And then she turned and, gently pushing the drab creature before her, went up the walk and into the house.
Joe looked back over his shoulder at them as he drove away.
CHAPTER XI
The rest of that troublous day passed hazily for Mary Louise. She avoided Maida, who in her turn seemed disposed to avoid her. She made a hasty escape after the tea-serving hour and hurried home.
The sun was setting as she entered her room; the tall spire of the First Church was all ruddy with the glow of it as she threw open the window, and as she paused for a moment with palms on the sill, she looked down into the deepening shadows of back passages and alleys, nooks and recesses, where lurked ash and garbage cans and heaps of rubbish. A black cat came slinking around the corner of an old gray-brick stable, disappeared for a moment in a passage, and a moment later she saw him spring to the top of a rotting board fence, pause, and then lightly let himself down into the shadow of the other side. And just a hundred feet to the left—she could barely see past the front cornice of the four-story dwelling below her—Broadway was thronged with its sleek, pleasure-loving, home-going crowd. You could never tell the back from the front.
She withdrew from the window, walked slowly across the room, and sank into a chair. She felt curiously ill at ease and sat staring blankly before her at the wall.
For the difficulty, which in some ways was trivial enough, no solution presented itself. Maida Jones, her companion and business associate, had developed a side that had never been taken into account. Or perhaps she had merely presented it for the first time. So much the worse. If so, then her judgment had been all the more faulty.
She had thought she had known Maida, known her well enough to count on her. She had known she was lazy, known she was a bit slipshod and indifferent. To offset this she was good-natured and compliant. She had had the money, enough for her share in floating the venture. There had been no complexity in the problem at the start.
It was unfair for her to pan out so. Mary Louise felt in a way that she had been swindled. She had felt all along that she could dominate the tone of the establishment, and in fact she had done so. Maida was not made of the stuff to furnish opposition. That had been one of the considerations of the partnership. And in all the months of their association nothing positive had ever cropped out in her. Why, she did not have the strength to say "no." That was why—Mary Louise's thought checked itself sharply here and paused. For a while her mind wore itself out in short, futile meanderings of suppositions. Directly the dim headlines of the paper she had brought with her claimed her attention, and then tiring of that she dropped the paper and stared emptily out of the window. Why, she decided suddenly out of nowhere, she didn't even know the girl.