His marriage with Jane, entered into on the impulse of the moment, was characteristic of the way his life had been ordered—or unordered. He had drifted along, taking what he wanted with a sort of unconscious selfishness as a central motive force. This was poor training for disappointment or tragedy.
Arrived at the studio, he tried to paint, but he could not put his mind on his canvas, so after an hour of labour lost, he gave it up. He wandered about the empty house, where every spot, every room, spoke of Jane and the baby. He could not bear it. He went to the club for lunch, but the men at his table poked fun at his gloom so he left them in a rage. He went to some picture exhibitions he had been meaning to see, but they bored him. He dodged a fellow artist or two, because he didn't want to talk. He tramped up the Avenue and through the Park.
Finally he gave up fighting his thoughts, he let them come. He had gone over the scene with Christiansen thousands of times. Sometimes it ran off in his mind as it had really happened. Sometimes he fell upon his enemy and beat him, sometimes he even killed him, but always the scene was dominated by Jane, who, for the first time in his acquaintance with her, was deeply moved, shaken to the very depths of her being. He realized it fully; it was the thing that frightened him. Jane was so sure, so true to herself. If, thus aroused, she saw her relation to Jerry in a new light, nothing on earth would keep her from severing that relation. It must be that she loved Christiansen, for he, Jerry, had never roused her so.
He thought back over the years, from the time she had applied to him for work, up to now. The years of the silent, mysterious Jane, coming and going like a silhouette against the screen of the studios. Her quiet sense of power had been like a pillow for them all to rest on. What a fool he had been not to see that power like that generated itself and spread like electricity.
He went over the weeks before the pageant, when he had forced her into a more personal relation with him. He recalled the really deep impression she had made on him, on all the audience, the night of the pageant itself.
For the first time he deliberately analyzed the motives that finally ended in his proposal to her.
"Anything she does to me now serves me right!" was his final comment on himself.
He laid aside any suggestion that she cared for him when she married him; he knew she did not. In fact, it was her indifference to him, her elusiveness, which had roused his senses—which had driven him to try to reach her by clumsy physical means—but he had failed.
Jane said that she had met Christiansen at the pageant for the first time, but was that the truth? Had he played some part in her life before that? Was it probable that a man like Christiansen would have been attracted solely by her performance of Salome—into such quick intimacy as theirs? Suppose he, Jerry, had been used as a cat's-paw between them. He flagellated himself for that suspicion. It was contemptible in the light of what he knew of Jane.
Could poverty have driven Jane into marriage? She had lived for years on what she made, apparently. She had no relatives, nor dependents. Besides, he thought she would have disdained surrender, on those grounds. It was a deeper reason than this, as she had said.