“I do believe he’s jealous!” She laughed coaxingly, slipping a hand through the crook of his unyielding arm. “Are you jealous? Just as jealous as you can be? Jealous of my typewriter?” She bent upon him a horrific frown. “Answer to me, sir! Do you love that electric plant? How dare you look at dynamos!”
He surrendered, laughing with her.
“You little idiot! Just the same—oh, well, what’s the use? Just so you’re happy.”
It was the first time there had been a sense of reservations behind their kiss. But he seemed not to know it, radiating content.
“All right, run along and play in San Francisco. I don’t care. I do care. I do care like the devil. But it won’t be long. Only I warn you, I’m not going to be called Mr. Helen Davies!”
She laughed too, rising and tucking up her hair.
“As if I wanted you to be! I’ll never be so well-known as that, don’t fear! Now if I were a real writer—” The trace of wistfulness in her voice was quickly repressed. “Then, young man, you’d have reason to worry! But I’m not. I wonder if that expressman’s never coming!”
“You oughtn’t to be trying to manage all this yourself,” he said. “I wish I’d known in time. I could have come up and done it for you.”
She was touched by his wholehearted acceptance of her plans, and she felt a twinge of regret, a longing to acquiesce in his. But some strong force within herself would not yield. She could not be dependent upon him, not yet. Later—later she would feel differently.
There were six months between her and final legal freedom. The miserable half hour that had given her an interlocutory decree of divorce had been buried by the rush of new events; routine completion of the court’s action had no vital meaning for her. She had in reality been long divorced from the past she wished to forget. The date six months in the future meant only the point at which she would face the details of a new life. Until that time she need not consider them too closely. It was enough to know that she and Paul loved each other. All difficulties when she reached them would be conquered by that love.
She turned a bright face to him.
“Let’s go out and walk in the sunshine. An empty house is so sorrowful. And I have heaps of things to tell you.”
They walked slowly up and down the pleasant tree-shaded street, passing the homelike porches at which she no longer looked wistfully. Her mind was filled with the immediate, intoxicating future, and she tumbled out for Paul’s inspection all her anticipations.
Mr. Hayden had refused her last story, about immigration conditions on Angel Island, and she had sent it to an Eastern weekly. Wouldn’t it be splendid if they took it! And wasn’t it a bit of luck, getting the Post’s city editor to take her idea of a department for working-girls’ problems?
And the new series—the series that was taking her to San Francisco. “O Paul, if I can only do it half as well as I want to! I’m just sure Mr. Hayden would take it. ‘San Francisco Nights.’ Bagdad-y stuff, you know, Arabian Nights. You’ve no idea how fascinating San Francisco is at night. The fishing fleet, going out from Fisherman’s Wharf over the black water, with Alcatraz Light flashing across the colored boats, and the fishermen singing Il Trovatore. Honestly, Paul, they do. And the vegetable markets, down in the still, ghostly, wholesale district at three o’clock in the morning, masses of color and light, the Italian farmers with their blue jackets and red caps, and the huge, sleepy horses, and the Chinese peddlers pawing over the vegetables, with their long, yellow fingers.”
“At three o’clock in the morning! You don’t mean you’re dreaming of going down there?”
“I’ve already been,” she said guiltily. “With one of the girls, Marian Marcy. I told you about her last week. The girl on the Post, you know?”
“Well, I hope at least you had a policeman with you.”
“Naturally one would have,” she replied diplomatically. Absorbed in the interest of these new experiences, she had not thought of being fearful; without considering the question, she had felt quite capable of meeting any probable situation. But she perceived that she was alarming Paul.
It seemed safer to discuss the little house she had rented, the little house that hung like a swallow’s nest on the steep slopes of Russian Hill, overlooking the islands of the bay and the blue Marin hills. Eager to take Paul’s imagination with her, she described it minutely, its wood-paneled walls, its great windows, the fireplace, the kitchenette where they would cook supper together when he came to see her.
“And you’ll come often? Every week?” she urged.
“You’ll see me spending the new parlor wallpaper for railroad fares!” he promised.
“Just as well. I don’t want wallpaper there, anyway!”
When the expressman had come and gone, she locked the door of the bungalow for the last time, with a sense of efficient accomplishment.
“Now!” she said, “We’ll play until time for the very latest train for San Francisco.”
Their delight in each other seemed all the brighter for the temporary disagreement, like sunshine after a foggy morning. Her heart ached when the evening ended and he had to put her on the train.
“I’ll be glad when I’m not saying goodbye to you all the time!” he told her almost fiercely.
“Oh, so will I!”
She sprang lightly up the car steps, seeing too late his effort to help her, and regret increased the warmth of her thanks while he settled her bags in the rack, hung up her coat, adjusted the footstool for her. These unaccustomed services embarrassed her a little. She was aware of awkwardness in accepting them, but for a little while longer they kept him near her.
He lingered until the
