“Not only,” said Jimmy mockingly, “in the presence of a third person. Night after night, Jane, while Agnes is arguing with me, the child falls asleep on the hearth rug.” He, too, was rising regretfully to his feet. He picked up his drowsy daughter.
“Can I get a taxi down here?” asked Jane.
“Jimmy’ll cruise out and find one,” said Agnes.
He left the restaurant with the child on his shoulder. Agnes sank back into her chair. Suddenly she leaned forward across the candlelight.
“If I could write a play, Jane,” she said earnestly, “a good bad play, such as managers have confidence in, it might run for a season. If it did, I’d make fifty thousand dollars.”
“Oh, Agnes!” said Jane reproachfully. “Don’t talk like that! You never used to. Why do you want to write a bad play—just for a manager? Write a good one if it never gets on. I bet you could. You have lots of ideas—you always had—”
“Exactly,” said Agnes, briefly. “I’ve always had more ideas than cash.” Her face clouded a little under Jane’s incredulous stare, then lightened suddenly with conviction. “If you think there’s an idea in my head that I wouldn’t sacrifice for a dollar, you’re very much mistaken. Jane—you have to have money to be happy. If I could make fifty thousand dollars, I’d put every cent of it in trust for little Agnes. It would clothe her and educate her and take care of her as long as she lived. I’d never have to worry about the future again. I wouldn’t feel anxious and driven any longer and I’d stop nagging Jimmy the way I have nagged him ever since Agnes was born, and if I stopped nagging him, we’d have time to talk together the way we used to—to be together the way we used to—Jimmy’s adorable when he isn’t nagged—I adore him when I’m nagging him. But I just can’t help it. I’m growing cross and nervous and old before my time and—”
“Taxi waiting!” said Jimmy, at Jane’s elbow. He looked a little curiously, Jane thought, at Agnes’s excited face. But he asked no questions.
Agnes rose from the table without speaking. Her hands were trembling a little as she picked up her daughter’s hat from the back of her chair. Jane followed her out onto the sidewalk in silence. She was almost trembling herself from the contagion of Agnes’s excitement. Or was it from the disconcerting glimpse she had had of Agnes’s private life through the rent that Agnes had torn in the curtain that hides the private lives of all married couples from the eyes of the world. She was acutely conscious of the intimacy of the moment that had just passed between them. And terribly sorry for Agnes. And for Jimmy. And terribly thankful in the dark of the uptown-bound taxi, for a husband like Stephen, who was a banker and caught the eight o’clock train every morning and didn’t write concertos and lie in bed and goad her into nagging him until—
Jane was so preoccupied with thoughts of husbands and marriage, and what life did to girls who were once young and full of promise and sat on Bryn Mawr window-seats confidently assuming that the world was their oyster, that she almost forgot to feel queer as she passed through the lobby of the Belmont Hotel alone at midnight. But not quite.
IV
“I thought you’d be more enthusiastic,” said Flora.
“I am enthusiastic,” protested Jane. “It’s just that I’m not used to the idea yet—”
They were sitting on the edge of Flora’s bed at the Belmont. The room was crowded with gaping trunks and strewn with the silk and satin confusion of Flora’s new winter wardrobe, fresh from the fingers of the Paris dressmakers. Flora, very chic and fair in a new sheath dress of black chiffon, was fastening on her slender wrist the first diamond wrist watch that Jane had ever seen. She was wearing the first slit skirt that Jane had ever seen, also. Jane could not keep her eyes off the unseemly exposure of Flora’s slender black legs. Flora had said they were wearing dresses like that in the streets of Paris.
“Be that as it may,” thought Jane, “in the streets of Chicago that skirt will look very queer.”
But Flora was only superficially preoccupied with slit skirts and wrist watches. She had been unfolding to Jane her plans for the winter. Jane wondered what her mother and Isabel would think of them. For those plans were very surprising. Flora, incredibly, was going to open a shop. A hat shop. And, of all places, in the old brownstone stable in the back yard on Rush Street.
“Lots of women are doing it in London,” said Flora. “I’ve got the duckiest French models and a very clever French vendeuse to help me. We’re going to make hats on the head, you know, just the way they do in Paris. I’m going to turn the coach-house into a showroom and make fitting-rooms out of the stalls. The workshop will be in the hayloft. Papa sold the Daimler last spring, and he thinks it would really be more convenient to use cabs this winter than buy a new one. I’m going to have a black-and-gold sign made to put over the door—‘Chez Flora,’ in a facsimile of my own handwriting. And copy it for the tags inside the hats. That lid of yours is a fright, Jane. It looks almost like Silly’s. I bet you bought it in Boston. You must be my first customer.”
The hat did not look like Silly’s, thought Jane indignantly. Then, as she recovered from the passing insult, “Do you expect to make much money?” Jane had been thinking rather wistfully of money and of the difficulty of making it, since her dinner last night with
