Explore "The Swing of the Pendulum" by Adriana Spadoni on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Soon after the first dinner with The Bunch, Herrick finished the series of articles and no longer came to the library. But often Jean found him waiting at the closing hour and they walked to the Ferry. Several times they had lunch in a little Mexican restaurant with a sanded floor and strings of red peppers hanging like stalactites from the ceiling. Jean always came from this place with the feeling of having been to another world and touched another life. And there was always the feeling of having shared this happy strangeness with Herrick.
On Sundays, sometimes Herrick called at the house for her, and sometimes she met him at the Ferry, and they went to Flop's. Martha made no comment, but Jean knew that after she had left the house, her mother cried, and because she never mentioned Herrick, Jean knew that Martha disliked him. In the studio Jean made a great effort to enter the spirit, for although she felt more and more strongly that Herrick, too, was bored, she clung to the belief that there must be some charm her own narrow training could not discover.