The Mulberry Bush by Helen Topping Miller Page A

either.”
    â€œI don’t see why you work for her. You could get plenty of places, couldn’t you—you’re so attractive—and men like you, I’ve noticed. I think she’s the most impossible woman I ever knew.”
    â€œBecause she’s successful,” Virginia said. “She’s very shrewd and clever at her business. And I want to be successful, too. I’m willing to give up a lot for it. Go back to bed now and rest. I’ll handle Teresa till morning.”
    She melted ice cubes and stirred the tall drink mechanically, but the little nurse’s “Why?” was repeating itself sharply in her brain. Why
was
she doing this—being utterly miserable and uncomfortable, bearing the brunt of Teresa’s exasperations, her insults, her condescending arrogance? She was a man’s wife—Mike would take care of her, gladly. She had money in the bank—all that money he had given her. If she wrote, “I’m so tired of working, Mike,” she knew what his answer would be. If—said the sick uneasiness in her heart—there was an answer!
    Terror caught at her sometimes in the nights. What if Mike were ill somewhere—fever—some obscure jungle thing? But surely Bill Foster would know. Then she remembered that even if Bill knew how Mike was, where he was—to Bill, she herself meant nothing at all. Just a girl he had met briefly in New York. One of Mike’s girls, Bill’s casually dismissing look had said. She should have known—just from that look in Bill Foster’s eyes—Oh dear God, let me stop thinking!
    What, her terrified imaginings said, if after all she had been only another pleasant episode in Mike’s exciting life? What if, now that he was far enough away to see things in his old whimsical, sardonic fashion, she was to him only another—mulberry bush? She reminded herself how long the miles were, how slow the ships. She got out maps at the office and traced distances—a little appalled when she reckoned the miles.
    She had written letters, filling page after page with a chatty, inconsequential narrative of her days, trying not to be effusive, to be loving and yet delicately reserved, because men were instinctively shamed and made uncomfortable when a woman gave too much. They hated a debt, a claiming that was too insistent, even the claiming of love. And Mike had talked so much of freedom. They were to be free—there should be no clinging, no reproaches, no holding to grievances, no injured martyrdom.
    Impulsively she added a paragraph at the end of a letter.
    â€œDon’t forget—our bargain holds. We’re free. But if you should
want
to write—same address.”
    She sealed it, then abruptly tore the envelope open again, ripped the letter to bits. That hint that if he wanted to write—that was not the proud voice of freedom. That was the hungry whimper of a slave. It was her pride that had interested Mike, her maidenly, small-town reserves, the primness that she had been unable to overcome that had kept delicately always a little aloof.
    He had teased her about it. “I ought to keep you wrapped in cellophane, Ginny—like a gardenia. You’ve got a kind of gardenia soul, even if your topknot does flame like a poinsettia. But you’ve got fire in you too—a nice kind of fire. The danger for you is that you might let it burn on a lot of wrong altars. That darned conscience of yours could turn sacrificial and fanatic mighty easy.”
    Had he been warning her gently then that worship could prove as tiresome to him as mulberry bushes? She sat before Teresa’s desk and looked out over the treetops of the avenue, where a few sad, wet leaves clung.
    â€œI won’t write again—till I hear from him,” she said, evenly. And then she would read between the lines and tune her message across the wide spaces, to Mike’s key. Black ink on white paper lasted