His proposal had seemed to her almost preposterous. Not that she felt herself too good for him. On the contrary her love for Walter had increased her very real humility. It was the concreteness of his offer that shocked her.
She rarely looked forward to Walter's return, and when she did, it was with no definite visualizing thought of marriage. The concept of sex was vague to her—and decidedly fearsome. Not even Harry Klein, her first lover—and she always thought of him as an incident in a dim and very remote past—had really stirred her woman's nature. He had appealed to her as an instrument, a key by which to escape from her dungeon. The sentiments, which his meagre caresses had raised, had by the fright of the adventure been driven back in dismay.
Sometimes, to be sure, a sort of sweet dizziness overcame her when she remembered how Walter had kissed her hand. The spot below the middle finger of her left hand which his lips had touched was a holy place. But more often she thought of his words. When in her dreams he seemed nearest, he was halfway across the room, in the big leather chair, while she was curled up on the window-seat. She was not yet twenty-one. Her girlhood had been sacrificed to the machine. Orderly, symmetrical development had been impossible. Now that she was a woman in body, in mind, in work, her imagination was still in the first flower of adolescence.
On the mantelpiece of his old room, where she lived, a snapshot of the white men of the Expedition leaned against the cow-faced god of the Haktites. Like Saul of old, Walter towered head and shoulders above his mates. Khaki and a pith helmet are not exactly silver armor—but to Yetta he seemed the Shining Prince. And Isadore wanted her to live with him in an East Side flat.
If falling in love with her had disturbed Isadore, his inability to put her out of his mind after her emphatic refusal troubled him a thousand times more. He got no ease from his pain except in work. The anxiety of his friends increased. But, brushing aside their protests, he sought out ever new activities. He hated to be idle, he came to fear being alone in his room. But not even the most strenuous endeavor to forget relieved him.
In the beautifully illogical way life has, help came to Isadore from a source he would never have dreamed of. He came home early one night to write an article for the Forwaertz. To his dismay he found that he had left his notes in the office. The article would have to wait, and here he was with nothing to do, alone in his room, where of all places he found it hardest to escape from the aching hunger of his heart, the sad confusion of his thoughts.
It was not much of a room—an iron cot, a big deal table, a few cheap chairs and bookcases. It was not even decently clean. In the five years he had lived there he had been quite oblivious to its sordidness. But of late it had become abhorrent to him. He was already half undressed. The bitter summer heat had driven the tenement dwellers out on the street. The perspiring humanity which crowded the sidewalks offered no comfortable escape.
He turned to his bookcases. But he needed something of more compelling interest than the census and immigration reports to fill the time till sleep would come. Most of his little library were reference books, the rest he had read and reread. On the bottom shelf was a bundle he had never unwrapped. They were books Walter had given him after one of their discussions over the meaning of Life. He had never read them, because he was sure he would find no interest in the hodge-podge, haphazard kind of thinking which Walter seemed to enjoy. He pulled them out now—at least they would offer the interest of novelty. The first book he opened was Henri Bergson's L'Evolution Créatrice. Walter, as was his custom, had annotated it copiously. On the fly-page he had written, "A superb discussion of the limitations of Pure Reason." The phrase caught Isadore's eye as he listlessly read the note. Was not this "limitation" of reason the very thing that was troubling him?
No book that he had read in years seemed to vibrate so compellingly with a sense of actuality. This was partly due no doubt to the master craftsmanship of the author. But very likely it would have made no impression on Isadore if he had read it when Walter had asked him to. The jar and conflict of the last few months had opened up the compartments of his brain to a long-lost receptivity. The facts of life had shaken his intellectual structure until he was prepared to understand.