Agnes’s writing-room overlooked the garden. It had walnut panelling and book-lined walls and a large eighteenth-century table desk, with a typewriter on it, in a corner near the fireplace. Agnes and Jane spent most of the afternoon on the window-seat, looking out at the view. Jane liked the view. The grey-green river, glittering under smoke and sun, eddied swiftly past the parapet at the foot of the garden. City tugs and excursion boats plied up and down the stream, the grey towers of the Queensborough Bridge were etched against the enamelled sky, and the grass on Blackwell’s Island was the brilliant emerald green of city parks in June. Kept grass, thought Jane, that grows behind iron palings, man-made like the skyscrapers, but very tranquil and pleasant to look upon in the wilderness of brick and stone that was New York.
They talked of Cicily and her coming marriage. They talked of Jenny and her Seventy-Ninth Street penthouse. They talked of Steve and his house on Beacon Hill. They talked of Agnes’s work and of Agnes’s daughter.
Agnes turned out a play a year now. She had written twelve and had disposed of all of them, and only three had failed. One, to be sure, had had only a succès d’estime. It had been fun to work on it, but Agnes was never going to write a play like that again. Agnes was never going to finish her novel or write any more short stories, unless her luck failed her on Broadway. Agnes had banked two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the course of the last fourteen years and bought the house on Beekman Place and educated little Agnes.
Little Agnes was a Bryn Mawr junior. She had been prepared at the Brearley School and had gone in with a lot of nice girls whom she knew very well and was majoring in biology and physics. Little Agnes wanted to be a doctor, and was planning to enter the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, just as soon as she graduated. She was off on a house party now in the Berkshire Hills.
Marion Park had been kind to little Agnes and thought the child had ability. Though Agnes had often been back to the college and had seen Marion standing in Miss Thomas’s rostrum in a black silk Ph. D. gown with blue stripes on its flowing sleeves and a little black mortar board on her still brown hair, it seemed just as strange to her as it did to Jane to think that Marion Park was now President of Bryn Mawr. Agnes’s plump, authoritative person was a familiar figure on Broadway. Her grey head was crowned with authentic dramatic laurels. Jane was a grandmother three times over. Yet it seemed incredible to both of them that a contemporary of theirs could be a college president. Incredible to think that Marion, with whom they had so often sat upon a Bryn Mawr window-seat, could have become a privileged person like Miss Thomas—Miss Thomas, who had always seemed to them not quite of this world of every day.
“Does little Agnes feel that way about Marion?” asked Jane.
“The rising generation,” said Agnes with a smile, “doesn’t feel that way about anyone on God’s green earth.”
“Do you remember what Papa said about her,” said Jane, “that first night in Pembroke, when he sat next to her at supper? ‘I bet that girl will amount to something some day.’ ”
“Your father was always right about people,” said Agnes.
That, of course, made Jane think instantly of Jimmy. Had her father been right about Jimmy or had he been blinded by parental fears? Jane knew more now about parental fears than she had in the days when Jimmy had aroused them in the breast of her father. She knew they were very blinding.
“What’s the matter, Jane?” asked Agnes. “You look so sober.”
“I was thinking of Jimmy,” said Jane quietly. “I was thinking of how proud he would have been of you, Agnes, and of how he would have loved all this.” Her glance wandered over the cheerful, luxurious room, then came to rest on the restless river rolling past the window.
“Yes. He would have loved it,” said Agnes gently. “For a time. Jimmy loved success and comfort. But if he never worked for them, Jane, it was only because he loved other things more. He wasn’t like me. I’m a moneymaker, pure and simple. But Jimmy was a gypsy. Jimmy loved success for the fun of it and comfort for the ease of it, but they would soon have bored him. Jimmy could never have sat on this, window-seat and looked at all those boats without wanting to charter a tug for Shanghai or Singapore. Jimmy would never have locked up his money in banks or sunk it in bricks and mortar. He wouldn’t have been any happier, really, on Beekman Place than he was on Charlton Street. Jimmy’s happiness was always just around the corner.”
Jane listened in silence. She had been around the corner, of course. Was that why she had represented happiness to Jimmy? If so, how lucky, how very, very lucky, that she had never let him discover that her street was no different from any other thoroughfare!
Agnes was very wise. Agnes was wonderful. Agnes knew everything—except one thing. In all the years of their common experience, thought Jane, nothing bound her to Agnes as closely as the secret that Agnes would never share. She rose to leave her a little sadly.
“I hate to think of what’s before you, Jane,” said Agnes. “But remember one thing—there can’t be understanding between two generations. I’m convinced of that. Love, Jane, and sympathy,
