At night, letting down her hair, she looked back at a day gone from her life, a day spent in sweeping and dusting and making pleasant a house that must be swept and dusted and made pleasant on the morrow, a day that had accomplished several inches of scalloping on a tablecloth, and she was overwhelmed with a sense of futility. “After all, I’ve rather enjoyed it,” she said. “To enjoy a day—what more can one do with it?” The argument rang hollow in her mind, answered only by an uneasy silence.
If she were with Paul the days would mean more, she told herself. But it seemed best to remain in San José until the first legal formalities were done. The case, her lawyer told her, would come on the court calendar in four or five weeks. She would have no difficulty in getting a decree. “But can’t you charge something to make it more impressive? No violence? He never hit you or threw anything at you?” The lawyer’s eyes filled with a certain eagerness. Wincing, she told him with cold fury that she would charge nothing but desertion. No, she wanted no alimony. When, disappointed, he had jotted these details on a pad and tried with professional jocularity to make her smile, she escaped, shrinking with loathing.
Something like this she must endure again, upon a witness-stand in open court. Better to face it alone, to finish it and push it behind her into the past before she went to Ripley to meet the shrewd interest of Mrs. Masters and the warmth of Paul’s sympathy. Meantime her life seemed motionless as a treadmill is motionless, and a vague irritation nagged at her nerves.
She began to frequent the public library. In a locked room, to which the librarian gave her the key after an embarrassed scrutiny, she found on forbidden shelves a history of marriage, and curled among the cushions on her window-seat, she spent an afternoon absorbed in tracing that institution from the first faint appreciation of the property value of women into the labyrinth of custom and morality to which it led. She became interested in marriage laws, and discovered with amazement the contracts so blithely entered upon by men and women who would not so unquestioningly subscribe to any other legal agreement. When she wearied of this subject, she turned to others and, with an interest sharpened by the European news, she devoured history and floundered beyond her depths in economics. She bought a French dictionary and grammar and, finding them but palely alluring in themselves, she boldly attacked La Livre de Mon Ami, digging the meaning from its charming pages eagerly as a miner washing gold. But the nights found her still haunted by a restlessness as miserable and vague as that of unused muscles. “I wish I were doing something!” she cried.
XX
Two weeks after she left the office her feet took her back to it, as if by volition of their own. The familiar walls, covered with photographs of alfalfa fields and tract maps painted with red ink, closed around her like the walls of home. Hutchinson sat smoking at his desk; nothing had changed. She said that she had only dropped in for a moment. How was business? Her eye automatically noted the squares of red on the maps. “Hello! That three-cornered piece by Sycamore Slough’s gone! Who sold it?”
“Watson,” said Hutchinson. “He’s uncovered a gold mine in the Healdsburg country, selling the farmers hand over fist. Last week he brought down a prospect who—” She heard the story to its end, capped it with one of her own, and two hours had passed before she realized it.
In another week it had become her habit to drop in at the office every time she came down town, to discuss Hutchinson’s difficulties with him, even on occasion to help him handle a sale. Business prospects were not brightening; the prune market was disrupted by the European War, orchardists were panic stricken; already a formless, darkening shadow hung over men’s minds. In any case she had no intention of going back into business; she told herself that she detested it. And she continued to go to the office.
Hutchinson awaited her one day with a bit of news. A man named MacAdams had been telephoning; he was coming to the office; he wanted to see her. “MacAdams?” she repeated. “Odd—I seem to remember the name.”
MacAdams came in five minutes later, and the sight of his square, deeply lined face, the deep-sunken eyes under bushy gray brows, brought back to her vividly all the details of her first sale. She met him with an outstretched hand, which MacAdams ignored. “I’d like a few words with you, miss.”
She led him into the inner office, closed the door, made him sit down. He sat upright, gnarled hands on his knees, and badly, in simple words, laid his case before her. The land she had sold him was no good. It was hardpan land. After he bought it he had saved his money for a year and moved to that land. “They told me I could make the payments from the crops.” He had leveled the forty acres, checked it, seeded it to alfalfa. The alfalfa had begun to die the second year. That fall he plowed it up and sowed grain. He made enough from that to pay for seed and meet the water-tax. In the spring he and his boy had planted beans. The boy had cultivated them, and he had worked out, making money enough for food. The irrigation ditch broke; they could get no water for the beans when they needed it. The beans had died. He was two years behind in his payments; he could not meet the interest; he owed a hundred dollars in grocery bills.
“I put three thousand dollars into that land. I went to see your firm about it. They said
