"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"
"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better clear out before it.
I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah, who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast, but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me. It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve and apprise him that I was there. What deterred me was the reflection that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled head to make a case of his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of sundry vagrant impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain above the din of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter. The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance at Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.
He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.
"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."
"For where?"
"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment. "Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."
"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers, and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.
Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.
"I don't blame you for going."