CHAPTER THREE

When Anita returned to New York winter was in full possession--a wet winter, a sickly winter, chilling the blood into sluggish mounds, turning a gray snow into slush and mud among the morass of cobblestones by the station. She had come to New York an energetic novice, had left it as a cool, experienced resident. She returned a stranger. New York did not recognize her, and in the midst of its docks and cobblestones, its trucks and wagons splashing mud to either side, foggy, gray with the drizzle, on the way to its markets, she was lost, very small, uncertain. A porter, noticing her in her brown coat by the cheap valise, indicated the Travelers' Aid Society. This made her laugh, though it hurt too. She felt like a person who had been cut dead by an old friend. And though she had resolved not to trouble Grace till she was settled, she went eagerly to a telephone booth and asked to see her at once.

On the way to the M.A.N. office she stopped by her old rooming house. A sign announced its sale; the wreckers had set their seals on its door and walls. With small-town faith, Anita had counted on this dreary house, the greetings of her landlady, on her old room or one just like it. Now there remained between her and complete disassociation only Grace.

She had to wait for Grace amid the heavy consequence of carpets, plush and oak. She was announced and ushered into the presence by a devious way through a great main office and short passages that made no attempt to keep the elegant promise of the reception room. Grace's desk in the Publicity Department was one of a number lost under pictures, papers, and telephones. Grace was typing and waved her hand. "Sit down a minute, Anita. I have to finish this."

She seemed to have taken on an impressive amount of assurance and a soft sheen, partly of grooming, partly of well-being, by which Anita, as she watched her, was more and more abashed. Her own shoes were sensible in rubbers, her gloves were not too fresh, and her hat bore traces of the drizzle. Grace, in a dark blue suit perfectly attuned to her like all her clothes, with the pale light of amber beads falling over the delicacy of her blouse, with her skin that appeared to have a richer glow over cheeks that had lost their hollows--this Grace was so aloof from her that no words and no attempted kindness could possibly reach across the space between them. Of course, Grace had to be polite for the sake of old times, old confidences--how old those times seemed suddenly!--but how could she have expected concern, the warmth of intimacy? She had better go, she thought. She was on the point of rising and going forthwith when Grace at last turned to her.

"Do you know what I'm doing?" she said. "I'm justifying my college education. I figured out a way to connect George Bernard Shaw's Superman with Babe Jean, the baseball player, who's under contract to us for one picture. They call him the Sultan of Swat. So I suggested--why not cable G.B.S. and ask if we might not advertise Babe Jean as the--Superman of Swat. Shaw is always good for loads of newspaper space. And luck was with us! To-day we got a cable from Shaw: 'Never heard of her. Whose Baby is Jean?' And Mr. Williams thinks we'll make every front page in the country."

At this moment Mr. Williams hurried out of the inner office and leaned over Grace with a marked gallantry. "Are you through, Grace? Would you let me have the stuff, then? I want to hold it over for the morning papers. I'll plant it myself. That was certainly one swell hunch of yours!"

He ran his eyes swiftly over the page and a half, came to a point that pleased him and nodded vigorously. "Yop. You made your sale fine!"

"I'll see that you get full credit for it," he assured her, and hastened away.

When the door of his private office had shut Grace said to Anita with a small, sly smile, "He likes me." She stretched in her chair, a gesture of voluptuous weariness after enjoyed and appreciated effort. "I'm having a grand time," she confided. "I've even stopped--worrying so much. Roy Williams is awfully nice to me. I'm supposed to do mostly woman's-page stuff for the press books, fashions, and feature stories, but he lets me try my hand at anything that comes up. It's lots of fun and so much easier than the Strauss job."

She had not yet asked about Anita. Now she looked her over, seeming abstracted, and remarked, "You look well. Have you decided what you'll do?" She rose as she said this, took her coat from the back of a chair, picked up a pale amber-colored hat and various possessions from the desk. "Come out with me. We can talk better outside." Anita followed unwillingly.

She went with Grace to buy a pair of stockings. On the way she was regaled with such bits of gossip as Grace felt she would surely wish to know. Letty was engrossed with Paul. Harold had gone into the lace business with a friend. He was also growing more docile.

"He's even got to the point where he'll make lunch dates with girls," announced Grace triumphantly. "And he no longer turns up his nose at me--so much."

"How's Blake?"

"Very well," said Grace in a cool voice. "You know, it's interesting," she added reflectively, as if repeating an explanation that had often been in her mind, "to watch the--er--balance--waver between us. At first--Blake was the chief person and I was a nobody. I cared for him more than he cared for me. But gradually I've been watching the balance sort of--even up. And now on this job I've been doing so well and making so many new friends, I can see--the balance swing slowly over to my side."

Anita listened without much interest and wondered how she could leave, and where to go when she left. They turned a corner.

Grace urged her: "Come up to Diana Reece's place. It's right here. She's away but she gave me the key. I want to see what you think of it. You know--I was thinking--Dee's place is only thirty-five a month. I'm starting a feature for the Enterprise Syndicate on Wives of Famous Men, and if I could only make enough out of it to pay the rent--I'd be ready to leave Ma. Dee's awfully sweet to me; she said if I took over the place she'd let me have her furniture. So you see--I'm almost set."

Yes, Anita saw, and the contrast between their conditions depressed her more than ever. Not for the first time, this talent of Grace's for ranging and consolidating trifles to form a stable background, a stable shelter, a stable footing seemed to her enviable. With Grace, one thing always led to another and more profitable thing.

Diana Reece's studio was a tiny front room in an old house off Fifth Avenue. This house, soon to suffer the fate of all old houses, stood far back from the street in a courtyard decorated with plaster statues that belonged to the shop next door. The statues of lions and angels were ghostlike in the gray mist; the house, black stairs after black stairs of which they climbed, smelled of mold and ancient woodwork, and Diana Reece's room was icy.

Grace turned on an electric heater and sat by it, drawing fresh, sheer stockings over her white feet. The room took on an air of graciousness from her movements, of comfort, of animation. The stockings, with their fragile smoothness of new silk, just reward for Grace's labors, struck Anita with the full force of her own idleness. She felt the darns on her own heels and toes. And she was even a little older than Grace. And here she sat, idle, with a cheap valise checked at a station, little money, and no home. She got up.

"I really have to go now. I ought to find a room to-day anyhow."

Grace contemplated her out of startled eyes that grew deeper, larger, softer. "Haven't you a room?" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you tell me? Do you mean to hunt for a room in this weather?"

"Well, I have to," said Anita miserably. "Unless I want to go to the Y.W. And I don't care for that."

After a long pause Grace started to plan in her deliberate accents. "You're so funny, Anita. I suppose you'll turn on me for suggesting this, but--you know you could stay here for a while. I wanted to tell you, but I thought... Anyhow, Dee never uses the place except to work. If you got out before ten and came back around five, I know she wouldn't mind your staying here. I sleep here myself now and then. It's--convenient. All I have to do is walk down Fifth Avenue to the office. This couch is very comfortable, and see, you have a heater, and it wouldn't cost you a cent."

"It's awfully decent of you," murmured Anita. "I don't know..."

"Oh, don't be proud! Just this once, don't be proud--please. It doesn't mean a thing to Dee. Keep your suitcase under the couch, and she won't even know you've been here!"

With relief, Anita yielded.

"Er--I saw Mr. Milford the other day," added Grace carefully. "He asked about you. You wouldn't want your old job back, would you?"

"No!"

"Well. I only asked. And you know--I'll look around for you, if you like."

"Not if it's a bother to you," said Anita. "It's ever so kind of you. I thank you and all that."

She was grateful, some of the burden slipped from her mind, and as a small, immediate token of gratitude, she now gave deep attention to Grace's talk.

"I have a lunch date with Tommy Manship," Grace was saying. "Did I tell you about him? He's on the dramatic staff of the _Times_. He's a cute lad and we are progressing by leaps and bounds, you might say."

"How's your baritone?"

"Oh! My baritone! I can't get rid of him. The latest development is--that he wants to marry me. I almost think I would, too, if he weren't so--Italian and so jealous. That's not so good. But I'd like to marry someone, then get divorced right away. Blake, as you can imagine, doesn't think much of the idea. But really, if you've once been married it's such--an advantage. An old wedding ring is a sort of--ad that you're no longer a virgin, and no one cares to check up on you further. If I had my life to live over again, as the saying goes, I'd marry at the earliest possible moment, at sixteen, when it's easy because you can fall for practically anybody, and be divorced, naturally, pretty soon, and then I'd have that behind me. I could always say I'd been married and I could do just as I pleased. That's the advice I'm going to hand on to my daughter, if I ever have one, which seems--unlikely."

Anita smiled. "What's the matter with this Tommy Manship person?"

"Oh. He's too smart. He guesses about Blake, I think. Not that I take any great pains to hide the fact. By the way, I have another man--too. He sells plate glass and reads poetry. Honest. I like him. But--he's married, separated from his wife. They're all married and separated," said Grace with a sigh. "The older you get, the more married and separated they are."

Anita began to laugh.

"Wait," said Grace darkly. "You'll see. Unless you can get interested in _children_. I can't. Walk over to the Algonquin with me."

In the lobby of the Algonquin, with its air of hush and velvet duskiness, the pale lights being lost among the somber shadows of deep armchairs, like candlelights in a cathedral, Grace resumed her former preoccupation. Drawing herself up in her sealskin coat that shone in the dimness, she seemed to set herself apart within an intangible circle of cool importance as she nodded here and there from a height and called remote hellos to girls whose coats likewise shone, to men who walked briskly here and there, nowhere, deigning to greet others of their kind. As her luncheon partner rose she turned to Anita in an attitude of dismissal.

"I'll think about a job for you. I'll let you--know," she said, her eyes fixed elsewhere.

And these words, trite and chilly congé to the job hunter, spattered from Grace's lips like so many hard, cold drops of rain, one by one, on Anita's new mood of hope, made her shrink and huddle into herself as she walked back along the foggy streets to her room.