She tried to keep calm about it, to exert emotional control, but again the tears would rise, only this time they were tears of opposition to defeat.
She did not want to be hounded this way.
She wanted to be let alone.
She was trying to do right now.
Why couldn't the world help her, instead of seeking to push her down?
CHAPTER XLII
The fact that Lester had seen this page was made perfectly clear to Jennie that evening, for he brought it home himself, having concluded, after mature deliberation, that he ought to.
He had told her once that there was to be no concealment between them, and this thing, coming so brutally to disturb their peace, was nevertheless a case in point.
He had decided to tell her not to think anything of it—that it did not make much difference, though to him it made all the difference in the world.
The effect of this chill history could never be undone.
The wise—and they included all his social world and many who were not of it—could see just how he had been living.
The article which accompanied the pictures told how he had followed Jennie from Cleveland to Chicago, how she had been coy and distant and that he had to court her a long time to win her consent.
This was to explain their living together on the North Side.
Lester realized that this was an asinine attempt to sugar-coat the true story and it made him angry.
Still he preferred to have it that way rather than in some more brutal vein.
He took the paper out of his pocket when he arrived at the house, spreading it on the library table. Jennie, who was close by, watched him, for she knew what was coming.
"Here's something that will interest you, Jennie," he said dryly, pointing to the array of text and pictures.
"I've already seen it, Lester," she said wearily.
"Mrs. Stendahl showed it to me this afternoon.
I was wondering whether you had."
"Rather high-flown description of my attitude, isn't it?
I didn't know I was such an ardent Romeo."
"I'm awfully sorry, Lester," said Jennie, reading behind the dry face of humor the serious import of this affair to him.
She had long since learned that Lester did not express his real feeling, his big ills in words.
He was inclined to jest and make light of the inevitable, the inexorable.
This light comment merely meant "this matter cannot be helped, so we will make the best of it."
"Oh, don't feel badly about it," he went on.
"It isn't anything which can be adjusted now.
They probably meant well enough.
We just happen to be in the limelight."
"I understand," said Jennie, coming over to him.
"I'm sorry, though, anyway."
Dinner was announced a moment later and the incident was closed.
But Lester could not dismiss the thought that matters were getting in a bad way.
His father had pointed it out to him rather plainly at the last interview, and now this newspaper notoriety had capped the climax.
He might as well abandon his pretension to intimacy with his old world.
It would have none of him, or at least the more conservative part of it would not.
There were a few bachelors, a few gay married men, some sophisticated women, single and married, who saw through it all and liked him just the same, but they did not make society.
He was virtually an outcast, and nothing could save him but to reform his ways; in other words, he must give up Jennie once and for all.
But he did not want to do this.
The thought was painful to him—objectionable in every way.
Jennie was growing in mental acumen.
She was beginning to see things quite as clearly as he did.
She was not a cheap, ambitious, climbing creature.
She was a big woman and a good one.
It would be a shame to throw her down, and besides she was good-looking.
He was forty-six and she was twenty-nine; and she looked twenty-four or five.
It is an exceptional thing to find beauty, youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of view—softened and charmingly emotionalized—in another.
He had made his bed, as his father had said. He had better lie on it.
It was only a little while after this disagreeable newspaper incident that Lester had word that his father was quite ill and failing; it might be necessary for him to go to Cincinnati at any moment.