Nothing personal, nothing her own, part of her conscious choice. But something hidden, impersonal, something that she shared with all the pitifully weak victims of lust and their own senses.
The breakfast bell sounded. Jean went slowly across the room and opened the door. She stepped into the hall and heard Catherine come out from her room below. She stepped back and closed the door quietly.
When she was sure that Catherine had gone, she went downstairs. The stairs and the hall had the same quality of strangeness as the familiar toilet articles and her own attic. As Jean took her usual seat at the table, the quiet dining-room seemed to retreat and Jean felt physically smaller in it. And as she closed the front door, the whole house seemed to be whispering about her. She turned and looked up at the mellow red bricks with cool spots of ivy grown window boxes, the white curtains of Catherine's windows, up to her own attic. The whole house was strange, inimical, self-righteous in its aloofness, as if she had betrayed its trust.
It would be impossible to go on living there. She could not stand living under pretense to Catherine and, besides, Philip would no longer come. It was the nearest thing he had to a home and it had been his long before she came. And if Philip stayed away, something would go out of the days for Nan, and Nan had so little. Nan's life seemed emptier than ever now, when Jean thought of it in relation to Philip, all possibility of love and warmth centered on the fat body slouching away into the night.
Jean stayed at the office only long enough to attend to the most important matters and left before noon. The rest of the day she spent looking for a place to live. But it was difficult to find. She walked all that day and all the next and the next, going home long after the dinner hour, when she was sure she would not meet Catherine. And then, on the fourth day, she found it, a four-room apartment, a penthouse on the roof of a quiet, middle-class apartment house in Old Chelsea. High above the street, it perched on a secluded corner of the roof, and faced the Jersey shore.
Jean scarcely looked at the rooms as she followed the caretaker and even while the latter was still pointing out the usefulness of a drop-table in the kitchen, Jean was back in the little living-room, facing west, just where the widest space between distant factory chimneys opened to the Jersey shore. The roar of the city below rose in a pleasant murmur that gave an added feeling of peace and a deep security, as if nothing dangerous or violent, no matter how it tried, could ever reach up to this sun-drenched peace. For the first time in five days Philip's hold loosened and he slipped back into a roaring vortex that could not reach her.
That night Jean went home to dinner. She had determined to wait up in case Catherine was not there, but Catherine was, and they had an uncomfortable meal during which Jean made repeated efforts to introduce the subject of her moving and could not. At last she said abruptly, just as they both rose and Catherine moved toward the living-room as if afraid Jean was going to suggest the lawn,
"I've taken an apartment, Catherine."
She waited a moment for some comment, but none came. She could scarcely throw the statement at Catherine and walk out of the room, so she began to describe her wonderful new home upon a roof. But Catherine's silence made her uncomfortable, and she stopped as suddenly as she had begun.
As if she had been waiting for Jean to clear away this ornamentation of enthusiasm, Catherine said: