"It's only a quarter to and it won't take five minutes to get there. Shall we stay here or go and wait for the rest in the restaurant?"
"I'd rather wait here."
Jean hoped that some opportunity would offer to correct what must be Herrick's impression of her, but none came. Herrick sat silent.
As she rested against the pile of cushions Herrick had arranged, and watched the quick western twilight blot the world to night, Jean felt as if for the twenty-four years of her life she must have been fast asleep. All about her men and women had been loving and hating and misunderstanding and hurting each other, and she had been studying books like a child. She had used up much energy and bitterness longing for the moment when she would get out into life and earn her own living, make one of the army that fought its way back and forth each morning and night on the boats. And all the time the real thing was not that at all. The real thing was human relationship, the relations between men, and between women, and between women and men. There were thousands of sensations and cross currents and impressions. There was ambition, not vague ambition like hers, but a focused force like Freeman's and Harcourt's and Herrick's. There was struggle and disappointment and the pain that so evidently Herrick had known, and Flop too, not the petty annoyance of Elsie's whining, but sweeping pain that left one bigger. There was loneliness even in a glorious room like this and pleasant interludes of chance meetings with kindred souls.
The wonderful romance of friendship gripped Jean. From the ends of the earth two people, of different tradition, it might be of different race, met accidentally and their lives forever after were different. From the silent dark streets below, all the personalities of all the thousands she had never seen, came close and touched her, so that she felt that in some hidden way she was being influenced by every one of them. There was nothing in life insignificant, nothing unimportant, nothing unrelated to the whole.
Every one was bound to every one else by achievement and encouragement and understanding. Each of these was a definite thing, like a thread, made up of millions of minute strands, passing glances, chance handclasps, too fine to be caught and held in words and yet each so strong that it could bear the weight of many disappointments.
And there was the web of the whole with its radiating threads of the bigger social relationships, made from these fine, thin filaments of everyday occurrences.
She thought of herself and of Pat, of Tom and Elsie and her mother, each weaving his own pattern. Pat wove carelessly with whatever thread came to hand, singing as she wove, while Tom and Elsie fought over the threads that broke under their ceaseless nagging and left the pattern torn and frayed. And Martha, so sharply did the figure of a weaver present itself to Jean, that she saw as clearly as if her mother had been there, the patient figure sitting before its loom, weaving only the dark gray threads, gently thrusting aside with small, tired hands the golds and reds. And so vital did the need come to Jean of choosing the best threads, weaving the most glorious pattern she could, that she clenched her hands and whispered aloud:
"I will do it. I will."
"Do what?" Herrick bent to her and took both hands in his.