"Hell!" Gregory almost said it aloud.
"Well, go into the other room and wait as patiently as you can," she whispered.
Jean went into the kitchen. The table was strewn with the things for dinner just as Mary had dumped them out. Jean's eyes filled with tears. "I won't let it end, I won't, I won't." In the other room she heard Gregory's well-feigned surprise and Mary's laugh.
Jean put on her apron and began to get dinner. Mary's anecdotes flowed on like a river, breaking every now and then on the rock of Gregory's laughter. After all, perhaps it did not make so much difference to him. Last evening they had sat for almost an hour, silent, with their hands linked across the intervening space between the chairs and Jean had been wonderfully happy. Had he been happy, too? How did she know that he had not been a little bored? Jean's eyes blurred and the tomato she was peeling slipped into the sink with a plop.
"You fool. What do you expect? She is interesting and he can't sit there like a statue." Jean scooped up the tomato and threw it viciously into the garbage pail.
"Jean! Oh, Jean, come here a minute," Gregory called. "Do it again for Jean. It's a scream."
Mary twitched the dressing gown so that it trailed like a royal robe and twisted the white hair into a knob not unlike a coronet.
"Mamie Horton, of Chicago, now Duchess Mary of Belfort, doing the East End, visiting a family of eight living on three dollars a week." The doctor's face froze into a mask of horror and she pointed dramatically to what was supposed to be the laborer's dinner table. "Most unhygienic. I will send you a case of shredded wheat to-morrow!"
"Never, Mary. That's too much. You've spoiled it."
"Well, it wasn't shredded wheat, but it was just as bad. Jean, I longed for you. If there had been anything in thought transference you would have hopped on the next boat. You think your committee is bad! You ought to see real caste at the business. And worse than that are the Mamie Hortons. Why, when I told a group of the reals and the pseudos, at a luncheon, about the tenements, and how you had raised the money and had the whole thing going in a few months, they stared at me, and Horton actually said: 'Reahlly,' in that exasperating English voice that means: 'You're a liar.' It takes a year to call a meeting over there."