“I’m glad you missed me and I’m sorry I missed you. I’m so silly, Jim. I want you to have a good time and yet I want it to be had with me. Isn’t that silly and disgustingly feminine?”
“It’s most beautiful.”
“Good night, Jim, dear.”
The telephone clicked on the hook. Horatia turned to go up the stairs—but the smile on her lips did not match the look in her eyes, that was not quite one of satisfaction.
CHAPTER XIV
STILL Horatia stayed with her sister. It was not what she had planned to do after Maud’s return, but there seemed no easy way of immediate escape and she shrank from the thought of taking another flat. Harvey and Maud were cordially insistent in urging her to stay with them. They told her that they needed her—that the children had become so used to her that they would be miserable without her. And Jim seemed inclined to think it better for her there during the heat of the summer. In the autumn, after they were married, they would have a place of their own. Until then—Maud’s house offered all the comforts which would make the summer easy.
Work slackened a little. The office force took their vacations in due order but Horatia kept postponing hers, hating to leave Jim for even two weeks. And yet there was the faintest little cloud between her and Jim. Since the Sunday which he had spent with Mrs. Hubbell she had not felt quite so free with him as she had before—not quite so intimate. She did not want to discuss Rose Hubbell with him but she wanted to talk things out with him which concerned Rose. She felt the first peace of her engagement marred and was resolute in her determination to mar it no further. He had never referred to that Sunday and she was shocked to find that her mind reverted to it fairly often. She found that she wanted to know every incident of every hour and that she was jealous of every minute that he had spent with Rose—that she wanted to share every mood and every hour with him. It made her slightly inquisitive as to what he did with his time. Jim never resented—never seemed to notice her questionings, but Horatia noticed herself sometimes—with a fierce sense of shame—prying into his movements.
“It is disgusting,” she told herself, “but of course it isn’t as though I was just plain jealous. It’s really because I don’t think Rose Hubbell is good for him. Even Kathleen Boyce insisted on telling me that.”
She herself saw nothing much of Rose. Once they met by accident downtown and Horatia had to lunch with her and twice she declined invitations which included her and Jim. But Rose had little opportunity to get near Horatia when Horatia was intrenched behind the life at Maud’s. When Horatia had free time, Maud had a way of absorbing it and Maud sometimes had a good deal to offer in the way of entertainment. She had somehow managed the acquaintanceship of Marjorie Clapp, who seemed pleasantly interested in Maud’s entire household now that Horatia was living there. The Clapps week-ended at the cottage to which Horatia had gone once with Anthony, and Horatia spent a happy Saturday and Sunday there with Mrs. Clapp. Anthony was not in evidence. His sister told Horatia that he had decided to go in with his father and that his father had sent him West for six weeks to get acquainted with the branches of the business.
It was as if a background were being given Horatia against which she must paint her life with Jim. The more she saw of these orderly people, the more impossible it seemed not to conform in part to their standards. One’s mind, of course, would remain more free than Maud’s and run deeper in its current than did Marjorie Clapp’s. But there were surely unescapable necessities in any plan of life which she might arrange. Three meals a day and a servant and a certain amount of intercourse with pleasant people. She knew that there were people who did without the servant and took the three meals “out of the house,” but she could never vision herself living as those people lived—without dignity and eternally in disorder. “More of Aunt Caroline is coming out in me every day,” she complained to Jim. “As I plan for the fall my mind almost begins to run to West Park and a house with a stone dog.”