The City Club was strictly a man’s club. There was a ladies’ dining-room, to be sure, but women did not make a practice of lunching there without an escort who was a member. This club had been the one place outside his office where Stephen had felt safe from Stella in Milhampton.

Stephen wasn’t alone when he met Stella and Alfred Munn. There was a lawyer from Boston with him, an older man with whom he had been conferring all the morning; and upon whom he was anxious to make just the right impression. Stella had greeted Stephen with enthusiasm when she met him, and he had had to introduce the Boston lawyer to her, to present her impossible escort to him as well.

It was with a sinking heart that Stephen noticed that Stella had probably ordered something in the way of liquor to go with the luncheon she had just been enjoying with Munn. She was particularly vivacious. Stella never drank enough of anything to lose her self-control, but she did like getting her tongue unloosened, once in a while, she said, and her “flirting spirit up.” Her flirting spirit was up now, Stephen observed. She made an arch attempt to flirt with the Boston lawyer, as she gave him her hand!

Stephen could feel himself grow red with mortification. He hastened the meeting to as speedy an end as possible, but brief as it was, it unpoised him, sapped him of all assurance and self-confidence.

He didn’t want to look the Boston lawyer in the eyes after the meeting with Stella and Munn.

That night he wrote to the New York law firm and definitely accepted their proposition. Stephen was in a mood to accept any proposition which offered him relief from Stella.

Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

1

IT WAS ONLY temporary relief he contemplated, then. It was his intention, when he first went to New York, to establish Stella somewhere, sometime, within commuting distance of his business. Not within too easy commuting distance, however. “In New York a man’s business-life and his home-life,” Mr. Palmer had once said to Stephen, avoiding his eyes as he did so, “can be made two distinct and separate affairs, which is difficult to accomplish in a place the size of Milhampton.”