“Here’s luck!” he exclaimed spitefully as he got back into the car. “Just about enough gas to pull us to that garage half a mile ahead. I guess somebody’s pinned a jinx on the evening!”
“I’ll wait outside,” she said when the car had been coaxed to the garage.
“Only a minute, Grace. I’m awfully sorry.”
As she stood on the cement driveway the whistle followed by a flash of the headlight of an incoming interurban car on the track that ran parallel with the highway caught her attention. Across the road several people were waiting on the platform and she resolved to board the car if it stopped before Cummings reappeared. She was in a humor to annoy him if she could and as the car slowed down she began to walk slowly toward the platform and then with a glance over her shoulder ran and swung herself aboard. As the car got under way she caught a glimpse of the roadster as Cummings backed it out. She derived no small degree of satisfaction from the reflection that her departure in this fashion expressed her scorn of him more effectually than anything she could have said.
She left the car at the interurban station and walked home. Her knowledge of life was broadening and that too in divisions of the Great Curriculum of whose very existence she had had only the haziest consciousness. Her freedom, the independence she so greatly prized, was not without its perils. Her thoughts took a high range; she wondered whether after all the individual could, without incurring serious hazards, ignore the warnings and safeguards established for the protection of society.
She wanted to laugh over the encounter at McGovern’s, but in the quiet street it was not so easy to laugh at it. What society had done to educate her, to fortify and strengthen her for the battle of life—a phrase she detested from her mother’s frequent use of it—counted for naught. She was alarmed to find that she never really reached any conclusion in attempting to settle her problems. When she thought she had determined any of the matters that rose with so malevolent an insistence for decision some unexpected turn left her still beset by uncertainties.
Two policemen standing on a corner stopped talking as she passed and she felt their eyes following her. They symbolized the power of the law; they were agents of society, they were representatives of the order of things against which she had been trying to persuade herself she was in rebellion. She now seriously questioned the desirability of being a rebel; such a status had its disagreeable and uncomfortable side.
When she reached her room she sat down thinking she would write her usual daily letter to Trenton; but with paper before her and a pen in her hand she was unable to bring herself to it. The disturbance at McGovern’s had shaken her more than she liked to believe.
In her cogitations, as she lay in the dark unable to sleep, she wondered whether the incident at McGovern’s might not be a warning, which she would do well to heed, to discourage Trenton’s further attentions. Trenton might in a similar circumstances behave no better than Bob had behaved and she was not anxious to subject herself to the ire of another indignant wife.