When she left, little Emma McChesney was sleeping, by a curious coincidence, as she had been when Emma arrived, so that she could not have the satisfaction of a last pressure of the lips against the rose-petal cheek. She had to content herself with listening close to the door in the vain hope of catching a last sound of the child's breathing.
She was laden with fruits and flowers and magazines on her departure, as she had been when she left New York. But, somehow, these things did not seem to interest her. After the train had left Chicago's smoky buildings far behind, she sat very still for a long time, her eyes shut. She told herself that she felt and looked very old, very tired, very unlike the Emma McChesney Buck who had left New York a few weeks before. Then she thought of T. A., and her eyes unclosed and she smiled. By the time the train had reached Cleveland the little lines seemed miraculously to have disappeared, somehow, from about her eyes. When they left the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station she was a creature transformed. And when the train rolled into the great down-town shed, Emma was herself again, bright-eyed, alert, vibrating energy.
There was no searching, no hesitation. Her eyes met his, and his eyes found hers with a quite natural magnetism.
"Oh, T. A., my dear, my dear! I didn't know you were so handsome! And how beautiful New York is! Tell me: Have I grown old? Have I?"
T. A. bundled her into a taxi and gazed at her in some alarm.
"You! Old! What put that nonsense into your head? You're tired, dear. We'll go home, and you'll have a good rest, and a quiet evening——"
"Rest!" echoed Emma, and sat up very straight, her cheeks pink. "Quiet evening! T. A. Buck, listen to me. I've had nothing but rest and quiet evenings for six weeks. I feel a million years old. One more day of being a grandmother and I should have died! Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stop at Fifth Avenue this minute and buy a hat that's a thousand times too young for me, and you're going with me to tell me that it isn't. And then you'll take me somewhere to dinner—a place with music and pink shades. And then I want to see a wicked play, preferably with a runway through the center aisle for the chorus.
And then I want to go somewhere and dance! Get that, dear? Dance! Tell me, T. A.—tell me the truth: Do you think I'm old, and faded, and wistful and grandmotherly?"
"I think," said T. A. Buck, "that you're the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most adorable woman in the world, and the more foolish your new hat is and the later we dance the better I'll like it. It has been awful without you, Emma."
Emma closed her eyes and there came from the depths of her heart a great sigh of relief, and comfort and gratification.