“Listen, Jo. They’ve offered me the job of first assistant resident worker. And I’m going to take it. Take it! I know fifty other girls who’d give their ears for it. I go in next month.”
They were at dinner. Jo looked up from his plate, dully. Then he glanced around the little dining-room, with its ugly tan walls and its heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted cumbersomely into the five-room flat).
“Away? Away from here, you mean—to live?”
Carrie laid down her fork. “Well, really, Jo! After all that explanation.”
“But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood’s full of dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all. I can’t let you do that, Carrie.”
Carrie’s chin came up. She laughed a short little laugh. “Let me! That’s eighteenth-century talk, Jo. My life’s my own to live. I’m going.”
And she went.
Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then he sold what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayed splendor was being put to such purpose.
Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. And he found he didn’t even think of marrying. He didn’t want to come or go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck. Much has been written about the unwed, middle-aged woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of mind and body. In the male that same fussiness develops, and a certain primness, too. But he grows flabby where she grows lean.
Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva’s, and on Sunday noon at Stell’s. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the homemade soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried to talk business with Eva’s husband, or Stell’s. His business talks were the old-fashioned kind, beginning: