But Horatia had put on her hat and gone down the steps. Maud ceased with a gesture and looked after her sister thoughtfully.
Horatia went home to her apartment and threw herself down to fume in rage. Grace Walsh laughed. Horatia, in ardent need of a confidante, had told her about Jim that morning and Grace guessed where Horatia had been.
“What did you expect? What you want to do is to make Langley a social asset. Don’t growl so. I mean what I say. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. Turn the tables on Mrs. Williams.”
Grace’s own attitude had not brought much satisfaction to Horatia. Her modernism apparently involved cutting the roots of all sentiments. Love and marriage were to her states which were productive of many epigrams—interesting studies. She had a stock of opinions about such things made of a blend of W. L. George, Havelock Ellis, W. G. Robinson and the more skeptical modern specialists in sex literature. A rather brilliant conversationalist when discussion hinged upon such things, in the face of an emotional awakening like Horatia’s she had little to say. But she had not been satirical. A little questioning, non-committal—her attitude satisfied nothing in Horatia’s heart.
“Your sister,” she went on, “only approves of something quite fashionable in matrimony and Jim Langley is a bit out of style.”
Horatia laughed and telephoned Jim, first at his rooms and failing there, tried the office, where she located him. There was a delicious sense of possession in conversation with him now.
“I want to go out in the country to shake off a lot of foolish talk. Can’t you come?”
The very tone of his voice over the wire brought back the glow in her heart but he told her that it must be later, that he was busy.
“Then I’ll come down too and work and we’ll pretend that the office is the country.”
He welcomed that suggestion. She put on a different dress, her choicest one, which she had meant to save for a very special occasion with Langley. But then she meant today to be a special occasion. She meant to ask him about this Hubbell affair. She should know about it so that she could contradict false impressions, correct them. It was essential that these silly wonderings in her own mind should be laid to rest too.