CHAPTER ONE

One Sunday of the following March Grace set out to walk from her house to Letty's. She had been waiting now for three months since the event which even Grace had never fully dared to expect and which had caused her incredulous friends to exclaim as with one gasp, "What a marvelous break!" Blake's wife was dead.

But still Grace waited. Even in her work she felt becalmed. Her job had chosen this time to vanish; her book had sunk almost without a ripple, and she could not, as ordinarily, generate within herself sufficient power to counteract these circumstances. The best she had been able to do was to maintain the noise of activity, to keep the engine whirring on the same spot. She went about indefatigably as usual; the difference was not yet visible to the naked eye. She gave no hostages to failure; she wrote; she got odd jobs of publicity; whatever she economized on, she was careful not to economize on her appearance. Meanwhile, the circle of her friends stood about, cocking ears and eyes inquiringly and impatiently for the climax. They had been present a long time at this affair and did not hesitate to let her know that they would feel cheated unless it came to a fitting close. Renie Harrington suggested, when she had Grace up to dinner to observe with her own blue, ingratiating, cutting eyes, that "it would be so convenient to be able to put them at last into one bedroom on week-end visits." There were bets laid as to whether or not a marriage would occur.

Grace was taciturn. Drawing herself up with that retreat of her chin and advance of her eyes which had the effect of holding the other person at the end of a very long arm, she said with dignity, "I--don't know--what--our plans--will be."

Only Letty knew. As in the very old days when Grace had rushed up to the one-room-and-alcove harbor on Riverside Drive to spill tears on Letty's glossy spreads, and had cramped herself into the living-room couch of nights to cry in peace at Letty's house, so the road led back again to Letty.

Grace marched along briskly, decisively, but her cheeks were hollow, the skin drawn tense and translucent over them, while her eyes, twice as huge, the narrow coat from Paris patterned all over in orange wools and brown wools and held tight across her flat body, the gleam of queer, fragile stones set in spidery silver at her throat--all these conspired to resolve her into a new aspect, to give her a jeweled, plumaged, bird-of-preyish look.

On Sundays, the maid's day off, Harold and Letty spent the morning providing their baby with fresh air in Central Park. Grace knew where to look for them, just past an entrance by a little summer house. Harold was reading the Sunday papers within, while Letty walked slowly without, keeping pace with her little girl. She was about two years old, dressed in a short green wool coat and bonnet, and she shoved herself around in a tiny pen on wheels. Grace looked her over indulgently, admired her with preoccupation. Then the two girls sat down on a bench, while the child jerked herself back and forth by their knees.

For a long time Letty listened, nodding now and then. Too many confidences were deposited with her; she was a strongbox to her friends. And these confidences were all so simple really. They all boiled down to the fact that the man one wants is always the most difficult man to get, and that was no news to Letty.

"It's not that I'm not--sure of Blake in a way," concluded Grace. "But he's so--evasive. He _won't_ see."

Letty nodded briefly. "I know."

"Well, I'll tell you what I can do," she said at length in a matter-of-fact tone. "If you like I'll make a date with him and talk to him like a Dutch uncle. I'll tell him that he's causing you a lot of unnecessary trouble and worry and embarrassing you before your friends and that it really is about time he realized it. I think that should work. Blake likes me."

"Yes, he does," agreed Grace. Some such plan had been in her mind. She gave a long sigh of relief but added almost at once, "Don't be too--don't rub it in, Let. Be a little careful. You know--you can't--bludgeon Blake."

"Oh, of course," said Letty, shrugging. "I'll be tactful. Little Mrs. Tactful Fix-It, that's me."

The two girls looked into each other's faces. Letty's eyes wavered before the intent appeal, the clutching hope, in the countenance of Grace. She stared at the asphalt path, dejected, somewhat petulant before the present necessity and the final futility of her errand. Why did Grace have to clutch so? And she could no more feel why than one with full control of his muscles can feel why a person in a nervous spasm is powerless to unclose his fingers. She had to stop and search for reasons in her mind and from them argue herself into sympathy. She had to remember that to share a home with Harold and only Harold, to have him and him alone there in the morning and there at night, had once seemed to her the most blissful of all eventualities. Consciously there was no accounting for this sentiment now; the veiling, aching glamour effused from, old times, old feelings, rose ever and ever more wanly on the horizon and ever and ever more imperceptibly faded like receding smoke. But far be it from Letty to counsel anyone against even the slight sustenance of distant smoke! She said in a lower voice, "I suppose I might as well make the date right away--can't Monday; got a date with li'l Leroy--Tuesday maybe--and talk to him and get it settled."

Grace and Blake were married a week later. Blake had always liked and trusted Letty. Once she had set before him, with a directness that--as she was not involved--could be at once persuasive and unexacting, what Grace's feelings were and what his inaction seemed to mean to outsiders, he had understood. He was surprised. He supposed he had always intended to marry Grace, that she was aware of his intentions, and that therefore the need for action nullified itself. Some day he supposed they would find themselves standing before a justice of the peace who probably would fall from heaven before them at the propitious moment. He was rather resentful to be confronted with the reality of arrangements while he was in the midst of a mild, unmarried peace, while they were both free, he thought. Still, if delay made Grace miserable, he agreed with Letty that they might as well get it over with. He only stipulated that, lest his haste should seem indecent or suspicious to his parents, the nuptials should be secret until he had had a chance to "plant the idea" in their minds. Grace thoroughly comprehended such a plan. As for his state of mind, it no longer hurt her though it would always make her sigh. After so many years, she had still to scheme in order to convey to him subtly, so as not to frighten or antagonize him, what to her were the plainest phases of human relations. So it was. And so, no doubt, it would always be.

The morning of the wedding was dank and gray. Grace awoke earlier than usual, dressed in a sticky half-light, and tramped through the living room to bang the coffee pot on the gas stove. A good deal of methodical noise always followed her risings and Anita, shaken out of sleep by the hangings and tramplings, stared at her resentfully from the daybed. Since the loss of her job Grace had developed a systematic mania for avoiding the purchase of meals. She collected lunch dates and she collected dinner dates and she had taken to fixing her own breakfasts. Anita could only admire the resourceful way in which she circumvented ill fortune, but in the mornings it was quite a nuisance.

The coffee boiled; Grace shut the bedroom door and spoke through the telephone, very low. By prearrangement, she was calling up her mother, who had exacted a promise to be at least told of the marriage. Grace said over the phone, "Ma? How--_are_ you? ... Well, I'm calling according to schedule.... Yes. To-day." She gulped her coffee over the sink in the kitchenette. Although she went back and forth from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, crossing the living room every few minutes, she avoided Anita, who lay with eyes half shut and the bedclothes pulled tight and warm about her. The latter was accustomed to Grace's intervals of self-sufficient hauteur. They meant that things were entirely satisfactory with Grace at the moment and she had no need of encouragement. Anita would ask no questions.

There were three rings of the bell and Anita heard Grace trample through the bedroom, down the short hall, and the sound of a brass key in a brass lock.

Letty was waiting downstairs in the chill, early-morning grimness that overlaid the street. People passed, silent, preoccupied, bent on work and nothing else. From the Fifth Avenue corner came gigantic hammer blows, hard, spiteful, even, one, then an--other--then an--other ... then the long, raucous shriek, the bellow tearing raw flesh from raw flesh, of a riveting machine. Grace was aware for the first time that the old houses near Fifth Avenue, guarded by plaster statues of lions and angels, by moldy lawns and rusted iron gates--the house where Diana Reece had once had a studio, where Grace had gone to draw fresh, sheer stockings over her white legs on the way to new, exciting dates with new, exciting men in the days of Harry Strauss; where she had borrowed Dee's key and met Blake in the days when he used to return to Brooklyn for dinner; where Anita had once lived as a ghost--those houses had vanished and the steely ribs of a skyscraper were being riveted together in their stead. They must have been demolished some time ago but Grace had never noticed.

"Look, those old houses are gone!" she exclaimed to Letty.

They paused and peered up and down the street. Two new structures had been built across the way, where there had once stood a modest red and white brick hotel and some rooming houses. They were of sandstone, beetling as far as possible over the sidewalk, projecting as high as possible into the sky. They were tipped with gold and the long strips of windows straight up and down, divided by strips of sandstone straight up and down, glinted iridescently. The old brownstone fronts and the old red-brick fronts and the small, white, rebuilt houses seemed compressed to suffocation between skyscrapers at the head and impending skyscrapers at the foot.

"The street's changing so," said Grace rather wistfully.

They turned the Sixth Avenue corner, continued past the El station and so down to Blake's house. Grace rang three times. This street was still serene with glossy shops composed behind their shut doors and their smooth displays, with a limousine dozing before the tall, white apartment building across the way and next to it a sedate little gray dwelling sleeping with shuttered windows behind a No Parking sign. All the speakeasies in all the basements of all the sere-looking brownstone houses were closed at this hour.

Blake came down rather pale and cold, a little hoarse, blinking. He never rose so early. They caught a taxi to the Tube station at Herald Square. Letty giggled. "We're off at the post," she said.

The train to Newark was not as deserted as they had expected and a headachy light oozed through it. What weird people to ride to Newark at such an hour--old women with newspaper bundles that somehow hinted to the senses of pickles, men in overalls with pitted noses. What _for?_ "They can't all be going to get married," said Letty wonderingly.

Grace knew a lawyer, an old admirer, who had an office and political influence in Newark. She had arranged with him to prepare a secret way for them. They taxied around a gray-green park into a region of tall, sooty granite. Grace's friend was waiting in his office and his car was parked on a side street. They walked to it, Grace with the lawyer and Letty with Blake. Recovering from the blight of the chilly morning, Letty hugged Blake's arm. "He mustn't get away," she called back to Grace.

"By the way, have you got a ring?" said the lawyer suddenly.

Blake had never thought of it. They halted on the sidewalk and laughed and laughed.

"You could use mine," said Letty. "It married me good and fast."

But Grace's friend stopped at a jeweler's and insisted on buying one for her. A thin circlet of white gold. "It's a wedding present," he declared with a smirk.

Blake was still sleepy. Grace was nervous and curious.

The judge into whose chambers they were ushered mistook Letty for the bride. When his error was pointed out he turned but languidly to Grace, appearing to feel that she would do as well. He asked each whether they had been divorced. It seemed that he had a prejudice against marrying divorced people. He was so sure there would be a divorce somewhere--"He smells a divorce," Grace murmured to Letty--so sure that he would not have to bother after all, that he hardly looked up at them before this question.

There was an element of triumph in replying that Blake was a widower. Even the judge raised an eyebrow and devoted one whole glance of interest to Blake alone. "I thought he was going to say, 'Well, aren't you the lucky guy!'" giggled Letty afterward. In five minutes the ring had been slipped on Grace's finger. The judge noticed at last that she was good-looking and he kissed her.

"Ugh! One of those nasty, wet kisses," said Grace to Letty, scrubbing her mouth with a handkerchief the minute the door closed behind them.

The lawyer thought they ought to have a breakfast, but Letty had had hers and Grace wasn't hungry and Blake professed to distrust New Jersey coffee. The lawyer shook hands with them. He stood on a street corner, hesitating between sentiment and skepticism, and finally discarded the former as likely to amuse such sophisticated people. He wished them luck with a wink and left them.

"Well, you're married now," said Letty to Blake.

"I know. I've been married before," retorted Blake.

Grace and Blake were both disposed to be glum on the ride back. Even Letty was pensive. Though they joked and Grace sniggered and Letty giggled from time to time, the vows that had been uttered struck them all with a sense of disappointment. Beside the glamorous shadow of the unwritten, unspoken, yet irresistible promises that those two had been conscious of so long at every meeting, the vows, articulated at last, became disconcertingly meager and pallid, as a cherished thought, a lovely symbol in the mind, forms itself into but a sentence of the usual words, the common and oft-repeated figures of expression, when put down on paper.

Blake left them, after kissing Grace lightly, to finish his morning's sleep which the wedding had interrupted. Letty hailed a taxi, squeezed Grace's hand, and left to finish her morning's duties which the wedding had interrupted. And Grace, that having been attended to, set out in earnest to find herself a new job.

As the marriage was such a very secret one, Anita did not learn of it for several days.