“Hate him, don’t you?” Cele teased her. “Isn’t it a pity he’s married. And such a stunning wife and children. Did you see her picture on Sunday? She ought to be in the movies instead of politics with that hair.”
Except for Margaret Freda saw only one other person at very close range. That was Gage’s stenographer, Cecilla Nesbitt, commonly known as Cele. Cele was a joyous soul who had taken a liking to Freda and shortly invited her to come home for dinner. Freda had gone and been made happy and intimate at once. There were all the traces of the cottage that the Nesbitts had before they moved to St. Pierre—old rattan rocking chairs and scroll topped beds. Over everything, invading everything was the Church. There was a little holy water font inside the door, there were pictures and holy cards framed and unframed everywhere, crucifixes over the beds, holy pictures in the bureau frames and rosaries on the bed posts. To Freda in her sparsely religious home, God had been a matter of church on Sunday and not much more than that except a Bible for reference and a general astronomical warder at the enormity of God’s achievements. This difference—this delightful easy intimacy with God was all fascinating. This was the comfort of religion, religion by your bedside and at your table. She expanded under it. There was a plenitude of Nesbitts, sleeping rather thickly in the four bedrooms—two brothers, young men of twenty or thereabouts—there was Cele after them and then two younger girls of ten and thirteen and stepping rapidly downward the twins of nine, Mrs. Nesbitt having finished her family with a climax, especially as the twins were boys and made up for being altar boys on Sunday by being far from holy on all other occasions. Still their serving of Mass endowed them in the eyes of Mrs. Nesbitt with peculiar virtues. She had a gently conciliatory Irish way towards her sons rather different from her tone to her daughters. Freda contrasted it with some amusement with the cold classicism of Margaret’s attitude. To Mrs. Nesbitt they were obviously slightly inferior in the sight of God and man, being female, to be cherished indeed, frail perhaps, and yet not made in the exact image of the Creator.
They were headed for the Nesbitt flat. Freda had no letter from Gregory, had had none for two days and her heart felt as if it were thickening and sinking. She would not let it be so. She set to work to make herself interested. She would not mope. It was not in her to mope. But she did not know where Gregory was, for his last letter had said he was waiting advice from the bureau—one of his talks having been cancelled—and that he didn’t know where he would go now. It did not make her worried or nervous but she had been drugging her emotions with his letters and the sudden deprivation hurt her cruelly. So she was going home with Cele to forget it.
They got on the street car and hung from their straps with the nonchalance of working girls who have no hopes or wishes that men will give up their seats to them, their attitude strangely different from that of some of the women, obviously middle class housewives, who commandeered seats with searching, disapproving, nagging eyes. Freda loved this time of day—the sense of being with people all going to their places of living, fraught with mystery and possibility. Her spirits rose. She was not thinking sadly of Gregory. She thought of how her intimate thought and knowledge of him reached out, over her unfamiliarity with these others, touching him wherever he was, in some place unknown to her. The thought put new vigor into her loneliness.
It was an oppressively hot evening for June. They climbed the three flights to the Nesbitt flat with diminishing energy and Cele sank on one of the living-room chairs in exhaustion as she went in.
“Hot as hell,” she breathed. “Let’s sit down a minute before we wash, Freda.”
Freda took off her hat and brushed her hair back with her hand.
“Pretty hot all right. Bad weather for dispositions.”
“My idea of this kind of weather is that it’s preparation for the hereafter.”
Mrs. Nesbitt opened the door to the kitchen and hot heavy smells from the cooking food came through to the girls. But Mrs. Nesbitt herself, mopping great hanging drops of sweat from her forehead, was serene enough. She shook hands with Freda with vast smiling cordiality.