"I'll give you the 'phone, too, in case anything should happen, but don't let anything, please."
"No, I won't." Jean took the slip, and at the same moment the chairman glided up and began scolding Margaret for monopolizing Mrs. Herrick. Jean was led away, and for another half hour she answered questions. Then Margaret was before her again, delicious in a coat with fur cuffs and a collar that framed her face like a huge leaf.
"Au revoir, until to-morrow at seven."
Margaret caught the envious glance of the chairman and made an intimate little motion of farewell to Jean.
It was over at last, and Jean was walking along briskly in the coming night. She was going to see Gregory Allen again. She was going to sit at his table, with his wife and child, and talk of general things. She was going to grasp this haunting power that held her days and crush it. She would not be afraid after she had seen him there in his own world.
"I suppose she will tell him to-night—'Oh, Gregory, Mrs. Herrick is dining with us to-morrow.'"
Jean smiled. He would be surprised. She could see his eyes widen in that childish fashion that had come to make her feel——
"You fool. You unspeakable fool." Jean's scorn of herself before these vivid pictures of a man, who had never given her the slightest right to think he had any of her at all, lashed her pride to anger.
"You're thirty-four, you idiot. Suppose you do love him? What of it? Maybe you won't after to-morrow night."
All the way down in the Subway the refrain beat in Jean's ears: