agnes in Mr. Ward’s library on Pine Street. Handsome young Stephen, flushed from the winter cold! She remembered her own dismay at the unspoken verdict of “cotillion partner” in Agnes’s honest eyes.

“Y-yes,” she said slowly, with a twinkle, rising to her feet, still holding the child’s hand in hers. “I think he did⁠—for a first impression.”

“If anything,” said Jimmy engagingly, “I improve on acquaintance. I’m an acquired taste, like ripe olives. I feel that’s been said before. Let’s say I’m a bad habit, like nicotine or alcohol. Once you take me up, you’ll find it hard to get on without me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” said Agnes. She threw a glance at Jane to see how she was taking his banter.

“I was just warning her,” said Jimmy.

“Jane never needs much warning,” said Agnes.

“Now, that’s just the sort of thing she’s always said of you,” sighed Jimmy plaintively. “It gave me such a false impression. I’ve never been attracted by the type of woman who doesn’t need to be warned against a handsome man⁠—”

“Agnes,” interrupted Jane, “is he always like this?”

“Always,” said Agnes, with great good cheer. She looked distinctly relieved by Jane’s frivolous question. She knew now that Jane was taking Jimmy in the right spirit. “Sometimes he’s worse.” She placed her hand affectionately on Jimmy’s shoulder. “How did the music go today, old top?”

“Oh⁠—rotten!” said Jimmy lightly. “My rondo’s a flop.”

“He’s writing a concerto for the violin,” explained Agnes, with a glance at the music on the sofa.

“Really?” cried Jane, honestly impressed. Then, turning to Jimmy, “Aren’t you excited about it?”

He met her shining eyes with an ironical smile.

“Well,” he said calmly, “I’ve lost my first fine careless rapture. I’ve been writing it for ten years.”

“Some of it’s very good,” said Agnes.

“And some of it isn’t,” pursued Jimmy cheerfully.

“I want him to finish it,” said Agnes.

“And I’m eager to please,” said Jimmy. “So I sit here, day after day, pouring my full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art, while Agnes supports me in the style to which I was never accustomed before she laid me on the lap of luxury. I don’t get much done, however.”

His voice sounded a little discouraged, Jane thought, in spite of his levity. Agnes changed the subject abruptly.

“We’re dining out at a restaurant,” she said. “I won’t cook dinner in hot weather.”

“She’s a swell cook, you know,” said Jimmy to Jane.

“I’ve known it for twenty years,” said Jane to Jimmy.

“Come with me while I clean the child,” said Agnes. She opened the door through which Jimmy had vanished in quest of his necktie. It led into a narrow dark corridor. Agnes pushed open another door and Jane found herself in a bedroom. A very dark bedroom, with one corner window opening on a dingy airshaft.

“No electricity,” said Agnes. “It’s a curse.” She struck a match and lit a flaring gas-jet beside a maple bureau. The bureau and two iron beds completely filled the room. One bed was neatly made and covered with a cotton counterpane. The other was in complete disorder.

“Jimmy never gets up until after I’ve gone in the morning,” said Agnes apologetically, “so he never gets his bed made until I come home at night.” As she spoke she picked up a pair of pajamas from the floor and hung them on a peg behind the door. A couple of discarded neckties were strewn on top of the bureau. Agnes added them to a long row of other neckties that hung from the brass gas-bracket. Then she tossed off her hat, without even a glance at the mirror, and opening a bureau drawer, took out a clean blue romper for the child. Jane suddenly realized that Agnes looked tired. Her hair was really very grey.

“I’ll make the bed,” said Jane.

“Oh⁠—do you want to?” asked Agnes. Jane nodded. “Well, it would save time.” She vanished into the bathroom with her daughter.

Jane walked very soberly over to the bed and pulled off the sheets and turned the mattress. She heard once more the sound of running water. This bedroom was not fit to live in, thought Jane. A black hole of Calcutta. How could Agnes put up with it? How could Agnes put up with a husband who didn’t get out of bed in the morning until after she had gone down to her office to earn his living? Jane tucked the bottom sheet firmly under the mattress. She’d like to take Jimmy by the ear, she thought, and make him make his own bed, while Agnes sat in a rocking-chair and watched him do it. Jane was thoroughly shocked by Agnes’s revelation. Lots of wives, of course, lay serenely in bed every morning until long after the breadwinner had departed for his day’s work. But that seemed different, somehow. Why did it? If Jimmy had nothing in life to get up for, there was, of course, no real reason for his getting up. Still Jane smoothed the blankets and turned to pick up the counterpane from the windowsill. Wasn’t Jimmy acting just the way she had always wished that Stephen sometimes would? Stephen thought the world would come to an end if he did not catch the eight o’clock train every morning at the Lakewood Station. Jane had been mocking that delusion of Stephen’s for the last fifteen years.

Agnes reentered the room with a clean blue-rompered daughter at her side. Jane smoothed the counterpane over the pillow. Agnes walked over to the bureau and, still without glancing in the mirror, ran a comb casually through her low pompadour. Agnes did her hair just the way she always had since the day that she first put it up⁠—a big figure eight twisted halfway up her head in the back. She had always run a comb through it just like that, without a thought for a looking-glass.

“Come on,” said Agnes.

Jimmy rose from the sofa as they entered the living-room.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Tony’s?”

“I thought so,” said Agnes. Then, turning to Jane, “Or do you hate Italian food?”

The night was so hot that Jane thought that she would hate food of any nationality.

“I love it,” she said falsely.

They all walked down the corridor and the uncarpeted stairs into the odour of cooking cabbage and out into the comparative freshness of the sultry street.

“Tony’s is just around the corner,” said Agnes. She slipped one arm through Jane’s and the other through Jimmy’s. Little Agnes skipped on ahead of them. She seemed to know the way to Tony’s quite as well as her parents did. Jane threw a glance past Agnes’s clever, contented face to Jimmy’s faun-like countenance. It was clever, too, but it wasn’t very contented, Jane thought. In the grey September twilight Jimmy looked older than he had in the softer light of the chintz-hung living-room. Suddenly he met her eyes and smiled.

“This is swell!” he said cheerfully. “But an embarrassment of riches! Taking two beautiful women out to dinner at Tony’s the same night!” And suddenly he began softly, ridiculously, to sing.

“How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away!”

A wrinkled old woman, pulling a little wagon full of kindling, turned to smile toothlessly up at him at the sound of his artless tenor. He grinned at her pleasantly and resumed his song. Jimmy might be irritating, thought Jane, and of course he was a worthless husband, but he had charm.

III

The waiter’s hand, which touched Jane’s accidentally as he placed her demitasse before her, felt damp and warmly clammy. His collar was wilted and great drops of perspiration beaded his swarthy brow. Throughout the meal Jane had seen him surreptitiously mopping it with the wrinkled napkin that hung over his arm. Tony’s was hot and very crowded. Vaguely conscious of having eaten too much garlic in the salad and too much cheese in the spaghetti and of having drunk rather more Chianti than was perhaps quite wise on such a warm evening, Jane was half-listening to Jimmy, who was conversing most intelligently on modern American music, and half-reflecting that little Agnes, who had eaten quite as much garlic and cheese as she had herself, should have been in bed hours ago and would certainly be sick when once she was. The child was half-asleep in her chair.

Agnes was arguing with Jimmy, also most intelligently, on modern American music and everyone else within hearing at the little candlelit tables seemed to be arguing also. Across the room four dark-eyed, oily-headed, hairy-wristed young men were certainly arguing very vociferously in Italian on some unknown subject, and, just beyond them, a middle-aged woman with short grey hair and a green smock was arguing in tense undertones with her adolescent escort as to whether or no he should order another apricot brandy, and at the round table in the middle of the room an uproarious group of young men and women were shouting their arguments on the relative merits of Matisse and Picasso, two painters, apparently, of whom, until that moment, Jane had never even heard.

In spite of the heat and the garlic and the cheese and the arguments, and, possibly, Jane thought, partly because of the Chianti, she had enjoyed the evening very much indeed. It was fun to be with Agnes again and fun, after two months at Gull Rocks, to be chattering carelessly with contemporaries whose intellectual slant on life was the same as her own. Moreover, Jane, in the course of the evening, had become comfortingly reassured about Jimmy. Why, she almost understood, already, why Agnes had married him. He was certainly amusing and seemed also to be intelligent, and he was very much sweeter with Agnes and his little daughter thar Jane had expected him to be after his cavalier references to them in his initial advances toward her. He did not seem at all like Agnes’s husband, of course. He did not seem like anyone’s husband. More like some young relative⁠—a brother or a cousin or even a nephew⁠—whose attitude toward his family was marked by humorous detachment, affectionate and appreciative, but distinctly irresponsible.

His attitude toward Jane had been marked by a mocking, but flattering, attention and a rapidly increasing sense of intimacy. There was something in his manner, not at all unpleasant, that seemed subtly to suggest that he was always remembering that Jane was a woman and never allowing her to forget that he was a man. Jane could not think of any other American husband who was just like him. Bert Lancaster, of course, was always woman-conscious, but in a slimy, satyrish sort of way that bore no resemblance to Jimmy’s cool recognition of a world in which you felt he thanked God that there were two sexes. There was a friendly matter-of-factness about Jimmy’s frank admiration that made Jane feel very sure that they would get on well together. She was glad that he was coming to Chicago.

He was coming, almost immediately, to take up a friend’s job as musical critic on the Daily News, while that friend spent the winter in Munich. He was bringing his fiddle and the unfinished concerto and he expected to get a great deal of work done in some boardinghouse bedroom, with no woman around to distract him. Agnes hoped that he would. She hoped to do some writing herself, in the evenings after little Agnes was in bed. Not the novel, of course⁠—she would never finish that now; but she had plots for a couple of short stories that she thought she could sell and⁠—Jane would laugh at her, she knew⁠—an idea for a play about newspaper life that had never been done before.

Jane did not laugh at her. She had no high hopes for Jimmy’s concerto, but she longed to see Agnes take up writing again. She thought that Jimmy would like Chicago. She would introduce him to all Agnes’s old friends and Stephen would put him up at the clubs⁠—

“He hadn’t better do that,” Jimmy had interrupted lightly. “At the only club I ever belonged to I was kicked out for nonpayment of dues. I shouldn’t advise a conservative banker to back me at another⁠—”

Jane had laughed at his nonsense, wondering, however, just how much Stephen would have laughed had he been present that evening. Jimmy did not seem just Stephen’s kind. Something told her that Jimmy would not take the importance of bank mergers very seriously, and that to Stephen a man without visible means of support, who had spent ten years of his life writing a concerto for the violin, would seem rather one of the broader jokes⁠—unless he seemed just an object of charity, in which case Stephen would be very kind and considerate and helpful, of course, but possibly not entirely understanding.

“Agnes,” said Jane suddenly, in the midst of the argument on modern American music, “you ought to put that child to bed.”

“I know I ought,” said Agnes, rising regretfully from her chair, “but it’s such fun to be with you again, Jane, and Jimmy’s always so pyrotechnic in the presence of a third person! When I get arguing with him, I never want to stop!”

“Not only,” said Jimmy mockingly, “in the presence of a third person. Night after night, Jane, while Agnes is arguing with me, the child falls asleep on the hearth rug.” He, too, was rising regretfully to his feet. He picked up his drowsy daughter.

“Can I get a taxi down here?” asked Jane.

“Jimmy’ll cruise out and find one,” said Agnes.

He left the restaurant with the child on his shoulder. Agnes sank back into her chair. Suddenly she leaned forward across the candlelight.

“If I could write a play, Jane,” she said earnestly, “a good bad play, such as managers have confidence in, it might run for a season. If it did, I’d make fifty thousand dollars.”

“Oh, Agnes!” said Jane reproachfully. “Don’t talk like that! You never used to. Why do you want to write a bad play⁠—just for a manager? Write a good one if it never gets on. I bet you could. You have lots of ideas⁠—you always had⁠—”

“Exactly,” said Agnes, briefly. “I’ve always had more ideas than cash.” Her face clouded a little under Jane’s incredulous stare, then lightened suddenly with conviction. “If you think there’s an idea in my head that I wouldn’t sacrifice for a dollar, you’re very much mistaken. Jane⁠—you have to have money to be happy. If I could make fifty thousand dollars, I’d put every cent of it in trust for little Agnes. It would clothe her and educate her and take care of her as long as she lived. I’d never have to worry about the future again. I wouldn’t feel anxious and driven any longer and I’d stop nagging Jimmy the way I have nagged him ever since Agnes was born, and if I stopped nagging him, we’d have time to talk together the way we used to⁠—to be together the way we used to⁠—Jimmy’s adorable when he isn’t nagged⁠—I adore him when I’m nagging him. But I just can’t help it. I’m growing cross and nervous and old before my time and⁠—”

“Taxi waiting!” said Jimmy, at Jane’s elbow. He looked a little curiously, Jane thought, at Agnes’s excited face. But he asked no questions.

Agnes rose from the table without speaking. Her hands were trembling a little as she picked up her daughter’s hat from the back of her chair. Jane followed her out onto the sidewalk in silence. She was almost trembling herself from the contagion of Agnes’s excitement. Or was it from the disconcerting glimpse she had had of Agnes’s private life through the rent that Agnes had torn in the curtain that hides the private lives of all married couples from the eyes of the world. She was acutely conscious of the intimacy of the moment that had just passed between them. And terribly sorry for Agnes. And for Jimmy. And terribly thankful in the dark of the uptown-bound taxi, for a husband like Stephen, who was a banker and caught the eight o’clock train every morning and didn’t write concertos and lie in bed and goad her into nagging him until⁠—

Jane was so preoccupied with thoughts of husbands and marriage, and what life did to girls who were once young and full of promise and sat on Bryn Mawr window-seats confidently assuming that the world was their oyster, that she almost forgot to feel queer as she passed through the lobby of the Belmont Hotel alone at midnight. But not quite.

IV

“I thought you’d be more enthusiastic,” said Flora.

“I am enthusiastic,” protested Jane. “It’s just that I’m not used to the idea yet⁠—”

They were sitting on the edge of Flora’s bed at the Belmont. The room was crowded with gaping trunks and strewn with the silk and satin confusion of Flora’s new winter wardrobe, fresh from the fingers of the Paris dressmakers. Flora, very chic and fair in a new sheath dress of black chiffon, was fastening on her slender wrist the first diamond wrist watch that Jane had ever seen. She was wearing the first slit skirt that Jane had ever seen, also. Jane could not keep her eyes off the unseemly exposure of Flora’s slender black legs. Flora had said they were wearing dresses like that in the streets of Paris.

“Be that as it may,” thought Jane, “in the streets of Chicago that skirt will look very queer.”

But Flora was only superficially preoccupied with slit skirts and wrist watches. She had been unfolding to Jane her plans for the winter. Jane wondered what her mother and Isabel would think of them. For those plans were very surprising. Flora, incredibly, was going to open a shop. A hat shop. And, of all places, in the old brownstone stable in the back yard on Rush Street.

“Lots of women are doing it in London,” said Flora. “I’ve got the duckiest French models and a very clever French vendeuse to help me. We’re going to make hats on the head, you know, just the way they do in Paris. I’m going to turn the coach-house into a showroom and make fitting-rooms out of the stalls. The workshop will be in the hayloft. Papa sold the Daimler last spring, and he thinks it would really be more convenient to use cabs this winter than buy a new one. I’m going to have a black-and-gold sign made to put over the door⁠—‘Chez Flora,’ in a facsimile of my own handwriting. And copy it for the tags inside the hats. That lid of yours is a fright, Jane. It looks almost like Silly’s. I bet you bought it in Boston. You must be my first customer.”

The hat did not look like Silly’s, thought Jane indignantly. Then, as she recovered from the passing insult, “Do you expect to make much money?” Jane had been thinking rather wistfully of money and of the difficulty of making it, since her dinner last night with Agnes.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Flora easily. “I guess so. My expenses will be quite heavy. If I do I’ll give it away, of course.”

“To whom?” asked Jane. She was wondering already whether if she and Flora could get up a little trust fund for Agnes’s daughter, Agnes would consent to accept it.

“Oh⁠—to some charity. I haven’t thought which. My goodness, Jane, I don’t have to worry about that! The poor we have always with us. Mrs. Lester would be glad to grab it for her crippled children.”

“I see,” said Jane doubtfully. She was not at all sure that she did. She could not help feeling that Flora must have some very special reason for wanting to do anything so unusual and so unusually unpleasant as running a hat shop. Of course, if it were for charity⁠—

“I do think,” said Flora with conviction, “that a really chic hat shop is needed in Chicago. But the main thing is⁠—it will give me something to do.”

Across the brass hotel bedstead Jane looked at Flora. Her red-gold hair was just as shiny as ever, her figure was as slender and her eyes as brightly blue. She had never lost that look of the Dresden-china shepherdess. Was it just because Flora had never really done anything that she still seemed as delicate and fragile and fair as a precious piece of porcelain? Things had always been done to Flora. From the hour of her mother’s dreadful dishonoured death, her life had been swallowed up by her ageing father. He had carried her around an empty world, trying to fill its emptiness with her Dresden-china prettiness. She had summered in England and France and Germany and Switzerland. She had wintered in Italy and Egypt and India and Spain. She had opened and closed the brownstone house on Rush Street for innumerable brief Chicago seasons. But she had never settled down⁠—never really belonged anywhere, since the winter of Muriel’s marriage. There had been, of course, that incident in Cairo, eleven years ago, with that young Englishman with the unbelievably British name. Inigo Fellowes!⁠—that was it! Jane had had a letter from Flora⁠—such a happy letter⁠—confiding the secret of her engagement. And three weeks later a second letter, saying that Mr. Furness had been ill in Shepheard’s Hotel and that Flora had been very much worried about him, and that the engagement was broken and that Flora was going to take her father to the South of France for the spring. Jenny had been born two days after the arrival of the second letter. Jane had been too preoccupied to think much about it. She did not see Flora again for two years, and Flora had never mentioned Inigo’s name. And now Mr. Furness was seventy-nine years old and really too feeble to travel any longer. And Flora was thirty-seven and was going to open a hat shop in the brownstone stable in the back yard.

Jane thought she would much rather be as grey and as tired as Agnes and work in Macy’s advertising department and sleep in a black hole of Calcutta and nag a worthless husband and worry about a baby’s future than open a hat shop to give herself employment.

But she only answered: “Yes, of course it will, Flora. And I’d love to buy a hat. So will Isabel, I know. And Muriel and Rosalie.” She thought her encouragement sounded a trifle hollow, however, and changed the subject brightly. “Did you have fun this summer?”

“Yes,” said Flora absently. “We motored in Ireland. How was Gull Rocks? Pretty dull?” Then, without waiting for an answer, “Oh, Jane! Whom do you think I saw in London, just before I sailed?”

Jane couldn’t imagine.

“André Duroy!” cried Flora. “After all these years! In a picture gallery in New Bond Street. He recognized me. I should never have known him. He asked after you, Jane. I told him all about your children.”

Jane sat a moment in silence.

“What⁠—what was he like?” she ventured.

“Oh⁠—funny,” said Flora. “He’s gone frog. He had a little black beard and a wife who couldn’t speak English.”

“Nice-looking?” said Jane, after a pause.

“The beard or the wife?” questioned Flora.

“The wife,” said Jane.

“Oh, very pretty,” said Flora. “A mere child.”

Jane sat another moment in silence. She couldn’t think of any other question to ask and Flora evidently considered the subject finished.

“Let’s get some theatre tickets,” said Flora. “I’d like a gay evening.”

“So would I,” said Jane. She sprang up from the bed. “I’m here for a time and I mean to have it!”

Flora took down the telephone receiver and called the ticket broker.

“We’ll make Papa stand us to a magnificent dinner,” she said.

Jane did not answer. So André had gone frog and had a little black beard. It seemed only yesterday to Jane that she had noticed that André had begun to shave. And Cyprienne couldn’t speak English. She wondered if Flora had told him that Cicily was fourteen. Somehow she hoped that she hadn’t.

V

“Well⁠—I guess this is goodbye,” said Agnes.

“I hate to say it,” said Jane.

They were sitting on two high stools in a Broadway Huyler’s and had just finished a luncheon composed of a sandwich and a soda. Jane was going back to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited next day and that evening she and Flora and Mr. Furness were having a last whirl at the theatre.

Jane had had a gay week in New York. She had seen six plays in seven days and all the picture exhibitions up and down Fifth Avenue and had gone twice to the Metropolitan, and had bought a new dress at Hollander’s and a boxful of toys for the children at Schwartz’s, and had dined once again with Agnes and had had her and Jimmy to dine at the Belmont one evening before a symphony concert.

This, of course, was Agnes’s noon hour. She had to be back at Macy’s in ten minutes. Jane seized the soda check and slipped regretfully from her stool.

“It has certainly been great to see you,” she sighed.

“And you’ll take care of Jimmy in the corn belt,” said Agnes a little wistfully.

“Of course I will,” said Jane, pushing the check through the cashier’s cage. “I think he’s a darling. When will he show up?”

“Oh⁠—right away,” said Agnes. “He would have loved to go with you, Jane, but he has to pay his own expenses, so the Twentieth Century seemed foolish. He’ll loiter out on some milk train in a day or two and show up in Lakewood looking hungry for a square meal.”

“Well, he’ll get one!” Jane pocketed her change.

“And now, darling”⁠—Agnes looked steadily in Jane’s shining eyes⁠—“you are a darling, you know, Jane⁠—wish me luck on the play!”

“You know I do,” said Jane. “I hope it’s bad enough to run forever.”

“It won’t be my fault if it isn’t,” said Agnes. She put one arm around Jane’s waist. Jane looked tenderly at her funny freckled face.

“Agnes,” said Jane. “You’re the most gallant person I ever knew.”

Agnes smiled in defensive mockery.

“No,” said Agnes. “You’ve forgotten. Dido was that.”

“Dido?” questioned Jane. Then she remembered. The memory of Agnes’s little front porch, “west of Clark Street,” rose before her. The Aeneid and André and the Thomas Concert.

“No,” she said earnestly, “you beat Dido. I’m going to see that the Eroica Symphony is played at your funeral pyre.”

“Jimmy might whistle it,” suggested Agnes. Her lips met Jane’s cheek.

“Duty calls!” she said. “Goodbye, old speed!” Jane watched her solid, slightly shabby figure disappear in the Broadway traffic. To Jane it looked very heroic. She was conscious, curiously enough, of a slight sense of envy. Agnes’s life, at least, was still an adventure. She was fighting odds and overcoming difficulties. She was struggling with life and love. Goodness! Jane jumped⁠—that taxi had almost exterminated her! If it had, thought Jane, as she pushed her way through the hurrying crowd of Broadway pedestrians, Agnes would have rated that best of epitaphs⁠—“I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.”

VI

Jane sat beside Flora in their compartment on the Twentieth Century, watching Flora and Mr. Furness play cribbage. She was thinking how much Mr. Furness looked like her mother-in-law and how much he looked a venerable codfish and how much more feeble he had grown during his summer months abroad. His hands trembled terribly when he dealt the cards and fumbled as he fixed the little pegs in the holes in the cribbage board. The train had just passed Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson stretched glittering, a river of steel, in the hazy September sunshine outside the window.

It was warm in the compartment, in spite of the whirring electric fan, and Jane was not particularly interested in cribbage. She thought she would go back to the observation car and read a magazine. She said as much and Flora looked up patiently from the cribbage board. Flora was not particularly interested in cribbage either, but Mr. Furness loved it. Jane could remember him playing it with Flora’s mother in the green-and-gold parlour of the Rush Street house. She could remember just how the rings had looked on Flora’s mother’s lovely listless hands as she moved the cribbage pegs. One of those rings, a sapphire between two diamonds, was on Flora’s hand that minute. And Flora’s hand was just as lovely and just as listless. Mr. Furness should have taken up solitaire early in life, thought Jane brutally.

She walked through the plush and varnished comfort of the Twentieth Century thinking idly that Flora’s life was terrible. Nothing ever happened in it. She wondered in how many trains, bound for what exotic destinations, Flora had played cribbage with Mr. Furness. Of course, on the Twentieth Century Limited, just passing through Spuyten Duyvil, you would not expect anything very surprising to happen in any case, but on those trains de luxe, en route, for Calcutta and Luxor and Moscow, had not Flora ever felt⁠—Jane passed from the narrow corridor to the observation compartment and saw Jimmy Trent, stretched comfortably in an armchair, scanning the columns of the Evening World.

He saw her instantly and cast aside the paper.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” he said casually. Then, rising to his feet, “I saw you get aboard and took an upper on the same section. I was just about to page the train for you.”

Jane stared at him in astonishment. She could not believe her eyes.

“Did⁠—did Agnes know you were coming?” she asked stupidly.

“Oh, yes,” said Jimmy. “I had lunch with her. I only decided to come this morning.”

“Oh!” said Jane. Then after a tiny pause, “I thought⁠—”

“I’ve no doubt,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “that you shared all those thrifty thoughts of Agnes’s about that milk train. But I say anything that’s worth doing at all is worth doing well. And I haven’t been out of New York City for six years.”

“Oh!” said Jane again.

Jimmy continued to contemplate her with a sunny smile.

“I took this train,” he said presently, “because I thought we’d have fun on it together. Don’t you think it’s time we began? We’ve lost almost an hour already.”

“What⁠—what do you want to do?” asked Jane, again rather stupidly. She felt totally unequal to coping with Jimmy.

“I want to talk to you,” said Jimmy disarmingly. “There’s nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you’re talking, that is, with the right person.”

Jane, still staring up at him, felt her features harden defensively.

Jimmy burst into gentle laughter.

“Jane,” he said, “you look like a startled faun! You needn’t. Would it have been more discreet of me to use the plural? Should I have said ‘the right people’? I don’t like that phrase. It has an unfortunate social significance.”

Jane began to feel a little foolish. She laughed in spite of herself. Her laughter seemed to cheer Jimmy immensely.

“Curious, isn’t it,” he went on airily, “that ‘talking with the right people’ means something so very different from ‘talking with the right person’? You are an awfully right person, Jane. No doubt you’re of the right people, too, but don’t let’s dwell on that aspect of your many charms. Do you want to stand here in the train aisle all afternoon?”

Having once laughed, Jane found it perfectly impossible to recapture her critical attitude.

“Where shall we go?” she asked.

“How about the back platform?” said Jimmy promptly. “Or will the dust spoil that pretty dress?”

“Mercy, no,” said Jane. “Nothing could spoil it.”

The back platform was rather sunny and quite deserted. Jimmy opened one of the little folding chairs and brushed off the green carpet-cloth seat and placed it in the shade for Jane. He opened another for himself and sat down beside her. Jane looked out over the sparkling river.

“Isn’t the Hudson beautiful?” she said.

“Don’t let’s talk about the Hudson,” said Jimmy.

Jane couldn’t keep from smiling as she met his twinkling eyes.

“What shall we talk about?” she said.

“I’ll give you your choice of two subjects,” said Jimmy promptly. “You or me!”

“In that case I think I’ll choose you,” said Jane.

“All right,” said Jimmy. “Shall I begin or do you, too, find the topic stimulating?”

“I think I’d like to hear what you have to say for it,” said Jane.

“It’s my favourite theme,” smiled Jimmy. “I’ll begin at the beginning. I was born in East St. Louis and I was raised in a tent.”

“A tent!” cried Jane. Vague visions of circuses rose in her mind.

“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” said Jimmy. “A revivalist’s tent. I’m the proverbial minister’s son. My father was a Methodist preacher.”

Jane looked up at him with wide eyes of astonishment.

“My mother,” went on Jimmy brightly, “was a brewer’s daughter. Not the kind of a brewer who draws dividends from the company, but the kind who brews beer. My grandfather⁠—so I’m told⁠—used to hang over the vats in person and in shirtsleeves and my mother used to bring him his lunch at the noon hour in a tin pail. My father was an itinerant revivalist. When my mother met him, he was running a camp meeting in town, crusading against the Demon Rum. She met him in a soft-drink parlour and promptly got religion and signed the pledge. After that my grandfather had to eat a cold lunch and carry his own pail when he went to work in the morning. Mother wouldn’t have anything more to do with the brewery. Father told her it was the Devil’s kitchen. That made quite a little trouble in the family, of course. My grandfather kicked my father out of the house a couple of times, but Mother was hell-bent to marry him, and so, of course, presently she ran off and did. That’s how I came to be raised in a tent.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Jane. “You’re making it all up.”

“It’s Gawd’s truth,” said Jimmy, “and you don’t know the half of it! I’m just the kind of a young man that H. G. Wells writes novels about. I ought to get in touch with him. He’d pay me for the story of my life. I’d make him one of those wistful, thwarted, lower-middle-class heroes⁠—”

“I know you’re lying,” said Jane cheerfully, “but go on with the story.”

“You see,” said Jimmy triumphantly, “it holds you! It would be worth good money to H. G. Wells. Well, I was raised in a tent, and before I was six I knew all about handing out tracts and passing the plate. All about hellfire, too. I believed in a God who was an irascible old gentleman with belligerent grey whiskers and in a bright red Devil with a tail and a pitchfork. I thought Father was God’s ablest lieutenant on earth and Mother was His most trusted handmaiden. Mother loved music and she learned to play the melodeon at the camp meetings. By the time I was ten, I was equally expert with the drum and the fiddle and the tambourine. We wandered up and down the Mississippi Valley with our tent, keeping up a guerilla warfare with the Devil, and, until I was fifteen, I really thought the chances were about a hundred to one that I’d burn through eternity for my sins.” There was a note of real emotion in his voice.

“Is this actually true?” asked Jane.

“You bet it is,” said Jimmy. “But at fifteen I met a girl. I met her on the mourner’s bench, singing ‘Hallelujah’ with the rest of the saved. She fell off it pretty soon and I kept on seeing her. She was a bad egg, but she taught me more than you can learn at a camp meeting.

“By the time we moved on to the next town, I’d lost all real interest in fighting the Devil. I took a pot shot at him now and then, but most of the time I declared a neutrality. I didn’t state my views to Father, of course, but he noticed a certain lassitude in my technique with the tracts and the plate. He began to row with me a good deal and ask me questions about what I was doing when I wasn’t in the tent. I’d skip a prayer meeting whenever I could and hang around the soda fountains and cigar stores. I used to long to steal money from the offering and run off to a burlesque show, but I never had the nerve to do it. Long after I’d lost my faith in the Irascible Old Gentleman, I used to feel a bolt would fall on me if I did a thing like that.

“When I was seventeen, I had my first real drink at a real bar, and when I came home Father smelled the whiskey on my breath. First he prayed over me and then he beat me. I snatched the cane away from him and broke it over my knee, and that night he prayed for me by name, in public, at the camp meeting. That finished religion for me. Mother tried to patch things up between us, but it was no use. After six months of family warfare she gave up. I travelled around with them after that in the position of Resident Atheist. I never went to any more prayer meetings, but I was useful putting up and taking down the tent and doing odd jobs backstage. Every now and then I’d consent to drop in and play a violin solo while they were collecting the offering.

“I was just nineteen when my father died of pneumonia, caught preaching in the rain. And my mother and I went back to East St. Louis. Jane⁠—your eyes are as big as saucers.”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” cried Jane breathlessly. “It’s perfectly thrilling.”

“It wasn’t very thrilling while it was going on,” said Jimmy. “My grandfather was dead, but my grandmother took us in and my mother got me a job with my rich uncle. He lived across the river in St. Louis and he was a fashionable druggist. I worked in his shop for two years, making sodas and mixing prescriptions. At first I liked it. I had money of my own for the first time in my life and I didn’t have to hear any preaching. I went to night school at a settlement and I read all the books I could lay my hands on and pretty soon I turned socialist. That got my uncle’s goat right away. He was making a pretty good thing off the drug business and the established order was all right with him. He talked of Karl Marx just the way my father had of the Devil, and I was too young to have the sense to keep my face shut. I’d air my views and he’d call me an anarchist and I’d say there were worse things than anarchy. I used to like to get him on the run. Pretty soon he really got to believe I had a bomb up my sleeve, and he was afraid to let me mix prescriptions any longer for fear I’d add a little strychnine to the cough-mixture of a plutocratic customer. So he told Mother he guessed I wasn’t suited to the drug business.

“Mother thought I’d better learn to run an elevator, but I didn’t fancy a life in a cage and presently I got a job with my fiddle in a theatre orchestra. That nearly finished Mother, of course. She thought the stage was the Devil’s recruiting office. I lost the job pretty soon and got another through a man I knew at the settlement as a cub reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That didn’t last long either, but it made Mother’s last days happy to think I was through with the stage. She died when I was twenty-two and left me three thousand dollars saved from Father’s life insurance. The day after the funeral I took the train to New York and signed up with a vaudeville circuit as a ragtime accompanist for a blackface comedian. I guess I lost forty jobs in the next six years on newspapers and in orchestra pits. But I learned a lot about music and more about slinging the English language. I was just twenty-eight when I met Agnes. I thought she was a card. She was the only woman I’d ever met who was as good as my mother and as clever as I was. She took a fancy to reform me, though I told her at the time I’d been immunized to salvation from early childhood. After that, of course, it was all over but the shouting.”

“It is like a novel,” said Jane breathlessly. “It’s just like a novel.”

“But how does it end?” asked Jimmy, a trifle gloomily.

“It ended when you married Agnes,” said Jane promptly.

“It isn’t a fairy story,” said Jimmy gently. “H. G. Wells’s novels never end at the altar.”

Jane did not reply to that. She was watching the ruddy September sun sinking into the western haze behind Storm King. She was conscious of Jimmy’s eyes, fixed thoughtfully on her face. They sat a long time in silence. Jane could see the dim outline of the Catskills, pale lavender against an orange sky, before he spoke again.

“And your novel, Jane?” he asked gently. “Who wrote that?”

“Louisa M. Alcott,” said Jane promptly. “There’s nothing modern and morbid in my story.”

“Now it’s my turn to be disbelieving,” said Jimmy.

“Do I look morbid?” said Jane, turning to smile serenely into his admiring eyes.

“You look modern,” said Jimmy. “And you look very, very thoughtful. All people who think sooner or later go through hell.”

“Then my hell must be ahead of me,” said Jane steadfastly.

“You haven’t even experienced a purgatory?” smiled Jimmy. “Something you got in and got out of?”

“Not even a purgatory,” said Jane. “I’m a very naive person. I’ve never experienced much of anything.”

“Perhaps that will be your hell,” said Jimmy.

The door behind them opened suddenly and Flora stood on the platform.

“Oh, here you are, Jane!” she cried. “Papa wants to dine early. He’s pretty tired.” Then she recognized Jimmy. She had met him, of course, at that dinner at the Belmont. She looked very much astonished.

“Why⁠—Mr. Trent⁠—” she said uncertainly.

“Jimmy decided to come West on the Century,” said Jane, rising from her chair.

“How nice!” said Flora, in her best Dresden shepherdess manner. Then to Jimmy with a smile, “You’ll dine with us, of course?”

“I’d love to,” said Jimmy.

They all walked together into the observation car. Flora looked distinctly cheered at the thought of a little male companionship other than Mr. Furness’s. Jane was thinking of Jimmy’s story. How fairy-like and fantastic it was compared to her own! By what different roads they had travelled to reach that intimate moment of companionship on the back platform of the Twentieth Century Limited. Having met at last, it seemed very strange to Jane that they could speak the same language. But yet they did. Jimmy, holding open a heavy train door to let her pass in front of him, smiled down into her eyes. She thanked him with an answering smile. Jane felt as if she had known Jimmy for years.

VII

The Twentieth Century was pulling slowly into the La Salle Street Station. Jane stood in the vestibule, knee-deep in luggage, looking eagerly for Stephen beyond the little crowd of porters that lined the greasy platform. Jimmy was at her elbow, but Flora and Mr. Furness were still sitting in the compartment. Mr. Furness found crowds very tiring.

The train came slowly to a standstill. Jane tumbled down the steps, stumbling over suitcases. She looked quickly down the long vista of the train-shed. The platform was crowded, now, with red caps galvanized into action and with travellers trying to sort out their bags from the heaps of luggage piled at each car entrance. No Stephen was to be seen. Jimmy was watching her with his ironical smile.

“He’s forgotten you,” he said presently. “He isn’t here.”

“He always meets me,” said Jane. “In fifteen years of matrimony he’s met me every time I’ve come home.”

“What an idyll!” smiled Jimmy. It didn’t seem impertinent because of the smile.

Suddenly Jane saw Stephen. She saw his grey Fedora hat towering over the heads of the crowd.

“Oh⁠—Stephen!” she called, her voice lost in the uproar of the train-shed. He saw her waving arm, however. In a moment he was at her side. Jane cast herself into his arms. She knew Jimmy was watching them. She pressed her cheek against the rough tweed of Stephen’s coat lapel, then turned her face to his. She felt a trifle histrionic, under Jimmy’s ironical eye. Stephen kissed her cheek, very tranquilly.

“Hello, Jane!” he said cheerfully. “Your train’s an hour late. You can get a dollar back from the railroad.”

Jane wished his greeting had been a bit more idyllic. Jimmy was grinning now, quite frankly.

“Stephen,” said Jane, “this is Jimmy⁠—Jimmy Trent. He’s been giving me a whirl all the way from New York.”

Stephen looked over at Jimmy. He seemed a little surprised, Jane thought, at what he saw. Or perhaps it was at what she had said. She remembered her last words on Jimmy in the Boston South Station, eight days before, “I know I’ll hate him.” Jimmy had stepped forward and extended his hand.

“How do you do, sir,” he said simply.

His ultimate monosyllable struck Jane’s ear. She glanced from Jimmy to Stephen. Jimmy looked very casual and debonair. Stephen looked⁠—well, Stephen looked just like what he was, the forty-four-year-old first vice-president of the Midland Loan and Trust Company. Jane felt again that curious little pang of pity. Stephen had once looked quite as casual and as debonair as Jimmy. He was only ten years older than Jimmy that minute. Yet Jimmy had called him “sir.” And the worst of it was that it had sounded quite suitable.

Flora and Mr. Furness had descended from the train. They were greeting Stephen, now, very warmly. They all trooped down the platform together and into the station, and over to the ticket window to collect their dollars. Jimmy pocketed his and turned to Jane with a smile.

“Could you have lunch with me?” he said. “Meet me somewhere at one and show me the town.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Jane. “I have to go out to the country and have lunch with the children.”

“Have dinner with the children,” smiled Jimmy persuasively. “I’m a dollar in pocket and I’d like to give you a time.”

“I couldn’t,” said Jane firmly. “But I’d like you to have lunch with Stephen. Stephen!” she called. He turned from the ticket window. “Don’t you want to lunch with Jimmy at the University Club? I’d like him to meet people.”

Once more, Stephen looked just a little surprised.

“I’d be glad to,” he said, “if he can come early. I’ve a date to meet Bill Belmont there at noon. He’s on from New York to put through that Morgan deal. If Jimmy doesn’t mind talking of bond issues⁠—”

“I’m not awfully helpful on bond issues,” said Jimmy self-deprecatingly. “And I’m afraid I couldn’t get off at noon. I’ll be busy with the boys at the News. Thanks ever so much, though.”

They all turned away from the ticket window to the taxi entrance. Jane was solemnly reflecting that Jimmy was outrageous. She felt very thankful that Stephen had not heard him invite her to lunch. Suddenly she heard his voice at her ear.

“And when am I going to see you?” said Jimmy.

Jane hadn’t forgiven him.

“You must come out to Lakewood sometime,” she said vaguely. “For a night or a weekend.”

“Oh, I’ll come out to Lakewood,” said Jimmy.

“When you’re settled,” pursued Jane politely, “let me know where I can reach you. Give me a ring when you find a good boardinghouse.”

“Oh, I’ll give you a ring,” said Jimmy.

By this time Stephen had hailed a taxi.

“I won’t go with you to the other station,” he said. “I’ve got to run into the Federal Building.” Jane stepped into the cab. “Your mail’s on your desk, dear. Don’t pay the painter’s bill till I talk to you about it.”

Jane nodded very brightly. She was once again conscious of Jimmy’s ironical eye. This time she wouldn’t stoop to be histrionic. She waved her hand casually as the taxi started. Jimmy and Stephen, standing bareheaded on the curbstone, both smiled and waved cheerfully in reply. Their waves and their smiles were very different, however, reflected Jane, as the taxi turned into the traffic at the station entrance.