Jerome stretched beside him. Pips snapped languidly at a few gnats and went to sleep. But Jerome could not sleep. His head felt hot and empty, and although he had accomplished nothing all day, he was exhausted with the effort of getting rid of the hours. He tried to find something interesting to think about, but there seemed to be nothing worth wasting a thought upon. The week ahead stretched as flat and monotonous before him as the week behind. There was nothing, except the problem of Jean's inexplicable behavior.
She had not gone on a vacation because she had told him half a dozen times she did not intend to take one. Summer, everywhere, was dull and he could imagine no work that would call her out of town. No. Jean was following some whim of her own, with no consideration of upsetting him.
That was the trouble with women who had brains, especially after they had passed their first youth; they got so set in their habits, that consideration for others never occurred to them. No doubt, Jean was quite unconscious of causing him any inconvenience.
And there he was wondering about Jean when he had definitely put her out of his thoughts a dozen times that week.
Queer how a thought persisted against one's wish.
A thought ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep where you wanted it. A person could intrude, or an extraneous body inject itself into your cosmos, but a thought didn't exist apart from yourself, and if you didn't want it there, why did it come?
Interesting business, Thought, like a demon, dwelling inside and ordering you about at its will. Fascinating, if you got to really thinking about Thought. Jerome gripped the idea of Thought, dragged it along with him like a companion over the field of the Will and the Subconscious, until he brought up in a conversation he had had a few days before with the psycho-analyst he had corralled for Tony's tea.
But now, as soon as he thought of him in relation to the tea, Jean rose from nowhere, drove out the psycho-analyst and usurped his place. Jean as she had looked when he came in through the glass door, amused and a little sad; Jean at the gate: dimming in the dusk; as she had looked when they first talked of the piers, eager and alive in every nerve; standing close while Tony played, in the candle lighted room, with the thick, heavy odor of hothouse plants; as merry and teasing as Alice, at supper afterwards, in "the little joint"; at the concert—
Jerome jumped up. "Here, boy. It must be almost six."
He took a short cut back across the fields and entered the kitchen just as the clock struck five. On a table, covered by a white cloth, mysterious humps disclosed Malone's provision for his supper. It made him think of a country undertaker's, with grewsome appurtenances of death concealed under the cloth. Jerome lifted the edge and discovered cold meat and Malone's tragic efforts at a cake.