The door to the inner rooms opened suddenly and Jimmy reappeared, freshly washed and brushed, his collar rebut-toned, and a soft blue necktie bringing out the colour in his smiling eyes. He picked up his coat from the back of the sofa and put it on with a sigh.
“What men do for women!” he murmured as he adjusted his collar.
“What women do for men!” laughed Jane. “This dress is French, but it’s fearfully hot.”
“I bet you didn’t put it on for me!” grinned Jimmy. Jane’s blush acknowledged the home thrust. “You just wanted to show Agnes how well you’d withstood the assaults of time.”
Jane had thought Agnes might think the dress was pretty. Not that Agnes ever noticed clothes, of course.
“You must have been an infant prodigy,” went on Jimmy. He was sitting on the sofa now, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed flatteringly on her face.
“Why?” asked Jane unguardedly.
“To have been Agnes’s classmate,” said Jimmy promptly.
Jane frowned. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all. That was no way for Agnes’s husband to speak of Agnes.
“I wish she’d come home,” she said with severity.
“Do you?” smiled Jimmy. “Well, she will soon. She stops at the Play School every evening to bring home the child. It began again last week, thank God! Another day of vacation and I should have committed infanticide.”
Jane did not reply to this sally. She continued to look, very seriously, at Jimmy. But he rattled on, ignoring her silence.
“A Play School is a wonderful invention. It takes children off their parents’ hands for nine hours a day. I call it immoral—but very convenient. So much immorality is merely convenience, isn’t it? We resort to it, faute de mieux. Saloons and play schools and brothels—they’re all cheap compromises, forced on us by civilization. In an ideal Utopia I suppose we’d all drink and love and bring up our children at home. Do it and like it—though that seems rather a contradiction in terms. Progressive education is really only one of many symptoms of decadence. It’s a sign of the fall of the empire.” He paused abruptly and looked charmingly over at Jane, as if waiting for her applause. Jane felt an inexplicable impulse not to applaud him.
“That’s all very clever,” she said quickly. “But of course it isn’t true.”
Jimmy burst into amiable laughter.
“So you are a pricker of bubbles, are you, Jane?” he asked amusedly. “You certainly don’t look it. Are you a defender of the truth and no lover of dialectic for dialectic’s sake? Do beautiful rainbow-coloured bubbles, all made up of watery ideas and soapy vocabulary, floating airily, without foundation, in the void, mean nothing in your life?”
“Very little,” said Jane severely. “I’m a very practical person.”
“I seem to be a creature of one idea this afternoon,” said Jimmy lightly, “but I can only repeat—you don’t look it! The picture you present, as you sit in that armchair, Jane, is far from practical—”
As he spoke, Jane heard with relief the sound of a latchkey in the outer door.
“That’s Agnes!” she cried, springing to her feet.
“It must be,” said Jimmy, rising reluctantly to his.
The door opened quickly, and Agnes, hand in hand with her five-year-old daughter, stood beaming on the threshold. Just the same old Agnes, with her funny freckled face and her clever cheerful smile! No—somehow a slightly plumper, rather more solid Agnes, with a certain maturity of gesture and authority of eye! Jane clasped her in her arms. It was not until the embrace was over that she noticed how grey Agnes’s hair had grown. It showed quite plainly under her broad hat-brim. Jane sank on her knees before the child. She looked a little pale and peaked, Jane thought, but she was Agnes all o’er again—the little Agnes that Jane had known in the first grades of Miss Milgrim’s School! How preposterous—how ridiculous—to see that little Agnes once more in the flesh! How absurdly touching! Jane clasped the child gently in her arms.
“Agnes!” she cried. “She’s precious! She’s just like you!”
“Unfortunately,” remarked Agnes with mock criticism. “When she might have favoured her fascinating father! Whatever you may say against Jimmy, Jane, you have to admit he has looks. In six years of matrimony they’ve never palled on me.”
“Don’t talk like that, Agnes,” remonstrated Jimmy promptly. “You make me feel superficial. I’ve much more than looks. I’ve all the social graces. I’ve been exhibiting them for Jane’s benefit for the last twenty minutes and I leave it to her if my face is my fortune! I’ve many more important assets.”
“How about it, Jane?” said Agnes, smiling. “Did he make the grade?” Behind the smile Jane detected a gleam of real concern in Agnes’s glance. She suddenly recalled that winter afternoon, sixteen years ago, when she had first displayed Stephen to Agnes in Mr. Ward’s library on Pine Street. Handsome young Stephen, flushed from the winter cold! She remembered her own dismay at the unspoken verdict of “cotillion partner” in Agnes’s honest eyes.
“Y-yes,” she said slowly, with a twinkle, rising to her feet, still holding the child’s hand in hers. “I think he did—for a first impression.”
“If anything,” said Jimmy engagingly, “I improve on acquaintance. I’m an acquired taste, like ripe olives. I feel that’s been said before. Let’s say I’m a bad habit, like nicotine or alcohol. Once you take me up, you’ll find it hard to get on without me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” said Agnes. She threw a glance at Jane to see how she was taking his banter.
“I was just warning her,” said Jimmy.
“Jane never needs much warning,” said Agnes.
“Now, that’s just the sort of thing she’s always said of you,” sighed Jimmy plaintively. “It gave me such a false impression. I’ve never been attracted by the
