U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [137]
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 atroci-ties and propaganda. One morning a French military mis-sion came to cal on J. Ward, handsome pale officers with blue uniforms and red trousers and decorations. The youngest of them was on crutches. They'd al of them
-345-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 tel J. Ward about Gladys's pro-Germanism, whether it mightn't be her patriotic duty. The s 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 al 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 pri-vate car coming up from Mexico, so that when he met her in the hal 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. Al 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 hound-ing 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 tel 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 news-papers were always looking for dirt and particularly liked
-346-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 real y would have to consult counsel before replying. He told her al about his life and how poor he'd been as a boy and then about jobs as stationagent and freight-agent and conductor and the enthusiasm with which he'd gone into work for the Brotherhood and how his muck-raking articles on conditions in the railroads had made hint a name and money so that al his old associates felt he'd sold out, but that, so help me, it wasn't true. Janey went home and told the Tingleys al about the proposal, only she was careful not to say anything about Queenie or bigamy, and they al 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 in-teresting men always fel 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 cal ed 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 busi-ness reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more