Yetta walked home through the dawn. She was very tired, and she tried not to think. But she could not free herself from the insistent question—"Did I really kiss him?" She looked at herself in the glass, just before she turned out the gas and went to bed. "Did I really kiss him?" she asked her reflected image. She got no answer, and, as though vexed at this silence, she spoke defiantly. "If I did, I'm sorry. I don't love him." This rather comforted her, and she fell asleep at once.
But when she woke up in the early afternoon, she felt worse about the night's adventure than ever. Very emphatically she told herself that she loved Walter. That had been La grande passion. No. Not "had been"; it "was." It was a treason to think of it as "having been." She had told Walter that love had no tenses, that it was "somehow eternally always and now and for ever and ever." Romance still dominated all her thinking. The books and poems said there could only be one real love. She was sure that her love for Walter had been real—hence, in strict logic, she loved him still and always would and could never love any one else.
Although she really believed this—wanted to believe it, felt that life would be impossible on any other hypothesis—she was beginning to realize that somehow the Romantic Explanation of Life does not quite explain. For the poets it was beautifully simple—either you loved or you did not love. It was the crudest sort of dualism. Things were black or white. The gray tones were not mentioned.
But while she did not love Isadore as she had loved Walter, he was certainly in a different category from all the other men whom she did not love. The men at the office, for instance. She was the best of chums with them; she respected them, admired them, liked them—and did not love them. But it was different with Isadore.
The hungry look in his eyes haunted her. The memory of his sudden, unexpected ardor—the rough vehemence of his caresses, his stormy outbreak of passionate tenderness—disturbed and distressed her. She had never taken him quite seriously before. She had deliberately, but unconsciously, refused to look the matter in the face. It is very hard to be sympathetic and just to a love we do not return. It had not occurred to her that Isadore's love was as painful to him as hers for Walter had been. That startling contact in the dark of the office had opened her eyes to the reality of his passion. What a mess it all was! Isadore loved her. She loved Walter. Walter loved Mabel!
The sun was resplendent, and Yetta—having promised herself a holiday—walked over to Washington Square and took a bus up to Riverside Drive. It was zero weather, the sun shone dazzlingly on the blanket of snow, which had given an unwonted beauty to the Jersey shore. Yetta walked up and down the Drive till the sinking sun had reddened the West with an added glory. It was not often that she had such outings. The crisp air stimulated her. She was happy with the pure joy of being alive and outdoors in a way she had not known since Walter went away. To be sure her mood was tinged with melancholy. She was sorry for Isadore. But less sorry than usual for herself. Somehow she felt less bitterly the appalling loneliness.
As she was going downtown in the dusk she noticed a poster of the Russian Symphony Orchestra. It offered a programme from Tchaikovsky. She had some neglected work she ought to finish up. She had barely enough money in her pocket for a ticket—and a hundred things she ought to use it for. But in a sudden daredevil expansiveness, she dropped off the bus, got a scrap of supper at a Childs' restaurant, and went to the concert.
Under the spell of the music she forgot all her preoccupations. Her intellect dropped down into subconsciousness. She did not think—she felt.
Music can be the most decorative of all the Arts—or the most intellectual. The trained musician, who knows the meaning of "theme" and "development," who can recite glibly all the arguments for or against "programme" music, who will tell you offhand in what year this Symphony was written, whether it is a production of the composer's "first period" or a mature work, cannot avoid bringing a large assortment of purely intellectual considerations—historical and technical—to the appreciation of music. But to the naïve listener, like Yetta, music is decorative. It appeals solely to the emotions. It is never interesting—it is either pleasing or displeasing. Yetta sat dreamily through the concert—half the time with closed eyes—and found it wonderful. There was too little chance for the play of sentiments in her life. Every waking hour she had to think. Tchaikovsky laid a caressing hand over the tired eyes of her intellect and showed beautiful things to her heart.
The next morning as Yetta went to the office she thought with some uneasiness of meeting Isadore. As usual in such matters she decided to face the affair frankly.