“How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away!”
A wrinkled old woman, pulling a little wagon full of kindling, turned to smile toothlessly up at him at the sound of his artless tenor. He grinned at her pleasantly and resumed his song. Jimmy might be irritating, thought Jane, and of course he was a worthless husband, but he had charm.
III
The waiter’s hand, which touched Jane’s accidentally as he placed her demitasse before her, felt damp and warmly clammy. His collar was wilted and great drops of perspiration beaded his swarthy brow. Throughout the meal Jane had seen him surreptitiously mopping it with the wrinkled napkin that hung over his arm. Tony’s was hot and very crowded. Vaguely conscious of having eaten too much garlic in the salad and too much cheese in the spaghetti and of having drunk rather more Chianti than was perhaps quite wise on such a warm evening, Jane was half-listening to Jimmy, who was conversing most intelligently on modern American music, and half-reflecting that little Agnes, who had eaten quite as much garlic and cheese as she had herself, should have been in bed hours ago and would certainly be sick when once she was. The child was half-asleep in her chair.
Agnes was arguing with Jimmy, also most intelligently, on modern American music and everyone else within hearing at the little candlelit tables seemed to be arguing also. Across the room four dark-eyed, oily-headed, hairy-wristed young men were certainly arguing very vociferously in Italian on some unknown subject, and, just beyond them, a middle-aged woman with short grey hair and a green smock was arguing in tense undertones with her adolescent escort as to whether or no he should order another apricot brandy, and at the round table in the middle of the room an uproarious group of young men and women were shouting their arguments on the relative merits of Matisse and Picasso, two painters, apparently, of whom, until that moment, Jane had never even heard.
In spite of the heat and the garlic and the cheese and the arguments, and, possibly, Jane thought, partly because of the Chianti, she had enjoyed the evening very much indeed. It was fun to be with Agnes again and fun, after two months at Gull Rocks, to be chattering carelessly with contemporaries whose intellectual slant on life was the same as her own. Moreover, Jane, in the course of the evening, had become comfortingly reassured about Jimmy. Why, she almost understood, already, why Agnes had married him. He was certainly amusing and seemed also to be intelligent, and he was very much sweeter with Agnes and his little daughter thar Jane had expected him to be after his cavalier references to them in his initial advances toward her. He did not seem at all like Agnes’s husband, of course. He did not seem like anyone’s husband. More like some young relative—a brother or a cousin or even a nephew—whose attitude toward his family was marked by humorous detachment, affectionate and appreciative, but distinctly irresponsible.
His attitude toward Jane had been marked by a mocking, but flattering, attention and a rapidly increasing sense of intimacy. There was something in his manner, not at all unpleasant, that seemed subtly to suggest that he was always remembering that Jane was a woman and never allowing her to forget that he was a man. Jane could not think of any other American husband who was just like him. Bert Lancaster, of course, was always woman-conscious, but in a slimy, satyrish sort of way that bore no resemblance to Jimmy’s cool recognition of a world in which you felt he thanked God that there were two sexes. There was a friendly matter-of-factness about Jimmy’s frank admiration that made Jane feel very sure that they would get on well together. She was glad that he was coming to Chicago.
He was coming, almost immediately, to take up a friend’s job as musical critic on the Daily News, while that friend spent the winter in Munich. He was bringing his fiddle and the unfinished concerto and he expected to get a great deal of work done in some boardinghouse bedroom, with no woman around to distract him. Agnes hoped that he would. She hoped to do some writing herself, in the evenings after little Agnes was in bed. Not the novel, of course—she would never finish that now; but she had plots for a couple of short stories that she thought she could sell and—Jane would laugh at her, she knew—an idea for a play about newspaper life that had never been done before.
Jane did not laugh at her. She had no high hopes for Jimmy’s concerto, but she longed to see Agnes take up writing again. She thought that Jimmy would like Chicago. She would introduce him to all Agnes’s old friends and Stephen would put him up at the clubs—
“He hadn’t better do that,” Jimmy had interrupted lightly. “At the only club I ever belonged to I was kicked out for nonpayment of dues. I shouldn’t advise a conservative banker to back me at another—”
Jane had laughed at his nonsense, wondering, however, just how much Stephen would have laughed had he been present that evening. Jimmy did not seem just Stephen’s kind. Something told her that Jimmy would not take the importance of bank mergers very seriously, and that to Stephen a man without visible means of support, who had spent ten years of his life writing a concerto for the violin, would seem rather one of the broader jokes—unless he seemed just an object of charity, in which case Stephen would be very kind and considerate and helpful, of course, but possibly not entirely understanding.
“Agnes,” said Jane suddenly, in the midst of the argument on modern American music, “you ought to put that child to bed.”
“I know I ought,” said Agnes, rising regretfully from her chair, “but it’s
