“That was a stroke of luck!” Jerome observed in his calm, automatic manner. “You don’t often get back things you lose in a crowd.”
Stella, though she beheld in what had just occurred a sly stroke of irony in that the chivalrous act should have fallen to another than Jerome, made no immediate reply. Indeed, for the moment her mind surged richly with excited imaginings. It was like the beginning of a romance! “I was just wishing,” she mused, still flushed. “Then a door slammed—as though fate had been listening all the time, and then....” Yes, she liked to view life in terms of indefinite grandiloquence. Still, it had all ended there. The handsome stranger, who might be a prince setting out on some fabulous tour of the universe, had quickly disappeared. She would never see him again.
Once more the fog settled about her. Life slumped. She felt more dismally hemmed in than ever.
Jerome cheerfully broke the silence with easy commonplaces, to which she responded moodily if at all. Each time a space of stillness came between them, Stella was reminded in a curious, haunting way, of the silence of that long wait in the Utterbourne drawing room, where there had seemed something ominous or impending, invisible yet more palpable, too, than mere fancy.
At length Jerome fell taciturn also; and it was then that the girl reëstablished the theme which the episode of the fashion page had broken.
“Don’t you ever have a feeling,” she wearily insisted, “you ought to be getting more out of life?”
This time his laugh was slightly constrained. “I’ve thought of cutting quite a figure in the world some day. How do I know but I still may? You never can tell.”
“You certainly won’t unless you make up your mind to!”
“Oh say!” he protested, his masculine dignity beginning to feel menaced. “Why do you want to jump on me all of a sudden? I guess I’m no worse off, at least, than I was a year ago.”
But his defensive nonchalance infuriated her. “A year ago!”
“Well,” he replied easily and a trifle coolly, “I lay a whole lot of plans I don’t always discuss, because I prefer to wait till I’m ready to spring something definite.”
Their voices were taking on a sharper quality as they carried their lovers’ quarrel through the home-rush of the ignoring fog-choked city.