“Why?” said André very seriously.
Jane felt her eyes fill with tears.
“Because,” said Jane, and her lips were trembling, “I didn’t know what you’d think of me.”
André saw the tears. He looked awfully embarrassed and terribly kind.
“That’s all right, Jane,” said André. She was smiling straight up at him through the tears. “I guess you know I’ll always think one thing of you.”
Jane was consumed in a flame of grateful happiness.
“Oh, André!” she breathed.
“Never mind Camille,” said André, as they began walking again. “We can do something else.”
Jane became suddenly conscious of the windows of her house. They stared down on Pine Street.
“Perhaps—perhaps,” she said guiltily, “you hadn’t better come any further.”
André flushed right up to the edge of his beret. But he never stopped smiling.
“Oh—all right,” he said.
“See you tomorrow!” said Jane.
He waved his cap at her. Jane ran across the street and up the block. At her front steps she paused to look after him. He waved again. She felt terribly happy. She didn’t mind about Camille, now. No one could help mothers. And they would do something else.
II
I
“I don’t see why you want to go to college,” said Muriel, “at all.”
Jane was taking lunch with Muriel. And Jane was very different. Her sleek brown pigtails had vanished, turned up in a knot on her neck beneath a big black hair ribbon. Her skirts were down to her boot tops and her dresses, though they were still made by Miss McKelvey, had a subtly young-ladyfied air. Jane was sixteen. It was September. Jane would be seventeen in May.
Muriel was sixteen, too, of course, and the seven black finger curls had been twisted into two, that hung down her back under a black hair ribbon, just like Jane’s, and she wore a thick, cloudy bang on her white forehead and her eyes were bigger and bluer than ever and her eyelashes longer and even more curly. She looked just like a postcard that André had sent Jane from the Tate Gallery in London last summer. “A typical Pre-Raphaelite,” he had written across it. Muriel looked almost as old as her second sister, Rosalie, thought Jane admiringly. It was the being pretty that did it. Being pretty made Muriel look old and Rosalie look young. Rosalie was twenty-one and about to become engaged, so Isabel said, to Freddy Waters.
Edith, the eldest, had married and was living in Cleveland, but had come back to her mother’s house to have her first baby. Jane privately sympathized with Muriel about it. It was awfully embarrassing to have Edith around, looking so large and queer, with great dark shadows under her big black eyes and grey hollows in her waxen cheeks, when only last Christmas she was the prettiest bride Chicago had ever seen, floating up Saint James’s aisle on old Solomon Lester’s arm, in a cloud of tulle and yards and yards of stiff gored satin, with a waist so tiny that she looked as if she’d break in two in the middle. Flora and Jane had been very much thrilled by the wedding. They had sat together in the sixth pew on the bride’s side, because Muriel was a flower girl.
Jane’s mother and Isabel had thought it was awfully funny to import old Solomon Lester to stand by his granddaughter’s side in that Episcopal chancel, when everyone knew that back in New York he was a pillar of the synagogue. Of course Edith had been on the altar guild for years, and she had no brother and her father was dead. Nevertheless, Jane’s mother and Isabel had thought it would have been better taste to have had a house wedding.
There she sat, at any rate, in a cerise silk tea-gown, at her mother’s right hand, languidly sipping her tea with lemon and looking quite as uncomfortable as she made everyone else feel. It was awfully hard on Rosalie, Isabel told Jane, to have her always in evidence when Freddy Waters came to call. And Isabel thought it was perfectly disgusting of her to go about to parties. She had a long story that Jane had never thought so terribly funny about her almost pulling the horse off his feet when she stepped into a hansom, right in front of Bert Lancaster, on her way home from one of Flora’s mother’s receptions.
Mrs. Lester, however, sitting comfortably behind her silver tea-tray, seemed sublimely unconscious that there was anything embarrassing in her presence. Isabel said that she positively encouraged Edith to go about everywhere and was continually seen in public, brazenly knitting on the most unmistakable garments, and talking of the baby in the most extraordinary way, as if it could be talked about—as if it were really there. She didn’t do this in front of Jane and Flora and Muriel of course. Jane’s mother said it was the Jew coming out. They were very queer about family life.
Jane didn’t exactly see why you couldn’t talk about a baby before it was born, but obviously you didn’t, and it certainly made her feel very uncomfortable to look at Edith. There was something in the expression of Mrs. Lester’s big brown eyes, however, as they rested on her firstborn, that brought a lump into Jane’s throat. Something anxious and worried and somehow proud and tender, all mixed up. Fat, funny Mrs. Lester, who was almost as large as Edith this minute! Her napkin was always slipping off her lap and she had three double chins that cascaded down from her tiny mouth to her broad lace collar. It would seem awfully funny, Jane thought, if you were having a baby yourself, to know you must never mention it, when it would be all you would think about, all those long months.
“I don’t know why you don’t want to go to Farmington next year, Jane,” continued Muriel, “with Flora and me.”
Jane knew very well. She
