"But with all this success ... why, they fairly stood on their feet last night."
"I know, I know," he looked unendurably harassed. "I can't stand it, Olivia, I can't stand it. This place is full of ghosts." I remembered that both his children had been born there and that he had not seem them for more than a year, and I did not press him.
"I'll keep your end up for a week if I can," I assured him as he wrung my hand. He turned back when he was a step or two down the stair.
"Don't stay too long yourself," he admonished. "New York's the place."
I was feeling that when Pauline came to me. It wasn't until I saw her that I realized what a distance there was—in spite of our common youth, had always been—between us. It started out for us both in the first glimpse we had of one another, in the witness in all the inconsiderable elements of line and colour which go to make up a woman's appearance, of growth and amplitude in me and fulfilment in hers. Pauline had been in her girlhood, if not pretty, at least what is known as an attractive girl, and though there was only a matter of months between us, it came to me with a shock that she was now, not only not particularly attractive, but middle-aged. It was not so much in the fulness under her chin which apparently caused her no uneasiness, nor in the thickness of her waist, of which I was sure she made a virtue, but in the certainty that all that was ever to happen to her in the way of illuminating and self-forgetting passion, had already happened.
She had reached, she must have reached about the time I was taking my flight upward by the help of Morris Polatkin, the full level of her capacity to experience. She was living still, as I saw by the card which I still held in my hand, in Evanston, and she was living there because it was no longer within the scope of her possibility to live anywhere else. All this flashed through me in the moment in which Pauline, checked by what she was able to guess of unfamiliar elements in me, was crossing the room and taking me by the hands in the old womanly way, keyed down to the certainty of not requiring it in her business any more. It was so patent that Pauline was now in the position of having done her duty toward life and Henry Mills, and was accepting all that came to her from it as her due, that it almost seemed for a moment that she had said something of the kind. What did pass between us besides a kiss of greeting, were some commonplaces about my being there and how pleased Henry and the children would be to see me. We sat down on a sofa together and for a moment the old girlish confidence put forth a tender sprig of renewal.
"So many years since we were at school together! You've gone a long way since then, Olivia."
"A long way," I admitted, but she didn't catch the double meaning the phrase had for me.
"Henry and I were talking about it this morning. And the times you had here in Chicago, you poor dear; you had to make a good many starts before you got on the right road at last."
"A great many."