The train was no better than the bus. She shared a seat with an amazingly fat and amazingly rude woman who acted as if Horatia’s travelling bag was a personal insult and made little digs at it with her umbrella. Horatia idly wondered why she noticed all these things and later why she found it such a nuisance to carry her own bag.
“I’m quite spoiled,” she said to herself, “spoiled and soft.”
In the station she hesitated. She did not want to go to The Journal office until late afternoon and it was only half past ten. The reporters would be there now. By afternoon they would be out and Jim (at the very thought her heart beat faster), Jim would be alone perhaps. Well, she couldn’t go to Maud’s house. She boarded a car for West Park.
West Park sat complacently still in the sunlight. Horatia was glad to see it again—glad to come back to its acceptance of everything, including herself. She went up the hill to her uncle’s house and Aunt Caroline greeted her with what for Aunt Caroline was almost enthusiasm. She wanted to know all about Maud’s babies and Maud’s rent and how Horatia liked it. Horatia answered a host of petty questions with no irritation. It was a good thing, she thought, that these bland and undesigning aunts are in the world. How they comfort us in all our worries by their placid fronts and limited worlds. If—
“And how is Mr. Langley?” asked her aunt as they finished their lunch. She could never come to calling him Jim.
Horatia could have kissed her for that assumption that everything was all right between her and Jim.
“And by the way, a telephone message came for you here the other day. I said I didn’t know when you’d be back, but I took it down.”
“Funny it should come here——” said Horatia.
Her aunt consulted the memorandum on her desk.
“Here it is—a Mrs. Gordon at Mercy Hospital wanted to see you.”