"Think it over again—and come back."
She shook her head. She did not want to lie again to Jerome Stuart.
The next day Jean stood in the empty apartment that had been her home for five years. With the removal of the furniture it seemed to have changed its spirit. The bare walls stared back indifferent to the pain and happiness they had encompassed. Before another twenty-four hours were gone, some one else might be looking down into the tree-lined street where, later, the fat white babies would be wheeled, and where now the trees were beginning to leaf, not as they would in the full eagerness of a few weeks hence, but in the meager, timid fashion of a chilly spring, a little leaf here and there.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The porter dimmed the lights for the night. In the berth above a man snored, and across the aisle an old woman breathed in gasping squeaks. Jean pulled up the blind, and, propped on her pillow, stared into the night and tried not to hear. But the breathing of the crowded car was persistent and grouped itself into strange rhythms and chords that stripped away spiritual differences and leveled the sleepers to a common physical need.
Jean remembered how she had lain so, her first night in a sleeper, ten years before, and how the hot, dark intimacy had excited her. How near she had felt to some mystery, as if she were just about to penetrate some exciting secret. Even the blackness of the prairie had quivered with it. The red and green semaphores, uncannily obedient to a hidden power, had winked their inclusion in the great adventure. The lonely little stations, specks of light in the night, had been so friendly and knowing. Now they hurt, so bravely and uselessly battling against the engulfing darkness, the thick, limitless blackness of the prairie.
Late in the evening of the fourth day, Jean stepped from the train, and Mary put her arms around her. As they crossed the Bay, they sat very near together in the bow and watched the city lights, diffused in the high fog, glow a red mist over the hills. But it was not until they stood in the small room opening from the Doctor's, that the armor Jean had raised for her own protection loosened, and then she dared not speak for fear of crying.
A gong sounded.
"We meet every night in the Assembly Hall for half an hour or so," Mary said huskily and Jean nodded. "This is going to be your room. Don't wait up for me."
When Mary was gone, Jean switched out the lights and went to the window where she had stood so often in the old days, relieved at Herrick's going, wondering at her own lack of wonder; and a year later, tingling with excitement at the offer from New York. Almost ten crowded years. And now she was back.