Jeannette, on her way to Cohasset Beach, let her Sunday newspaper drift indifferently into her lap, and turned her attention to the October landscape through the car window. The train was filled with Sunday visitors like herself, bound for friends and relatives in the suburbs. They would enjoy a hearty meal around a crowded table at one o’clock, would inspect the local country club for a view of the links or the golfers in their “sports” clothes, indulge, perhaps, in a motor trip to gain further aspects of the autumnal foliage, or, complaining of having over-eaten and demurring at any effort, establish themselves at the card table to while away the rest of the afternoon at bridge. At five o’clock the swarm that had filtered into the country all morning through the Pennsylvania Station would decide with one accord to return to the city, the cars would be jammed and every seat taken long before the westbound trains reached Cohasset Beach. It was always a noisy crowd with crying, tired babies wriggling in parents’ laps, golfers arguing about their scores and the adjustment of their bets, silly girls convulsed at one another’s confidences or lifting shrill pipes of mirth at the hoarse whispered comments from slouching male escorts, returning ball teams of youthful enthusiasts who banged each other over the head and vented their high spirits in rough jibes or horse-play.
Sunday travel was a bore, thought Jeannette in mild vexation. Even the outbound trains during the morning, which were never more than comfortably filled, stopped at every station along the line, no matter how insignificant. It took ten minutes longer to get to Cohasset Beach on Sundays than on any other day of the week; the express trains that left the city late in the afternoons from Monday to Saturday landed Roy home in nineteen minutes. It used to take a weary forty-five, Jeannette remembered, when the East River had first to be crossed by ferry and the rest of the way travelled in the old racketing, shabby, plush-seated, puffing steam trains from Long Island City.
She fell to musing as she idly watched the country flying past. She recalled the time when she and Martin had paid their first visit to Cohasset Beach as guests of the Herbert Gibbses and had gone picnicking on the shore at the Family Yacht Club. The Gibbses owned a handsome home on the Point to-day, and the little Yacht Club had been merged into the Cohasset Beach Yacht Club, which, since the fire that had laid it in ashy ruins, was now housed in a large, imposing edifice of brick and stone. The town itself,—then hardly more than a summer resort for “rich New Yorkers,” a few hundred houses scattered carelessly over some wooded hills,—had grown within the last dozen years into a flourishing community with banks, brick business blocks, and fireproof schools, with paved streets, and rows upon rows of white painted houses with green shutters and fan-shaped transoms above panelled colonial doorways. The woods were gone; the sycamores and gnarled old apple trees had given place to spindling elms set at orderly intervals on either side the carefully graded streets and to formal little gardens and close-cropped patches of lawn. The dilapidated wooden station had been supplanted by a substantial concrete affair, surrounded with cement pavements, and provided with comfortable, steam-heated waiting-rooms. The whirring electric trains swept on to other thriving villages further down the Island, and paused, coming or going, but a minute or two at the older town which had once been the terminal. There were now blocks and blocks of these trimly-built, neatly-equipped houses at Cohasset Beach, each with its garden, its curving cement walks and contiguous garage, and Messrs. Adolph Kuntz and Stephen Teschemacher had built stone mansions for themselves in the center of Cohasset Beach Park, to-day the “court” end of town.
Alice and Roy lived in humbler quarters: the old frame house Fritz Wiggens and his paralytic mother had once occupied. It was yellow and gabled, rusty and blistered, and spread itself out in ungainly fashion over a none-too-large bit of ground. It had, by no means, been a poor investment, although the building had needed a steady stream of repairs since the Beardsleys acquired it. Roy had been offered three times what he paid for it on account of its desirable location overlooking the waters of the Sound. Every now and then he and Alice discussed selling the place but invariably reached the same conclusion: Rents were prohibitive and no other house half as satisfactory could be purchased for the money without assuming a mortgage, an additional financial burden not to be considered; their problem was to devise ways of reducing expenses rather than increasing them.
§ 2
Jeannette had decided to walk to her sister’s house, but on the platform as she descended from the train she unexpectedly encountered Zeb Kline and his wife, awaiting the arrival of Sunday guests. Zeb had married Nick Birdsell’s daughter and gone into partnership with his father-in-law; Birdsell & Kline, General Contractors, had built most of the new houses in Cohasset Beach, and now Zeb had a fine stucco one of his own, and his wife drove about in her limousine and kept a chauffeur.
At the time Jeannette and Martin separated, the former had been aware that the sympathy of the community was with her genial, amusing, good-looking husband. The townsfolk considered she had treated him “shamefully”; only Edith French and the Doc were acquainted with the true facts of the case and had defended her, but the Doc and his wife had moved away within a year after Jeannette returned to work, and she had lost touch with them. Word reached her that they had settled in St. Louis, that the Doc had had his right hand amputated as the result of an infection from an operation, and that he was running a drug store there. Later Jeannette heard that Edith had left him and married an actor.
Suspecting a hostile attitude among these friends and acquaintances of her married years, Jeannette had kept herself carefully aloof from all of them when Roy and Alice selected Cohasset Beach for their home. She would avert her eyes when passing any of them on the street, or would bow with but a brief, unsmiling inclination of the head when forced to acknowledge recognition.
Now, as she came face to face with Zeb Kline and his wife, Zeb, a trifle flustered, lifted his cap and greeted her by name, and Jeannette, also taken unawares, responded with more cordiality than she felt. She was somewhat perturbed by the incident and was conscious of Kitty Birdsell Kline’s appraising eye following her as she made her way across the station platform.
It was this trifling occurrence that induced her to alter her intention and ride to Alice’s. Mrs. Kline might be admiring her,—her clothes and carriage,—or she might be sneering. In either case, the scrutiny was unwelcome, and, straightening her shoulders, Jeannette directed her steps toward one of the shabby, waiting Fords, and climbed in. She had no intention of letting the Klines sweep by her in their limousine while she trudged along the sidewalk.