“I will,” said Isabel. “There probably will be. Muriel never does anything for herself.”
The car crunched slowly around the gravel driveway. Jane watched it to the entrance. Curious, she thought, the gap between the points of view of different generations. The facts of life were always the same, but people thought about them so differently. New thoughts, reflected Jane, about the same old actions. Was it progress or merely change? Sex was a loaded pistol, thought Jane, thrust into the hand of humanity. Her mother’s generation had carried it carefully, fearful of a sudden explosion. Her generation, and Isabel’s, waved it nonchalantly about, but, after all, with all their carelessness, they didn’t fire it off any oftener than their parents had. What if the next generation should take to shooting? Shooting straight regardless of their target. As Jane entered the front hall, the telephone was ringing.
She stood still, suddenly, on the doormat. That might be Jimmy, she thought instantly, and despised herself for the thought. Jane hated to think that she had been back in the Lakewood house for three weeks and that, in all that time, the telephone had never rung without awakening in her unwilling brain the thought that it might be Jimmy. For Jimmy had never telephoned. He had vanished completely out of her life that morning in the La Salle Street Station. At first she had been only relieved to find that the voice, whosever it was, trickling over the wire, was not his. Jane had been firmly determined to discipline Jimmy for that outrageous refusal to lunch with Stephen on the day of his arrival. But, as the days passed and she did not hear from him, her relief had been subtly tempered first with curiosity then with concern, and, at last, with indignation. Jimmy ought to have telephoned. It was rude of him not to. She had really felt, after those intimate hours on the back platform of the Twentieth Century, that she meant something to Jimmy, that he really liked her, that he was depending on her for support and diversion during his visit to Chicago. And then—he had not telephoned. By not telephoning he had made Jane feel rather a fool. For Jimmy had meant something to her, she had really liked him. Of course he was irritating and she had known he was not to be counted on, but still—she had thought that she had read an honest admiration in his ironic eyes, she had felt that he was a very amusing person, she had even wondered just what she had better do in case Jimmy’s honest admiration became a trifle embarrassing. She had solemnly assured herself, on her arrival at Lakewood, that if she were firm and pleasantly disciplinary she could, of course, handle Jimmy, who was a dear and Agnes’s husband, but not very wise, perhaps, and obviously in the frame of mind in which he could easily be led astray by the flutter of a petticoat. And then—he had not telephoned.
“Mrs. Carver,” Miss Parrot’s pleasant voice called down the stairs, “Mr. Carver wants you on the wire.”
Jane walked to the telephone in the pantry.
“Yes, dear?” she said.
“I can’t get out for dinner this evening,” said Stephen. “Muriel wants me to come up and talk business with her. It seems Bert was just advising her about some investments when he was stricken. She’s got some bonds he wanted her to sell immediately.”
“Of course go, dear,” said Jane quickly. Stephen would be very helpful to Muriel. Everyone turned to Stephen when in trouble. And Muriel had no one to advise her except Freddy Waters, her volatile brother-in-law. Unless you counted Cyril Fortune, who was a young landscape gardener recently rumoured to have lost twenty thousand dollars in a flyer in oil. He wouldn’t be much to lean on in a financial crisis.
“I’ll be out on the ten-ten,” said Stephen. “Don’t be lonely.”
“I won’t,” said Jane. “I’ve got letters to write. Give my love to Muriel.”
As Jane turned from the telephone she heard the whirr of a motor. That would be the children coming home from school. The car called for them at the playground every afternoon at five. Jane was always afraid to let them walk home alone through the traffic. The country lane on which her house had been built, fourteen years before, had long since become a suburban highroad. As she entered the hall again, they burst in at the front door. The cocker-spaniel puppy tumbled down the stairs to meet them.
“Mumsy!” called Jenny. “Oh, there you are! I’ve made the basketball team and I need some gym shoes!”
“I’m going to take my rabbits to school for the Animal Fair!” cried little Steve.
“Can I ask Jack and Belle to come out on Saturday?” said Cicily. Jack and Belle were Isabel’s seventeen- and thirteen-year-old son and daughter. No weekend was complete without them.
“When can we get the gym shoes?” said Jenny.
“I need a cage for the rabbits,” said little Steve.
“I’ve got to have the gym shoes by Monday, Mumsy,” said Jenny.
“Do you think I could make a cage out of a peach crate?” said little Steve.
“Hush!” said Jane. “Pick up your coat, Jenny, and hang it in the closet. Steve—your books don’t belong on the floor.
“Yes, Cicily, you can telephone Aunt Isabel tonight and ask them.”
“Mumsy, where can I find a peach crate?”
“Be quiet!” said Jane. “Now go upstairs, all of you, and wash! If you get your homework done before supper, I’ll read King Arthur stories to you tonight. Daddy’s not coming home.”
The children clattered up the staircase. Jane walked into the living-room with a sigh. They were terribly noisy. They never seemed to behave like other people’s children. She sat down at her desk and began to look over the afternoon mail. An invitation to dine in town with Muriel before an evening musical—that would be off, now, of course. A bill from the plumber for repairing the faucets in the maid’s bathroom.
