“You haven’t had dinner?”
“No, but I don’t think I’ll go out——”
“I’ve been waiting, Pidge. There’s a little place near, where I used to come from uptown, thinking it an excursion—just a neighbor of ours now, The Hob and Hook, where they make a stew like Dickens tells of in the old English inns—smoking in the pot for twenty-four hours; and there’s tea for tired folks, and no end of scones and honey——”
“Oh, please——” said Pidge. Then she added stubbornly, “No, I’m not going out again to-night.”
“It is a trifle wintry,” Dicky observed. “We’ll have supper here. I’ll go out and get an armful, and Nagar will make us a pot of tea. Oh, I say, Pidge, have a little thought of somebody else.”
She weakened. Alone upstairs a minute afterward, she lit the gas and stood before the mirror that waved.
“If I turned loose just once and ate all I wanted, he’d never speak to me again!”
VII
“THE FREEDOM OF IGNORANCE”
PIDGE was gone from Harrow Street from seven in the morning to seven at night. She had been absolutely blurred with fatigue at the end of the first days, but her hands were hardening, her back adjusting to the monotonous work at the big pasting table. She was actually learning like the other girls the trick of sinking into a sort of coma for an hour or more at a time. Sometimes (as one under the influence of a prying drug, which opens scenes, as from a past life) she would remember the palisades of Santa Monica, the ocean pressing its white fringes up against the gray sand; tirelessly pressing again and again, but never leaving its white lines of foam, unless the water was sick from the big sewer of El Segundo. Rarely a sail on that great sunny bay, but many wings—pelicans, sandpipers, gulls in hundreds, feeding out beyond the surf lines, or gathered in conference on the beaten sand—three strange and ancient bird types, gathered together in one vast audience facing the sea.
This was but one of her pictures. Other times she roamed the canyons, Santa Monica and Topango, and the cheerful and solitary mesas.... “Yes, that same creature—Pan Musser,” she once said, half aloud.... Then she would think of New York and Miss Claes and Richard Cobden; of the book she had actually written, and pretty nearly died for, the book around which there was a conspiracy of silence. In spite of the coma at the pasting table, and the moments of memory drift, the stimulated laughter in the washroom, or in the half hour for lunch as they heated their tea pails over the radiators at noon; in spite of the clatter of tins passing from left to right around the big table, and the tireless goading of Fanny Gallup’s cheerful boy-talk—the brown wool dress contained plentiful hells of the human heart.... And to-morrow would be Thursday, the next day Friday, the next day Saturday, and then sleep, and this was also New York.