"Of course. Do you suppose I couldn't read him like a book after all I've been through?"
"Yet you went just the same! You—"
"I trusted to luck, and for once luck was with me. He had a big offer from a Chicago firm, and left town the very day I went into the cloak department. Oh, you needn't stare," she added, with a touch of passion. "The world hasn't been any too kind to me, and I'm learning to beat it at its own selfish game. Don't let it worry you."
"I can't help it."
"Then you're silly. I'm not as soft as I look. Besides, you'll find yourself pretty busy paddling your own canoe."
Jean fell into a brooding silence. The new life was incredibly complex. It held possibilities before which imagination flinched. A picture, recalled again and again with extraordinary vividness, flashed once more before her. She saw a camp among birches bordering a pellucid lake; a boyish, pacing figure; a straightforward, troubled face confronting her own. She evoked a voice, "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps...." Every syllable, every intonation, was ineffaceable. Where was he now, that flawless young knight of the enchanted forest, who had stayed her folly and changed the current of her life? He had promised to befriend her when, against his counsel, she had thought to dare this unknown world. Would he still have faith, should they meet?
Amy's laugh caught her back to the room of three dormers.
"You looked a million miles away," she said. "If you were another sort of girl, I'd say you were dreaming of your best fellow. What! Blushes! Then you were? Was it Paul?"
"Paul!" Jean repelled the suggestion with a pillow. "Take that!"
They said no more of the buyer—he was luckily out of the reckoning; and although Jean deemed the dentist a wiser judge of men in general, and of floor-walkers in particular, than Amy, she decided for the present to side with neither, but try to weigh Mr. Rose for herself. If Amy was skimming thin ice, she was at least a practiced skater, with the chastening memory of a serious splash. Moreover, to recur to Amy's metaphor, she had a canoe of her own to paddle, as she was roughly reminded that same afternoon.