CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The next day Jean went back to work. Charlotte Stetson, who had taken her place, tried to evince genuine pleasure but could not quite convey it. Jean felt that she had been suitably mourned for as dead, and that this sudden and unexpected resurrection was an intrusion in questionable taste. So it was with mingled amusement and curiosity that, about eleven o'clock, Jean knocked on Jerome Stuart's door, and, at his short "Come in," entered.
"Well—I'll be——" he had risen, but dropped back into his chair with an amended "Thank God."
Jean laughed, "Now Idofeel like a returned corpse. I suppose I ought to have written but it never occurred to me."
"I'm glad you didn't. Nothing exciting has happened for weeks, and I always did like a surprise."
"I'm glad you take it that way. Charlotte Stetson made me feel that I ought to creep back into my tomb. She——"
"Oh, to——" Jerome Stuart broke off, realizing that he was about to say aloud what he had so often said in the last eight months, "To the devil with Miss Stetson," and added clumsily, "To be quite honest, you know, it was only a kind of surface surprise. I've always known you would come back."
There was no conceit of assurance in the tone. This quiet man who did things quietly had learned. Perhaps he, too, had run away from life once and come back.
"Thank you," Jean said, following her own train of thought, and Jerome Stuart seemed to understand. There was a short pause and then he said, smiling:
"Well?"
"Well, begin at the beginning. What has been going on in the world?"
"How much do you know? I suppose you know about the Sweat Shop law?"
"No. Did it go over? I am glad. No, really I don't know a thing that's been going on."
Jerome Stuart handed her a bunch of clippings, but Jean could not focus her attention on them, because she felt that the man before her was studying her quietly. He might have known that she could return because he knew that one didn't quit unless one were a coward clear through. But the details puzzled him.
She handed back the clippings. "Great. After all Californiaisa long way off and they have their own problems out there."
"Of course. What are they doing?" Jerome accepted the implication, as Jean intended, that she had been working. She began to sketch the Hill House, what they were trying to do, and Mary. But the doctor bulked larger than any of it, and Jerome knew that this woman meant much to Jean. He had never thought of Jean with the emotional feminine associations of most women, with the "best friends" his daughter Alice had had since babyhood, and this new point of view held him to the exclusion of any interest in the Hill House or its accomplishments. It was a new background against which this large, unemotional person moved in human intimacies. So that, when a chance remark of Jean's introduced some young college girls who were working with Dr. Mary, Jerome found himself talking of Alice, her approaching marriage, her amusing frankness about life, the mixture of old-fashioned love and modern feminism that Alice called "seeing life clearly and seeing it whole."
It was after one, when the stenographer knocked on the door for her afternoon batch of letters, and recalled to Jerome that he had an appointment at two-thirty and had not yet been to lunch, He gave the girl her work and turned to Jean.
"I haven't even begun on our latest and I have an appointment at half- past two. Couldn't we have lunch somewhere? I want to tell you about Mike Flannery. He's the alderman who's going to give us the most trouble."
The suggestion fitted in with the intimacy of their long talk, so that Jean did not realize she was doing anything unusual, until Jerome drew out her chair in a corner of an attractive tea-room. Then all the teas and luncheons she had had with Gregory in just such rooms marshaled before her, and Jean wished she had not come. In time it would be easy, but now it was difficult to keep her attention fixed, and the luncheon began in a restraint that Jerome felt, but whose origin puzzled him. It was not until the meal was over that, in the relief of its ending, Jean's mood lightened to its earlier cheerfulness.
"We'll give Mike Flannery a run for his money and the surprise of his life," she said, as the waitress departed with the bill.
"I suppose you'll want a few days' grace to get rested and set up the lares and penates."
"There's not a penate to set up. I am sharing a house with four other women and all the lares are in place. I'm with Catherine Lee and Nan Bonham, Brooklyn Relief."
"Grove Street!"
"Yes. Do you know them?"
Jerome laughed until Jean demanded:
"Why? Are we very ridiculous?"
"I beg your pardon. No, of course not. But Grove Street is the skeleton in my family closet. You give teas during the winter."
"Do we?"
"Yes, indeed, large teas where celebrities and semi-celebrities are handed about with the cake. Alice adores them, drags Sidney to almost every one, 'to keep his social viewpoint broad,' and nags me to death to go too."
"I take it that you don't often oblige."
"Not if I can escape, although, as teas, they are the best of their kind. Catherine Lee's a hustler and she does manage to root out talent. She gets her business tied up with her social life and so, when she wants anything, she can generally put her finger on some frequenter of the teas who can get it for her."
Jean laughed, and together they went out into the street.
"To-morrow then? And Mike Flannery."
"To-morrow."