"No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister's wedding clothes, understand? I guess I'm not broke--yet.I'll furnish the money for her things, and there'll be enough of them, too." Babe had as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant pink-and- blue and lacy and frilly things, as any daughter of doting parents.Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them.But it left him pretty well pinched.After Babe's marriage (she insisted that they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on Calumet.He and Carrie took one of those little flats that were springing up, seemingly overnight, all through Chicago's South Side.
There was nothing domestic about Carrie.She had given up teaching two years before, and had gone into social-service work on the West Side.She had what is known as a legal mind--hard, clear, orderly--and she made a great success of it.Her dream was to live at the Settlement House and give all her time to the work.Upon the little household she bestowed a certain amount of grim, capable attention.It was the same kind of attention she would have given a piece of machinery whose oiling and running had been entrusted to her care.She hated it, and didn't hesitate to say so.
Jo took to prowling about department-store basements, and household goods sections.He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or a sack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a new kind of paring knife.He was forever doing odd jobs that the janitor should have done.It was the domestic in him claiming its own.
Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve.They had what she called a plain talk.
"Listen, Jo.They've offered me the job of first assistant residentworker.And I'm going to take it.Take it!I know fifty other girls who'd give their ears for it.I go in next month."They were at dinner.Jo looked up from his plate, dully.Then he glanced around the little dining room, with its ugly tan walls and its heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted cumbersomely into the five-room flat).
"Away?Away from here, you mean--to live?"Carrie laid down her fork."Well, really, Jo! After all that explanation.""But to go over there to live! Why, that neighborhood's full of dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all.I can't let you do that, Carrie."Carrie's chin came up.She laughed a short little laugh."Let me! That's eighteenth-century talk, Jo.My life's my own to live.I'm going."And she went.
Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up.Then he sold what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayed splendor was being put to such purpose.
Jo Hertz was his own master.Free to marry.Free to come and go.And he found he didn't even think of marrying.He didn't even want to come or go, particularly.A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck.
Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva's, and on Sunday noon at Stell's.He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the homemade soup and the well-cooked meats.After dinner he tried to talk business with Eva's husband, or Stell's.His business talks were the old- fashioned kind, beginning:
"Well, now, looka here.Take, f'rinstance, your raw hides and leathers."But Ben and George didn't want to take, f'rinstance, your raw hides and leathers.They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take golf, or politics, or stocks.They were the modern type of businessman whoprefers to leave his work out of his play.Business, with them, was a profession-- a finely graded and balanced thing, differing from Jo's clumsy, down- hill style as completely as does the method of a great criminal detective differ from that of a village constable.They would listen, restively, and say, "Uh-uh," at intervals, and at the first chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glance at their wives.Eva had two children now.Girls.They treated Uncle Jo with good-natured tolerance.Stell had no children.Uncle Jo degenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the position of honored guest, who is served with white meat, to that of one who is content with a leg and one of those obscure and bony sections which, after much turning with a bewildered and investigating knife and fork, leave one baffled and unsatisfied.
Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.
"It isn't natural," Eva told him."I never saw a man who took so little interest in women.""Me!" protested Jo, almost shyly."Women!""Yes.Of course.You act like a frightened schoolboy."So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of fitting age.They spoke of them as "splendid girls." Between thirty-six and forty.They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear way, about civics, and classes, and politics, and economics, and boards.They rather terrified Jo.He didn't understand much that they talked about, and he felt humbly inferior, and yet a little resentful, as if something had passed him by.He escorted them home, dutifully, though they told him not to bother, and they evidently meant it.They seemed capable not only of going home quite unattended but of delivering a pointed lecture to any highwayman or brawler who might molest them.
The following Thursday Eva would say, "How did you like her, Jo?" "Like who?" Joe would spar feebly.
"Miss Matthews." "Who's she?"
"Now, don't be funny, Jo.You know very well I mean the girl who was here for dinner.The one who talked so well on the emigration question.""Oh, her!Why, I liked her all right.Seems to be a smart woman.""Smart!She's a perfectly splendid girl." "Sure," Jo would agree cheerfully.
"But didn't you like her?"
