Harris, Hunt and Harris were in a gigantic office building on Broad Street, one of the places I had gone into at the time I was considering a restaurant business of my own downtown. They occupied one whole floor. I had not phoned Mr. Hunt I was coming, as I could not quite resist the temptation to burst in on him as a big surprise. But when I stepped out of the elevator and gave my name to the girl at the window she looked up quickly and reached for her telephone. I had barely sat down when a gentleman appeared who said he was Mr. Hunt’s secretary and invited me inside. “Mr. Hunt stepped out, Mrs. Harris, but he’s in the building and I’ll have him located at once.”
He opened a door and began leading me through a very large room with bright lights and rows and rows of desks where people were busily working. A stir went over the place as soon as I appeared. Nobody stared but I could feel that I was an object of great curiosity and that they were all aware of me, from the girls, who started talking to each other with an elaborate appearance of casualness, to the men, who kept shooting little glances at me over papers they pretended to examine.
That is, all except one. Behind a desk at the far end of the room where I would have to pass him, sat Grant, and I could tell that he hadn’t seen me or noticed any of the commotion I had caused. My heart stood still when I saw him and I almost turned around and ran out. However, I kept following the secretary, and then suddenly I wanted to cry. Because he looked so insignificant there, with a green shade over his eyes and a pipe in his mouth, writing something on a piece of paper. Most of the sunburn was gone and he looked sallow and seedy. It flashed through my mind what he had once said about being a slave, and I wished he would at least take off the green eyeshade, which depressed me most of all.
But I kept sailing bravely along, and then I remembered my perfume. As I passed his desk I opened my coat quickly so he would get a good whiff of it as I went by. He looked up and our eyes met. “Oh, hello!” I said, just as gaily as though nothing had ever happened between us at all. Then I zipped through a glass door marked “Mr. Hunt,” and the secretary was bowing me into a big leather chair. But all I could think of was the amazed look on Grant’s face, and I began fumbling in my handbag so I wouldn’t show how much I wanted to cry.
The secretary went and in a moment there came a rap on the door. I tried to look casual and said, “Come in.” Grant was standing there, the green shade still over his eyes, acting terribly nervous and not quite looking me in the eye. I struggled for control so I could act naturally, and yet it was a second or so before I heard myself say: “Well! How have you been?”
“Very well, thank you.”
But he sounded shaky and queer. I held out my hand and he took it. “And how have you been?”
“Quite well, thank you.”
“You’re looking well.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’re certainly a success.”
“Oh, am I?”
“A Wall Street celebrity, I should say. The whole place has practically suspended activity trying to find out what you’re going to do next.”
“I didn’t know I was that important.”
“Oh, you’re pretty important... You’ve become prominent in the labor movement, Bernie tells me.”
“Oh — I keep in touch.”
“I got interested in it myself once.”
“Oh, yes. I seem to remember, now you speak of it.”
“I guess I’m not cut out for large affairs, though. It never occurred to me it could be used as a basis for market speculation.”
He sounded a little bitter as he said this, and I replied: “I’m afraid you disapprove of my career in the market.”
“Oh, no. I’m merely learning things. What’s your part in the movement?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t any just at present. I was a sort of traveling secretary.”
“Oh.”
He licked his lips once or twice as though they were dry, and I knew he was dying to ask about Mr. Holden, but I volunteered nothing. There was a long uncomfortable pause and then he said suddenly: “What name are you using now, Carrie?”
This caught me wholly by surprise. I had been half enjoying the foolish talk we had been carrying on but now the same icy feeling began to creep around my heart that I had had in the last days before he left me. “...Why — that’s something I hadn’t quite got around to. The court gave me permission to resume my maiden name, and traveling around that’s what I use. But on my bank accounts and in my business transactions I’m still using yours. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to know.”
“Nothing was said about it in the agreement that was drawn up.”
“No, I saw to that.”
“If my use of your name bothers you—”
“Not at all. In fact, it’s not on my account I raised the question. But mother—”
“Oh, ‘mother’ again!”
“...I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“So after the way you treated me, after you let that woman wrap you around her finger like some kind of worm—”
“We don’t have to go into that.”
“Oh, yes, we do! After all that, all you can think of to say to me now is that you don’t want me to use your name because that simpleton finds it a little inconvenient to have a second Mrs. Harris around to spoil her solitary eminence! Well, I’m going to use your name!”
“It’s quite all right, Carrie.”
“But for a reason you don’t know anything about yet. I don’t know my own name!”
“You—? What did you say?”
“That’s something the newspapers didn’t find out about me, with all their snooping around. I don’t know my name! And while I was perfectly welcome to use my foster-parents’ name, yours is the first name that was ever legally mine. And I’m going to use it! The court didn’t say I had to use my former name. It only said I could if I chose. I choose. I’m going to use your name. Not that I like it. But it’ll do until I get another which, praise God, may not be long now.”
This last slipped out on me, for I truly hadn’t given Mr. Holden a thought all morning. But I was so bitter over the whole discussion that I couldn’t help saying it. He wheeled around, his eyes blazing, caught my hand and tried to jerk me up so that I would be standing, facing him. “What do you mean by that?”
I sat where I was and slowly twisted my hand out of his grasp before I answered. “What I mean by it is none of your business. You left me, you let your mother pay me to get a divorce, and now I’m free. This was your choice, not mine. Isn’t that true?”
I looked at him when I said this and his eyes dropped. He walked around the office two or three times, picking up things and putting them down, and then abruptly turned and walked out.
Chapter Seventeen
A minute or two after that Mr. Hunt breezed in, kissed me and was perfectly lovely, but the meeting with Grant had taken all the fun out of my nice surprise. I explained briefly the reason for my strained manner, and switched at once to what I had come there about. I told him I was ready to pay back Mrs. Harris what I had taken from her, shut him up when he began to protest, and said I wanted him to have her at my hotel promptly at eleven o’clock the next morning, to have the money with him in cash, and then I would wash my hands of everything called