“And you’ll take care of Jimmy in the corn belt,” said Agnes a little wistfully.
“Of course I will,” said Jane, pushing the check through the cashier’s cage. “I think he’s a darling. When will he show up?”
“Oh—right away,” said Agnes. “He would have loved to go with you, Jane, but he has to pay his own expenses, so the Twentieth Century seemed foolish. He’ll loiter out on some milk train in a day or two and show up in Lakewood looking hungry for a square meal.”
“Well, he’ll get one!” Jane pocketed her change.
“And now, darling”—Agnes looked steadily in Jane’s shining eyes—“you are a darling, you know, Jane—wish me luck on the play!”
“You know I do,” said Jane. “I hope it’s bad enough to run forever.”
“It won’t be my fault if it isn’t,” said Agnes. She put one arm around Jane’s waist. Jane looked tenderly at her funny freckled face.
“Agnes,” said Jane. “You’re the most gallant person I ever knew.”
Agnes smiled in defensive mockery.
“No,” said Agnes. “You’ve forgotten. Dido was that.”
“Dido?” questioned Jane. Then she remembered. The memory of Agnes’s little front porch, “west of Clark Street,” rose before her. The Aeneid and André and the Thomas Concert.
“No,” she said earnestly, “you beat Dido. I’m going to see that the Eroica Symphony is played at your funeral pyre.”
“Jimmy might whistle it,” suggested Agnes. Her lips met Jane’s cheek.
“Duty calls!” she said. “Goodbye, old speed!” Jane watched her solid, slightly shabby figure disappear in the Broadway traffic. To Jane it looked very heroic. She was conscious, curiously enough, of a slight sense of envy. Agnes’s life, at least, was still an adventure. She was fighting odds and overcoming difficulties. She was struggling with life and love. Goodness! Jane jumped—that taxi had almost exterminated her! If it had, thought Jane, as she pushed her way through the hurrying crowd of Broadway pedestrians, Agnes would have rated that best of epitaphs—“I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.”
VI
Jane sat beside Flora in their compartment on the Twentieth Century, watching Flora and Mr. Furness play cribbage. She was thinking how much Mr. Furness looked like her mother-in-law and how much he looked a venerable codfish and how much more feeble he had grown during his summer months abroad. His hands trembled terribly when he dealt the cards and fumbled as he fixed the little pegs in the holes in the cribbage board. The train had just passed Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson stretched glittering, a river of steel, in the hazy September sunshine outside the window.
It was warm in the compartment, in spite of the whirring electric fan, and Jane was not particularly interested in cribbage. She thought she would go back to the observation car and read a magazine. She said as much and Flora looked up patiently from the cribbage board. Flora was not particularly interested in cribbage either, but Mr. Furness loved it. Jane could remember him playing it with Flora’s mother in the green-and-gold parlour of the Rush Street house. She could remember just how the rings had looked on Flora’s mother’s lovely listless hands as she moved the cribbage pegs. One of those rings, a sapphire between two diamonds, was on Flora’s hand that minute. And Flora’s hand was just as lovely and just as listless. Mr. Furness should have taken up solitaire early in life, thought Jane brutally.
She walked through the plush and varnished comfort of the Twentieth Century thinking idly that Flora’s life was terrible. Nothing ever happened in it. She wondered in how many trains, bound for what exotic destinations, Flora had played cribbage with Mr. Furness. Of course, on the Twentieth Century Limited, just passing through Spuyten Duyvil, you would not expect anything very surprising to happen in any case, but on those trains de luxe, en route, for Calcutta and Luxor and Moscow, had not Flora ever felt—Jane passed from the narrow corridor to the observation compartment and saw Jimmy Trent, stretched comfortably in an armchair, scanning the columns of the Evening World.
He saw her instantly and cast aside the paper.
“I was wondering when you would show up,” he said casually. Then, rising to his feet, “I saw you get aboard and took an upper on the same section. I was just about to page the train for you.”
Jane stared at him in astonishment. She could not believe her eyes.
“Did—did Agnes know you were coming?” she asked stupidly.
“Oh, yes,” said Jimmy. “I had lunch with her. I only decided to come this morning.”
“Oh!” said Jane. Then after a tiny pause, “I thought—”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “that you shared all those thrifty thoughts of Agnes’s about that milk train. But I say anything that’s worth doing at all is worth doing well. And I haven’t been out of New York City for six years.”
“Oh!” said Jane again.
Jimmy continued to contemplate her with a sunny smile.
“I took this train,” he said presently, “because I thought we’d have fun on it together. Don’t you think it’s time we began? We’ve lost almost an hour already.”
“What—what do you want to do?” asked Jane, again rather stupidly. She felt totally unequal to coping with Jimmy.
“I want to talk to you,” said Jimmy disarmingly. “There’s nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you’re talking, that is, with the right person.”
Jane, still staring up at him, felt her features harden defensively.
Jimmy burst into gentle laughter.
“Jane,” he said, “you look like a startled faun! You needn’t. Would it have been more discreet of me to use the plural? Should I have said ‘the right people’? I don’t like that phrase. It has an unfortunate social significance.”
Jane began to feel a little foolish. She laughed in spite of herself. Her laughter seemed to cheer Jimmy immensely.
“Curious, isn’t it,” he went on airily, “that ‘talking with the right people’ means something
