Children of the Ritz

Chapter Twelve

Mrs. Pennington’s leave-taking of her friends, which had been in progress since ten that morning, had turned into a card orgy around three in the afternoon and showed signs of continuing indefinitely.

At seven, when Angela walked into the suite, they were still playing. Women with determined faces, other women with lax, smiling faces. Mrs. Pennington — Diane — holding three aces in her hand, had one of the lax, smiling kind. Her cigarette was attached to the little finger by means of a silver band. She hadn’t changed in the least. Prosperity, then adversity, now prosperity once again, a degree less of it perhaps, but sufficient in itself for all practical purposes.

Angela paused to straighten an imaginary plait of hair, then stepped over the threshold and stood revealed.

“How do you do, Angela?” said Mrs. Pennington, the hostess in her coming immediately to the fore. “There’s coffee in the other room.”

Angela went over to her. “Mother, my trunk is downstairs,” she said in the pearl-heavy ear.

“One no trump,” said Mrs. Pennington. “Have it brought up,” she murmured. “It will have to go in Lyle’s room.”

“Tch, tch,” said the lady on the left, “puts me completely off my game.”

“I said one no trump,” repeated Mrs. Pennington, drawing serenely on her cigarette.

“I never want to go back again,” said Angela, shifting to the other side of her mother’s chair. “He came in at seven o’clock this morning after being out all night.”

“I think I’ll make it, don’t you?” said Mrs. Pennington.

“Of course, you and Angela have a great deal to talk over,” said the lady on the right, showing her hand over one shoulder. “Still you must remember we’re at bridge.”

“Very well, two no trump,” rejoiced Mrs. Pennington.

“Tch, tch,” said the lady on the left, vexed.

Angela went into Lyle’s room and studied herself vacantly in the glass out of sheer force of habit. The image didn’t register in her mind; she was thinking of other things.

They didn’t seem to attach as much importance to her coming back as they had to her going away. Or perhaps they didn’t take her seriously. That was typically one’s family for you! There wasn’t an editor in town who wouldn’t have regarded it as a brilliant scoop to have been able to secure the inside details of her estrangement from Dewey, and paid gladly and lavishly for the privilege. And here they went right ahead playing their stupid old bridge.

She picked up an atomizer of gold glass and threw it on the floor with a crash, unable to curb her resentment.

Her mother came anxiously to the half-shut door.

“Angela, did something break in here?”

A subtle overtone of musk began to insinuate itself about the room. The rug throbbed with scent, like the bier of a thousand roses.

Angela indicated the spasms of light that lay here and there on the floor like frost.

“I dropped it. Too bad.”

“Lyle will have a fit,” said her mother. “Never mind, I’ll get some one to pick it up.”

“I knocked it down on purpose. Damn it, all the attention I get here wouldn’t turn any one’s head!” Angela exclaimed bitterly, feeling herself to be losing ground.

“But, my dear, what am I to do? You walk in on us suddenly like this—”

“I thought I had a home here,” said Angela, whose nerves were beginning to tighten like the strings of a harp. “Naturally that’s where one goes when one’s in trouble.”

Her mother gave her a synthetic kiss on the lips.

“Really, Angela, don’t be inconsiderate at a time like this. You know what it means to have guests on your hands. My dear, lie down and quiet yourself. I can see the strain in your eyes. We’ll talk this all over later. I daren’t stay another minute. I have a roomful of people inside.”

She hustled out, forgetting to close the door in her excitement. Angela did it for her, with great ardor. In the orderly confusion of the rooms given over to the game, the players were seen to look up from their cards for a moment and ask, “What was that?”

“The wind,” said Mrs. Pennington complacently, taking up her hand again. “One spade.”

Word was sent up from the lobby: “Mr. Wilder is waiting for Mrs. Haines.”

“Quite all right,” said Mrs. Pennington pleasantly, putting back the phone. “Angela’s friend,” she commented quietly. “You’d better let her know, Lyle.”

“I wish you could see my room!” remarked Lyle ungraciously.

Mrs. Pennington went to tell Angela herself, wondering slyly whether or not Lyle was a little put out at Angela’s return to the fold.

Angela’s trunk had reared itself upright in the middle of what had once been Lyle’s room. Angela stood between its open jaws, a strap of satin ribbon over each shoulder, lifting and dropping things with the precision of one pulling molasses.

“I’m looking for something to go with this fuchsia teddy,” she declared.

“I wouldn’t take too long,” Mrs. Pennington advised her. “Your friend’s waiting.”

“Jerry?” exclaimed Angela, conscience-stricken. “Oh, I forgot. I left him sitting downstairs.”

“Father’s cross at you, Angela. He says you neglect him frightfully.”

“I was in there a minute ago,” said Angela; “what more can I do? Look, how about this? It’s a shade lighter. Do you think it will go?”

The echoing of a bell throughout the suite put breathless haste into her.

“There he is now. Tell Gil to go out and be nice to him for a few minutes, will you?”

“Gil can’t. He’s applying hot and chilled towels to himself thick and fast. You’d never believe how many he uses in the course of an evening. Our laundry bills are immense.”

“What does he think he is, the Venus de Milo?” Angela hopped wildly about on one foot. “You go, Mud. Harp on what a mistake my marriage to Dewey was. He’ll love to hear that.”

She almost pushed her mother from the room.

She had slipped into a thin excuse of a dance tunic and was powdering her back with a long-handled puff when Lyle came in, a decided frown on her face.

“Are you almost through in here?” she said coldly. “I’d like to begin to get ready too. You’ve made me very late this evening. I’m behind with all my packing.”

“How stupid,” remarked Angela. “There’s nothing to keep you from coming in to dress the same time as I do. Plenty of room for two. Is my back shiny?”

“I really can’t say,” answered Lyle with elaborate aloofness. “All I know is I can see right through you.”

“Visually or otherwise?” countered Angela.

“You’re going to a swimming meet, apparently, in that?”

“Any objections?” The pupils of Angela’s eyes flashed for an instant, then screened themselves in scornful tolerance.

“Well, jump in three times and come out twice,” Lyle cried, losing her temper.

Angela laughed derisively and spun herself out of the room, closing the door on her.

Gil came out of his own room simultaneously, the rite of the towels having finished apparently.

“Tie’s a little off,” she said, taking him in at a glance. “There, that’s better.”

“He came up to Wilder’s a few minutes after you two had left,” Gil murmured. “Bev and I were sitting there alone. He wouldn’t take our word for it that you had gone, insisted on going all over the place himself. I wish you could have seen him rampaging around. ‘Whom shall we say called?’ asked Beverly sweetly when he finally got ready to go. ‘I’ll leave my visiting card all over his face if I get hold of him,’ he said. Kind of a nice boy, isn’t he, doing one good deed like that each day?”

“Old bully,” observed Angela disdainfully, “that’s all he is.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Pennington and Wilder, standing off together a little to one side, their cigarettes at a common level, had been getting acquainted. She found him charming and perfectly qualified to take up as much of Angela’s time as she cared to let him have. Caste, you know, written all over him. The sort that could bring her in at six in the morning without causing any one any anxiety. Of course, she was married and all that, still it was a matter-of-fact age and things were to be taken matter-of-factly, it seemed.

They had been discussing Sunday.

“I hate Sunday,” Wilder asserted. “I’ve stayed up all night Saturday to make Saturday last longer. It’s never really another day, you know, until you’ve slept in between. Your state of mind changes then.”

“Saturday is a lovely yellow,” Diane informed him, “and Monday I always think of in terms of Indian brown. Not ‘Blue Monday.’ That’s a middle-class term. But I despise Sunday. It’s always the nastiest green, the color of those upholstered chairs in sleeping cars. I mean, stuffy and all that.”

“Exactly,” he assured her, and thought, “They better watch the old girl closely. How nice we look.” This last to Angela.

“Hello,” she said quietly, slipping her arm obediently through his with a little pat on the hand.

“All set?” he murmured, looking cozily down at her.

“Have my things taken down to the boat,” Angela told her mother. “I’m coming directly on board from wherever we go.”

“Please see that you leave no later than eleven-thirty,” Mrs. Pennington cautioned her earnestly. “You can invariably count on being delayed a quarter of an hour getting through the after-theater traffic, and the gangplank is raised at twelve.”

“I’ll be there all right!” laughed Angela. “Good night, everybody. See you at twelve.”

From her mother’s they went back to Wilder’s apartment again. He explained that he had to dress.

“You could have dressed while I was at Mud’s.”

“You kept me waiting around downstairs,” he reminded her.

First she thought she would wait in the machine, and then she decided to go up with him anyway, being in rather an arbitrary mood herself. He put the lights on for her, then excused himself and disappeared into his room. While she was waiting for him she poured herself a cocktail but then on second thought she let it stand untasted. It had been standing in the shaker since five o’clock, anyway.

She was unusually restless, pacing back and forth between the window and the door a dozen times, picking things up and fingering them and setting them down again without any idea of what she was doing. Finally she subsided into a sink-in couch laden with pillows that was not easy to get up from on account of its very floppiness. He came out a moment later, twirling a gardenia by its stem.

“Everything jake?” she said languidly. “Let me look at you.”

He sat down next to her, one knee bent under him as though he were going to propose marriage in the Victorian manner. They both stared moodily at nothing for a moment.

“Shall we go?” he asked absent-mindedly.

“Let’s wait a bit. I’m all in a mix-up.”

Presently he began to make love to her, absorbed in fastening one of his cuff buttons which had come apart. She liked it. She was the old Angela again, gemmed bangles from wrist to elbow. Sex was a game to while away the years from fifteen to fifty. Choose your partners!

“I thought there was nothing new under the sun until I saw you that night. And it turned out after all that you were the oldest thing in the world; you were love.”

“I was love,” she assented cheerfully. When you repeat the last word or two of their marmalade, no matter what it is, it will keep them going like well-oiled clocks.

“I’d lived my life, you bet. And I was sick of the night time and sick of the daytime and sick of the sunshine and sick of the rain. And of lacing my shoes and of the watch on my wrist that went tick-tick all day long. At times it was only laziness that kept me from going to some open window or gas jet. There I was, when you came along, smiling the way you do, talking the way you do, looking the way you do, star dust in your hair.”

“And sawdust in my head.”

“What chance did I have of not falling? Why, I’d fallen for others not half as glamorous as you. I was used to falling, my dear; it was my nature to fall by the time I met you. You were a flower thrown over a wall at me. Why shouldn’t I pick you up? Did you expect me to twiddle my thumbs and look the other way while some other chap pinned you to his lapel and walked away with you?”

She laughed ruefully at his nice phrases. “Sometimes I think that’s all a girl is good for in this world, to be worn in some one’s lapel a while so all his friends can see. ‘Nice little posie you’ve got there, Buster.’ But it’s nice to be the flower in the lapel, if you can’t be anything else. Only sometimes flowers land in ash barrels too, you know, especially when they’ve changed buttonholes a couple of times too often.”

“Big wise eyes, I’d like to see anybody try to put something over on you.”

“So would I.”

He accepted the challenge. Reaching up in back of him, he twitched the tasseled cord and the light went out. She put it on again. The conversation went on as though nothing had happened.

“What murder they commit in the name of love,” she remarked pointedly.

“You don’t know what love is. What does a mechanic know about love? You’re married but you don’t even know what a kiss is.”

He showed her.

She smiled a little remorsefully. “That was too well rounded to be genuine. You think too much of the kiss, I’m afraid, and not enough of the lips themselves.”

“Say things like that to me,” he growled, “you fire worshiper.”

“No,” she said, drawing back. “Long kisses are a mistake. Let me warn you right now, don’t ever be too perfect with a woman or else you lose her sympathy, because she likes to have the upper hand. A man is always supposed to be the amateur in making love, don’t you know that yet?”

“Who told you all these things?”

“Do you think we have to be told? Every girl is Cleopatra and Delilah, even if he’s only the grocery clerk. Sometimes the simpler the material the better the results.”

“That only shows how cold-blooded you are. With me it’s at my fingertips, I can never think twice about it.”

“What thievish fingers you must have.” She felt them coolly, clasping and unclasping them as though they were breadsticks. “You should use lemon to take those cigarette stains off your nails.”

“Never mind about changing the subject. There’s quicksilver in your eyes. You’re not a girl; you’re just a bundle of magnetism. I’d crucify myself for you.”

“I’d much rather you’d stay in circulation, you’d be more of a help to me.”

“Whoopee,” he said.

“Don’t, you take the powder off my arm. And besides, that’s getting a little too primitive.”

“I’m going to have you if it’s the last thing that happens to me in my life.”

“For pity’s sake, don’t speak of me as though I were an artichoke.”

She quickly lit two cigarettes in her mouth at once and passed one to him.

“My word, relax. You’re like a room full of tacks to me right now.”

A little later they had drifted into a discussion of inflammability, and he was telling her how susceptible he had been toward her from the very beginning.

She leaned her head back and addressed the ceiling.

“Attraction burns itself up too quickly nowadays. One look and we want to kiss. One kiss and we want to marry. A few weeks married and we want to get rid of each other.”

“Well, what do you expect us to do, lock ourselves up in glass cases and wait till we grow moldy?”

“No, I’m not saying that. But it’s like green apples. You’ve got to wait until they’re ripe before you can eat them, otherwise—”

“Who told you that, your friend the mechanic?”

“You leave my mechanic alone. Quit tearing him to pieces — oh, no, I forgot, I’m on the outs with him. Excuse me.” All this last was only make-believe, to show him when not to take liberties. She could down Dewey herself to her heart’s content if she felt like it, but it was not for him to abuse the privilege.

And when he broached the subject of marriage and an apartment in Paris after the six months’ legal residence over there that would free her from Dewey, she showed him plainly how skeptical she was about the whole thing.

“Why should I change the Downhearted Blues to the Prisoner’s Song? Would I be any better off if I padlocked myself to you? Little Red Riding Hood’s a big girl now.”

She busied herself putting the gardenia he had brought in with him into his coat.

“Let’s go,” she said, flicking the petals so that one dropped off like a tiny piece of eggshell.

“Yes, let’s,” he said wearily.

For Dewey there was no more sun or moon. She was gone. And he wanted her back again. Florence, the maid, had come back at nine, Judas-like, and was in the kitchen dissecting grapefruit pulp and sugaring it, and dipping from time to time into a magazine she had brought with her entitled Rabid Romance.

“You can go home now, Florence,” he told her. “It doesn’t look as if Mrs. Haines will be here tonight. No, I don’t want any dinner.”

Florence put on her hat and took her magazine and went.

Dewey strayed like a lost thing from room to room. In her room the lights were still burning the way she had left them two hours before. Ghost lights of a vanished episode. Perfume still hung about the skeleton-like dressing table, bereft of all its toiletries and dolls. But in a drawer he found a pink silk stocking with a small hole in its heel, and in her desk the blur of her writing was still on the blotter, and there was a box of gold-tipped cigarettes she had overlooked, with one missing from the top layer. And on the floor lay an apricot velour powder puff the size of a pancake.

She had gone from other places like this, from her home, and then later from the hotel, leaving just such flotsam of her personality behind. She was a gypsy, didn’t seem to care.

And in the living room, forlorn, he conjured up the memories that the place was spattered with. This was where they had put her down when she fainted that night of the party, and over there was where she had stood, one knee on the piano bench, whispering something to Gil, and here was where she had knelt to him in the fur coat, then had got angrily up again and kicked it with her foot.

And all the little gold and crystal grapes on the cushions, each one a tear now. And finally, coincidence of coincidences, laying a hand upon the radio, it was on before he realized it, and the very air seemed to mock him. For it was Angela’s song and his, by right of a hundred rose-lit evenings, dyed with their whispers and caresses, woven into their past. “Mem’ries I recall of all your pretty little love tales—” There was a dull impact and a blue spark, and a tinkle of glass, and the song had fled, like Angela, like love, like confidence, like everything else in this life.

He covered his face with his hands and no one saw him cry.

He went home to the flat where his mother was living with Margie and Margie’s husband now. Margie had become very orchidaceous since her marriage. Patches at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Black chiffon lingerie. A perfume called Suivezmoi, Jeune Homme. When any one asked her what its name was she said: “It’s... um... er... now — it’s in a green bottle.” Straightening the hang of an earring with both hands, she would tell you: “When I first began to take regular baths (oh, yes, I’m so used to them now I couldn’t do without them) I used to mix five or six different salts in the water. Now I only use one at a time, because they eat the enamel off the tub. Sure, didn’t you know that?”

“You probably needed all six of ’em in the beginning,” commented her mother.

Dewey came in and pushed his hat far back on his head and slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket, which tightened the jacket around his hips and made him seem arrogant. He wasn’t feeling exactly arrogant, though.

“Angela’s left me,” he said.

“No!” piped Margie incredulously, “go on!”

“I knew it would come sooner or later,” remarked his mother, utterly dolorous, and folding her hands in her apron. “Ye can believe me.”

“Moly Hoses!” exclaimed Gaffney, looking up for a minute from his favorite racing form.

Dewey leaned against the wall, his hat still far back on his head, his heels dug forward into the rug, toes slightly tilted up.

“She went away this afternoon. I spoke to her over the phone two hours ago. Then she came back while I was out and cleared all her things out. It don’t look as if she’d come back now any more. Through with me, I guess.”

“All I can say is, it’s not much of a square deal, walking out on you like that,” commented Margie. “What do you suppose she’ll do?” she asked, eager to establish a precedent in her own mind.

“I don’t know,” he went on in the same heart-brokenly indifferent monotone, standing there like a meal sack against the wall.

“Never mind, Dewey,” said his mother, “maybe you’re better off this way. What’re you going to do about the place?”

She addressed Margie in an access of compassion: “Left the apartment on his hands and every thin’. A fine bird she was.”

“We would’ve been behind on next month’s rent anyhow.” Dewey’s voice rose querulously.

“You come here with us then, Dewey,” said Margie emphatically.

“Sure,” seconded the husband.

And Dewey, named after that hero of 1898, stood there looking very pathetic and feeling very sorry for himself. Suddenly he turned to the wall and buried his face in the crook of an arm and his shoulders twitched spasmodically. And his sister, turning to her husband, murmured poignantly, “Go over and say something to him, can’t you, you fool?”

Gaffney stood up, scratched the back of his neck, and approached diffidently. He rested a brotherly hand on the mourner’s heaving shoulder.

“What do you care?” he said consolingly. “They’re like street cars, another one’ll be along pretty soon.”

But Dewey’s mother was made of sterner stuff, “Snap out of it, son,” she said. “Be a man. If you let her walk away from you like that thin you deserve to lose her. Do ye think whimpering will bring her back? Nivver in the wide world. What kind of a husband are you, anyway, letting her gad all over the town with some other man? Be asha-amed of yourself, be asha-amed.”

She worked on him until, goaded to a passionate energy, he threw off the blues at last, and pulling himself together, stood facing them, hot-eyed and resentful.

“I’ll kill him,” he scowled.

“Don’t kill him,” advised Margie dryly; “cramp his style, that’s all.”

“If you need any help—” offered Gaffney.

“Help, hell. I’m going to find her if it takes me all night. I’ll hunt from Harlem to the Battery and from the East River to the Hudson, and if I don’t catch up to them it’s because they’re not in New York any more.”

And he pushed his hat off his head, swept it on again, and went out.

The boat was due to sail in ten minutes and every one but Angela was on board. It was one of those fleecy April nights with the pin-prick moon boring its way through eternities of silverish mist like a burning glass. The dirty harbor water glared like quicksilver. It hurt the eyes to look at it. The world-famous sky line, now merely a blurred leaden outline looming in the background, fluctuated as though seen through billows of smoke.

Five minutes to twelve and no Angela. Mr. Pennington has been put to bed in his stateroom, and is sitting there with cotton in his ears, dreading the imminent blast of the steam whistle that will leave him quivering for half an hour afterwards. The very bored young college man that is acting as a companion to him these days sits there by the bedside thinking there ought to be cotton in Mr. Pennington’s nostrils as well, that is, cotton soaked in chloroform. He catches a glimpse of Lyle, in a yellow neckcloth, chatting with her mother outside the door, and immediately is less and less bored. Lyle is conscious of him, too, and she smiles, without the smile bearing any relation to what she is saying.

Then there is Mrs. Pennington — Diane — in ecstasies of trepidation, who having lost all sense of direction since she first came on board, glances anxiously out toward Jersey City from time to time, thinking it to be Manhattan.

“Lyle, have you seen her yet? Where’s Gil?”

“Not since early in the evening, Mother. Gil’s down in one of the staterooms breaking the law with two other fellows. I wish you’d tell him not to throw the bottles into the water. Some one may notice it.”

Two to twelve and still no Angela. Mrs. Pennington trying to be sociable through it all, finds it increasingly difficult to keep her mind on what she is saying. “Yes, it is lovely over there in spring. My, indeed, yes. What can have happened to the child? I’ll go mad. Yes, we expect to remain two to three years. Mr. Pennington’s health, you know. Much better, thank you so much. Lyle, can’t you persuade Gil to step off the boat a moment and ring up? She may have been taken ill somewhere.”

“Mother, I wish you’d stop fussing me. Gil’s locked himself in with his friends and they’re singing indecent songs through the transom. I wouldn’t go near there for the world. If Angela misses this boat she can take the next.”

The water at the ship’s sides began to churn like stale beer. Then a long mournful blast of the steamer’s whistle, repeated twice, announcing that Angela had missed the boat.

“There go the planks,” said Lyle.

“And there goes Angela’s Paris divorce,” said her mother, weeping gently.

He had gone directly to her mother’s sanctuary at the hotel, expecting to find her there without fail. Instead he found the corridors choked with luggage piled high ready for departure and the condition the rooms themselves were in would have made the war zone look like a landscape garden by comparison. Every one had already gone to the boat but Florence, whom he discovered whistling merrily to herself in one of the rooms. She had stayed behind to wind up Angela’s packing for her.

“Where’s my wife?” said Dewey, breaking in on her in the midst of her preparations.

She looked up from behind a vermilion-lacquered hatbox. “She left here at about eight o’clock,” she said. “That was the last I saw of her.”

Suddenly he struck out and fastened onto her wrist.

“Quit stalling,” he said. “You were here with her at the time. You must have been in on what she intended doing.”

“Uff, my wrist,” she said, writhing unsuccessfully in an attempt to free herself. “Now you can’t do that. Take your hands off me.”

“Yes, I’m likely to, ain’t I?” he said, kicking the hatbox out of the way.

“All I know is she’s leaving on the twelve o’clock boat with the rest of them.”

“Not so you can notice it, she isn’t. Where’d she go?”

“Leave me alone, I tell you. If you break my wrist I’m going to sue you. I’m not your wife; you can’t treat me that way.”

“Come on, cough it up.”

“I heard her say they were going up to Sunshine’s because there’s an early show there and she wanted to get away on time.”

“Sunshine’s, eh? What’d she have on? Oh, yes, you do. You helped her dress, what’s the matter with you?”

Florence did her best to concentrate, much distracted by the unconscious tightening of his grip on her wrist. Once his sister Margie had nearly stifled with impatience because he couldn’t seem to distinguish the various cuts and colorings of women’s clothes. What he would have given right now only to have that faculty of hers! At that, the few words that Florence mumbled stuck in his memory for months and years.

“It was this candy-red,” she said, “with like diamonds down the sides.”

He flung her wrist down abruptly, like the handle of a broom. She blew her breath on it and rubbed it furtively with her other hand and her womanly dignity, long held in abeyance, came to her aid.

“Is that any way to treat a lady?” she demanded crossly. “I quit. I ain’t going to work for you no more.”

But all he said was, “It was this candy-red, with like diamonds down the sides.” And then he rushed downstairs and jumped into his cab.

The Sunshine had a long striped awning like a peppermint tunnel in front of its door. It was one of those places where you dance on actual mirrors and eat your licorice sherbet over living goldfish swimming under the glass table tops and dying right and left in the tepid electric-lighted water. Whoever lives through the fish episode and has enough pep left after he has seen them suffocate to get up and go out on the floor, is apt to turn an ankle on the looking-glass before the evening is through. And whoever gets away with both goes into bankruptcy the next day anyway, so it’s one of those things at which you can’t win.

While Angela and Wilder, lingering over the bluish flames that hovered above their cognac coffees, listened to six feet of tenor on an accommodatingly bent knee busily strumming a banjo while an interminable snake dance of half-clad beauties passed before him chanting the finale of the after-dinner revue, a taxi drove up outside with its little green flag bent down in refusal of all fares, although there was no one in it but the driver. Then the flare of a match, grape-pink, against the bellying side of the awning while Dewey and the doorman stand around and exchange confidences.

“How’s business in there to-night?”

“Packed. Standing room only; every table engaged since five o’clock day before yesterday. Going to enlarge the place next week.”

Dewey looks all around, up the street and down the street. Sees nobody. Takes out a ten dollar bill, slowly, almost one feather of the eagle at a time.

“What’s this for?” says the doorman, finding it one moment in his hand and the next in the pocket of his long gold-braided overcoat.

“There’s a couple in there now. They’ll come running out in about half an hour and ask for a taxi in a hurry. See that I get them, will you? I’ll be across the street.”

“What do they look like?” says the doorman, fingering an edge of the ten dollar bill to see whether it’s still in his pocket.

“She’s in this candy-red, with like diamonds down the sides.” Swan-song of a daughter of the Ritz.

Then he crosses over to his machine and waits there, a new and different kind of stage-door Johnnie.

Inside meanwhile, with the pink, white and green after-dinner mints had come regrets and thoughts of Dewey and various devices of a woman’s mind when it isn’t sure what it wants. She had three crying fits over him, one at eleven-forty, one at eleven-forty-two, and one at eleven-forty-five, ascribing them to the goldfish, who were giving up the ghost in increasing numbers as time went on.

“No,” remarked Wilder. “It isn’t these fish you’re crying about; it’s that other fish.”

“Be a little kind,” she said crossly. “I’m not exactly doing a vaudeville for your benefit.”

He must have thought she needed the coup de grace Gil had mentioned. At any rate he gave it to her.

“I suppose you know he spends his evenings driving a taxi around town.”

“Dewey does?” She was incredulous.

“Gil rode with him one night last week. No doubt he has his pedigree displayed under isinglass the way the law requires. How does that strike you?”

He took out a pocket notebook the size of a postage stamp and turned the leaves with his nail.

“Gil took his license number. It ought to be easy for you to verify it.”

“Thank you,” she said mechanically, “I don’t care to verify it.”

She saw him again as she had first seen him in the car. Flirt-proof “Oscar” staring straight ahead with that keen chin of his thrust forward, shining visor and glistening puttees. “Where to, miss?”

She saw him the night he came to the cabaret and took her home. The first kiss out there in the early morning, with the trees like drowsy feather fans slowly waving to and fro. She saw him that night at the Chinese restaurant, trying to dance with her and having a lot of trouble turning corners. And the two of them eating strawberries under electric light in that little lunch room up in Connecticut and holding hands under the counter. Sad sweet echoes of things he had said haunted her, turning her heart inside out: “I wanted love ’cause all the other fellows had it; I wanted some one to go to the movies with on Saturday night.”... “A girl like you makes a fellow mighty glad a girl like you came along.”... “Leave the chandeliers up; they look nice, like icicles.”...

The band played on, the dancers danced, the goldfish died, but who cared? Cold little needles of regret went shivering through her. “Mem’ries I recall of all your love tales, your pretty little love tales—”

She sat there brooding, and this is the story as it ran through her head: Once there was a little girl named Angela, and all she was good for was to spend money. And her baby was out working for her night after night, but he didn’t say a word about it because he didn’t want to hurt her pride. Did she give him credit? Not much. Instead of that she accused him of going the rounds and she left him to get a divorce. Now what would you do with a girl like that? Isn’t boiling in oil a darned sight too good?

“I’m going back,” she said, “if he’ll have me back.”

“No, you’re not,” said Wilder. “You’ve just got time to make that boat. Things’ll look different in Paris.”

“What kind am I anyway, to do what I’ve done to him? I’ll never have any luck if I don’t go back to my Dewey.”

“Blah,” he said. “I’ll give you a little jade luck piece that comes from Siam. Go to Paris. Get your divorce like other women. And then you’ll see what a difference it’ll make. You’ll have your cake and you’ll eat it too.”

“I don’t want cake. I’ve found out there’s nothing sweeter than just plain everyday bread. When he looks at you with those green-blue eyes, what does all the money in the world matter?”

And this, naturally, was no lullaby as far as Wilder was concerned.

“So you’re going to throw yourself away all over again? Well, there’s no bigger fool than a woman who thinks she’s in love.”

“I’d give everything I have to be back where I was yesterday,” she admitted.

He held a wafer of gold between his thumb and forefinger, his face a study in pessimism. “You’ve had your way. It’s twelve o’clock.”

“Thank God,” she said fervently. “I’ve missed the boat. I’ll cable Mud and explain everything to her. The sooner I get it over with the better. Come on,” jumping up and forcing her way out through the crowd.

“Ah, a table at last!” said sixteen or seventeen different people at once.

“Quick, the check!” said Wilder, making the waiter fill it out at a trot down the carpeted entry.

“Your hat, sir,” wailed the two blondes, leaning out of their booth. “Well, can you beat that!” they chorused.

He reached the sidewalk just behind Angela, who had not even brought her wrap out with her.

“A taxi, captain, we’re in a hurry,” he said.

The doorman took one look at Angela’s unmistakable candy-red, then leaned out and signaled Dewey, who couldn’t see them from where he was. He swung around to the canopied entry and drew up but instead of throwing the door of the cab open for them he jumped down and sent eight hours of accumulated ill-temper crashing between Wilder’s eyes. It was the most beautifully rhythmic thing imaginable, from his very first throwing in of the brakes to Wilder’s going flat on his back in a pose of utter abandon with arms and legs flung apart. All in swift, incisive curves. Ruth St. Denis should have been there. She would have appreciated it.

“Dewey!” bleated Angela in awe, “why didn’t you tell me you had a job?”

“You didn’t think I was out picking violets now, did you?” he breathed heavily, staring down at Wilder, who had gone into the never-never land.

He started to brush his hands disdainfully when he was interrupted. The doorman tried to hold him by the shoulder, at the same time blowing his whistle a blue streak. Dewey caught it in his hand and pulled it away from him, and the cord that went with it around his neck snapped in two. Whereupon the doorman turned and ran inside, either to get a new whistle or else to get more doormen.

Wilder had lifted his head and was pressing a hand to his eye, although his shoulders were still flat on the sidewalk. The gardenia had gone all to pieces and he didn’t look so debonair any more.

“I told you what I’d do to you,” said Dewey sullenly, thrusting a thumb toward him, “and I meant it.” And he swung himself back onto the driver’s seat, let out the clutch, and puttered down the street, supremely indifferent to the havoc he left behind him.

Angela stood there, as motionless as though she were a gorgeous red plant growing up through some crack in the tiled pavement. She looked at Wilder, prostrate, purple-eyed, with his tie off at an angle and white petals flecking his shoulders. To be a flower in his lapel and have that happen to you? No, never. She seemed to see herself kicking her heels an an immense goblet half filled with champagne and diminutive devils dancing gleefully around her. She seemed to see herself old and green-eyed and gazing at herself in a maze of mirrors, only to watch her creasy lard-like face turned into a grinning death’s head, traces of rouge still tinting the polished cheek bones. She thought of what she herself had once said: “Flowers that change buttonholes a couple of times too often land in the ash barrel.”

She turned and looked after Dewey, the little red stop light that was all there was left of him by now. There went the ghost of her youth and she must overtake it and not be left behind. They had mingled their breaths as on immutable crystal and woven dreams together. They were fated; one veil covered them both.

A great horror of being left alone out in the night overtook her. And then, unaccountably, she started to run after him, crying, “Dewey, wait! Dewey, take me with you!” and got her silver chiffon hosiery all flecked with mud and got carbon monoxide in her eyes and nostrils, yet didn’t seem to care, didn’t seem to care about anything but catching up with him. For family, Paris, divorce, and Wilder had all been knocked squarely out of the picture by that one breezy uppercut of his. Generations of hothouse culture had gone for nothing and he was just her man after all. It must have been love all over again.

And she wondered whether he was going to run her all the way home like this. And just when it seemed as though she would lose him in the distance, her gold kid slippers being what they were, a “blessed ijjy darling of a red light,” as she called it later, shone out at the next corner and Dewey’s machine had to stop dead on the instant and she caught up to him, panting and staggering and already bedraggled by one short block of running after him. She had a weak but triumphant air about her, as though she had got to where she wanted after all.

“Dewey, how could you be so mean? I wanted to tell you something—”

But just as she was about to jump in beside him he held his arm across the seat, stiffly, like a bar, and she couldn’t get past.

“Thought you said you were going to Europe? Well, go ahead, why don’t you? What d’ya come running after me for?”

A policeman came over, attracted by the “candy-red with like diamonds” standing in the middle of the street without any coat over it.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded gruffly.

“He won’t take me home,” said Angela immediately. “I’m his wife and he won’t let me ride with him.”

Dewey gave her a look of outraged dignity.

“Get in and clear out of here,” said the policeman, “or I’ll give both of yiz a ticket.”

“Fresh thing,” mumbled Angela piously, trying hard to curry favor with Dewey, but at the same time keeping her remarks discreetly under her breath. “You’d think he owned us body and soul.”

She had climbed in, meanwhile, edging as close to him as she dared. The light changed back to green again, so they went on, the policeman standing looking after them menacingly, no doubt fully expecting Dewey to turn around and try to throw her bodily out of the car.

The first two or three blocks went by in a mirage-like silence and self-consciousness.

“Oh, Dewey,” she ventured, “that was the nicest uppercut!”

“It should have been,” he answered; “I’ve been saving it since four o’clock this afternoon.”

“Dewey, I think you’re wonderful,” she sighed fervently, slipping an arm through his.

“You didn’t think so twenty-four hours ago. Funny how quick you change your mind.”

“I’m a woman, Dewey.”

And Dewey, a little bitterly and a little tenderly too, his one rebuke: “You’re a fool, honey.” Forgiveness and remonstrance both.

She bit her lip. No wounded pride, nothing like that. She was contrite, worshipful almost.

“I am a fool, Dewey. But don’t let me make a fool of myself any more.” Thinking to herself, “A man can make a fool of himself and there’s something almost noble about it, but a woman makes a fool of herself and she’s just cheap.” She threw her arms about him and pressed her lips to his for a moment. “It’s got to be you, Dewey, no two ways about it.”

“It’s about time you were finding that out,” said Dewey, much more cynical on the surface than he actually was at heart.

She looked at him adoringly. “My husband,” she thought. For the first time it meant something to her. “Your world is going to be my world, and my world yours.” It takes two to make a bargain, but when one of them happens to be a girl the outcome is never in doubt for very long. She knew he was as good as won already. Lamplight and Love Tales and a little judicious stroking of the nape of the neck where there are only stunted blue dots for hair would do the rest. Her tired eyes began to droop. She went on formulating harmless little plans awhile and before she knew it she had fallen asleep.

He turned around and looked at her, there, next to him on the front seat. A strand of her soft blond hair stirred in the wind. He brushed it back, keeping one hand on the wheel. He took his cap off and set it gently on her head. She was a chauffeur’s wife “for keeps” now. He bent down and softly kissed her, and as he looked at her his eyes shone with the sort of fire that never burns up and never dies out but is there to stay.

Her eyes half opened, like a kitten whose ears you tickle, and she smiled up at him dreamily and murmured “I knew you would,” like that night he had first kissed her long ago. Then she went back to sleep again with a little broken sigh. And he never said a word but went right on driving as though it didn’t matter to him in the least whether she were asleep or awake — but his heart knew better.