CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Mary had decided to stay on and work for an M. A. at Columbia. She was busy choosing courses of study and quarreling with professors about prerequisites, so Jean, by pleading extra work herself, managed to keep away from Gramercy Park for the first days of Gregory's going.
In the morning she went to the office and at night she came back. She tried to read and turned page after page with a detached sense of accomplishment in which all understanding of the words was lost. Finally, one night, when she had read from eight till eleven, and found that it was not the same book she had been reading so dutifully for days, Jean threw it across the room, and, standing defiantly in the center of the floor, faced the thoughts that she had refused entrance since the morning she had crept to bed in the gray dawn.
"Well? What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Why is this any different from his going away for a week-end?"
With her hands in the side pockets of her skirt, Jean paced up and down. It was the way she straightened tangles in her work, and the familiar rhythm seemed to throw this problem to an impersonal distance, beyond the haze of her own emotions.
"Well? What are you going to do? Are you going around always clouded up in this tragedy? He isn't any more married now than he was in the beginning, and you knew it from the very first. You knew he had duties and obligations. You rather prided yourself on your logical attitude toward them. You weren't being logical. You couldn't deny them because they were right there in front of you. But the first minute you got a chance to close your eyes, you shut them so tight that—that it's taken an operation to open them."
Jean stopped before the window and leaned with both hands on the sill, frowning into the night.
"He would have gone on living his life and so would you, and you would have done your work, too, if you had never met at all. Yes, you would, and so would he." The corners of Jean's lips twitched, for always before, when she had thought of Gregory's home, she had thought of it as something he had acquired by accident, not as something that he had made, an expression of himself. "We do mean something to each other, something terribly real, but it won't be real, if you begin to mess it up with jealousy. That's what it is—jealousy. You know that nothing in the world could have dragged you out of town this summer and you're mad and hurt and jealous clear through. There! Put that in your pipe and smoke it whether you like the flavor or not."
Jean began walking again. She went very carefully through the summer, picking up the happy hours from the scattered heap into which Gregory's going had shattered them, and built them anew.
"The trouble was that you never recognized the conditions; all you did was to ignore them, until you came to believe they weren't there." Again and again Jean dragged this fact forward from the background into which it was always slipping. "You never mentioned his wife or Puck and you slopped it all over with 'delicacy and broad-mindedness.' You were afraid, that's what you were, whether you knew it or not."