A week’s work was crowded into two days. As she sat on deck after breakfast the first morning out, Mimi felt a sense of security which made her comfortable for the first time since she had sat next to Jimmie Forrester at dinner. I’ll put these silly, childish notions out of my head, she resolved, and get back down to earth again. And after a few relentless pluckings of thoughts and fancies from her head she secured forgetfulness in reading. She swept through Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle , read the story of pathetic George F. Babbitt, walked the deck when she got tired, and then resumed her reading. She threw aside Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems—they were too poignantly reminiscent of love and its disappointments, she wasn’t in a mood now for such revelations. And she was glad when the crags of Manhattan rose out of nothingness, for here was her familiar world where sanity could be found in hard work again. …
New York was sweltering in the terrific heat of early summer. Mimi, back in Manhattan one week, gave up the attempt to work and set forth to find relief somewhere in the greenness of Central Park.
“You ran away!” a familiar voice accused her as she stepped from Francine’s door into the street.
“Oh—I thought I left you in Paris!” she parried, laughing nervously at the unexpected appearance of Jimmie Forrester.
“You did—but I’m here now. Shall we eat dinner at the Plaza? Or Pierre’s? Or the Brevoort?”
“At none of them. I’m busy this evening.”