“Who wouldn’t?” He took the toast from her, and buried himself in his paper, so Jane buttered another slice for herself and ate it in protesting silence—plus a poached egg, and a cup of coffee rich with yellow cream and much sugar. Jane’s thinness made such indulgence possible. She enjoyed good food as she enjoyed a new frock, violets in the spring, the vista from the west front of the Capitol, free verse, and the book of Job. There were really no limits to Jane’s enthusiasms. She spoke again of the percolator. “It’s as nice as a kettle on the hob, isn’t it?”
Young Baldwin read on.
“I simply love breakfast,” she continued.
“Is there anything you don’t love, Janey?” with a touch of irritation.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“You.”
He stared at her over the top of the sheet. “I like that!”
“Well, you won’t talk to me, Baldy. It isn’t my fault if you hate the world.”
“No, it isn’t.” He laid down the paper. “But I’ll tell you this, Janey, I’m about through.”
She caught her breath, then flung out, “Oh, you’re not. Be a good sport, Baldy. Things are bound to come your way if you wait.”
He gave a short laugh and rose. “I wish I had your optimism.”
“I wish you had.”
They faced each other, looking for the moment rather like two young cockerels. Jane’s bobbed hair emphasized the boyish effect of her straight, slim figure. Baldy towered above her, his black hair matching hers, his eyes, too, matching—gray and lighted-up.
Jane was the first to turn her eyes away. She looked at the clock. “You’ll be late.”
He got his hat and coat and came back to her. “I’m a blamed sorehead. Give me a kiss, Janey.”
She gave it to him, and clung to him for a moment. “Don’t forget to bring a steak home for dinner,” was all she said, but he was aware of the caress of those clinging fingers.
It was one of his grievances that he had to do the marketing—one could not depend on Sherwood’s single small store—so Baldy with dreams in his head drove twice a week to the butcher’s stall in the old Center Market to bring back chops, or a porterhouse, or a festive small roast.
He had no time for it in the mornings, however. His little Ford took him over the country roads and through the city streets and landed him at the Patent Office at a quarter of nine. There, with a half hour for lunch, he worked until five—it was a dog’s life and he had other aspirations.
Jane, left to herself, read the paper. One headline was sensational. The bride of a fashionable wedding had been deserted at the altar. The bridegroom had failed to appear at the church. The guests waiting impatiently in the pews had been informed, finally, that the ceremony would be postponed.
Newspaper men hunting for the bridegroom learned that he had left a note for his best man—and that he was on his way to southern waters. The bride could not be seen. Her uncle, who was also her guardian, and with whom she lived, had stated that there was nothing to be said. That was all. But society was on tiptoe. Delafield Simms was the son of a rich New Yorker. He and his bride were to have spent their honeymoon on his yacht. Edith Towne had a fortune to match his. Both of them belonged to old and aristocratic families. No wonder people were talking.
There was a picture of Miss Towne, a tall, fair girl, in real lace, orange blossoms, seed pearls——.
Pride was in every line of her. Jane’s tender fancy carried her to that first breathless moment when the bride had donned that gracious gown and had surveyed herself in the mirror. “How happy she must have been.” Then the final shuddering catastrophe.
Sophy arrived at this moment, and Jane told her about it. “She’ll never dare trust anybody, will she?”
Sophy was wise, and she weighed the question out of her wide experience of human nature. She could not read or write, and she was dependent on those around her for daily bulletins of the way the big world went. But she had worked in many families and had had a family of her own. So she knew life, which is a bigger thing sometimes than books.
“Yo’ kain’t ever tell whut a woman will do, Miss Janey. Effen she a trustin’ nature, she’ll trus’ and trus’, and effen she ain’ a trustin’ nature, she won’t trus’ nohow.”
“But what do you suppose made him do it?”
“Nobody knows whut a man’s gwine do, w’en it comes to gittin’ married.”
“But to leave her like that, Sophy. I should think she’d die.”
“Effen the good Lord let women die w’en men ’ceived them,” Sophy proclaimed with a chuckle, “dere wouldn’ be a female lef’ w’en the trump sounded.” Her tray was piled high with dishes, as she stood in the dining-room door. “Does you-all want rice puddin’ fo’ dinnah, Miss Janey?”
And there the subject dropped. But Jane thought a great deal about it as she went on with her work.
She told her sister, Julia, about it when, late that afternoon, she wrote her weekly letter.
“The worst of it must have been to lose her faith in things. I’d rather be Jane Barnes without any love affair than Edith Towne with a love affair like that. Baldy told me the other day that I am not unattractive! Can’t you see him saying it? And he doesn’t think me pretty. Perhaps I’m not. But there are moments, Judy, when I like myself——!
“Baldy nearly had a fit when I bobbed my hair. But I did it and took the consequences, and it’s no end comfortable. Baldy at the present moment is mid-Victorian. It is his reaction from the war. He says he is dead sick of flappers. That they are all alike—and make no appeal to the imagination! He came home the other night from a dance and read Tennyson—can you fancy that after the way he used to fling Amy Lowell at us and Carl Sandburg? He says he is so tired of short skirts and knees and proposals and cigarettes that he is going to hunt with a gun, if he ever decides to marry, for an Elaine or a Griselda! But the worst of it is, he takes it out on me! I wish you’d see the way he censors my clothes and my manners, and I sit here like a prisoner in a tower with not a man in sight but Evans Follette, and he is just a heartache, Judy.
“Baldy has had three proposals; he said that the first was stimulating, but repetition ‘staled the interest’! Of course he didn’t tell me the names of the girls. Baldy’s not a cad.
“But he is discouraged and desperately depressed. He has such a big talent, Judy, and he just slaves away at that old office. He says that after those years in France, it seems like a cage. I sometimes wonder what civilization is, anyhow, that we clip the wings of our young eagles. We take our boys and shut them up, and they pant for freedom. Is that all that life is going to mean for Baldy—eight hours a day—behind bars?
“Yet I am trying to keep him at it until the house is paid for. I don’t know whether I am right—but it’s all we have—and both of us love it. He hasn’t been able lately to work much at night, he’s dead tired. But there’s a prize offer of a magazine cover design, and I want him to compete. He says there isn’t any use of his trying to do anything unless he can give all of his time to it.
“Of course you’ve heard all this before, but I hear it every day. And I like to talk things out. I must not write another line, dearest. And don’t worry, Baldy will work like mad if the mood strikes him.
“Did I tell you that Evans Follette and his mother are to dine with us on Thanksgiving Day? We ought to have six guests to make things go. But nobody will fit in with the Follettes. You know why, so I needn’t explain.
“Kiss