Gregory stayed until the following Wednesday. When he went back, Margaret and Puck went, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was the end of October. The trees in the parks and along the Palisades were bare, but the sun still shone and children danced in the streets to the music of the hurdy-gurdies. On Fifth Avenue, women in costly furs drove from shop to shop, buying greedily. Starved through their long summer with the mountains and the sea, they bought laces and jewels and still more costly furs. Down in the restaurants of the foreign quarters, the proprietors had taken in the little tables and dismantled the artificial gardens. The husbands of the women in costly furs now dined at home or in their uptown clubs.
Everywhere people settled to their winter's work. The strikers and manufacturers were locked in a death grip, and Jean often sat up half the night with Rachael. Rachael was whiter and more flamelike than ever. She never mentioned Tom, but Jean knew that he had married a girl of his own faith and that Rachael knew.
Then, on the fifteenth the manufacturers capitulated. With almost all their demands granted the strikers went back to work. No jubilant mass meeting marked the victory. Worn with the long fight the workers went back quietly. Jean felt as if something had gone out of her life. The settlement left vacant hours, and she wanted something to fill every moment. For the thought of Gregory was always waiting, ready to slip in.
From dreading ever to see him again, Jean had passed through hours when nothing else mattered, dizzy hours when she juggled with excuses for communicating with him and persuaded herself that it was the perfectly natural thing to do. And there were hours, lying awake at night, when she did not think of herself at all, but went round and round the endless circle of Gregory's motives. That he had shared her fear never entered Jean's mind, for so deep and hidden was the longing to believe that he cared, that not even Jean's analysis dragged it to light. One impossible reason after another Jean grasped and held for a little while, and then it slipped away. He was busy. He meant to ring up or write or come—and didn't. Summer and winter were two different worlds in New York. He had been bored and lonely then; now his days were full.
Jean held to this firmly, and, as the weeks slipped away, succeeded in believing it. Still, she was glad when Mary at last stopped mentioning him. Shortly after Thanksgiving, Jean and the doctor made up the list of invitations to the tea, with which, in what now seemed another life, they had threatened Gregory. Dr. Mary jabbed her pencil through his name, which headed the old list made up that hot June night.
"It's your business, of course, Jean, and you can do as you like; but I wouldn't ask him, for anything. I don't believe it will make any difference, and we have Fenninger. It's really going to look terribly imposing, the building plans and the lot diagram, too."
"I don't want to ask him. Fenninger will be the whole show and more."
But, a week later, as Jean moved through the crowded rooms, explaining the same things over and over, receiving congratulations and the more substantial promises of checks, her eyes kept wandering to the door. And she knew she was hoping that somehow Gregory would come. There was no way that he could know, and yet——For what seemed interminable lengths of time Jean kept her back deliberately to the door, and then, when she was sure that it did not matter to her at all, turned, and for one brief second—so vividly was he in her imagining—saw him with his badly fitting clothes and the happy twinkle in his eyes.