"Didn't know it myself. I just woke up one morning with such a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked at Lucy Phillips that I knew the hour had come. I took a leave of absence for a year and I may extend it. I'm going to absorb and study what the rest of the world's been doing. In short, I'm going to stay until I love Lucy Phillips. I was going to make my point of saturation Chicago, until I got to really visioning you. Then I wired. I couldn't very well before, could I?"
"Hardly." Jean hugged her. "Mary, it's been an age. I don't believe I've known, myself, how much and how often I've wanted you."
"I was thinking about it the other night. Almost seven years since you came walking into the clinic and told me The Kitten was up at the studio and you weren't going back."
"And mummy trotted over the next afternoon, and when she found we'd both gone to keep our engagement with that Building Trades man as if nothing had happened, she sat down and cried. Poor little mummy."
"How is mummy, Jean? I never could quite picture her here in New York. I could never make her fit."
"Fits like a glove. But, then, no one can ever tell what mummy is going to do. She not only likes it, but is happy, really happy, for the first time in her life. I believe she has learned the trick at last."
"Much incense and lace altar clothes and Jeany all to herself, I take it."
"Pretty near. But we have been happy, both of us, these six years here. Mummy still believes social service is connected, or ought to be, with religion, and she calls my very finest pieces of work 'the act divorced from the spirit', but she lets me send out all the laundry and have a woman in once a week—a maid she absolutely forbade—and there's a church run by Father Something-or-other a few blocks away, and I'd get fatty degeneration of the soul if it weren't for Pedloe. He gets six thousand a year and poses as a radical, but he has the imagination of a mouse. Some day he's going to fire me, if I don't do it first myself. I work ten hours a day, get more and more furious at the whole business, and come home every evening like a novice to her convent. Our chief excitement is having Pat bring the children over for the week-end, when her husband is out of town. She has two children and is going to have another, all in four years, exactly like an immigrant. She hasn't changed a bit, manages her family as if it were a college committee and her husband adores her. Once in a while she brings an uncle of Stephen's with her, a fat, good-natured creature about fifty, who, I sometimes think, is a fool and sometimes I'm sure he's a philosopher. Mummy likes him and makes all his pet dishes. Years ago he was married to an impossible creature in an Arizona mining camp and she ran away in six months. So you see he's had his 'sorrow' too."
"You don't mean that she still looks on Franklin as a 'sorrow'?"
"He's my 'lesson.' She never speaks of him, but I know she prays for him."