"The only thing I want," he said, his arms around her, "the only thing I want in the world is just to take you home and take care of you."
She kissed him, a hushed solemnity in her heart. He was so good, so fine and strong. With all her soul she longed to be worthy of him, to make him happy, to be able to build with him a serene and beautiful life.
The days went by with surprising slowness. In the mornings, waking with the first twittering of the birds in the vines over the sleeping porch, she started upright, to relax again on the pillows and stretch luxuriously between the cool sheets, with delicious realization that the whole, long day was hers. But her body, filled with energy, rebelled at inaction. She rose, busying her mind with small plans while she dressed and breakfasted. At ten o'clock she could think of nothing more to do to the house or the garden, and still time stretched before her, prolonged indefinitely, empty.
The house, lamentably failing as an occupation, became a prison. She escaped from it to the streets. She shopped leisurely, comparing colors and fabrics and prices, seeking the bargains she had been obliged to forego while she was working. An afternoon spent in this way might save her a dollar, and her business sense grinned at her sardonically. She might meet an acquaintance, a woman who lived near her, and over ices elaborately disguised with syrups and nuts they could talk of the movies, the weather, the stupidities of servants. Time had become an adversary to be destroyed as pleasantly as possible. In the long, lazy afternoons she sat on a neighboring porch, listening to talk about details, magnified, distorted, handled over and over again, and while her fingers were busy at an embroidery hoop, stitching bits of thread back and forth through bits of cloth, her mind yawned with boredom.
At night, letting down her hair, she looked back at a day gone from her life, a day spent in sweeping and dusting and making pleasant a house that must be swept and dusted and made pleasant on the morrow, a day that had accomplished several inches of scalloping on a table-cloth, and she was overwhelmed with a sense of futility. "After all, I've rather enjoyed it," she said. "To enjoy a day—what more can one do with it?" The argument rang hollow in her mind, answered only by an uneasy silence.
If she were with Paul the days would mean more, she told herself. But it seemed best to remain in San José until the first legal formalities were done. The case, her lawyer told her, would come on the court calendar in four or five weeks. She would have no difficulty in getting a decree. "But can't you charge something to make it more impressive? No violence? He never hit you or threw anything at you?" The lawyer's eyes filled with a certain eagerness. Wincing, she told him with cold fury that she would charge nothing but desertion. No, she wanted no alimony. When, disappointed, he had jotted these details on a pad and tried with professional jocularity to make her smile, she escaped, shrinking with loathing.
Something like this she must endure again, upon a witness-stand in open court. Better to face it alone, to finish it and push it behind her into the past before she went to Ripley to meet the shrewd interest of Mrs. Masters and the warmth of Paul's sympathy. Meantime her life seemed motionless as a treadmill is motionless, and a vague irritation nagged at her nerves.
She began to frequent the public library. In a locked room, to which the librarian gave her the key after an embarrassed scrutiny, she found on forbidden shelves a history of marriage, and curled among the cushions on her window-seat, she spent an afternoon absorbed in tracing that institution from the first faint appreciation of the property value of women into the labyrinth of custom and morality to which it led. She became interested in marriage laws, and discovered with amazement the contracts so blithely entered upon by men and women who would not so unquestioningly subscribe to any other legal agreement. When she wearied of this subject, she turned to others and, with an interest sharpened by the European news, she devoured history and floundered beyond her depths in economics. She bought a French dictionary and grammar and, finding them but palely alluring in themselves, she boldly attacked La Livre de Mon Ami, digging the meaning from its charming pages eagerly as a miner washing gold. But the nights found her still haunted by a restlessness as miserable and vague as that of unused muscles. "I wish I were doing something!" she cried.