And he was almost fifty. A thousand little habits, acquired through years, locked him fast. Alice and he had walked happily side by side. Jean's path would not run parallel to his. It would cross and crisscross.
She was strong. She pulsed with life. She might want a child. He and Jean and their child. And Alice and Sidney and Sidney, Junior. Like an immigrant family with the generations overlapping. Sidney Junior grinned and gurgled at him.
The sun rose. The night dew melted. The earth awoke refreshed and younger than the youngest human thing upon it. Jerome went wearily back into the house. He felt old and confused with the night's thinking, hours of balancing between—fifty and thirty. Aching with a body-hunger his brain could not appease, blind in this storm of desire, lit with lightning flashes of self-ridicule, with amazement of the thing, with disbelief in its possibility, with the gurgling of Sidney, Junior, with strange reluctance and anger.
Milk wagons rattled down the lane. The sun rose full over the hilltops. A new day was begun, one of those new days, one of those "twenty-four hours to make into what you will." Jerome smiled feebly.
"Another twenty-four hours like this and there'll be nothing left of me to do anything with."
Malone banged about in the kitchen. At last she called him to breakfast. He sugared the cereal she set before him, arranged the paper against the sugar-bowl, and stared at the headlines.
When she thought he was ready she brought the first helping of hot waffles. He saw her look at the untouched bowl and with difficulty made her understand that he did not want it. He buttered the waffles and poured the honey on them, stacking the crisp quarters one upon the other as he always did. And there they were when Malone came with the second plate. She stood holding the covered plate until Jerome told her impatiently to stop baking them. He felt that in this unreasonable world, Malone might go on baking waffles all day.
At a quarter to eight as always, Jerome pushed back his chair. He looked at the paper still folded to the front page and the crust of the single slice of toast he had attempted to eat.
"It's fifty all right—or I would have eaten it—and not known what it was."
Then he went into the living-room. He wrote two notes, one to the office and one to Jean. He was called out of town most unexpectedly. The business would take several days, and as he would be in the northern part of the State, he had decided to go on for his vacation, without returning. The notes were brief and almost duplicates, except that he added to Jean's a regret that they would not be able to finish the piers together. He sent the notes by messenger and packed his trunk.