Don't Pick Me

CHAPTER XXVI

Jerry sat down on the couch, by the fire, and Jane stood looking down at him. She was trembling at the excitement of the moment.

"We haven't talked much of our inner selves, Jerry, and it's a little hard to begin—especially as this goes away back to the beginning of the time I came to the studio. Did you ever wonder why I took the work you offered?"

He nodded. She interested him now. She stood in that still way of hers, with the folds of her dull, blue gown hanging straight and close. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining; she was like a crystal ball which centred all the light and feeling in the room.

"I had to make a living so that I could go on with my real work, so I took the first thing that offered."

"What was your real work, Jane?"

"Writing. I always had a consuming desire to write—to express myself. I've always been rather silent—spoken words are so dangerous—but written words, they're like winged birds that I nurse in my heart. When I free them, they fly so far, so sure."

She stopped suddenly, aware that she had never spoken freely to him. His attention was concentrated on her.

"My mother thought I had a gift when I was a girl; no one else knew of my ambition. But when my father and mother were dead, I came to New York, with almost no money and some funny, childish little stories, to make a great name for myself."

She laughed at that, but it hurt Jerry. He did not smile at all.

"Almost the first editor who saw me told me I had no talent. He said I must take a position that would support me; then I might write until I learned how."

"So you took my job?"

"Yes; it was all I was fitted to do. It didn't matter what I did, anyway. My real life was at night, when I wrote."

"What did you write, Jane?"

"Everything. Stories, essays, poems, tons of things."

"Where did you sell them?"

"I didn't sell them. Nobody ever saw them—not until Martin came."

"How did he know about them?"

"I told him, that first night I met him, at your pageant. He asked me what I did and for some reason I told him. He asked me to see some of my things and he liked them, rather, only he saw that I needed to live—that I could not really write if I sat outside of life and speculated about it. He literally opened up a new world to me. He took me about, to the theatre, to hear music. He got me interested in the big problems of now; he made me hungry for all the experiences I had been starved for."

Jerry leaned out toward her.

"That's why you married me, Jane?"

She turned and looked at him, as if he were calling her out of a trance.

"Yes, that was why. I wanted a child," she said simply.

Jerry threw himself back on the couch and laughed at that—laughed stridently.

"Do you mind, Jerry?" she asked in surprise.

"Mind? Oh, no! It's amusing to hear that you've been gobbled up, as a possible experience, a stimulus, as it were, to a lady's literary expression. I really owe you to Christiansen, don't I?"

"Does it seem a meaner motive than yours, in marrying me, Jerry?"

"Go on with the story," he said, ignoring her question.