He bathed a third time. He was below watching the street both ways. Crowds were passing, by this time—on the way to work. Elbert’s feelings were torturingly divided. Sometimes he pitied all these people going to work; sometimes he envied their calm matter-of-fact seizure of life. As for himself, he seemed dangling in space, having lost his clutch entirely.
The crowd jostled him back against the entrance. It must be a half hour. Could there have been a mistake? His eye verified the fact that it was the Santa Clara hotel he was standing against. Many faces coming from the right, as many more from the left. He would hold his eyes one way, until he felt she must be standing at his back. Yet it was from neither right nor left that her call came—from the throng of cars in the street, a roadster pressing in toward the curb. She was alone. She had opened the door. Like that day in the flowered room, he had been listening and watching toward the hall and she had come from the porch.
‘I gave you a ring at the Finishing School,’ he said, as if he had been waiting months to say just that.
‘I finished last June, but stayed on part-time for other work there.’
‘Post-graduate work?’
‘I’ve been learning to ride a horse. I thought you might come there first.’
Any one could see she had driven a car for a long time—queer ease of her own, no thought. She straightened her dress and thrust her wrap back from her shoulders, as if ready for all day. The small boot poured gas with mathematical accuracy and steadiness.
They were out of heavy traffic now; passing through an end of town increasingly familiar to Elbert.
‘Everything has seemed tangled and lonesome during this last week,’ she was saying. ‘But before that, it all grew clearer and clearer.’
‘How do you mean?’