It was early and The Coast had not yet come to life, but to Jean it was filled with the rumblings of the swelling tide. A drunken sailor lurched from a dance-hall. A mechanical piano ground out a popular rag. A painted woman with sodden, indifferent eyes looked from a window and laughed shrilly. Other women, powdered to a deathly whiteness, turned to stare after Jean and Herrick. Their eyes were sometimes scornful, sometimes curious. When they brushed close to Jean she felt herself turn a little cold and sick.
Once when she was a small child, while playing in the garden Jean had accidentally plunged her foot through the planking of an unused well and had felt the cold blackness sucking up. For months after she had had a terror of that end of the garden, and could feel the bottomless blackness drawing her. Now the same feeling reached out from these painted women, and Jean drew a little closer to Herrick. There was something horrible and black and hidden, the same black oozing mud that lay at the bottom of the old well. These men and women who moved and talked like herself and Herrick were down there, crawling about. She drew nearer still to Herrick. For the first time he touched her, slipping his hand under her elbow.
"We'll soon be out of it."
Then he began to talk of his work at the library. He had another week of it before he would be through.
"And I'll be glad of it in many ways. If I had to go on much longer digging that dry rot out of books I'd quit my job."
"But in a way you put life in it, rearrange it, make it your own."
Herrick laughed. Like the echo of a memory Jean's repugnance to that high, thin laugh returned. But it seemed trivial now that she really knew him.
"There's nothing to make one's own in the whole business. It hasn't any permanence. Not a scrap of reality. It is not my work."
Herrick had said this so often that he believed it, and his voice was bitter with reproach. "You see it's not so bad so long as you don't want with your whole soul to do something else. It's the knowing and not being able to get at it that's hell."
Jean remembered her hatred of teaching and the misery of that last college year. And she had only known what she hated and not at all what she wanted. What was it that this man wanted so much that the thought of it changed his voice and made him seem suddenly older? She longed to ask, but felt that he had expected her to understand and she did not want to fail him. The next moment he answered it himself.