It would go on and on. Their meetings would grow more and more the result of circumstances, be wedged in the unfilled places between the world's demands.
She would fill her days, fuller and fuller, to keep the thought of Gregory away. She would do bigger and bigger things, and people would speak more and more admiringly of her. While she struggled not to wonder when Gregory was coming again!
Or he might never come again. An accident in the lives of either might separate them forever. Gregory might be called to the ends of the earth and she could not follow. He would go with Margaret and Puck and she would remain behind.
They would grow older. They would hold to the small, common interests of each other's lives by an effort. A little while, and they would no longer talk of this person and that without elaborate explanations. Gregory's little sketches of people she did not know would grow meaningless. Their lives would run two paralleled streams, mingling only in the moments snatched together. And what would these moments hold? No shared interests, no mingled hopes. Their hands and lips would cling, on to the very end, because something in Gregory would always call and something, beyond her brain or will, would always answer.
The white face of a clock peered at Jean through the snow. It was almost twelve. After all, she would have to go home some time.
The holidays passed and a new year began. Jean took long walks through the snow and believed, sometimes, when she came back tired and hungry, that she had left the tangle behind. There were moments when, whipped by the cold to an almost drunken ecstasy of health, the old sureness returned. Her love and Gregory's was clean and big, like the open, eternal as the earth.
But the snow went.
It grew warm again on the upland, cool in the hollows, as on the days she and Gregory had stolen two springs before. Jean battled to hold her peace but it slipped from her as the grass pricked the earth again and buds swelled on the branches.
She proposed a national campaign to awaken interest in other states, and link the women of the country in a common bond. But, while she listened to the applause that greeted her first suggestion, she heard beyond it the wailing gramophone wrapping the rebellious Mattie and her mother in sensuous peace. She worked until far into the night on this new project, but the old apple trees rustled in the orchard and dogs barked from farm to farm across the fields. She went to special luncheons to meet important people, but Uncle John was always there, eating his porridge in the blue willow bowl. And at night, when she lay alone in the dark, too weary with the crowded days to sleep, there was always a baby's dark, fuzzy head and wet, groping lips. Jean tried to push it away, but it would not go. In the morning, when the coffee-grinders set the world in motion, it was always there, smiling and pummeling with its fists.