Their words were stupid, inconsequential, in the face of Joy sitting there. Their eyes were speaking to each other, saying so much that Joy dared not look. And just last night——
“I wonder what Mabel will say,” she ventured. They paid to her remark the tribute of polite inattention.
“I owe Jerry to you,” said Jerry’s husband; “but I don’t intend to pay you.”
Of course—Jerry was leaving her now! Leaving her and the apartment—alone! She considered this bleak fact, all through the course. At last, breaking in upon the conversation of eyes, she said: “What will you do with the apartment, Jerry?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The lease will be up in July. Why don’t you stay in it till then? Phil and I are going to live in his apartment here, until we get a house in the suburbs, so I shan’t be moving out my stuff for some time.”
To stay in the apartment—with the ghost of Sarah in curl-papers and wrapper whining through the kitchenette—and the purple kimono and pink mules gone from everywhere. . . . She did not bring the thought to the surface of the table. “You two in the suburbs!” she exclaimed instead, in faint derision.
Jerry hardly smiled. People in love always lost their sense of humour, but you wouldn’t think Jerry——
“Apartment life would merely be existing for us,” said Phil. “We are going to live.”
Their eyes trembled together in close embrace. . . . Joy hurried through her dessert; the others had made no pretense of eating. Their appetite was as if they had just come in from luncheon. All three were regarding the meal as a more or less disagreeable formality to be gotten through with as quickly as possible. But when they had finished, they grew embarrassed at their haste, and everyone tried to be jovial, lingering over the coffee.
“Last night at this time,” said Phil, “I was telling our cousin just why I didn’t like younger or older women.”