"Thank you," Jean said, following her own train of thought, and Jerome Stuart seemed to understand. There was a short pause and then he said, smiling:
"Well?"
"Well, begin at the beginning. What has been going on in the world?"
"How much do you know? I suppose you know about the Sweat Shop law?"
"No. Did it go over? I am glad. No, really I don't know a thing that's been going on."
Jerome Stuart handed her a bunch of clippings, but Jean could not focus her attention on them, because she felt that the man before her was studying her quietly. He might have known that she could return because he knew that one didn't quit unless one were a coward clear through. But the details puzzled him.
She handed back the clippings. "Great. After all California is a long way off and they have their own problems out there."
"Of course. What are they doing?" Jerome accepted the implication, as Jean intended, that she had been working. She began to sketch the Hill House, what they were trying to do, and Mary. But the doctor bulked larger than any of it, and Jerome knew that this woman meant much to Jean. He had never thought of Jean with the emotional feminine associations of most women, with the "best friends" his daughter Alice had had since babyhood, and this new point of view held him to the exclusion of any interest in the Hill House or its accomplishments. It was a new background against which this large, unemotional person moved in human intimacies. So that, when a chance remark of Jean's introduced some young college girls who were working with Dr. Mary, Jerome found himself talking of Alice, her approaching marriage, her amusing frankness about life, the mixture of old-fashioned love and modern feminism that Alice called "seeing life clearly and seeing it whole."
It was after one, when the stenographer knocked on the door for her afternoon batch of letters, and recalled to Jerome that he had an appointment at two-thirty and had not yet been to lunch, He gave the girl her work and turned to Jean.
"I haven't even begun on our latest and I have an appointment at half- past two. Couldn't we have lunch somewhere? I want to tell you about Mike Flannery. He's the alderman who's going to give us the most trouble."