She did not answer. She was in no mood for discussion.
CHAPTER XIV
WHAT WAS TO BE EXPECTED
I
MONDAY was busy in Sable and Flandon’s office. Conferences, a dinning of telephones, a vast opening of mail. Every one was conscious of important work in transaction. The Laidlaw case was having its first hearing before the District Court and it was understood to be worrying, ticklish business. The Judge was irascible and his point of view of the case important from this first hearing. Both the partners were at the office by half past nine and left together, one of the younger lawyers accompanying them, much as young doctors are present at a skillful operation, to learn and observe.
Freda, watching and hearing much of the office talk, discreet as it was, wished she could have gone along too. She was feeling very fit, buoyed up by the first strength of separation when it is a delight to feel one’s capacity for cheerfulness and bravery in the midst of loneliness. She wanted to plunge very hard into work, to do something important, to get thoroughly absorbed in her work and not to dawdle into dreams. So she told herself strongly. At night, when she was alone, she would live with her memories and her dreams. It was youth’s swagger in the presence of emotion. She was busy until Flandon left the office, making memoranda of things to be done, getting papers for him, keeping him from telephone interruptions. But after ten o’clock the office settled down and became quiet. The clerks were hammering away endlessly at their typewriters, the few clients who came in were quickly taken care of, and Freda found herself harder to control. She was looking up a list of references that Mr. Flandon wanted ready by noon and answering his telephone. It was not absorbing work. Try as she would, her mind slipped away from her and concentrated on amazing facts.
She was a married woman. A week ago she had been a girl visiting at the home of the Brownleys’. Rapid enough the events which had led to her working here—but this other secret whirlwind—how strange it all was. She wondered if lives were like that. Going along placidly enough until they struck the edge of the waterfall of circumstance and then—. All lives must have secret strange places. She had loved, in Mohawk, to reflect on those sometimes. Spoon River had never quite gone out of her mind. She had always, since she had read it, seen people as other than the reflection of their acts and seeming—speculating on the curious contradictions of appearances and motives. Here she sat, working, Gage Flandon’s clerk, Eric Thorstad’s daughter. And those two things mattered not at all—gave no key to her. It mattered only that she was the wife, the secret wife of a man whom she had known six days. Physically, chemically, actually she was altered. That was life. When you found it, you held it to you secretly. You never told. That was why you couldn’t tell about people. Life might be caressing them, making itself known to them, biting them. Over it all the vast illusion of action. It was illusion.
The morning drifted by. At a little after twelve Mr. Sable and Mr. Flandon came in together. It was easy to see that things had not gone well. They were self-contained, sober, but the lines of Gage’s face were ugly and those of his partner disapprovingly set. They went into Mr. Sable’s office and closed the door. Freda, getting on her hat and coat, heard the young lawyer who had accompanied them, speaking to a colleague.
“Didn’t go well. Flandon got Judge Pratt mad. Something got under Flandon’s skin and he didn’t play the old judge very well.”
That was all she heard.
At the moment Gage was hearing the same thing. Sable was walking about the office in some irritation explaining it.