The next day The Kitten joined Vicky in the country.
Twice in the next three Herrick went to the phone to call Jean, and hung up in the very act of asking for the number.
"You can never make her care...." The Kitten knew him as no woman had ever known him, and he hated her for this knowledge.
He went nowhere and saw no one. Through the lonely dinners, and long evenings in the studio, Herrick worked himself into a fury that urged him on and held him back. His anger spread from The Kitten to Jean, to all women. He was sick of them, weary of the power they had always had over him. He loathed the women who had yielded to him and the women who had not. He hated his own inability to live his life independent of them. If no woman had ever crossed his life, interfering in its plan, destroying the dreams he had dreamed in those last years of the Connecticut farm, he would long ago have written something worth while. He would have succeeded as Freeman and Harcourt and the others had done. He would be free of The Bunch in their hectic fight for forgetfulness. His life would be ordered with calm poise. He had it in him. Jean felt it. Could she even yet make him what he might have been? Like an intermittent fever the conflict raged. Then, through sheer exhaustion, it dropped away. Herrick wondered what it had all been about and went again to call for Jean at the closing hour. She was not there. Two weeks before Jean had lost her place.
The next day they walked again in the hills. Jean was whiter and quieter than he had ever seen her. The two weeks had tried her nerves almost beyond control. The last to come on the library staff, a reduced appropriation demanded that Jean be the first to go. And, although she had taken no joy in the work itself, she had been happy in the security of having work to do. Now, after two weeks of following every advertisement to its end, only to discover she had none of the experience they all demanded, the old horror of teaching had come back, and Jean was almost ill. The new baby cried incessantly and the house was more cluttered than ever. Tom had at last been forced into a job at a ridiculous salary and from morning till night Elsie predicted starvation for herself and her "two helpless little ones." Through it all Martha Norris moved, armored by prayer to gentle acceptance of these petty annoyances that Jean felt closing about her forever.
Her independence weakened by fear for the future, Jean was another person and Herrick thrilled at the new Jean, this unsure, rather desperate Jean. She felt his strength and experience, so much greater than her own, and his understanding and sympathy seemed to relieve her from the necessity of maintaining the silence she had mapped out as a shield against the atmosphere of her home. For the first time she told him something of that atmosphere, of her childhood, not as poor and bare as his, but filled with the same rebellion for something whose name she did not know. Much of what Jean sketched in bare outline, Herrick could fill in. It told him much that had puzzled him. He knew her better than she knew herself.
As Jean sat, throwing pebbles into the almost dry creek at their feet, he knew her eyes were full of tears. He took her hands in his and forced her to look up.
"Don't, Jean. It hurts me terribly to see you unhappy. Something will turn up. It always does. I've been there too, you know."
Jean smiled through her tears. "I know I'm an idiot. But I do loathe the idea of teaching and yet it's the only thing I suppose I'm fitted for. I mean I have a diploma, an actual proof on paper, that I've been through the preparatory mill and I can wave it in their faces. I shall kill the next person who asks me if I've had experience."
"Well, don't begin with me, please. You're positively glaring."