"Yes." She thanked him with her eyes. "Good-by."
She was oppressed by a sense of futility, of the hopeless muddle of living, while the train carried her down the peninsula toward San José. To escape from it she concentrated her attention on the afternoon papers.
They were filled with wild rumors, with names of strange towns in Belgium, a mass of clamoring bulletins, confusing, yet somehow making clear a picture of gray hordes moving, irresistible as a monstrous machine, toward France, toward Paris. She was surprised by her passion of resistance. Intolerable, that the Germans should march into Paris! Why should she care so fiercely, she who knew nothing of Paris, nothing but chance scraps of facts about Europe?
"I must learn French," she said to herself, and was appalled by the multitude of things she did not know, both without and within herself.
The unsigned contracts in their long manila envelope were like an anchor in a tossing sea. She must get them signed that night. It was something to do, a definite action. She telephoned from the station, making an appointment with the buyer, and felt the familiar routine closing around her again while the street-car carried her down First Street to her office.
Bert was sitting in her chair, smoking and talking enthusiastically to Hutchinson, when she opened the door. The shock petrified them all. The two men stared at her, Hutchinson's expression of easy good humor frozen on his face; Bert's hand, extended in the old, flashing gesture, suspended in the air. The door closed behind her.
Later she remembered Hutchinson's blood-red face, his awkward, even comical, efforts to stammer that he hadn't expected her, that he must be going, his blind search for his hat, his confused departure. At the moment she seemed to be advancing to meet Bert in an otherwise empty room, and though she felt herself trembling from head to foot her hands and her voice were quite steady.
"How do you do?" she said, beginning to unbutton her gloves:
Though she had not been able to remember his face, it was as familiar as if she had seen it every day; the low white forehead with the lock of fair hair across it, the bright eyes, the aquiline nose, the rather shapeless mouth—No, she had not remembered that his mouth was like that. Her experienced eye saw self-indulgence and dissipation in the soft flesh of his cheeks, the faint puffiness of the eyelids. Her trembling was increasing, but it did not affect her. She was quite cool and controlled.
She heard unmoved his cajoling, confident expostulation. That was a nice way to meet a man when he'd come—she brushed aside his embracing arm with a movement of her shoulder. "We'd better sit down. Pardon me." She took the chair he had left, her own chair, from which she had handled so many land-buyers.