"Yes. I am going back. I am not going to drift, here, beside the sea and hills, which are my Kitten, my succession of sordid loves, my easiest way. I am going back. It won't be easy. I know that. There will be times—Mary, you don't know what it means to die inside, to see and never to feel, not even anger, to have nothing sharper than memory."
"And you don't know, Jean," Mary spoke slowly and rose from her chair as if she had grown very tired, "what it means to have been emotionally comfortable all your life. Never to have gone down nor up. Never to have died nor been alive. To have grown old in comfort. A kind of paradox, isn't it, to have been always so comfortable that sometimes it hurts."
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It was late in the afternoon of a cold, clear day two weeks later that Jean stood outside the Grand Central Station and looked at the moving streams of strangers, all touched to faint friendliness by the accident of being in the same city, on the same street, at the same hour as herself. She felt as if she knew them all, but had slipped back noiselessly without warning among them, and as yet they had not seen her.
Jean was smiling to herself, when one of the moving units escaped the stream, and came to a halt beside her.
"Well, Jean Herrick, of all people! I thought you were in California."
Jean turned to encounter the sharp face and mouse-bright eyes of Catherine Lee, whom she had neither seen nor thought of for years, although, during the first winter in New York, Catherine had been the center of a group that met every Sunday evening for tea, usually at Jean's.
"I was!"
"When did you get back?"
"About ten minutes ago, and I feel as if I had been dropped from a parachute. I was just debating the Y. W. C. A. or the Martha Washington. I loathe hotels——"