“Wait until fall, if you’re thinking of it,” K. advised. “This is tepid compared with what you’ll get down there.”
“I’ve got to get away from here.”
K. nodded understandingly. Since the scene at the White Springs Hotel, both knew that no explanation was necessary.
“It isn’t so much that I mind her turning me down,” Joe said, after a silence. “A girl can’t marry all the men who want her. But I don’t like this hospital idea. I don’t understand it. She didn’t have to go. Sometimes”—he turned bloodshot eyes on Le Moyne—“I think she went because she was crazy about somebody there.”
“She went because she wanted to be useful.”
“She could be useful at home.”
For almost twenty minutes they tramped on without speech. They had made a circle, and the lights of the city were close again. K. stopped and put a kindly hand on Joe’s shoulder.
“A man’s got to stand up under a thing like this, you know. I mean, it mustn’t be a knockout. Keeping busy is a darned good method.”
Joe shook himself free, but without resentment. “I’ll tell you what’s eating me up,” he exploded. “It’s Max Wilson. Don’t talk to me about her going to the hospital to be useful. She’s crazy about him, and he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
“Perhaps. But it’s always up to the girl. You know that.”
He felt immeasurably old beside Joe’s boyish blustering—old and rather helpless.
“I’m watching him. Some of these days I’ll get something on him. Then she’ll know what to think of her hero!”
“That’s not quite square, is it?”
“He’s not square.”
Joe had left him then, wheeling abruptly off into the shadows. K. had gone home alone, rather uneasy. There seemed to be mischief in the very air.
CHAPTER XII
Tillie was gone.
Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after Mr. Schwitter’s visit, Harriet’s colored maid had announced a visitor.
Harriet’s business instinct had been good. She had taken expensive rooms in a good location, and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store. Then she arranged with a New York house to sell her models on commission.
Her short excursion to New York had marked for Harriet the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. Here, at last, she found people speaking her own language. She ventured a suggestion to a manufacturer, and found it greeted, not, after the manner of the Street, with scorn, but with approval and some surprise.
“About once in ten years,” said Mr. Arthurs, “we have a woman from out of town bring us a suggestion that is both novel and practical. When we find people like that, we watch them. They climb, madame,—climb.”
Harriet’s climbing was not so rapid as to make her dizzy; but business was coming. The first time she made a price of seventy-five dollars for an evening gown, she went out immediately after and took a drink of water. Her throat was parched.
She began to learn little quips of the feminine mind: that a woman who can pay seventy-five will pay double that sum; that it is not considered good form to show surprise at a dressmaker’s prices, no matter how high they may be; that long mirrors and artificial light help sales—no woman over thirty but was grateful for her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed high. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but refined and rather impressive.
She took her business home with her at night, lay awake scheming, and wakened at dawn to find fresh color combinations in the early sky. She wakened early because she kept her head tied up in a towel, so that her hair need be done only three times a week. That and the corset were the penalties she paid. Her high-heeled shoes were a torment, too; but in the work-room she kicked them off.
To this new Harriet, then, came Tillie in her distress. Tillie was rather overwhelmed at first. The Street had always considered Harriet “proud.” But Tillie’s urgency was great, her methods direct.
“Why, Tillie!” said Harriet.
“Yes’m.”
“Will you sit down?”
Tillie sat. She was not daunted now. While she worked at the fingers of her silk gloves, what Harriet took for nervousness was pure abstraction.
“It’s very nice of you to come to see me. Do you like my rooms?”
Tillie surveyed the rooms, and Harriet caught her first full view of her face.
“Is there anything wrong? Have you left Mrs. McKee?”
“I think so. I came to talk to you about it.”
It was Harriet’s turn to be overwhelmed.
“She’s very fond of you. If you have had any words—”
