As they were coming out of the post office, Mauney noticed one of the middle-aged women whom he had met the previous evening at the club, sitting in a motor car at the curb. She bowed affably, then glanced quickly at Mrs. Poynton.
“Do you know Mrs. Squires?” Jean asked as they walked along.
“Yes, met her only last night.”
Before leaving Jean at her home he accepted her invitation to come up for dinner that evening. Her mother was then discovered to be a woman prematurely aged by a morose and taciturn disposition, which seemed to account for her daughter’s surprising animation. Jean made good to Mauney what her mother’s manner lacked in friendliness. And, indeed, the home was all in distinct contrast with the impression of affluence which Jean’s street appearance had so unquestionably made.
Dinner finished, Mrs. Byrne at once settled herself in a chair by a western window, and, adjusting a second pair of glasses, reached a Bible from the window-sill. Mauney thought this might herald a session of family worship, and was relieved when his hostess led him to the parlor. With a Bohemian grace that was foreign to his conception of his former country-school teacher, Jean opened for him a silver box of cigarettes, and selecting one for herself pressed it neatly into a pearl holder.
“Times have changed, since Lantern Marsh days,” she said, smiling gently, “and I hope you have learned by this time to excuse women for their little follies.”
“I am free and easy,” laughed Mauney. “I’ve been living for the last few years in a house where cigarette-smoke was the prevailing perfume.”
“And about five years on Queen Street East,” Jean said, “have made these things almost essential to me. I started smoking at bridges in self-defence, and now my meals don’t digest without them. Charles always hated me to smoke. But I presume he realized the environment was to blame.”
For perhaps an hour they talked of Beulah and its inhabitants, of deaths and marriages, of careers which had justified their early promise, and of others which had not. Mauney briefly outlined his college experiences, but noticed that she said almost nothing about her own married life. All girlishness had departed from her face, and gone, too, was a certain carelessness of appearance which had formerly been quite refreshing. She was now, as nearly as he could judge, possessed of a dormant bitterness, never expressed, but as ugly as she was attractive. He found himself not a little curious to learn her philosophy, but even now he felt the same unexplainable distaste in her presence as he had felt during a certain evening drive, seven years ago. To be sure Jean had lost the directness which had then displeased him. She had become more subtle, more complex. But in this quiet parlor a mental hand was reaching towards him with the same emotional intent.
“Well,” she said at length, “you’re a sly fox. You’ve told me all about your life just as if there hadn’t been a single woman in it. Now, please confess, as I am desperately curious.”