"Well, if I'm going to manage the beach, I've got to be on the job. You haven't been away, either."
"I couldn't think of leaving Bob."
Mrs. Benton's glance spoke disagreeing volumes.
A month later, Emily met Johnnie with his mother coming out of the post office. Just the same old Johnnie, happy-go-lucky and careless, grinning and frank. The Orient had conferred upon him no subtlety, Spanish America had taught him no guile. A small chance they had had, to be sure. A longer one would have been as ineffective. He came to see Emily that same day. She looked at him curiously, envying him his experience. To have smelled China! to have blinked at Brazil!
All he said was: "Sure I had a good time; I earned my own living, anyway. And there's no garbage can in the world I can't eat out of now, after what I lived on across the Pacific. When's Martha to be home?"
Emily didn't know. She gave him, rather reluctantly, her address.
He drove up to Chicago the next day, in the new car his mother had ordered as soon as he left Hong-Kong for San Francisco. Cora Benton said he had gone to see Martha, she felt sure, because he refused to take her with him. But what happened when their children met neither mother knew. Presently Johnnie went back East to college, driving the new car. Mrs. Benton said she really didn't need it. She wasn't well, and she was going to California early, for all the winter. Her tone implied that the town would just have to worry along without her as best it might. She hated, she said, having the children's Christmas party in the hall fall through.
Emily was drawing all the comfort about her that she could get from the fact that she was still, at any rate, with Miss Curtis, when Martha wrote that she had left her flat. She had got a better place in the apartment of a woman doctor in the neighborhood. The announcement upset whatever peace of mind Emily had achieved. Could Martha have quarreled with her friend? A woman doctor, Emily would have thought, was the last person she would have taken up with. There came a dull day when she said to herself that she didn't care whether Martha wanted her or not, she was going to Chicago to see where she was living.
But in the train her heart grew heavier. Martha had said distinctly that she had no room for company. She must have written that to warn her mother not to come investigating. This doctor person wasn't one you could just disturb. So Emily shopped all the afternoon, dispiritedly. Once she tried in vain to get Martha by 'phone. She sat in Field's tea-room an hour, determined not to go back home without seeing her child, yet dreading to find herself unwelcome. That would be more than she could endure. She felt tears coming into her eyes, at length. "I can't stay here and make a fool of myself!" she thought, angrily. She went down to the street into the darkness and got into a taxicab. And, after a long time, during which Emily commanded herself repeatedly not to be silly, the taxi stopped in front of a very smart new apartment house.
Emily announced herself up the speaking tube meekly, half expecting a rebuff. "This is Martha Kenworthy's mother. Is Martha in?"