"Yes, indeed. That was a wonderful talk! Besides, I almost feel as if we were old friends already. I'm terribly interested in the tenements."
Jean's smile deepened but she looked puzzled. She met such a lot of women like this, and was always forgetting them. Margaret might even have been at the tea or sent a check.
Margaret laughed. "No, you haven't met me somewhere and forgotten, though I shouldn't mind a bit if you had. I am Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Gregory Allen."
Jean's fingers closed on the saucer. From a long way off she heard the words dropping between herself and the woman before her:
"I am very glad."
The same power that dropped the words, lifted her hand, and Margaret's came to meet it.
"I was terribly interested, and so glad that Mr. Allen was connected with the tenements. It's so much more real than just ordinary houses, more human and broader, you know. Sometimes I tell him he'll petrify in all those angles and concrete, without the personal touch."
Jean grasped her brain and set it down outside, as she might have lifted a screaming child and put it firmly in a chair. She would deal with it later.
"There are dozens of things I would like to talk over with you. Couldn't I presume on the acquaintance we haven't really got yet, and ask you to take pot-luck with us? Now, please don't say you've got something desperately interesting to interfere."
For years Jean remembered that moment, and the way in which Margaret Allen receded, became more and more indistinct, almost vanished. But not quite. Just at the moment she was dropping beyond the horizon an icy hand clutched Jean's heart and Margaret was close again, smiling and waiting for an answer.