“But to leave her like that, Sophy. I should think she’d die.”
“Effen the good Lord let women die w’en men ’ceived them,” Sophy proclaimed with a chuckle, “dere wouldn’ be a female lef’ w’en the trump sounded.” Her tray was piled high with dishes, as she stood in the dining-room door. “Does you-all want rice puddin’ fo’ dinnah, Miss Janey?”
And there the subject dropped. But Jane thought a great deal about it as she went on with her work.
She told her sister, Julia, about it when, late that afternoon, she wrote her weekly letter.
“The worst of it must have been to lose her faith in things. I’d rather be Jane Barnes without any love affair than Edith Towne with a love affair like that. Baldy told me the other day that I am not unattractive! Can’t you see him saying it? And he doesn’t think me pretty. Perhaps I’m not. But there are moments, Judy, when I like myself——!
“Baldy nearly had a fit when I bobbed my hair. But I did it and took the consequences, and it’s no end comfortable. Baldy at the present moment is mid-Victorian. It is his reaction from the war. He says he is dead sick of flappers. That they are all alike—and make no appeal to the imagination! He came home the other night from a dance and read Tennyson—can you fancy that after the way he used to fling Amy Lowell at us and Carl Sandburg? He says he is so tired of short skirts and knees and proposals and cigarettes that he is going to hunt with a gun, if he ever decides to marry, for an Elaine or a Griselda! But the worst of it is, he takes it out on me! I wish you’d see the way he censors my clothes and my manners, and I sit here like a prisoner in a tower with not a man in sight but Evans Follette, and he is just a heartache, Judy.
“Baldy has had three proposals; he said that the first was stimulating, but repetition ‘staled the interest’! Of course he didn’t tell me the names of the girls. Baldy’s not a cad.
“But he is discouraged and desperately depressed. He has such a big talent, Judy, and he just slaves away at that old office. He says that after those years in France, it seems like a cage. I sometimes wonder what civilization is, anyhow, that we clip the wings of our young eagles. We take our boys and shut them up, and they pant for freedom. Is that all that life is going to mean for Baldy—eight hours a day—behind bars?
“Yet I am trying to keep him at it until the house is paid for. I don’t know whether I am right—but it’s all we have—and both of us love it. He hasn’t been able lately to work much at night, he’s dead tired. But there’s a prize offer of a magazine cover design, and I want him to compete. He says there isn’t any use of his trying to do anything unless he can give all of his time to it.
“Of course you’ve heard all this before, but I hear it every day. And I like to talk things out. I must not write another line, dearest. And don’t worry, Baldy will work like mad if the mood strikes him.
“Did I tell you that Evans Follette and his mother are to dine with us on Thanksgiving Day? We ought to have six guests to make things go. But nobody will fit in with the Follettes. You know why, so I needn’t explain.
“Kiss both of the babies for me. Failing other young things, I am going to have a Christmas tree for the kitten. It’s a gay life, darling.
“Ever your own,
“Jane.”
The darkness had come by the time she had finished her letter. She changed her frock for a thinner one, wrapped herself in an old cape of orange-hued cloth, and went out to lock up her chickens. She had fed them before she wrote her letter, but she always took this last look to be sure they were safe.
She passed through the still kitchen, where old Sophy sat by the warm, bright range. There were potatoes baking, and Sophy’s famous pudding. “How good everything smells,” said Jane.
She smiled at Sophy and went on. The wind was blowing and the sky was clear. There had been no snow, but there were little pools of ice about, and Jane took each one with a slide. She felt a tingling sense of youth and excitation. Back of the garage was a shadowy grove of tall pines which sang and sighed as the wind swept them. There was a young moon above the pines. It seemed to Jane that her soul was lifted to it. She flung up her arms to the moon, and the yellow cape billowed about her.
The shed where the chickens were kept was back of the garage. When Jane opened the door, her old Persian cat, Merrymaid, came out to her, and a puff-ball of a kitten. Jane snapped on the lights in the chicken-house and the biddies stirred. When she snapped them off again, she heard them settle back to sheltered slumber.
The kitten danced ahead of her, and the old cat danced too, as the wind whirled her great tail about. “We won’t go in the house—we won’t go in the house,” said Jane, in a sort of conversational chant, as the pussies followed her down a path which led through the pines. She often walked at this hour—and she loved it best on nights like this.