“Maybe not,” he admitted, at the same time realizing that at any rate he knew just how a man feels under the circumstances.
It wasn’t an agreeable feeling. It was a feeling, in fact, that would have knocked the bottom right out of his small universe a few months ago. But his universe was growing bigger, and he seemed to be growing along with it. In the old days Jerome would hardly have known what to do with obligations of any but the most rudimentary sort. But he had digested a perfectly marvellous fund of experience. The old unfledged Jerome, who used to eat his lunches on the step of the factory that made a leader of forty-nine cent chocolates, would no doubt have frozen with horror at the notion of sitting down opposite a girl and discussing such an issue as this. But now, while very far indeed from looking upon it as a pleasant situation, or one that could be handled with any degree of lightness, Jerome conceived it a natural enough thing to be a partner in the dilemma: the obligation was one he had helped to create. A man wasn’t a man who would allow himself to be scandalized by what had to be, no matter what.
He was at once so advanced and still so immature—knew life and didn’t yet know life, in a breath. But he argued with blunt assurance: “Don’t you see, Lili? All we have to do is get married. Everything will be all right.” He threw away his cigarette and, reaching over between the empty glasses, drew the girl’s hands gently down into his on the table. “I’ve tried hard enough to make you marry me; now, perhaps, you’ll listen to reason!” But he smiled a little sadly, for his ego told him there was something radically wrong about the way his romance was running.
“Jerry,” said the girl at length, looking at him seriously, “I guess the time’s come when I’ve got to tell you the truth about me. I can’t marry you, even now, because I’m married already.”
III
He stared at her, unable for ever so long to grasp the staggering new situation her words established.
Married! But how could she be? How could she? Who was her husband? Where was he? Questions that were the groping articulation of an ever deepening incredulity. And she answered them as well as she could, the answers, on her part, equally groping through the articulation of despair.
Well, she had married a man twice her age when she was seventeen. They had lived together only about a year. Then she left him. That was really about all. Her little story sounded so desperately hackneyed as she poured it out, with increasing enthusiasm, to Jerome.
She was singing in a cabaret when they met. Why she had married him could hardly be thought of as an essential question. Such marriages occur constantly, without rhyme or reason, and nothing on earth can prevent them or their often dismal consequences. She pleased him and he married her. He was without money and drank and had a heavy tendency toward sportiness. They tried to set up a little home in one bare room of a boarding house. It wasn’t very authentic. Her naturally happy and irresponsible nature drooped under a cloud of incompatibility. They fought. Things went from bad to worse. She began slipping back to her old life in the cabaret. Finally she disappeared entirely. She never saw her husband again. That was all there was to it.