Anne’s small exclamation was half fond and half weary.
“We’ll always have love. Every one of us has someone around in the background, sending us flowers. A woman without a man who loves her feels like a promissory note without an endorsement. But marriage!”
“And there’s always the question—what is love?” Helen roused at the little flutter of merriment, and after a moment she joined it with her clear laugh.
“Why, love is just love,” said Sara, bewildered.
“Of course. There’s only one definition. It’s something that isn’t there when you’re trying to analyze it. And every one of us would,” said Dodo. “Give me an orange, Sara darling, and tell us about the new pictures.”
It was their last evening together in the little house. Precious as each moment of it was to Helen, with the coming change in her own life hanging over it, she had no more premonition than the others of the events that would so soon whirl them apart.
XXII
Marian rushed in upon them at luncheon next day, glowing with excitement, to announce that she would leave that night for New York on her way to France.
“I’m going as a correspondent, of course. I never dreamed that I could pull it off. But the United Press has come through with credentials. Girls, when I get over there, stories or no stories, I’m going to do something to help. I’m going to find a place where I’ll be useful.”
“Wait till tomorrow,” said Dodo, quietly. “I’ll go with you as far as Washington.” Smiling at their stunned faces, she explained, still unruffled: “I’ve been thinking about it for some time. My assistants can keep things going here till I can arrange to put in someone else. I don’t know whether this country’s going into the war or not, but if it does, I want to be in the heart of things. I’d be no good in France, but I can do something in our own Department of Labor.”
Two days later they were gone. Helen’s own wistfulness was echoed in Willetta’s mournful exclamation: “Lucky dogs! What wouldn’t I give! But there’s no use. The East is no place to bring up children, even if I could afford to take a chance, with the infant to think about. Oh, well, you girls’ll come back twenty years from now to find me in the same old grind.”
“Never mind, Willie dear. I’ll be right here the rest of my life, too,” said Helen, and for a moment Paul’s name was on her lips. She felt that speaking of him would be a defense against her own illogical depression, and these girls would understand. It would not even occur to them that legally she was still another man’s wife. But Willetta’s “Oh, you! You’re going to leave all the rest of us a million miles behind!” silenced her.
“None of us have developed the way you have in this one year,” said Willetta. “If you knew what I hear everywhere about your work!” Though she knew in her heart that she would never be a great writer, praise for her work always gave Helen a throb of deep delight.
Two weeks later she sat in Mr. Hayden’s office listening to a suggestion that left her breathless.
“Why don’t you go to the Orient?” Mr. Hayden’s eyes, usually faintly humorous, were quite serious. “There’s a big field there right now. The undercurrents in Shanghai, Japan’s place in the war, the developments in Mesopotamia or Russia. France is done to death already. Everyone’s writing from there. But the East is still almost untouched. There’s a big opportunity there for someone.”
“Do you think I could handle it?”
“Of course you could. It’s a matter of being on the ground and reporting. All it needs is the ability to see things clearly and tell them graphically. You have that. It would take money, of course. I don’t know how you’re fixed for that.”
She thought quickly, her pulses leaping.
“With these last two checks—and I have a little coming in from deferred land commissions—I’d have not quite a thousand dollars.”
“Hm—well, it’s not much, of course. It would be something of a gamble. If you want to try it, we’ll give you transportation and letters and take a story a month. And I don’t think you’d have any difficulty finding other markets in the East.”
For a moment she tried to consider the question coolly, while pictures of Chinese pagodas, paper-walled houses of Japan, Siberian prairies, raced dizzily before her eyes. Then, with a shock of self-accusation, she remembered.
“I couldn’t go. Other arrangements.”
“Don’t decide too quickly. Think it over. There’s a great opportunity there, and I believe you could handle it. It would make you, as a magazine writer. If you make up your mind to go, let me know right away? There’s a boat on the twentieth. If you sailed on that, it would give us time to announce the series for the winter, when our renewals are coming in.”
“I’ll think about it,” she promised. “But I’m quite sure I can’t go.”
She walked quickly down the windy street toward Market. The whirling dust-eddies over the cobbles, the blown scraps of paper, the flapping of her skirts, seemed part of the miserable confusion in her own mind.
How could she have forgotten Paul even for a moment? She had been heartless, headstrong, foolish to stay on in San Francisco, trifling so with the most precious thing in her life. Paul had been superhumanly patient and kind and unselfish to let her do it. She had never loved him more deeply than at that moment when with a dim sense of fleeing to him for refuge she hurried toward a telephone. Her voice trembled unmanageably when at last his came thin and faint across the wires. She had to speak twice to make him hear.
“Paul? Oh, Paul! It’s Helen.—No, nothing’s the matter. Only—I want to see you. Listen—I want to get away—Can you hear me? I say, I want