Suppose something was wrong, at home? She stared about at the dingy, painted walls, with faint zigzags of cracks, and fear prickled through the enthusiasm which enclosed her. This was the first time that letters had failed to meet her. In two hours, or three, she should have an answer to her message. "Please wire me at once, care Commercial House. No word from you here." She picked up her pen again. No use to worry; letters miscarried, and she would hear soon.
She opened Henrietta's letter, to reread the comment on Stella Partridge. Something behind that, she thought. That woman doesn't make incautious remarks. Her mind fumbled with the news, as if it were a loose bit out of an intricate mechanism; if she could fit it into place, she could see how the whole affair ran. That was one of Charles's lowest boiling points, that contention about medical men and psychologists. Perhaps Partridge had been too greedy, and laid those smooth hands of hers on something Charles particularly wanted for himself, for his own job. Whatever it is—Catherine rose suddenly, piling her letters and portfolio on the corner of the dresser—whatever it is, I mean to know about it, when I go home again. I am through fumbling along.
Her room had grown chilly. A wind rattled at the loose sash of the window. She looked out at the angle of street; a hardware store across the way mirrored its enormous window light in shining pans and kettles. The air seemed full of whirling bits of mica. She pushed the window up and leaned out; sharp and wet on her face, the mica was snow, driven along on the wind.
Only an hour since she had telegraphed. She would go down to dinner. Something insidious in the way the soft fingers of worry pried between thoughts, pushed down deeper than thought.
She stopped at the desk.
"If a message comes for Mrs. Hammond, please send it in to the dining room."
"Guess we're going to have a blizzard, aren't we?" The clerk rubbed an inky forefinger thoughtfully over his red baldness. "Coming along from Chicago and the west on this wind."
More pushing of those soft fingers: delay of trains, wires down, who knows when I may hear!
"It may not be a bad storm," said Catherine, and went resolutely in to dinner. But she heard the clerk's, "You can't tell when you're going to get trouble."