When she came from the dressing-room to find him, careless, good-humored, handsome, tugging his tie into its knot before the mirror, she knew that nothing mattered except that she loved him and that she must hold his love for her. She came close to him, longing for a reassurance that she would not ask. Unless he gave it to her, left her with it to hold in her heart, she would be tortured by miserable doubts and flickering jealousies until he came back. She would be tied to the telephone, waiting for a call from him, trying to follow in her imagination the intricate business affairs from which she was shut out, telling herself that it was business and nothing else that kept him from her.
"Well, bye-bye," he said, putting on his hat.
"Good-by." Her voice was like a detaining hand. "You—you won't be gone long?"
He relented.
"I'm going down to see Clark & Hayward. I'm going to put through a deal with them that'll put us on velvet," he declared.
"Clark & Hayward? They're the real-estate people?"
"You're some little guesser. They certainly are. We're going to be millionaires when I get through with them! Farewell!"
The very door seemed to click triumphantly behind him, and she heard him whistling while he waited for the elevator. When he appeared on the sidewalk below, she was leaning from the window, and she would have waved to him if he had looked up. Her occupation for the day vanished when he swung into a street-car and was carried out of sight.
She picked up the pragmatism book again and read a few paragraphs, put it down restlessly. The untidy bedroom nagged at her nerves, but Bert was paying for hotel service, and once when she had made the bed he had told her impatiently that there was no sense in letting the very servants know she was not used to living decently.
She would go for a walk. There might be something new to see in the shop windows. She would take the book with her and read it in the dairy lunch-room where she ate when alone. It seemed criminal to her to spend money unnecessarily when they owed so much, and she could not help trying to save it, though all her efforts seemed to make no difference.