Joanna was cautious. “Of course I have my work. I do miss Peter though—sometimes.”
“Sometimes! Girl, you aren’t human. Well, being heartless isn’t bad! What do you want to do, go to the ‘Dance of The Nations’ down at the District Line Theater?”
But Joanna wanted a chance to think, so on the pretext of having to return to the Library, she left Vera. She realized the tragedy of her friend’s case, the awful emptiness that had come into her life. Hadn’t her own life been affected in the same way?
A bus stopped before her and she mounted it, her thoughts weaving mechanically. She did not blame Vera at all for the change in her mode of living. In those first few months after Peter had left her she had wondered often how she could go on with life. For a long while she had existed simply from day to day, paying an exaggerated attention to small happenings, making engagements with people whom she had scarcely noticed before, doing anything to get away from the weariness of her thoughts. Many a night she had spent meditating on some coup, some reckless expenditure of energy and interest no matter how silly, how scandalous, so long as it took her out of herself.
She had even tried flirting, a field hitherto unthought of. As it was she had been too kind to Harry Portor; of late she had consciously avoided him because she knew only too well what he meant to ask of her the next time they were alone. She hated to hurt him but that seemed inevitable, for her heart held not the slightest fraction of love for him.
Oh, Peter! Peter!
As she rode up Fifth Avenue under the starry reaches of the sky, beneath the tender budding of April trees, her desperate longing quickened to a sudden resolve. She would write to Maggie—Maggie, who could not possibly love Peter. And even if she did, she could not love him as she—Joanna—loved him. Why, there had been Philip once, and then Henderson Neal!—Whereas Peter had been the only love of her own life.
She would write to Maggie, very clearly, very frankly and she would beg her to let him go. It all seemed simple enough. And then she and Peter would be happy. She would make him love her again, worship her. And “Peter,” she would tell him, “never another unkind word, I’ll be a new Joanna, darling.”
Her father’s house, its windows darkened, loomed up before her. Straight up to her own room she sped, not stopping to enter Sylvia’s apartments, although the sound of laughing voices penetrated to her.
Alone at the little flat-topped desk, she took out pen and paper and began the letter—“Dear Maggie”—But that was what she had done years ago—written to Maggie to give up Philip. That was in the unconscious selfishness of youth. Now was she to write her again to give up Peter? Her courage oozed away, left her helpless. She looked at the pen, put it carefully away on the rack, slipped the sheet of paper back in the pigeonhole. She might go down to Philadelphia to visit Alice Talbert. Yes, she would do that very soon. And then maybe she would see Maggie Ellersley—on the street, or even go and call on her. Undoubtedly it was better to discuss such personal matters face to face.
XXV
While Joanna was sitting at her desk, Maggie Ellersley some fifty blocks away brooded over plans of her own. She had hoped, vainly as it turned out, that her absence from Philadelphia would quicken Peter’s need of her. His very real regard for her hospitality and kindness had long since been evident. She knew that he considered the little apartment on South Fifteenth Street his nearest approach to a home in Philadelphia, and she had hoped that the loneliness caused by her departure would induce him to urge her to come back. But Peter’s letters had not been in the least melancholy. Once a week he had written to her regularly during the four weeks of her stay in New York, but though he had been kind and pleasant, not once had he expressed a desire to see her, or even a passing curiosity as to the date of her return.
When she had first come back to New York, she had had a feeling of shame and despondency as she thought of her effort in Philadelphia to induce Peter to take a definite stand about their wedding. But her stay here with her mother had dissipated all that feeling. The prosy, uninteresting life which Mrs. Ellersley and Mis’ Sparrow led, the troop of commonplace, albeit kindly and dependable roomers made her turn again to Peter for a way out. More than ever she was in the same trap in which she had found herself years ago when as a little girl she walked home with her mother from the dinners which she had eaten in some employer’s house. Now, it was true, her surroundings were no longer dirty and she was no longer poor—she and her mother had all the money they needed and almost all that they wanted. Of lowly stock, Maggie had never cared in the least for the possession of riches. But the old loneliness, the old sense of unworthiness, of being nobody was strong upon her.
In earlier days she had frequented the Marshalls’ house; plenty of other girls had frequented it, too. It was to be presumed that the Marshalls from time to time had returned such visits. But somehow she had never contrived to be on really intimate terms with those others. They were all polite, more than polite, even cordial to Maggie, and yet she knew that while moving with that group, she was not of it.
The difficulty had been, had always been, that she had no background.
Other girls’ fathers and mothers were “somebodies.” Alice and Vera Manning’s father was a remarkably successful businessman, old Joel
