XXIV

Julie's congratulations reached them three days later at the decayed seaport, an hour's run out of Boston, which they had chosen at laughing haphazard in their flight. It was a skillful piece of literature. Ostensibly for both, its real message was for the errant Craig. There were delicate allusions to their close companionship of years, so precious to her. To him, a man, it had of course meant less. A woman's devotion—but she would not weary him with protestations. What she had been, she would always be. She bore him no unkindness for shutting her out at the momentous hour; she knew marriage would raise no future barrier. That was all.

"Dear old Julie!" said Atwood. "It did cut her." He smoked for a pensive interval, gazing out from their balcony over the rotting hulks of a vanished trade. "She's been my right hand almost," he went on presently. "Not many endearments between us—surface tendernesses. Some people think her hard, but she's as stanch as stanch. Did I tell you how she nursed me through typhoid?"

"Yes."

"That showed! Or take our Irving Place days. Many a play or concert she gave up for me—and gowns! She believed in me from the first. I can't forget that. What nonsense to talk of marriage shutting her out! We must not let her feel that way, Jean."

"No," said the wife; for to such charity toward the beaten enemy had she already come.

Indeed, her happiness had softened her to a point where she questioned whether MacGregor did Julie complete justice. He was a man of strong prejudices, set, dogmatic; even, she suspected, a man with a grievance, for Craig now told her that something in the nature of an engagement had once existed between his sister and his friend. Might not Atwood's insight be the truer? She began to put herself in Julie's place, and then, without much difficulty, saw herself acting Julie's part. Ambitious for Craig, scheming for him always, self-sacrificing if need arose, why should she not resent his marriage to a nobody whom she knew only as a model?

This flooding charity likewise embraced Mrs. Fanshaw. Her mother's chronicles of the small beer of Shawnee Springs had continued with the punctuality of tides. The weekly letter seemed to present itself to her mind as an imperative duty, like the Wednesday prayer-meeting, Saturday's cleaning, or church-going Sunday. Duty bulked less prominently in Jean's view of it, but she had answered, desultorily at first, and then by habit, almost with her mother's regularity. Yet she had told little of her life. The changes from cloak-factory to department store, from store to the Acme Company, and from the dental office to the studio had been briefly announced, but despite questions, never lengthily explained. Now she felt the need for confidence. Feelings quickened in her which she supposed atrophied, and under their impulsion she wrote her mother for the first time the true history of her flight from the refuge and traced the romance there begun to its miraculous flower.

A second note from Mrs. Van Ostade, received two days later, voiced in the friendliest way her acceptance of things as they were. She wondered whether they had formulated any plans for living? Craig's bachelor quarters, she pointed out, were scarcely adaptable for housekeeping, and surely they would not care for hotel life or furnished apartments? What they did want, she assumed, was an apartment of their own; that is, eventually. But, again, did they at this time of such critical importance in Craig's work, want the exhausting labor of house-hunting? Her suggestion—she was diffident, but oh, not lukewarm, in broaching it—was that for the time being they make the freest use of her much too spacious home. Craig knew how burdensome the East Fifty-third Street place had seemed to her since Mr. Van Ostade's death; he would remember how often she had urged his sharing it. Well, why not now? It need be only temporary, if they wished; merely for the critical present. It could easily be arranged from a financial point of view. When had he and she ever quarreled over money! And the domestic problem was as simple. Wouldn't they consider it? She meant literally consider, not decide. They could decide on the spot, for come to her they must on their return. She claimed that of them at least. They should be her guests first; then—but no more of that now.