"Men are a trial!" Bobs said, and dismissed them for the more congenial topic of the book. They talked it over for hours, and when Bobs left she had a typed copy in her arm. She called a good-night to Jerry, who came downstairs and tried to be agreeable. He insisted on walking home with her. While he was gone, Jane pondered deeply, and came to a decision. When he returned she was still in the studio. She had a pile of manuscripts in her hands, and she came toward him.
"Jerry, would you—will you read it?" she asked him gently.
"Thanks. I was going to ask you if you had a copy," he replied with effort.
She smiled a good-night and slipped off upstairs to bed. At three o'clock she woke to see the light still shining in the studio. She went to the balcony and looked down. Jerry sat, under the light, reading absorbedly, with sheets of script scattered about him like a troubled sea.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Jane lay awake until she heard Jerry tiptoe up to his room, in the early morning. It gave her an excited sense of satisfaction that, however much he opposed her confessed profession, the thing she had created held him spellbound. The artist in him could not withstand good workmanship. Or perhaps he found her ideas interesting. She could scarcely wait until morning to hear his verdict—and at the same time she dreaded it. She was tempted to go to his room now, and demand it, so that she might sleep.
She had suffered deeply through his facetious recital of her story, it was not until she understood that he was hurt by her neglect to offer him the book that she could force herself to forgive it. How they stumbled about in the dark, missing each other! Was it so in better regulated marriages? Did men and women really ever truly understand each other?
Jane pondered the question as to whether the initial dissimilarity between them was being widened by the engulfing current that was sweeping woman on so rapidly into new waters of unrest. If this storm was carrying her into any more than a temporary separation of interest from man's, then it meant destruction and the need of rebuilding. Men seemed to be blaming women with the unrest in the world to-day. Jerry voiced a grievance against them as trouble makers. It was like blaming the sea for its attraction for the moon—accusing the sun for sailing through its orbit. A force—generated who knows how or where?—had been set in motion. Call it education, industrial and economic freedom, or what you will, it had happened. Women could not start it—could not stop it. Nor could men.
Ours is an age of conflict, of rapid change, taking place in our knowledge and all about us. The conflict is psychological as well as material. Take one small detail of our machinery. In Jane's own lifetime had come a total revolution in man's method of transportation. Subways, elevated trains, automobiles, aeroplanes. How swiftly must the individual readjust himself. He has within him, intensified, the struggle and the discoördination which is taking place in the large social group. He has to meet the crisis of accepting daily new truths, while he is bound, even tortured, by traditional convictions.