The twenty-seventh came on Thursday; she had classes in the morning; well, Jinny would be coming in the afternoon anyway, and after twelve she had—Oh heavens that was the day, the day she was to go out with Roger, the day that he would put the great question. And she wrote to Virginia:
“Come the twenty-sixth, Honey, any time after four. I couldn’t possibly meet you on the twenty-seventh. But the twenty-sixth is all right. Let me know when your train comes in and I’ll be there. And welcome to our city.”
VI
The week was one of tumult, almost of agony. After all, matters were not completely settled, you never could tell. She would be glad when the twenty-seventh had come and gone, for then, then she would be rooted, fixed. She and Roger would marry immediately. But now he was so far away, in Georgia; she missed him and evidently he missed her for the first two days brought her long telegrams almost letters. “I can think of nothing but next Thursday, are you thinking of it too?” The third day brought a letter which said practically the same thing, adding, “Oh, Angèle; I wonder what you will say!”
“But he could ask me and find out,” she said to herself and suddenly felt assured and triumphant. Every day thereafter brought her a letter reiterating this strain. “And I know how he hates to write!”
The letter on Wednesday read, “Darling, when you get this I’ll actually be in New York; if I can I’ll call you up but I’ll have to rush like mad so as to be free for Thursday, so perhaps I can’t manage.”
She made up her mind not to answer the telephone even if it did ring, she would strike one last note of indifference though only she herself would be aware of it.
It was the day on which Jinny was to arrive. It would be fun to see her, talk to her, hear all the news about the queer, staid people whom she had left so far behind. Farther now than ever. Matthew Henson was still in the post-office, she knew. Arthur Sawyer was teaching at Sixteenth and Fitzwater; she could imagine the sick distaste that mantled his face every time he looked at the hideous, discoloured building. Porter had taken his degree in dentistry but he was not practising, on the contrary he was editing a small weekly, getting deeper, more and more hopelessly into debt she was sure. … It would be fun some day to send him a whopping cheque; after all, he had taken a chance just as she had; she recognized his revolt as akin to her own, only he had not had her luck. She must ask Jinny about all this.
It was too bad that she had to meet her sister—but she must. Just as likely as not she’d be car sick and then New York was terrifying for the first time to the stranger—she had known an instant’s sick dread herself that first day when she had stood alone and ignorant in the great rotunda of the station. But she was different from Jinny; nothing about life ever made her really afraid; she might hurt herself, suffer, meet disappointment, but life could not alarm her; she loved to come to grips with it, to force it to a standstill, to yield up its treasures. But Jinny although brave, had secret fears, she was really only a baby. Her little sister! For the first time in months she thought of her with a great surge of sisterly tenderness.
It was time to go. She wore her most unobtrusive clothes, a dark blue suit, a plain white silk shirt, a dark blue, bell-shaped hat—a cloche—small and fitting down close over her eyes. She pulled it down even farther and settled her modish veil well over the tip of her nose. It was one thing to walk about the Village with Miss Powell. There were practically no coloured people there. But this was different. Those curious porters should never be able to recognize her. Seymour Porter had worked among them one summer at Broad Street station in Philadelphia. He used to say: “They aren’t really curious, you know, but their job makes them sick; so they’re always hunting for the romance, for the adventure which for a day at least will take the curse off the monotonous obsequiousness of their lives.”
She was sorry for them, but she could not permit them to remedy their existence at her expense.
In her last letter she had explained to Jinny about those two troublesome staircases which lead from the train level of the New York Pennsylvania Railroad station to the street level. “There’s no use my trying to tell you which one to take in order to bring you up to the right hand or to the left hand side of the elevator because I never know myself. So all I can say, dear, is when you do get up to the elevator just stick to it and eventually I’ll see you or you’ll see me as I revolve around it. Don’t you move, for it might turn out that we were both going in the same direction.”
True to her own instructions, she was stationed between the two staircases, jerking her neck now toward one staircase, now toward the other, stopping short to look at the elevator itself. She thrust up her veil to see better.
A man sprinted by in desperate haste, brushing so closely by her that the corner of his suitcase struck sharply on the thin inner curve of her knee.
“My goodness!” she exclaimed involuntarily.
For all his haste he was a gentleman, for he pulled of his hat, threw her a quick backward glance and began: “I beg your—why darling, darling, you don’t mean to say you came to meet me!”
“Meet you! I thought you came in
