“Where is the cunning place?”
“On Sixth Street. New apartment building. I’m going to meet Grace there now and when we get the pictures hung, you can drop your editorial mantle and come to call.”
Langley flushed a little. It was a long time since he had had such light-hearted invitations flung at him—or so it must have seemed to him. And, vaguely understanding the flush, Horatia was suddenly enraged at the ostracism which had been forced upon him.
“Won’t you walk over and see the place now with me?” she said, impulsively. “It isn’t half a mile.”
She expected him to refuse her. He had not repeated his invitation to lunch since she had been in the office and, courteous as he always was, Horatia fancied that he avoided personal contact with her when he could. But now, to her surprise, he rose.
“I’d like to. I’ve been wanting a walk all day.”
They swung along briskly and this time the sardonic Langley seemed left behind in the office. The new one laughed like a boy and walked as if all the rigidity had melted out of his body. On the street, as they passed people whom he or Horatia knew, his hat was off almost with a flourish as if he greeted the world afresh.
“You act as if you’d dropped all the cares of the world,” laughed Horatia.
“No—I’m still carrying them. But it isn’t the cares of the world that weigh you down. It’s your own little cares. If you have none of those and no ugly scars left by them you can carry the troubles of the world easily enough. What an easy problem to solve Bolshevism is, if you aren’t trying to solve it with a mind diseased by personal aches and worries.”
Horatia did not answer. She hoped he would go on into fuller, more specific confidence. She hated herself for the question that so often cropped up in her mind as to what were the real facts of the Hubbell trouble. She understood so much of him now that she wanted to know about that. It would be the last link in the chain—no, the last step in the ladder that mounted—whither she did not know. Somewhere in her vaguest thoughts she and Jim Langley understood each other perfectly, scoffed at the rest of the world that did not understand.