"Your note, you know, wasn't very illuminating. I didn't know whether you were going for a day or a month."
"I know. But I was so excited and I didn't know myself exactly."
Jean saw that her abrupt going had hurt Herrick and she tried to make up now. She came closer and laid a hand on his.
"I'll make some chocolate and then I'll tell you all about it. It would make a perfectly ripping story."
Herrick looked down on Jean's hand resting upon his and it seemed to him something disconnected from both of them. He wished she would take it away. To his jangled nerves it was a real weight, pressing heavily upon him. It was force, that strong, white hand, a mechanical force for pushing obstacles from her path. It would push him and her mother and all who did not see things as she saw them, all but the fat, mannish little doctor with her stupid generalities. With the merest touch of those firm, cool fingers it would push The Kitten into oblivion.
"A corking story?"
Jean resented Herrick's mechanical interest but tried not to show it. She had been wrong and had said so and it was trivial of him to let the memory rankle.
"Wait till you hear it. It's a regular Thomas Hardy novel. It ought to be set in the granite hills of Devon."
While they drank the chocolate, Jean told him of the woman propped on her pillows in the miserable room, with the wind blowing over the stony hills; of the frightened Mayor with his overwhelming respectability. Her eyes glowed and the strong, white hands moved in unusual gestures, as if from the slough of human weakness and suffering into which they were plunged, she was drawing quivering bodies and setting them on a stage. Herrick's bitterness saw none of the drama, only Jean's own safety from any suffering. There she sat, glowing with interest in her "case," a stupid, everyday matter of seduction. She could work up a tragedy about a scrubwoman overcome by physical desire. But for him, for his needs, for The Kitten, for Flop, for any one whose way of life was different, whose clothes did not please her, whose manner did not suit her, she had no sympathy and no understanding. Herrick laughed.
"It's a scream, simply a scream! A lot of women puttering about, fiddling with the forces of Nature and getting paid for it!"