XX
A week’s work was crowded into two days. As she sat on deck after breakfast the first morning out, Mimi felt a sense of security which made her comfortable for the first time since she had sat next to Jimmie Forrester at dinner. I’ll put these silly, childish notions out of my head, she resolved, and get back down to earth again. And after a few relentless pluckings of thoughts and fancies from her head she secured forgetfulness in reading. She swept through Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle, read the story of pathetic George F. Babbitt, walked the deck when she got tired, and then resumed her reading. She threw aside Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems—they were too poignantly reminiscent of love and its disappointments, she wasn’t in a mood now for such revelations. And she was glad when the crags of Manhattan rose out of nothingness, for here was her familiar world where sanity could be found in hard work again. …
New York was sweltering in the terrific heat of early summer. Mimi, back in Manhattan one week, gave up the attempt to work and set forth to find relief somewhere in the greenness of Central Park.
“You ran away!” a familiar voice accused her as she stepped from Francine’s door into the street.
“Oh—I thought I left you in Paris!” she parried, laughing nervously at the unexpected appearance of Jimmie Forrester.
“You did—but I’m here now. Shall we eat dinner at the Plaza? Or Pierre’s? Or the Brevoort?”
“At none of them. I’m busy this evening.”
“You’re not!” he challenged her. “And even if you were, you surely wouldn’t deny me after I’ve come all the way from Paris to see you?”
After all, she decided, there’s no use in running away. I’ll face it now and get it over with. And then I’ll not see him again.
“Why did you leave so suddenly without giving me—us—a chance to see you again?” he demanded not unkindly when they had given their order.
“I finished my work and decided I was tired of Paris and wanted to get home.”
He said nothing but in his eyes she read his thoughts—she had not succeeded in deceiving him. The consciousness he knew her fear gave him an advantage that made her uncomfortable.
“Tell me about Mrs. Crosby. ‘The dear old Behemoth,’ you called her, I believe,” she sought to divert him.
“She’s still buying junk—and Horace is howling louder than ever. They’ll have to charter a ship to get the stuff home. Tell me, did I do anything that offended you?”
“Why do you ask me such a foolish question?”
“You ran away,” he answered simply.
“No, you didn’t do anything to offend me. And I didn’t run away. I just came home when my work was done.”
“I asked at the hotel and they said you had engaged your room through the fifteenth. And the Behemoth took me to Paquin’s and Beer’s and Worth’s and Drecoll’s and they all said you told them you’d had a cable calling you back to the States. And the steamship people told us you’d turned in passage on the Aquitania and made them squeeze you on the Mauretania. What was the cable that brought you back?” he demanded.
“You took a lovely method of enjoying a vacation in Paris, didn’t you?” she laughed, masking the perturbation she was feeling that he had gone to all that trouble to find out why she had gone. “Chasing around to modistes and steamship offices instead of enjoying Paris—”
“Mimi, don’t you know why I did it?” he pleaded. Neither of them noticed that he had called her by her first name.
“No, I don’t,” she prevaricated and then was immediately sorry, not because she had told an untruth but because he might consider it as an invitation to tell her why he had followed her. That was exactly what he did.
“Don’t think me foolish, silly, childish. Perhaps I’m all three and if I am I don’t care. I’ve always laughed at the notion of ‘love at first sight’ but I won’t do it again—”
“Don’t be foolish. You have seen me twice. You know nothing whatever about me other than that I work for my living at Francine’s. I might be an adventuress—”
“Please don’t,” he pleaded. “Be serious. Let me finish.”
“No, I can’t let you go on. There are very good reasons why there can never be anything between us—and I shan’t see you again,” she said firmly, as she rose from the table. “It’s best we let this drop right here—and oh, Jimmie, it must end now.” Her voice, which had begun so bravely and positively, faltered. At the end it was almost a sob. She left him there and was gone before he could follow her. …
Three times the next day she picked up the receiver of the telephone on her desk and hung it up again when she heard his voice. As she started to leave the building for the day, she saw him waiting outside just in time to dart back into the building and go out by the back door. He wrote her but his letters were unanswered. Once she saw him crossing perilously Fifth Avenue, dodging taxicabs and buses by a hair’s breadth while their drivers cursed and shouted at him fluently but a nearby shop gave her friendly refuge.
She prayed he would become disheartened, angry with her. And even as she
