"But you have been away for the summer, haven't you?" I ventured desperately.
"Yes, and I am back," she murmured gently, "and still—better come and lunch with me to-day—don't you think so?"
If there's any one thing that my career as a business man has done for me, it is to implant in my heart a hatred for procrastination and shiftiness. I had no luncheon engagement, and yet I despairingly told her I had.
"Dinner," she answered, "would suit me even better."
"I ought to go home," I protested feebly, with a sinking instinctive feeling that I really ought not to resume such relations with Gertrude.
"We'll have an early little meal, at six-thirty," she smoothly ignored me, "Until then, good-by."
I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up. Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic. We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is always an admirable hostess.
I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner, and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don't know what ye'll miss," I thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude's calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine shops be in the same world with Gertrude's flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real world, my daily environment. Gertrude's flat was now foreign ground.
"Yes—goose of a man!—don't you see? What could be better? The man comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and everything is satisfactory and you are free again—what could be more delightful?"
The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained silent.