Ellen waited through the morning for Jay. Of course she did her work for Mr. Rountree but, throughout it, she was waiting. Where was Jay? Noon passed; and his father offered no comment upon his absence.
She had determined, during the night, upon the attitude which, henceforth, she must maintain toward Jay in these days when he and she would be cast inte more frequent and intimate association than ever before. She must be close to him, and work with him impersonally. She imagined that she could assume an impersonal attitude toward him. She even had practiced it, repeating to herself words she would say to him. She wanted to start with him to-day, when she was thus prepared; and he did not appear.
He entered with his father, upon the next morning, and at sight of them together, she discerned that something unknown to her had happened. Mr. Rountree's manner with Jay was changed; it had been, always, critical or censorious; now it was less so. Jay was quieter and more considering.
He struck a sort of compromise between his father's plan for his employment and his own. He was assigned, definitely, to the sales force and to the direction of Mr. Lowry, but his immediate occupation was with the files in his father's and in Ellen's own little office, where he spent hour after hour, meeting her prepared impersonalness with one of his own not especially planned. Something had happened to him. What?
It was through the business, and the immediate instrumentality of Di, that days later Ellen learned.
Di was become serenely indolent about the room and, apparently, completely independent of outside demands upon her time; but she paid promptly her half of the weekly expenses, together with all arrears; also she had dispatched a hundred dollars in the form of a gift to her mother, as Ellen ascertained when Di flung her, carelessly, the letter of thanks.
Pansy had written a pæan of gratitude and praise to her daughter completely devoid of any anxiety as to the means of the abrupt improvement of Di's fortunes. The letter left Ellen with little to say or do about Di's scheme of life, which promised any real result.
"Well, it didn't last long," Di commented from her bed; and Ellen, with the letter in hand, said:
"The money?"
"Oh, that's gone," replied Di, carelessly, and laughed. "I meant Jay's marriage."
"What?"
"Haven't you heard?" asked Di, sitting up. "Don't you see him? His wife's gone home."
"Jay's wife? Where?"
"To mamma in Little Old."
"When?" cried Ellen.
"Gawd," said Di, "I was askin' you. Jello just got it to-day."
"How?"
"From Phil. He got it from Mrs. Metten. By the way, you're still keepin' your door open down at the office, lookin' for the Metten order boy? Don't do it; shut it."
Ellen ignored this. "What did he get from Mrs. Metten?" she demanded.
"That Jay's wife went to New York."
"I don't believe it," said Ellen.
"Neither does Mrs. Phil. That's why it's no use your catchin' cold sittin' in the draft keepin' your door open for a call from Mettens," Di advised. "They've lost your address."
Thereupon Ellen penetrated to the information that Lida Rountree had phoned Mrs. Philip Metten regretting her inability to make any engagements, now or in the future, because she was returning to New York and that Mrs. Metten, suspicious of a slight, awaited corroborative testimony.
"Phil called up the hotel," added Di. "And they checked out of there. But Jay's here."
"Yes," agreed Ellen, "he's here."
"Well, it wasn't exactly necessary for her to pull out. I didn't need it," asserted Di, comfortably, "but of course it didn't make it any harder for me. We got the Metten order, signed and countersigned now. You'll be told of it, to-morrow."
Ellen hardly heard this. His wife had left him! So she came to understand his new impersonalness with herself.
She went to bed, with no idea of sleep but because in bed, and with her light out, Di would not talk to her. She had to think. Think? It was not thought which was athrob in her, which thumped so that it seemed Di must hear. It was not thought which crumpled the edge of the sheet in her clenched hands; it was not thought which tried to toss her but which she controlled so that it only turned her slowly, as if she moved in her sleep, from side to side.
She deceived Di into thinking that she slept. Di ceased to munch marzipan and to read by her bed light; Di arose and moved to her mirror; she opened a drawer and produced a check book.
She had money, plenty of it, money to give away. Ellen did not doubt that Di and the Slengels had obtained the Metten order.
Di ceased to find satisfaction in scrutiny of her check book; she switched on the mirror light and leaned close to the glass, gazing at herself. She saw no change, none that showed. None that betrayed anything; nothing to alarm her; yet she was not reassured. She stole to her bed and back to the mirror for another look into her own eyes, to see what was behind them, what stirred in her soul.
She switched off the mirror light; beside her bed, she switched off the reading light and stood in the dark, cut by vague glints and patterns of shadows from the street. Di, alone in the dead of night, was become afraid of what she had done.
Suddenly she crumpled; she dropped to the floor, catching at the side of her bed and clinging to it. Di sobbed a bit and, like a little child frightened and sobbing, she prayed.
Ellen shut her eyes to see no more; Ellen's lips moved, but she did not make the mistake of speaking, even in a whisper, to Di. Ellen whispered to her God who also was Di's God, so far as Di remembered any—the God of the little white clapboard church with the belfry exposed to the four winds, sweeping across the point of the Michigan peninsula. Di and Ellen had knelt, children there.
The God of the four winds and the earth and seas, of the stars and the sky, endured with Ellen. When the doubled red flags, with the black square centers, flattened in the gale from the coast guard staffs, when the radio flashed the storm warning and the hurricane signals were set and you knew that your father, with ten thousand tons of iron in his ship, was off the rocky capes of Keweenaw, a girl needed a God to pray to.
A garage mechanic's daughter matured into no such need; God might be only a sudden, flitting panic of midnight memory. Di had recovered herself. She arose and, whistling softly, she went to bed.
The morning completely confirmed Di's claim upon the Metten order. Mr. Lowry himself reported to Mr. Rountree, when Jay and Ellen were present:
"It's signed, sealed and delivered. Slengels start the machines in their addition to-day."
The converse of this was that Rountrees must shut down machines in part of their plant but no one said it. Mr. Rountree listened to Lowry.
"Entertaining beat us and nothing else; the personal angle. Sam Metten appreciates parties; and they certainly gave him plenty—good parties."
"Good?" Mr. Rountree put in.
"Exactly to Sam's taste. Phil had different tastes; your son held him for a while, then Sam got too strong for us." Lowry knew of Lida's defection but he avoided reference to it. "Slengels figure that this shakes us and they can finish us. They're pointing for Alban now.
"They'll attract some of our little accounts," continued Lowry. "A few little fellows always trail a big one from the house losing him to the house getting him. There's always a bandwagon bunch. Slengels will mop up some of those; but they're after the big one—Alban. They're saying on the street: when they get Alban, they'll put us out."
Mr. Rountree's firmly set lips made no reply or comment but Jay asked: "Is that the way they say it, 'when they get Alban?' They say 'when'?"
Lowry looked at Jay steadily. "'When,'" he repeated, "was the exact word they used."
Jay followed Ellen into her little room for the ostensible purpose of applying himself to the files; but he did nothing with them. He was feeling fight with an intensity and to a degree strange to him. Previously, when he had thought of "fight," it had meant the sensation aroused in him when he had rowed himself out in a losing boat on the Thames and when, once in a tournament final, he had come to the "turn" four down on a champion and had fought on to win on the last green.
Such sensations suddenly had become childish compared to this. They had supplied him with a simple, almost immediate satisfaction in terms of physical exhaustion or of triumph; this taunted and goaded him, it whipped him up and exasperated him and offered him no ready means of satisfaction at all.
Ellen moved away from him for fear, if she stayed close, she must touch him; or without actual contact, she might show, even without another look at him, the heat of her heart. She slipped into her seat before her typewriter and spread her notebook open, but her fingers were useless at the keys.
"Lew Alban appreciates parties," Jay said.
"Yes; he's been to some of the Slengels'."
"How do you know?"
She jumped, it was so personal to her. She, how did she know?
"Lew told you?" asked Jay, without waiting for her answer.
"Di told me," said Ellen. "Diana Dewitt. I room with her."
"I remember," he said. "She works for Slengels."
"They gave her a party job. I told you. She's the one who beat you. You—you know how you were beaten, I suppose?" asked Ellen with her face burning.
"I know how they got Sam," replied Jay. "We weren't competing on him; we were specializing on Phil."
By we, he might mean the firm but he meant, Ellen knew, his wife and himself.
"Lew will be the only one to compete for on the Alban account, soon," said Ellen.
"I wish to God we could give him the gate!"
"No you don't," denied Ellen and saw the slow, deeper flush of shame underflow the redness of his excitement. "Do you?" she asked him, in her suddenly gentle, sweet way.
"Not if you say I don't," he acknowledged this.
"You'd not dodge him," said Ellen, almost as though speaking to herself, and his shame was gone. He'd not dodge Lew, she meant, because Lew had attained a power over him which Jay Rountree hated to acknowledge. Lew was become necessary to him; he was in no way necessary to Lew; it was humiliating to be in such a situation, but it was business to meet it and deal with it.
Ellen spun about quickly. This was not being impersonal with him—far from it!
"Lew Alban," she said. "will be harder to handle than Jello. . . . Sam Metten," she corrected quickly, "for the Slengels as well as for us."
"How?"
"He's not so simple. I know him, you see. He talks to me."
"Does he," said Jay.
"I don't like him," continued Ellen, without looking about but, under his eyes, she flushed hot; and she was relieved when he said: "I've moved. Do you know?"
"I didn't," said Ellen. She wanted to look up at him but she bent to her notebook. "Where?" she asked.
"I'm on East Pearson Street; in what, d'you suppose?"
"What?"
"Studio. You can get away with less room, less show and service and less rent, if you call it that."
"Does your wife paint?" asked Ellen. Then he told her:
"She's in the East. She went the other day. No, neither of us paints. The place hasn't a palette, or a smock. It just was a studio and now is diggings at lou'rent. Roof of my own, that's all."
Why had his wife left? For how long? Or was she to be back? These questions crowded to Ellen's tongue but she bit her lip and smoothed with cold fingers the pages of her notebook.
He went out bearing image of her small, slender figure bent over her book. She had been in blue, as she often was about the office, a plain, pretty dress with piping of white at the throat and cuffs; and he thought of her hair wound round her head.
Ellen, obliged to answer her questions herself, accordingly believed that the roof of his own meant that his wife would return; and she thought of him in his diggings that night, awaiting her.
Jay was under his own roof, but he was not awaiting Lida. He might go to her but she would never return to Chicago. He knew that his own roof was, in fact, little more than a gesture, an offer of a place for her with him. 'Lida was bent on escape; not from him, for she wanted him with her, but from all that here held him and to-night doubly bound him: for Rountree and Son, having lost Metten, was in danger; Rountree and Son—his father and he—were at the mercy, now, of Lew Alban. And Ellen Powell was right; he couldn't, and he wouldn't, dodge it.