Jasper looked relieved.
“I’ll be right along,” he assured me.
I went out with my umbrella and tried to call a taxi. But there were not enough; there never are when it rains, and a single woman has no chance at all. Men were running up the street a block and jumping into them and driving down to the awning with the door half-open looking for their girls or their wives along the sidewalk. I wished that some one was looking for me. A hand closed over mine where I held the handle of the umbrella and a pleasant voice said:
“Can I take you home?”
I looked up into the eyes of a bald-headed man I had never seen before, who was smiling at me as if he had known me something more than all my life. I jerked away and hurried down the street. After that I somehow did not dare even to take a car; I walked home; in fact, I ran. And all the way I kept thinking: “Why doesn’t Jasper take any better care of me? Why doesn’t he care what happens to me? That’s it; he doesn’t care.”
It is a dangerous thing to pity oneself when one’s husband is out with another woman.
“All I can have to eat is what is left over in the ice-box,” I said, raising the lid and holding the lettuce in one hand while I felt around in the dark for the bottle of milk. But there was no milk. And I had to laugh at myself then or cry, and so I laughed, a very little, and went to bed.
When Jasper came in it was so late that I pretended that I did not hear him.
CHAPTER VI
LOBSTER-POTS
GETTING up and out of the apartment before my husband was awake, I bought all the morning papers at the nearest kiosk and carried them back to my breakfast-table. At least I would know first, for my wakefulness, what the edict of the critics was. I hated to read what I knew in my heart to be their immature and sometimes even silly opinions, but such is the power of the press over the theaters that I could not wait for my coffee to boil before I unfolded the first sheet. These sophisticated young writers, many of whom I knew and whose opinions I respected less on that account, wielded the power of life or death over their subjects, the playwrights, who struggled in the arena of life for their approval and were never safe from their august “thumbs down.” Sometimes I thought the older men, who should have known better, were the most irresponsible. Bored out of all possibility of forming any constructive opinion of a first night, they waited only to see that every actor came on as advertised, and then scuttled back to their typewriters to pound off something, anything that would leave them free for half an hour’s game in the back of the newspaper office before going home. What had they done to us and to our play, to the cross-section of life which we had labored over all summer?