But the days dragged on and she did not get about.
Downstairs, Christine and Palmer had entered on the round of midwinter
gayeties. Palmer's "crowd" was a lively one. There were dinners and
dances, week-end excursions to country-houses. The Street grew accustomed
to seeing automobiles stop before the little house at all hours of the
night. Johnny Rosenfeld, driving Palmer's car, took to falling asleep at
the wheel in broad daylight, and voiced his discontent to his mother.
"You never know where you are with them guys," he said briefly. "We start
out for half an hour's run in the evening, and get home with the
milk-wagons. And the more some of them have had to drink, the more they
want to drive the machine. If I get a chance, I'm going to beat it while
the wind's my way."
But, talk as he might, in Johnny Rosenfeld's loyal heart there was no
thought of desertion. Palmer had given him a man's job, and he would stick
by it, no matter what came.
There were some things that Johnny Rosenfeld did not tell his mother.
There were evenings when the Howe car was filled, not with Christine and
her friends, but with women of a different world; evenings when the
destination was not a country estate, but a road-house; evenings when
Johnny Rosenfeld, ousted from the driver's seat by some drunken youth,
would hold tight to the swinging car and say such fragments of prayers as
he could remember. Johnny Rosenfeld, who had started life with few
illusions, was in danger of losing such as he had.
One such night Christine put in, lying wakefully in her bed, while the
clock on the mantel tolled hour after hour into the night. Palmer did not
come home at all. He sent a note from the office in the morning: "I hope you are not worried, darling. The car broke down near the Country
Club last night, and there was nothing to do but to spend the night there.
I would have sent you word, but I did not want to rouse you. What do you
say to the theater to-night and supper afterward?"
Christine was learning. She telephoned the Country Club that morning, and
found that Palmer had not been there. But, although she knew now that he
was deceiving her, as he always had deceived her, as probably he always
would, she hesitated to confront him with what she knew. She shrank, as
many a woman has shrunk before, from confronting him with his lie.
But the second time it happened, she was roused. It was almost Christmas
then, and Sidney was well on the way to recovery, thinner and very white,
but going slowly up and down the staircase on K.'s arm, and sitting with
Harriet and K. at the dinner table. She was begging to be back on duty for
Christmas, and K. felt that he would have to give her up soon.