There was nothing domestic about Carrie.  She had given up teaching two years before, and had gone into Social Service work on the West Side.  She had what is known as a legal mind—­hard, clear, orderly—­and she made a great success of it.  Her dream was to live at the Settlement House and give all her time to the work.  Upon the little household she bestowed a certain amount of grim, capable attention.  It was the same kind of attention she would have given a piece of machinery whose oiling and running had been entrusted to her care.  She hated it, and didn’t hesitate to say so.

Jo took to prowling about department store basements, and household goods sections.  He was always sending home a bargain in a ham, or a sack of potatoes, or fifty pounds of sugar, or a window clamp, or a new kind of paring knife.  He was forever doing odd little jobs that the janitor should have done.  It was the domestic in him claiming its own.

Then, one night, Carrie came home with a dull glow in her leathery cheeks, and her eyes alight with resolve.  They had what she called a plain talk.

“Listen, Jo.  They’ve offered me the job of first assistant resident worker.  And I’m going to take it.  Take it!  I know fifty other girls who’d give their ears for it.  I go in next month.”

They were at dinner.  Jo looked up from his plate, dully.  Then he glanced around the little dining room, with its ugly tan walls and its heavy, dark furniture (the Calumet Avenue pieces fitted cumbersomely into the five-room flat).

“Away?  Away from here, you mean—­to live?” Carrie laid down her fork.  “Well, really, Jo!  After all that explanation.”

“But to go over there to live!  Why, that neighbourhood’s full of dirt, and disease, and crime, and the Lord knows what all.  I can’t let you do that, Carrie.”

Carrie’s chin came up.  She laughed a short little laugh.  “Let me!  That’s eighteenth-century talk, Jo.  My life’s my own to live.  I’m going.”

And she went.

Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up.  Then he sold what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a room on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayed splendour was being put to such purpose.

Jo Hertz was his own master.  Free to marry.  Free to come and go.  And he found he didn’t even think of marrying.  He didn’t even want to come or go, particularly.  A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair and a thickening neck.  Much has been written about the unwed, middle-aged woman; her fussiness, her primness, her angularity of mind and body.  In the male that same fussiness develops, and a certain primness, too.  But he grows flabby where she grows lean.

Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva’s, and on Sunday noon at Stell’s.  He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the home-made soup and the well-cooked meats.  After dinner he tried to talk business with Eva’s husband, or Stell’s.  His business talks were the old-fashioned kind, beginning: