“What has happened?” he asked her gently, and taking her arm he led her out of the sharp bustle on the bridge into a side street and then to the entrance of the Boboli gardens. The great cypresses threw an inviting shade, towards which they walked. Jennings waited for her explanation.
“It has come, at last,” she stammered awkwardly. “I am free now.”
Jennings did not seem to understand her full meaning.
“But you have been ‘free’ for nearly a year. Have you at last found peace in that potent word?”
“No,” she replied impatiently. “I did not mean that. Walter brought me the news that—since the fifteenth—I have not been Mrs. Wilbur. I am legally free—to make a mess of it.”
“Well?” He implied that this news was not unexpected, or of sufficient importance to explain her tremor.
“It is dreadful,” she murmured incoherently. “What am I to do?”
“It hasn’t succeeded, has it?” His blunt words were spoken softly. “There isn’t any real difference between these people, Erard’s Art Endeavour Circle and Protestants in general, and the good people of Chicago. They aren’t a great deal more interesting, Salters and Vivian and the southern poet and the Jew critic and the chorus of aspirants, than the Chicago lot with their simpler ambitions and manners and cruder expression. On the whole they aren’t so good; they are nearer dead: the others have a race to run, and these have only their graves to dig. And if I were going merely to rot,” his voice trembled, “I should rather rot with the Philistines and be a good human animal than—”
“Well, there are others,” she protested. “You mention only the small fry, like me.”
Jennings looked at her abstractedly. He was answering his own heart rather than considering her.