What tangled threads of instinct and of need bound her? The age-old woman's need of being needed? But Jerome did not need her. He had run away.
It was her own need, not Jerome's. Her need of what? Something nearer than lives she never touched? Something of her own?
It was cool now and Jean went out to the roof. Far down in the street dwarfed figures hurried by. They had finished the day's work. They were going home.
Long after the dwarfed black figures were gone, Jean sat, staring down.
As the days passed, Jean came to wish, more and more deeply, that she had never seen Jerome Stuart. The thought of him filled her waking hours, and at night she often dreamed of the moment on the sidewalk, only, in the dreams, Jerome always came up to the roof again. And in the evenings when she tried to read, in the once peace-filled stillness, he was there across the room, his shoulders, with their student stoop, bent over a book. He stopped and read her bits and they laughed together, or she saw his anger against social injustice crackling like a fire in his gray eyes.
Three times in her life, Jean had felt the old landmarks slip away. Three times in her life she had felt the old Jean die and another woman take the place: when she had left Herrick, when she had received Gregory's letter, and when she had come home to find Martha dead. Each time she had felt as if no future experience could ever reveal unguessed depths in herself. And now, at thirty-nine, because a man whom she did not love, had desired her for a moment against his own will, she felt.... What was it that she felt? Not the ending of all things, as she had felt at Gregory's going. Not the loneliness that followed Martha's. These had been like sudden death in the midst of life. Now she was not dead. She was outside life, watching it go by. And, like the old people, whom she had watched with Gregory, following the sun about the Almshouse walls, she did not want it to go.
"For a few years yet you will be a woman."
Jean went slowly across the roof, through the living-room, to the small blue and white bedroom. She turned on the light above the mirror and looked calmly into it. In the last two years the band of gray above her ears had thickened. There were faint lines, very faint, at the corners of her eyes. The eyes themselves were clear and young, but now that Jean looked steadily into their frank depths, something rose from beneath the surface, an intangible record of the years.
Jean turned, getting almost the full view of her body in the mirror. It was wonderfully strong and straight. The throat and breasts were firm and the flesh soft. Jean remembered how soft and white her mother's body had been when she had covered it against the draught.
Her own, perhaps, would keep its youth, too, a mockery of the lessening power within. In spite of all her efforts, her enthusiasm would decay, more quickly now that she had recognized her need to keep it. Her body more quickly, her brain more slowly, would obey the law. She would sink, with tragic unconsciousness of the process, into benumbed indifference. No more stress, no more impatience, no longing, no regret. Patient acceptance.