“You speak as if Jerry might influence you the other way. Jerry loves to mind her business with strict impartiality, but if she ever overstepped her limits she would only urge you to strive as she might have. That girl has the makings of a diseuse of the first water.”
She left the studio in the gilded bubble of youth’s ambition. All the voices and urges within her seemed this morning to have crystallized themselves into one refrain: “No work is too hard if it reaches towards perfection!” How could she have thought she could leave Pa?
She had forgotten—Jerry, Jerry, the mystery—about whom Pa seemed to know more than she, Joy, who lived with her.
What could she do? What was she to think? Where could she turn, in this perplexity?
Jerry was sitting in her room—a pale, seedy-looking Jerry in the familiar purple kimono, staring dully at the half-packed trunk. She did not turn as Joy came in.
“So you’ve—decided to go,” she said in a funny, hard little voice that wavered at the end.
All the resentment and doubt that had been torturing Joy, was dispelled by the sight of that desolate figure and those few wry little words. “Jerry!” she cried. “I—I thought about it this morning—but I—I couldn’t!”
Jerry’s lashes flickered, but she remained sitting in the same position, knees drawn against her chin, pink mules flapping in front of her. “It never wandered into my bean until just now, when I came in and saw——But I’ve been boiling the idea down—and I think you’d better.”
“Jerry!”
“You aren’t happy here; I—I guess you never have been. I’ve never done anything but harm to you from the first moment I knew you. God knows I didn’t mean to, but it seems my good intentions always make the smoothest kind of boulevards for the joy-riders in hell.”