She didn't envy the men who had to work sixty feet beneath the sidewalk all day long, in rain and slush on bad days and always with the deafening clatter of steam-shovels and riveting machines to add to their woes.
She found the locket without difficulty, because she had a quick eye for tracing the course of small glittering objects falling from a height and the crevice into which it had fallen was a yard long and it stood out.
She picked it up, examined the chain and shook her head in chagrin. One of the tiny links had simply parted and now the chain was in two parts and she would throw it away and get a heavier one this time for sure—no further putting it off. She snapped open the locket, looked at the picture of her father and a twinge of guilt shivered through her. She'd replaced her father's picture with a photograph of Roger, and had carried Roger around her neck like an evil talisman for almost a year. She was cured of that now and she hoped her father would forgive her, if a man dead twenty years could forgive, for what she had done. All of it—not just the disloyalty to his memory she'd committed by giving Roger a preferred place close to her heart.
Her father had been old-fashioned enough to think any kind of an affair a degradation, the equivalent of harlotry undisguised, a living in sin which he could not have forgiven. He'd been a kindly, charitable man, but not without a terrible, inward struggle which would have seared his soul. "That a daughter of mine—"
She glanced at her wrist-watch, and saw that she was still quite early—barely twenty minutes to nine. If she ascended to the street again quickly none of the Eaton-Lathrup office staff would be likely to see her emerging from the excavation, breathless and with a complete lack of dignity, her skirt swirling up above her knees.
She opened her hand-bag, dropped in the locket and snapped the bag shut, tightening her lips a little as her father's handsome, but sad-eyed, rather melancholy face flashed again before her inward vision. She was quite sure she didn't have a father-complex, but the thought of bringing any kind of pain to him—
Oh, damn such thoughts—damn such modern jargon silliness. You'd think people today spent nine-tenths of their lives on psychiatric couches. Perhaps they did—or that's what the head shrinkers wanted everyone to believe. She liked that word—head shrinkers. It put them in their place. A cult, that's what it was. Sweeping the country and poor old Freud himself had known poverty and heartbreak and if he could have gotten twenty dollars an hour he might have been able to smoke better cigars, at least, and taken more rides through the beautiful streets of old Vienna and have gotten in his personal life a few of the compensations genius was entitled to as a young man. How was he to know his theories would make perhaps a billion dollars for practitioners he'd never set eyes on in a far-off land?
She had turned and was just starting back up the slope when she saw the big flat stone. What is there about that kind of stone which fascinates almost everyone, which few people can resist overturning to see what lies beneath? Young school-boys do it all the time—young naturalists in search of beetles and centipedes and all kinds of damp, hueless crawling insects. And adults do it for a dozen reasons, often for the same reason, or to see if there's any grass growing underneath, in a region of barren, tumbled earth, or if it's covering a diamond necklace someone dropped weeks before—just as Ruth Porges had dropped the locket, but had given up more easily than she had done. Or just for the sheer pleasure of overturning a big flat stone, covering dampness, covering mold.
The stone was about forty feet from the base of the crane and almost directly in the path of a sturdy-looking steam shovel with a large enough scoop to lift it up and deposit it in a heap of tumbled earth into which it would sink, and be carted away and dumped elsewhere, along with the tons of earth which had already been scooped out of the pit.
As soon as the construction gang arrived and the clatter started up the stone would lose its identity, become just an impediment to be removed and buried in tons of earth and rubble. Its position on the floor of the excavation had quite possibly been changed already, shifted about a bit by the upheavals going on about it. The earth on both sides of it had a decidedly torn-up, worked over look.