"I feel like it. I'm afraid to breathe in case I use up all the air in poor old Manhattan at one swoop."
He took his usual place without offering to shake hands. Jean continued to stand. If she relaxed her muscles, the poise she had summoned would relax too, and Jerome Stuart would know that she had weighed her power to waken again his momentary passion.
Jerome wished that Jean would sit down. It made him feel that he had interrupted her in an important piece of work and that she was waiting for him to go. Besides, standing so, the strong sweep of body disturbed him, and his resolve to proceed slowly and carefully was shaken almost beyond control.
"So you haven't taken a vacation at all. Don't you intend to?"
"I don't know. I may." Jean looked away to her desk, covered with papers.
The first impression that she had given of pleasure at his return was gone. She was frowning slightly as if she found it a little difficult to accept this interruption.
She was so strong and self-reliant. She needed no one. The thing he had felt in her had been of his own imagining, it was a projection from within. This big woman, impatient to get at her work, had no need within her. The white softness of her flesh was a lie. She was alive in her brain only.
And he, in two short weeks had lived a lifetime.
For twenty-three years he had thought of himself as Alice's father. He had touched emotion only in relation to his child and her life. He had lived in the reflected glow of others' more intense emotions. And this woman, with her ill-concealed impatience for him to be gone, had dragged him down, in two weeks, in less, in one night, down into the rushing current, back to the very Purpose of Life. There she stood, waiting for him to go.
Jerome rose. If he stayed another minute he would tell her that he loved her. Or strike her. He did not know which.