“It’s none of Jim Dalton’s business,” said Joy. “He doesn’t have to come; I wish he wouldn’t. I barely know him, and he keeps turning up and acting as if he were my father or something.”
“Or something!” Jerry repeated derisively. “No—you’ve got a wrong slant on him. Of course, if you look at it that way, he is being a bit outside the works—but when you think it over, the knights of old they talk about who beat it to the rescue of dames in distress, didn’t always stop to decide whether it was any of their business.”
A bitter resentment swept over Joy—resentment that it had been Jim Dalton and not Grant who had followed them on that ride; that it had been Jim and not Grant who had come to see how she was. “Jerry!” she cried suddenly. “Did you know that Grant had left me?”
Jerry had been watching her smoke rings space themselves to the ceiling, but turned swiftly. At her look of blank interrogation, Joy repeated: “Grant has left me! I—I don’t think he’s ever coming back!” Then she stopped, with a tearing intake of breath.
There was an interval while Jerry’s smoke rings turned to curlicues and gargoyles, and Jerry remained seemingly lost in admiration of her skill. Finally, Jerry spoke.
“Of course, Joy, I don’t know the facts of the case—but he’ll come back. I’d stake ten to one on it. He’ll come back—I tell you he will!”
“I’m waiting——!” said Joy.
And she waited—through a week that turned hope to hopelessness. She dared not leave the apartment for fear the telephone would ring. She told herself that he was not coming; yet she sat in the living-room, a book on her lap, or sat at the piano touching keys into strange harmonies . . . waiting.
Gradually life began to resume its accustomed gait at the apartment. Jerry had curtailed all parties during Joy’s convalescence, but now was off again. It was nearing fall; people were coming back into town; the telephone jangled constantly. Joy lacked the energy to join any of these parties, and the evenings were very lonely; as she had not gone back to Pa Graham’s as yet, her days also were long and purposeless.
And so a week had passed on leaden wheels. And one evening about ten-thirty when she heard a babble of voices in the living-room, she made up her mind to dress and annex herself to the crowd.