He picked it up, tapped his fingers gently with it and began to argue. He argued long and eloquently: the money did not belong to him, it was hers, it represented the profits of her own little deal, he hadn’t a right to a cent of it, it was impossible for him to touch it. But now no word from him could reach Jeannette. Fear was awake in her; she began to be very frightened; her panic grew. Suddenly she wanted to get up from the table and run into the street. She wanted to go to her mother; she wanted her mother badly. She felt she must get out of the restaurant, must get into the air, must get away from that table and this man at any price. She was like one who stands with her back to a precipice and, turning around, finds herself within a few inches of its edge, a chasm yawning at her feet. Fright made her giddy, her mouth was dry, her throat closed convulsively.
“If I can only stand it for ten minutes more,” she said to herself, gripping tight her folded hands beneath the table, “and keep my head and not let him suspect! ... I must go on and pretend.... Just ten minutes more.”
She managed it badly. The experienced eye of her companion guessed all that was passing in her mind, and he cursed himself for having been too precipitous. The wary hare that he had been at such pains to coax to his side for so many months had taken flight at the first lift of his finger. He would have to begin all over again, and this time proceed more leisurely. For the present, he knew his cue was to withdraw.
He let her make her escape without remonstrance. He asked if she would not allow him as a friend to mail her the check, and when with more vehemence than she meant to display, she refused, he tore the paper neatly into bits and let the fragments flutter from his finger-tips to the table.
“Well,—it’s too bad,” he said with a shrug that eloquently expressed his hurt. “Sorry. My only object was to try and help a bit.”
He left her at the door of the restaurant with a graceful lift of his hat, saying he hoped to see her soon again. It was lost upon the girl. She hurried to a telephone booth in a drug store at hand and tried to reach the apartment on Ninety-second Street, but there was no answer. She thought of Martin but there was the uncomfortable confession she would have to make to him of her recent extravagances. Her recklessness, she realized, had robbed her of the righteousness of her quarrel with him; reproach he could meet with reproach.
She longed then for her sister,—her quiet, brown-eyed sister,—who had never judged her harshly in her life, but Alice was in far-away California. There was nobody, nobody in the world to whom she could turn for comfort, for sympathy and counsel, and then coming toward her with a pleased and smiling recognition in his face she saw Mr. Corey. She fluttered to him with almost a sob, and put both her hands in his; as he greeted her affectionately she wanted desperately to lay her head against his shoulder and give way to the fury of tears that fought now to find escape. In that moment, everyone seemed to have failed her,—mother, sister, husband,—but this staunch, loyal, rock-solid friend who believed in her, who knew only the best of her, whose faith in her was unbounded, who knew her as she really was.
He was talking but she listened not to his words but to her own heart that told her here was the haven for which she sought, here was the counsellor, the friend who would help her without cavil or reproach.
“Tell me about yourself,” he was saying. “You promised you’d come in to see me once in awhile,—and that brother-in-law of yours? I thought we were going to find a job for him? What happened?”
Jeannette attempted to explain: Roy was trying to become an author, his first story was appearing as a serial and he and his wife and babies were in California. As she spoke of Alice, her voice suddenly grew husky and when she tried to clear her throat, the hot prick of tears sprang to her eyes, and she was obliged to stop and press her lips together. Mr. Corey’s brows met sharply.