“Well, then, what prevents you going somewhere else?” Jinny asked impatiently.
“I can’t go traipsin’ about to new places and new faces at my age. And I don’t want to go agin ’Lijah neither—he ought to ha’ been married long since, and wasn’t it me spurred him on to look that high? And won’t he have the loveliest wife in Chipstone? What’s your game, trying to drive me away? Why, if I leave Chipstone I’d never see my grandchicks.”
“Well, but would you see them anyhow, even supposing they’re hatched?”
“I reckon there’s days I’d be allowed out and I could see ’em as they went by in their baby-cart.”
“Well, at that rate you’d be happier in the poorhouse.”
“Yes,” with a burst of weeping, “I’d be happier there. Happen I’d better go there.”
“But I don’t believe your son will let you,” Jinny reassured her, and tore herself away, miserably conscious of a sort of Nemesis for her strategic lingering. She dismissed the scene from her mind. But it added to the heaviness of her heart as she drove slowly about the streets with never a glimpse of the face she sought, and the ache of his absence began to be complicated by the fear that it was wilful, or at least not unavoidable. Surely it was not possible for three days to elapse without their meeting, had he been as keen as she. Even the funeral, she now felt grimly, was not an absolute necessity of life! He could have got out of it. No, there was something behind, more sinister than funerals. She went anxiously over her one brief episode of happiness. Had she done or said anything to offend him? Was it that, on reflection, he had resented the little trick she had played at the flooded farm in luring him outside his door? Yes, that must be it. And she had sillily rubbed it in with her last words: “You bet your bottom dollar on that!” But no, he could hardly be resenting the innocent device without which they would never have known the wonder of their first kiss. The wonder? But was it a wonder to him? Tumultuous thoughts of Blanche and more shadowy others tore at her bosom. He did not really care, did not really need her.
The sport of elemental passions, she drove vaguely around, hoping against hope to espy him. She was a creature of pure feeling—unsophisticated by fiction or drama—and darkling images of death came to her for the first time. And for the first time she let her work go undone. It was no mere apprehension of meeting “Mother Gander” that finally kept her from the courtyard of the inn, no mere sense that with the sweeping away of competition she could afford to neglect for once even the commissions she already held; it was the absolute distraction of her mind. She could have borne final separation more easily than this uncertainty.
As she jogged home, she realized miserably that Will had at last succeeded in stamping out her business, if only for a day.