“It doesn’t sound so good,” said Cicily, “if you read it ‘Forever wilt thou love and she be silly’!” She tucked her arm under Jane’s elbow. “Come on, Mumsy, Albert and Dad are waiting.”
VII
“I think,” said Stephen, “I’ll try to take a nap.”
“Why don’t you, dear?” said Jane.
Jane herself was far from feeling sleepy. She had been sitting in silence for the last half-hour on the Empire sofa in the little green sitting room, watching Stephen turn over the pages of the Paris Herald and the London Times. She rose, now, and followed him into their bedroom. It was rather a relief, she was thinking, to have something definite to do, even if that something was only pulling down three window-shades and raising one window and tucking a light steamer rug over Stephen’s recumbent form. Stephen was looking very grim and tired. They had had a hard day, though nothing much had happened in it. At eleven in the morning Cicily had telephoned. She had telephoned to announce that her lawyer had just called her up from the courtroom to inform her that her decree had been made final. There had been no complications and the last requirement had been complied with. That was all there had been to the formal proceedings that Jane and Stephen had tragically prepared themselves to witness. Two months ago two foreign lawyers had spoken in an alien tongue. Cicily had murmured a few French words of acquiescence. A judge had entered an interlocutory judgment. Today that judgment had been entered on the records of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. And a marriage had been dissolved.
Cicily had planned to have a little lunch with Albert. She had arranged for Jane and Stephen, however, to join Muriel and Ed Brown at the Ritz. That luncheon with Muriel, Jane reflected, had been rather like the first meal after a family funeral. Though, of course, you did not usually have to take the first meal after a family funeral in a public restaurant and you did not usually have to talk through it about prohibition with Ed Brown. Jane and Stephen had returned very early in the afternoon to their rooms at the Chatham.
Jane closed the bedroom door and reentered the green sitting-room. She sat down on the Empire sofa. From behind the heavy green curtains of the long French windows the sharp, staccato uproar of the traffic on the rue Daunou rang in her ears. The shrill, toy-like toots of the French taxis punctuated the sound. Cities had voices, thought Jane. Chicago rumbled and New York hummed and Paris tooted. Jane glanced at the London Times and the Paris Herald. She felt curiously empty-handed, but she did not seem to want to read the papers. Reading the papers, Jane reflected, was the eternal resource of men. It offered no distraction to women. She had at last her hour alone in Paris and she did not know what to do with it. She wondered what Cicily and Albert were doing. She thought of the Bureau of Vital Statistics. The Catholics were right. Metaphysically speaking, there was no such thing as divorce. Marriage was a mystical union of body and spirit. It was a state of being. It could not be dissolved by legal procedure. The past could not be denied. The present was its consequence. The future—but as far as the future went, though Cicily seemed to Jane as much Jack’s wife as she had ever been, she was going to marry Albert Lancaster in Flora’s apartment in three days’ time. After that, Jane reflected hopelessly, she would be two men’s wife! It was frightfully complicated, metaphysically speaking.
Just then Jane heard a knock on the door.
“Entrez!” she cried, with a curious sense of relief. But it was only a bellboy. He had a letter on a little silver tray. “Merci,” said Jane and fumbled for a franc. The letter was from Isabel.
Jane opened it before the bellboy had left the room. Isabel’s letters were always good reading. This one contained a surprise, and Jane felt, as she read it, exactly as if Isabel were sitting beside her on the little Empire sofa. Her sister’s very accents clung to the sixteen closely written pages.
“Dearest Jane,
“I haven’t written, but I’ve been awfully busy. I’ve been thinking of you, of course, and of Stephen, too. I sometimes feel that all this has been harder on Robin and Stephen than on you and me. In a way, I think, fathers care more than mothers what happens to daughters.
“I care most about Jack. But, Jane, I’m beginning to feel much happier about him. He loved his work at Tech, and as soon as he left there this June, he took a summer job with the telephone company down near Mexico City. I’ve just had his first letter. He’s stringing wires and building bridges, just as Cicily said he would. He misses the children fearfully, of course, but he could not have taken them to Mexico, in any case. Nevertheless, they are the insuperable problem.
“At any rate, work is the thing for Jack to tie to, just now. It can’t betray him, as a woman might. It’s so much safer to love things than people.
“This brings me to Belle’s news. It’s what I’ve been so busy over these last two weeks. It’s still a great secret, but I know it will make you and Stephen happier to know it. She’s engaged to Billy Winter. She’s not going to announce it, but just marry him quietly here in the apartment some afternoon and slip off to Murray Bay for her honeymoon. Robin and I are going to keep the babies while she’s gone. Billy’s rented a Palmer House on Ritchie Court for the winter.
“Belle has no misgivings about anything and almost
