Janey thought what a shame it was he’d had his neck shaved when he had a haircut; his neck was red and had little wrinkles in it and she thought of the rough life he must be leading and when he came back she asked him why he didn’t get a different job. “You mean in a shipyard? They’re making big money in shipyards, but hell, Janey, I’d rather knock around… It’s all for the experience, as the feller said when they blew his block off.” “No, but there are boys not half so bright as you are with nice clean jobs right in my office… and a future to look forward to.”
“All my future’s behind me,” said Joe with a laugh. “Might go down to Perth Amboy get a job in a munitions factory, but I rather be blowed up in the open, see?”
Janey went on to talk about the war and how she wished we were in it to save civilization and poor little helpless Belgium. “Can that stuff, Janey,” said Joe. He made a cutting gesture with his big red hand above the tablecloth. “You people don’t understand it, see… The whole damn war’s crooked from start to finish. Why don’t they torpedo any French Line boats? Because the Frogs have it all set with the Jerries, see, that if the Jerries leave their boats alone they won’t shell the German factories back of the front. What we wanta do’s sit back and sell ’em munitions and let ’em blow ’emselves to hell. An’ those babies are makin’ big money in Bordeaux and Toulouse or Marseilles while their own kin are shootin’ daylight into each other at the front, and it’s the same thing with the limeys… I’m tellin’ ye, Janey, this war’s crooked, like every other goddam thing.”
Janey started to cry. “Well, you needn’t curse and swear all the time.” “I’m sorry, sister,” said Joe humbly, “but I’m just a bum an’ that’s about the size of it an’ not fit to associate with a nicedressed girl like you.” “No, I didn’t mean that,” said Janey, wiping her eyes.
“Gee, but I forgot to show you the shawl.” He unwrapped the paper package. Two Spanish shawls spilled out on the table, one of black lace and the other green silk embroidered with big flowers. “Oh, Joe, you oughtn’t to give me both of them… You ought to give one to your best girl.” “The kinda girls I go with ain’t fit to have things like that… I bought those for you, Janey.” Janey thought the shawls were lovely and decided she’d give one of them to Eliza Tingley.
They went to the Hippodrome but they didn’t have a very good time. Janey didn’t like shows like that much and Joe kept falling asleep. When they came out of the theater it was bitterly cold. Gritty snow was driving hard down Sixth Avenue almost wiping the “L” out of sight. Joe took her home in a taxi and left her at her door with an abrupt, “So long, Janey.” She stood a moment on the step with her key in her hand and watched him walking west towards Tenth Avenue and the wharves, with his head sunk in his peajacket.
That winter the flags flew every day on Fifth Avenue. Janey read the paper eagerly at breakfast; at the office there was talk of German spies and submarines and atrocities and propaganda. One morning a French military mission came to call on J. Ward, handsome pale officers with blue uniforms and red trousers and decorations. The youngest of them was on crutches. They’d all of them been severely wounded at the front. When they’d left, Janey and Gladys almost had words because Gladys said officers were a lot of lazy loafers and she’d rather see a mission of private soldiers. Janey wondered if she oughtn’t to tell J. Ward about Gladys’s pro-Germanism, whether it mightn’t be her patriotic duty. The Comptons might be spies; weren’t they going under an assumed name? Benny was a socialist or worse, she knew that. She decided she’d keep her eyes right open.
The same day G. H. Barrow came in. Janey was in the private office with them all the time. They talked about President Wilson and neutrality and the stockmarket and the delay in transmission in the Lusitania note. G. H. Barrow had had an interview with the president. He was a member of a committee endeavoring to mediate between the railroads and the Brotherhoods that were threatening a strike. Janey liked him better than she had on the private car coming up from Mexico, so that when he met her in the hall just as he was leaving the office she was quite glad to talk to him and when he asked her to come out to dinner with him, she accepted and felt very devilish.
All the time G. H. Barrow was in New York he took Janey out to dinner and the theater. Janey had a good time and she could always kid him about Queenie if he tried to get too friendly going home in a taxi. He couldn’t make out where she’d found out about Queenie and he told her the whole story and how the woman kept hounding him for money, but he said that now he was divorced from his wife and there was nothing she could do. After making Janey swear she’d never tell a soul, he explained that through a legal technicality he’d been married to two women at the same time and that Queenie was one of them and that now he’d divorced them both, and there was nothing on earth Queenie could do but the newspapers were always looking for dirt and particularly liked to get something on a liberal like himself devoted to the cause of labor. Then he talked about the art of life and said American women didn’t understand the art of life; at least women like Queenie didn’t. Janey felt very sorry for him but when he asked her to marry him she laughed and said she really would have to consult counsel before replying. He told her all about his life and how poor he’d been as a boy and then about jobs as stationagent and freightagent and conductor and the enthusiasm with which he’d gone into work for the Brotherhood and how his muckraking articles on conditions in the railroads had made him a name and money so that all his old associates felt he’d sold out, but that, so help me, it wasn’t true. Janey went home and told the Tingleys all about the proposal, only she was careful not to say anything about Queenie or bigamy, and they all laughed and joked about it and it made Janey feel good to have been proposed to by such an important man and she wondered why it was such interesting men always fell for her and regretted they always had that dissipated look, but she didn’t know whether she wanted to marry G. H. Barrow or not.
At the office next morning, she looked him up in Who’s Who and there he was, Barrow, George Henry, publicist… but she didn’t think she could ever love him. At the office that day J. Ward looked very worried and sick and Janey felt so sorry for him and quite forgot about G. H. Barrow. She was called into a private conference J. Ward was having with Mr. Robbins and an Irish lawyer named O’Grady, and they said did she mind if they rented a safe deposit box in her name to keep certain securities in and started a private account for her at the Bankers Trust. They were forming a new corporation. There were business reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more than half the stock of a new concern and would work for it on a salary basis. Mr. Robbins looked very worried and a little drunk and kept lighting cigarettes and forgetting them on the edge of the desk and kept saying, “You know very well, J.W., that anything you do is O.K. by me.” J. Ward explained to Janey that she’d be an officer of the new corporation but of course would in no way be personally liable. It came out that old Mrs. Staple was suing J. Ward to recover a large sum of money and that his wife had started divorce proceedings in Pennsylvania and that she was refusing to let him go home to see the children and that he was living at the McAlpin.