"It's so stupid to care—about anything," Catherine murmured, as if she were not talking directly to Jean. "If you never let any one in—you don't have to drag them out."
"But that's too high a price to pay for anything," Jean said more gently. "It would take such a lot of happiness to pay for such little escapes."
Catherine laughed harshly. "You don't pay for it all at once. You string it out over the years—all through your life—like buying peace on the installment."
The last words she seemed to hurl at Jean and went. Jean watched her disappear through the farther door; heard her go up the stairs and close the door of her room.
Jean sat on alone. The misunderstanding of the last few weeks spread through the heat. Catherine's bitterness saturated the heavy air and it seemed to Jean that mystery and bitterness were pressing down upon her physically. Nothing was the same as it had been. The clean precision of the winter was gone. Motives were no longer clear. Every one and everything was confused and blurred in the water-sogged air. Jerome stayed away, long after the supposed date of his return, without an explanation. Things were piling up in his office and every day his secretary wanted to know if Jean knew when he would return. Catherine was almost ill with bitterness and hatred of something concealed. Philip came rarely and then he, too, was different. And since the others had gone, he had not come at all. Everything was shrouded in a thick mist of misunderstanding, and Jean felt that it was, somehow, all meshed together, Jerome's unexplained delay with Catherine's bitterness and Philip's strangeness with Alice's postponed wedding.
The leaves hung motionless in the breathless night. Jean felt that if she did not get up and out into a wider space, she would be walled forever in that ridiculous garden. As she passed Catherine's room on the way to get her things, she saw that there was no light. The silence reached through the paneling and Catherine's bitterness was a living thing, with which she was closed in alone in the darkness.
Jean passed quickly on her way down again, and opened the front door quietly.
As she stepped out she almost collided with Philip, his hand stretched toward the bell button.
"Why the get-away? Will you divide the loot?"
"Did it really look as stealthy as that? It's this weather, all messy and heavy and silent, a thunderstorm gum-shoeing about, afraid to come out into the open."