Paul, though conscientiously modest, agreed with her, and was deeply pleased by her applause. After an evident struggle between two opposing impulses, he began to ask questions about her. She found there was very little to tell him. Yes, she was having a very good time. Yes, she was very well. His admiration of her rosy color threw her into a strangling whirlpool of emotions, from which she rescued herself by the sardonic thought that her technic with rouge had improved since their last meeting. She told him vaguely that business was fine, and that they had a lovely apartment on Bush Street.
There was nothing else to tell about herself, and both of them avoided directly mentioning her husband. She had never more keenly realized the emptiness of her life, except for Bert, than when she saw Paul’s mind circling about it in an effort to find something there.
He turned at last, baffled, to the book beside her plate.
“Still keeping on reading, I see. I re—” he stopped short. They both remembered the small bookcase with the glass doors that had stood in his mother’s parlor in Masonville, and how they had lingered before it on the pretext that she was borrowing a book. “Something good?” he asked hastily. When she showed him the title, he repeated it doubtfully: “Pragmatism? Well, it’s all right, I suppose. I don’t go much for these Oriental notions about religion, myself.”
“It isn’t a religion, exactly,” she said uncertainly. “It’s a new way of looking at things. It’s about truth—sort of. I mean, it says there isn’t any, really—not absolutely, you know,” she floundered on before the puzzled question in his eyes. “It says there isn’t absolute truth—truth, you know, like a separate thing. Truth’s only a sort of quality, like—well, like beauty, and it belongs to a thing if the thing works out right. I’ve got it clear in my head, but I don’t express it very well, I know.”
“I don’t see any sense to it, myself,” he commented. “Truth is just simply truth, that’s all, and it’s up to us to tell it all the time.”
She knew that an attempt to explain further would fail, and she felt that her mind had a wider range than his; but she had an impression of his standing surefooted and firm on the rock of his simple convictions, and she saw that his whole life was as secure and stable as hers was insecure and precarious. She felt about that as she did about his house, envying him something which she knew was not as valuable as her own possessions.
A strange pang—a pain she could not understand—struck her when he stopped at the cashier’s grating and paid her check with his own in the most matter-of-fact way.
They parted at the door of the lunchroom; for seeing his hesitation she said brightly: “Well, goodbye. I’m going the other way.” She held out her hand, and when he took it she added quickly, “I’m so glad to have seen you looking so well and happy.”
“I’m not so blamed happy,” he retorted gruffly, as if her words jarred the exclamation from him. He covered it instantly with a heavy, “So’m I—I’m glad you are. Goodbye.”
That exclamation remained in her mind, repeating itself at intervals like an echo. She had been more deeply stirred than she had realized. Fragments of old emotions, unrealized hopes, unsatisfied longings, rose in her, to be replaced by others, to sink, and come back again. “I’m not so blamed happy.” It might have meant anything or nothing. She wondered what her life would be if she were living in a little house in Ripley with him, and rejected the picture, and considered it again.
Looking back, she saw all the turnings that had taken her from the road to a life like that—the road that she had once unquestioningly supposed that she would take. If she had stayed at home in Masonville, if she had given up the struggle in Sacramento; if she had been able to live in San Francisco with nothing to fill her days but work and loneliness—she saw as a series of merest chances the steps which had brought her at last to Bert.
One could not have everything. She had him. He was not a man who would work slowly, day by day, toward a petty job and a small house bought on the instalment plan. He was brilliant, clever, daring. He would one day do great things, and she must help him by giving him all her love and faith and trust. Suddenly it appeared monstrous that she should be struggling against him, troubling him with her commonplace desires for a commonplace thing like a home, at the very moment when he needed all his wit and skill to handle a big deal. She was ashamed of the thoughts with which she had been playing; they seemed to her an infidelity of the spirit.
XII
Bert was not in the apartment when she reached it; she knew her disappointment was irrational, for she had told herself he would not be there. However, he might telephone. She curled up in the big chair by the window, the book in her lap, and read with a continual consciousness of waiting. She felt that his coming or the sound of his voice would rescue her from something within herself.
At six o’clock she told herself that he would telephone within an hour. Experience had taught her that this way of measuring time helped it to pass more quickly. With determined effort she concentrated her attention upon her book, shutting out voices that clamored heart-shaking things to her. At seven o’clock she was walking up and down the living-room, despising herself, telling herself that nothing had happened, that he did these things only to show her his
