"Blue background"—Sylvia was forgetting Joan as she rambled on, punching and jamming her clothing into the case—"and a bit of a story running through the frieze—a kind of sea-nymph search for the Holy Grail—stretching from the door back to the door. Can't you see it, Joan?"
Joan could not. She was seeing something else. Something daily becoming visualized. A seeking, yearning desire issuing from her soul and trying to find—what?
"You'll have Pat here?" suddenly asked Sylvia. "I'd rather have someone besides Pat, but the others are either away or worse than Pat. You're good for Pat if she isn't for you. You sort of stiffen her up—she told me so. Pat needs whalebone. When her purse gets flat her morals dwindle; mine always get scared stiff. I'll write twice a week, Joan, my lamb, Sunday and Wednesday. I'll be back before long."
And off Sylvia went with her heavy bag and her light heart, and Joan called Patricia up on the telephone.
"All right," Patricia responded, "but if I get homesick for these rooms, I must be free to come."
"Of course," Joan agreed.
Patricia was in a dangerous mood and Joan was vividly alive to impressions.
Patricia was writing verses as a bird carols—just letting them pour out. She was selling them, too, and running out to New Jersey to talk over with Mr. Burke the publication of a book.
"I cannot see," Patricia had said to Sylvia, "why one should feel it necessary to stick to hot, smelly offices when a library, looking out over acres of country, is at one's disposal."
"Is Mrs. Burke there?"