Presently she came to Agnes’s corner. Charlton Street was quite broad and paved with cobblestones. A car-track ran down the centre of the street. The houses on both sides were built of red brick, with white frame doorways. Nice white-panelled front doors with fanlights above them and brass knobs and knockers, some brightly polished. The windows were all square-paned and many of the houses had green window-boxes. The plants in them were drab and shrivelled, however, in the city heat. Jane did not see a single flower.
Agnes’s house was in the centre of the block. It looked just like all the others. There was a sign in the downstairs front window, “Furnished Room. Gents Preferred.” Jane mounted the front steps and regarded the empty hole, where a doorbell had once hung, for a moment in perplexity. Then she pushed open the front door. She found herself in a small white-panelled vestibule, carpeted with yellow linoleum. Three mailboxes met her eye and on the middle one a card, “Mr. and Mrs. James Trent.” She pushed the electric bell beneath the mailbox and, after a minute or two in which absolutely nothing happened, she opened the inner door. The odour of cooking cabbage instantly assailed her nostrils. The entrance to the first apartment was on her left hand. A white-panelled door, soiled with countless fingerprints. A straight, steep staircase, with uncarpeted wooden treads, led to the upper floors. Jane slowly ascended the stairs into comparative darkness. The odour of cooking cabbage grew fainter. At the front end of the upper corridor was a second white-panelled door. Jane knocked at it tentatively. She heard, immediately, the sound of masculine footsteps and the airy notes of a masculine whistle, a fragment of “La Donna e mobile” from Rigoletto. The door was suddenly opened by a young man. He stood smiling at her on the threshold. A rather charming young man, with tousled dark hair and an open collar, who looked, Jane thought from the dusk of the corridor, with his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun.
“Come in,” he said pleasantly.
“I—I’m looking for Mrs. James Trent,” said Jane.
“Come in,” the young man repeated. Jane stepped, a little hesitantly, over the threshold. “You must be Jane.” His smile deepened into a grin of appreciation. “You don’t look at all as I thought you would. Come in and sit down. Agnes will be home any minute.” Then, as she continued to stare at him in perplexity, “I’m Jimmy.”
Jane’s eyes widened with astonishment. This boy, Jimmy—Agnes’s husband? He did not look a day over twenty-five. Jane knew he was thirty-four, however.
“Oh—how do you do?” she said. “Yes—I’m Jane.”
Agnes’s living-room was pleasantly old-fashioned. The ceiling was high and was decorated with a rococo design in plaster that looked, Jane thought, like the top of a wedding cake. A charming Victorian mantel of white marble dominated one end of the room. It was adorned with a bas-relief of cupids holding horns of plenty in their chubby arms. The cupids were dusty and the hearth was discoloured and the fireplace was filled with sheets of musical manuscript, torn in twain. Two tall chintz-hung windows looked over Charlton Street and a battered davenport sofa was placed beneath them. The sofa was strewn with other sheets of music, and a violin lay on a pile of disordered cushions in one corner. The top of the mantelpiece was piled with books, and a high white bookcase, filled with heterogeneous volumes, occupied one end of the room. A small gate-legged table, covered with a clean linen cloth, stood near the hearth, with an armchair on one side of it and a child’s Shaker rocker on the other. Through the half-open folding-doors across from the fireplace Jane caught a glimpse of a little room that was evidently a nursery. The floor was strewn with toys and a white iron crib stood near the window.
“Sit down,” said Jimmy, throwing an armful of music from the sofa to the floor. “Hot as hell, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I’m very early,” said Jane, sitting down in the armchair.
“No. Agnes is late,” said Jimmy. He was standing before the Victorian mantel, still regarding her with an appreciative grin. “You look as cool as a cucumber in that blue silk. Maybe I ought to put on my coat.”
“Oh, no,” said Jane politely. She hadn’t noticed his shirtsleeves until that moment.
“Well, anyway, a necktie,” persisted Jimmy engagingly, fingering his open collar.
“You look very nice and Byronic as you are,” smiled Jane.
“I know I do,” said Jimmy rather surprisingly. “I get away with a lot of that Byron stuff. But just the same I think I owe that French frock a cravat.” He walked across the room as he spoke and, opening a door, disappeared into the inner recesses of the apartment.
Jane, left to herself, began to inspect the room once more without rising from her chair. Her eyes wandered to the high bookcase. She recognized some old Bryn Mawr books that had adorned, for two years, the walls of her Pembroke study. The two small blue volumes of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The green Globe editions of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The Buxton Forman Keats and Shelley. The Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists. And the long dark red line of Matthew Arnold and Pater.
The sound of running water from the interior of the apartment distracted her attention. Jimmy was a great surprise. She had never thought that he would be like that.
