To Jim's they went; and it seemed to him whimsically watchful eyes that she had an occasional moment of being her old girlish self as they strolled through the wandering streets of Greenwich Village and stepped down into the basement oyster and chop house that had made its name a full generation before Socialism was more than a foreign-sounding word and two generations before cubism, futurism, vorticism, imagism, Nietzsche, the I. W. W., Feminism and the Russians had swept in among the old houses and tenements to engage in the verbal battle royal that has since converted the quaint old quarter from a haunt of rather gently artistic bohemianism into a shambles of dead and dismembered and bleeding theories. Jim's alone had not changed. Even the old waiter who so far as any one knew had always been there, shuffled through the sprinkling of sawdust on the floor; and the familiar fat grandson of the original Jim was still to be seen standing by the open grill that was set in the wall at the rear end of the oyster bar.
The Worm suggested thick mutton chops and the hugely delectable baked potatoes without which Jim's would not have been Jim's. Sue smiled rather wanly and assented. Her air of depression disturbed him; his own buoyancy sagged; he found it necessary now and then to manufacture talk. This was so foreign to the quality of their friendship that he finally laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table and considered her.
“Sue,” he remarked, “it's getting to you, isn't it—the old Village.”
She tried to smile, and looked off toward the glowing grill.
“Why don't you come around and have a look at the rooms? I haven't changed them. Only your pictures are gone. Even your books are on the mantel where you used to keep them. It might hook things up for us, so we could get to feeling and talking like ourselves. What do you say—could you stand it?”
She tried to look at him, tried to be her old frank self; but without marked success. The tears were close. She had to compress her lips and study the table-cloth for a long moment before she could speak.
“I couldn't, Henry.” Then with an impulse that was more like the Sue that he knew, she reached out and rested her hand on his arm. “Try not to mind me, Henry. I can't help it—whatever it is. I don't seem to have much fight left in me. It's plain enough that I shouldn't have tried to come in. It was just a crazy reaction, anyway. You caught me when I had been hurt. I was all mixed....”
She was excluding him from her little world now; and this was least like her of all the things she had been saying and doing. But if the Worm was hurt he did not show it. He merely said:
“Sue, of course, you've been going through a nervous crisis, and it has taken a lot out of you.”
“A lot, Henry,” she murmured.