It was only little by little that Gussie and Gladys came to a sense of this importance, thus finding themselves enabled to react to some small degree against their sense of disgrace. In the shop, Gussie had heard Corinne whisper to a customer:
"That pretty girl over there is the sister of Follett, who murdered Flynn, and whose sister made that romantic marriage with the banker."
Though she glanced up from the feather she was twisting only through the tail of her eye, Gussie could reckon the excitement caused by this announcement. When it had been made a second time, and a third, as new customers came in, she saw herself an asset to the shop. Stared at, wondered at, discussed, and appraised, she began to feel as princesses and actresses when recognized in streets.
Similarly, Hattie Belweather had run to Gladys to report what Miss Flossie Grimm had said over the counter, in the intervals of displaying stockings.
"See that little red-headed, snub-nosed thing over there? That's the Follett child, sister to the guy that shot the detective and the girl that married the banker sport. Some hummer he must be. Jennie, the married one's name is. They say she's had an offer of a hundred plunks a week to go into vawdeville. Fast color? Oh, my, yes! We don't carry any other kind."
Thus Gladys began to find it difficult to discern between notoriety and eminence, moving among the other cash girls as a queen incognita among ordinary mortals.
Most of this publicity was over by the time Bob reached New York, though the echoes still rumbled through the press. His own arrival reawakened some of it, offering opportunities that were never ignored of drawing dramatic contrasts. He was represented as having been "born in the purple," and stooping to a "maiden of low degree." Low degree was poetically fused with the occupation of a model, and by one publication the statement was thrown in, without comment, and as it were accidentally, that the present Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham, Junior, of Marillo Park, had been greatly admired by appreciative connoisseurs as the figure in Hubert Wray's already famous picture, "Life and Death." Hubert Wray was even credited with "discovering" this beauty when she was starving in the slums.
Except for the detail of Wray's picture, the publicity was something of a relief to Bob, since it left him nothing to explain. The truth in these many reports being tolerably easy to disengage, his friends and acquaintances knew of his position, and, in view of its circumstances, they respected it. He went to the bank; he went to his club; he passed the time of day with such neighbors as remained at Marillo Park, finding it the easier to come and go because everyone knew what had happened.
From almost the first day he fell into a routine—the bank, Stenhouse, Teddy, Indiana Avenue. Though he was not yet working at the bank, he felt it wise to show himself daily on the premises, in order to establish the fact that his relations with his family were unchanged. Stenhouse he didn't visit every day, but only when there were matters connected with the case to talk over. He saw Teddy as often as the Brig regulations would allow, growing more and more touched by the eagerness with which the boy welcomed him. In Indiana Avenue he was assiduous. Whatever the hints flung out by Addie Inglis and Samuella Weatherby, they received contradiction as far as that was possible from obvious devotion.
As for his personal relations with Jennie, they changed little from the modus vivendi agreed upon. That she was growing more and more grateful was evident, but gratitude wasn't what he wanted. What he wanted he himself didn't know, and, in a measure, he didn't care. Till she got what she wanted, he could never be wholly satisfied; and if she wanted Wray....