Children of the Ritz

Chapter Nine

Several months of morbid unhappiness followed for both of them. Once Angela had driven them from her home the subject of Dewey’s people was never mentioned again between them. Other bones of contention, however, arose to take the place of that one. Chief of these was Angela’s unfailing extravagance, or from her point of view, his continual bickering over money matters.

As each succeeding bill of hers met with a storm of protest from him, it began to dawn on Angela that the money he had won was perhaps less than she had chosen to believe. To her it had always been a mountain of gold shimmering vaguely in the back of her mind. Dewey, to her, was no more than the goose who had laid the golden egg. The golden egg was charming and came in quite handy in one’s life, but as for the goose — well, a goose was no bird of paradise, especially when it couldn’t dance, couldn’t play bridge, couldn’t wear a stiff shirt front without bulging, couldn’t do any number of things that one’s brother and one’s friends had been brought up to do from the very cradle.

Once a friend of Gil’s who was calling on them asked him more or less affably, “What fraternity were you at college, Mr. Haines?”

And Dewey answered complacently, “Me? I went to night school.”

This, mind you, in front of her. She had prayed for the floor to open up beneath her feet and swallow her whole.

Afterwards, in the heat of their quarrel about this, he said: “What do I care about that college snob or about any of your brother’s friends? Let them think what they please.”

“Yes, but what about me?” cried Angela, slapping her chest excitedly. “How do you suppose I feel when I catch them winking to each other when your head’s turned? Did it ever strike you that a wife wants some one that her friends will look up to?”

“Look up to!” he scoffed. “Those parlor lizards, those teacup Annies — are you worried about them, do you mean to say? I’d be ashamed to admit they were my friends if I were you.”

“It’s no use arguing with you,” she said wearily; “you’re on an entirely different plane.” And then from the door, trying to flick him back into resentment, she turned and said, “You don’t even know what that means, do you? Think it over.”

And so Angela, after the manner of the fable, while slowly killing her goose with unkindness, expected the supply of golden eggs to continue indefinitely. The arrival of a matchless fur coat in her name one evening put an end to them altogether.

“Dewey,” she said, “like it on me?” The way had been paved by caresses, caresses that neither of them found comfort in. She had turned on only the softest lights a little earlier in the evening, hazy lights of romance that blurred the outlines of things as much as a fire in a glowing fireplace would; the radio, turned to a whisper, was playing Love Tales as though it were made of threads of spun gold. The stage had been set to perfection. She felt sure no man could resist this combination of witcheries.

She paraded back and forth before him in the pearly pink light, the furs gathered about her, pointing her toe as she had seen professional models do, softly rubbing her cheek against the rich collar that stood up over her head.

He asked her how much it was, which was the husband in him getting the better of the lover.

“Four thousand.”

“Oh, Angela,” he said like a little boy, “take it off.”

“Ah, Dewey,” she crooned, standing with her back to him and examining her nails as though she had never seen them before.

Without saying anything more he went back to the magazine he had been looking through.

“Put your hand on it,” she urged. “Feel how soft it is.” She seized his hand and stroked the fur with it. Her voice became drowsy, soothing, hypnotic. “Isn’t it smoo — th, isn’t it ni — ce?”

“Cut it out, Angela,” he said gruffly, breaking the spell by virtue of his matter-of-factness.

Angela’s stock of patience and blandishments was exhausted by now anyway.

“I want the fur coat,” she said, getting up from the half kneeling position she had been in, “and I’m going to get it.”

“Go ahead, get it,” he said; “you can bet I’m not going to pay for it.”

“Delightful husband you are. Well, if you won’t,” she told him darkly, “I’ll find some one else who will.”

“Woof-woof,” said Dewey imperturbably, “that’s what they all say.”

“I know some one who would be glad to make me a present of this,” she improvised, hoping to spur him on. “They’re not all like you, you know.”

“I’ll break your neck and his, both,” he answered calmly.

And the dulcet radio, as though in sarcasm, trilled, “Mem’ries I recall of all your pretty little love tales—”

Angela shut it off with a vicious snap. “Very well,” she said, discarding the coat and rolling it up like a blanket, “we’ll see about this whole business.”

“Look out, you’ll crush the fur,” he advised.

“Florence,” called Angela, ignoring him completely, “Florence. Here, put this back in the box and give it to the young man in puttees out there. It’ll have to go back. But take your time about it,” she added, very much under her breath.

Florence winked knowingly and carried it out under her arm, while Angela, flinging herself around by the shoulders like a dervish, fell into a chair so that her back was toward him and began to cry with rage and bafflement.

“You should be above that,” said Dewey, misjudging the genuineness of the upheaval. It was real enough. Her profile, white against the wine velvet of the high-backed chair, was exquisite, a cameo of torment and unrest. One upraised arm, bare from the shoulder, was bent at the elbow and clung despairingly to the top of the chair.

“Tell you what I’ll do,” he said finally, “I’ll let you have an account of your own, and then you can do what you want with it. But you don’t get a nickel on the outside, not for a whole year.”

The lifted arm dropped to her lap and she raised her head and looked at him. She became conversational almost at once.

“How much are you thinking of letting me have for a full year?”

“I’ll give you six thousand,” said Dewey, as unused to figures as she was.

Angela stopped to think, a finger at the edge of her mouth. Six thou. The coat was four thou. She would have enough left over for knickknacks.

Her heels struck the floor with a simultaneous click and she got up and went over to him.

“All right, Dew,” she said, lowering the lids of her eyes with pleasure, “it’s a go.”

“We’ll go around the first thing in the morning and see about opening a checking account,” he said. But Angela didn’t hear him; she was at the door telling the maid, “It’s all right, he can go back with it now. But have them hold it for me down at the shop because I’m coming after it in a day or two myself.”

The following day she had six thousand in the bank. Twenty-four hours later, she had the fur coat and there was two thousand left in the bank. On second thought she decided to draw this out too, and get it over with, to save herself the trouble of cashing extra checks.

One morning, Angela having chosen to breakfast in bed, a husbandly streak asserted itself in Dewey that surprised both of them. He waited outside her door, waylaid the maid with a cocked finger and a knowing wink and relieved her of Angela’s breakfast tray, which he proceeded to carry in to her himself, and much less gracefully than Florence could have done it.

“Hello, there,” he said, putting it aside on a small table and sitting down on the edge of the bed. He smelled guardedly of shaving lotion and glowed with cold water.

Angela made a shocking face and rubbed her eyes with the back of her fist. She whimpered, for no apparent reason. Then she moaned. And finally she yawned.

“My nose,” she said suddenly, covering her face with both hands. “You shouldn’t’ve looked at me.”

“What’s the matter?” he replied gallantly. But as though he understood what she meant, he proceeded to fetch a bowl brimming with powder, sat down with it between his knees, and flecked her nose with a ball of fluff.

“Put lots on,” she said, “I feel weak this morning.”

“Good show last night, eh?” he ventured.

“No, rotten show,” she contradicted. “They all talked too much.”

“Got too much on now, I’m afraid,” he remarked, beating his knees with a handkerchief.

Suddenly she twined her arms impulsively around his neck.

“You’re the boy I married, all right!”

The tray, which had been placed between them, went over with a crash. A roll went spinning along the floor, leaving a faint streak of powdered sugar behind it. They both laughed.

“I wasn’t a bit hungry,” said Angela with great dignity.

“The bedding got all the coffee.”

She squealed and jumped aside. Then carefully examining her surroundings, “Don’t fool me like that! You mean the apartment below us got all the coffee.”

He looked at her adoringly. “A girl like you makes a fellow mighty glad a girl like you came along.”

She clasped her hands, threw her head back, and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Oh, Dewey, that was cute!” she exclaimed. “Say that over again.”

They kissed each other half a dozen times in rapid succession.

“I could be crazy about you all over again,” she mumbled. An admission, though neither one of them recognized the significance of it, that her first infatuation for him was distinctly gone by now.

“Turn on the radio,” she suggested, “and let’s dance right here in the room.” And then as she watched him start across the room she suddenly remembered that he was not a very apt dancer and didn’t like it. “Oh, no,” she cried contritely, “I didn’t mean that. Anyway, my foot’s asleep, I can’t,” taking it in both hands and pretending to rub it to bring back the circulation.

He smiled to himself, probably guessing what was uppermost in her mind.

Her face became a trifle pensive. “Dewey,” she said, “I wish you could find something for yourself. I want you to be a big success some day. Something creditable.”

Dewey scratched the back of his head with his thumbnail. What did he know how to do that was creditable?

“Like—” he hedged.

“Like—” She motioned indefinitely with her hand. “Oh, I don’t know. There must be loads of things you could do.”

“Ye-es,” he said uncertainly, looking down at the floor.

“I want to see your name up on a glass door,” she asserted vehemently.

“Most wonderful girl there ever was.”

“Most wonderful boy.”

And at other times, “blue hours,” they call them.

“Angela, why do we quarrel?”

He’s waiting for just an edge of a smile, just a downcast look of the eyes, even just a pout, to take her in his arms and whisper silly little words close to her silly little ear. But Angela’s reaction freezes everything at the roots.

“You never try to please me. I used to imagine that when I was married, every day there’d be a new surprise for me. A little white Pomeranian hidden in my bathroom. A little sport model waiting downstairs at the door for me. A flexible diamond bracelet around my napkin at the breakfast table. Or even just a telegram from downtown in the middle of the afternoon: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ So that I’d know you hadn’t lost interest altogether. Instead of that, what do I get? Not a thing. You’ve been promising for six weeks to take me to The Follies. Now it’s closed and I’ve missed it. I’ve hinted and hinted about that solitaire and each morning when I put my hand under my pillow there’s nothing there.”

“No,” said Dewey stiffly, “that’s too much like buying your love.”

“You’re some husband. I’d rather have a police dog for all the interest you show around here.”

“What would you like me to do, turn somersaults in bed?”

“Then you wonder why we quarrel when you talk to me like that.”

“Go ahead, cry.”

“Just for that I won’t!”

“I’m glad I haven’t got your disposition.”

“I bet you wish you did have it, you wouldn’t be such a heel.”

“Ah, forget it, woman—”

“Don’t call me woman. I’m your wife, remember that, young man.”

“Who’s saying anything? Give us a rest.”

“I’ll give you one all right, and a good long one, with alimony every sixty days. It won’t be so sweet then.”

“Oh, no?”

“Oh, no!”

“If you have to raise your voice like that I’m going out.”

And usually a moment after the door has shut between them like an explosion and brought down specks of plaster from the ceiling comes the impulse to run back to her and throw your arms around her, with a wistful little murmur, “Angela, why do we quarrel?”

One evening, an evening that had threatened to be as colorless as all their evenings together were becoming, the telephone rang. The maid was busy at the moment so Dewey answered it. Angela, in her room with the door open, heard him say: “Yes, just hold the wire a second.” He came to the door and advised her, rather ungraciously, she thought, “Some friend of yours wants to talk to you.”

“Why didn’t you find out who it was?” she said prettily.

“She’ll hang there all night before I get on the line again,” he vowed.

She went to it herself. “You’re so full of favors, aren’t you?” she cast back at him bitterly.

“Hello. Yes, this is Mrs. Haines,” smooth as honey.

“I wonder if you remember me,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Lorraine Driscoll. I was with Gil that night at the Frivolity.”

“Oh, yes. How do you do?” Angela wondered what she wanted. “So nice of you to ring up. How is Gil, by the way?”

Lorraine’s voice betrayed a lack of enthusiasm. “I haven’t seen much of him lately. I’m afraid he’s gone back on me.”

“Oh, no,” Angela laughed politely, “that couldn’t be.”

“Do you skate?” asked Lorraine.

“Why, yes,” said Angela, wondering what was coming next.

“I rang up to find out if you’d care to go with me to-night. I have tickets for Greenland. Ever been there? No? Well, you’ll like it, and if you’ll come, there’s a surprise waiting for you.”

“I have no skates,” complained Angela.

“You should worry,” said Lorraine, “you’ll rent a pair. Now, don’t waste too much time powdering your nose. Hurry on down as fast as you can.”

“My nose powders itself,” laughed Angela. “By the way, shall I bring my husband?”

Lorraine became querulous at once. “Do you have to take him with you every place you go?” she demanded.

“Why, of course not. Only I thought that maybe—”

“I’ll go in a while,” announced the impatient Lorraine. “Give your name to the man at the door. He’ll let you by. I’ll look for you on the ice. Don’t take an age, now. ’By.”

“ ’By,” said Angela.

In twelve minutes she had donned a boyish jersey with a standing collar up to the ears, a béret, and a short sport coat that wrapped itself around her like a blanket around an Indian. She dabbed red on her mouth, put out the lights, and came out of her room.

“Do you skate?” she asked Dewey, who was reading a magazine under a mauve and orange lamp.

He looked at her a moment before answering. “No,” he said finally.

“What’s the matter, can’t you remember whether you skate or not?” she asked impatiently. “Does it take you all night to answer? It’s obvious enough. You don’t dance, you don’t skate, what do you do? I’m going down to Greenland for a couple of hours.” This last from the foyer.

“Before you go, be sure to fix the door for me so I can get in,” she breathed to the maid.

Downstairs, the hall boy called a taxi to the door for her. “G’night, Mrs. Haines,” he said.

“Good night,” she answered mechanically, impatient at the law of civility which requires an answer for every casual greeting.

Inside the taxi she turned on the light in the corner opposite to where she sat and went over her tightly pursed mouth once more with a lipstick as thick as her wrist. The taxi lurched in turning a corner, and the edge of the cube slipped. She realized she had got a little too much on. It looked magenta in the uncertain quivering light. She could fix it when she got there. What were these damned taxis good for anyway? She switched the bulb off, much to the driver’s relief. (He had been afraid the battery would run out. People didn’t usually use lights in his taxi.) She wondered what Lorraine’s surprise would turn out to be. Perhaps she and Gil had got married. That would be just like him, without a cent to his name. Lorraine had said she hadn’t seen him lately, though. That might have been simply to throw dust in her eyes. Oh, well. “Should worry,” she thought.

She got out and paid the driver. The sidewalk was the color of diamonds under an enormous electric sign consisting of a red ball on a white field. She went inside to the steam-heated lobby. A group of young girls with skates were standing waiting for some one. Several of them had on khaki trousers and boys’ checked lumber jackets.

“Mrs. Haines,” said Angela to the attendant at the door. “Is there a pass for me?”

“Go right in, Mrs. Haines.”

Angela went straight to the dressing room to repair her marred lip. She had seen several people look at it. She reshaped it with the corner of her nail and gave her face a fresh coating of powder. She emerged from her coat like a fourteen-year-old in the jersey. “And here I’ve been married five months,” she told herself. And again, taking off the béret and smoothing her hair, “It’s a shame to waste all this on Lorraine Driscoll.”

Coming out of the dressing room, she rented a pair of skates at a little electric-lighted booth, and a young man, so to speak, who might have been a senior at high school, offered his services in putting them on for her. She saw no reason for not letting him if he felt that way about it. But when once the skates were on, she found it no easy matter to dispense with him. He insisted on accompanying her out on the ice. She felt like saying, “Does your mother know you’re out?” Suddenly she forgot him. That must be Lorraine over there, in the blue. She was waving to her. And who was that she had with her?

“Excuse me,” said Angela to the high school boy. “See you later,” and she skated across to them. Before she was halfway over her knees began to get wobbly, and it wasn’t on account of the skates either. No use pretending she didn’t recognize him. It was Jerry Wilder. And because she was so gone about him in her heart, it made her all the more shy. She turned all her attention to Lorraine and hardly had time for him, seemingly.

“Hello, Angela. How’s Angela?”

“Hello, Lorrie.” She took both her hands in hers and swung them to and fro. “Awf’ sweet of you to call me up to-night.”

Lorraine babbled meaninglessly. “Oh, nothing of the sort. I just thought it would be nice to have you with us—”

“How do you do?” he said.

All Lorraine’s small talk vanished into air at this point, as though it had been nothing more than a smoke screen to the evening’s real purpose.

“How do you do?” murmured Angela.

Their fingertips met for the fraction of a second. Sometimes, the smallest things seem out of all proportion to their importance.

“Let’s skate,” said Lorraine, taking them each behind an elbow, “I’m getting chilly standing here like this.”

They both rode up with her in the taxi afterwards. Dutifully, with a rebellious grinding of the teeth against Dewey, she had insisted on going straight home from the rink. Both she and Lorraine had shouted down his suggestion to take in a club of some sort, crying they weren’t dressed for it. Lorraine though, she noticed, had not been overenergetic in her protest.

“You make me sick,” the disgusted Lorraine growled afterwards as they seated themselves in the cab. “Always doing a Cinderella at the last minute.”

“You go with him,” urged Angela under her breath, “and I’ll ride on up by myself.”

“It isn’t myself I care about,” protested Lorraine hypocritically. “I can go any night in the week. It’s you I’m thinking of.” Which wasn’t true. She knew Wilder wouldn’t dream of taking her without Angela.

He got in and sat down between them, Lorraine shifting accommodatingly to one side.

“Then this is the end of the party, Angela?” he said.

“It looks that way, Jerry. Sad but true.”

He pushed back the glass slide facing them and directed, “Cathedral Parkway.”

Angela gave a little sigh.

“Let’s go to my place first,” murmured Lorraine under cover of a big eiderdown powder puff. “I can lend her one of my dance dresses.” She nudged him encouragingly.

He leaned forward and changed the address.

Angela, perfectly aware of what was going on, sat there without saying a word.

He had skated exquisitely. Not this razor-edged corner clipping much doted on by callow youths, but real grace and speed combined. And once she had stumbled more or less purposely, and his arm had gone about her and tightened there and she thought of Dewey regretfully. The way you think of some one you don’t love any more when you’re beginning to love some one else.

The taxi stopped and they got out.

“Come up to the apartment for a few minutes,” said Lorraine, standing on the sidewalk and straightening her coat.

“Who told you to do this?” Angela reproved, without being really angry.

“I’m full of little tricks like that,” said Lorraine, emboldened now that Angela failed to show resentment.

“Come on, it won’t bite you.”

Angela hesitated.

Lorraine, who was by way of being a strategist, cut the Gordian knot. “You wait for us in the taxi,” she told Wilder. “The poor child thinks we’re trying to lead her astray or something.”

It worked. With a laugh to cover her embarrassment, Angela followed Lorraine into the enormous building, whose upper stories seemed to lose themselves in moon mist.

They rose in a mosaic-ceilinged, slightly perfumed elevator fifteen, eighteen floors above the ground, without a word between them the entire way. Lorraine, slightly nervous, had had her key ready from the eleventh floor upward. They stopped at last and came out into the open. Stars were scattered overhead like seed pearls and the city had dropped out of sight.

“I have a bungalow apartment up here,” related Lorraine, unlocking a door, “I’ve got this part of the roof all to myself. Comf’table? Say, I wouldn’t give it up for the world.”

She ushered Angela in, and as she went around the room, lights began popping up here and there, dim blurred things swathed in silk and gauze, almond-green, apricot, flesh. There was an air of kennel-like luxury about the place.

“My maid goes home at six in the evening,” she told Angela. “I could get along better without her.”

The way she said it you suspected that she had once heard some more housewifely person say it and now used it as a cliché to give the impression of an impassioned domesticity.

She turned on a radio built into the pale green wall, and a grotesque, infinitely decadent doll occupying a niche just above it began to gesticulate the Black Bottom. She allowed Angela to see a measure or two and then turned it off, as though tired by innumerable repetitions. The doll at once subsided, her nose buried coquettishly in the ruche around her neck.

“Take y’things off,” she invited with a slovenly show of hospitality. “Be with you in a minute.”

Angela opened her coat, nothing more. Lorraine, who had gone behind a door, was making slight metallic noises with things.

“With or without?” she wanted to know.

“None for me, thanks,” answered Angela firmly.

The clinking stopped abruptly, then went ahead more or less sporadically, finally stopped altogether. There was a noiseless interval, then Lorraine reappeared, tucking back a plait of hair.

“I have something that’ll just fit you,” she declared, and proceeded to an inner room, which immediately blazed with diamond-like light.

Angela’s eye was caught by an expensively framed photograph on a small table. It was of a heavy-set handsome man in a dinner jacket and soft gray hat, pictured in the act of lighting a cigarette. Evidently his cupped hands had held an electric torch, for the face was illumined from below, supposedly by the one feeble match.

Lorraine returned, holding an orgy of glittering gold beads stitched together on silver tissue up to her shoulders to show Angela.

“Isn’t this spiffy?” she said. “Come on, get busy.”

“Whose picture is that?” asked Angela.

“My friend.”

Suddenly Angela understood the whole situation. What a fool she was to have come up here in the first place! She got up, said, “I’m going,” and walked to the door.

Lorraine threw the glorious golden dress over a chair and came hurrying after her.

“What’s th’ matter?” she pleaded. “You’re not put out about anything, are you?”

An older woman would have endeavored to be as tactful as possible in a situation of this kind, but Angela, not yet nineteen, made no secret of her feelings.

“The idea of any one like you telephoning me!” she cried. “Don’t you ever try it again, do you hear?”

Lorraine, without saying a word, crashed the door passionately shut after her guest. Angela, all aquiver with loathing at a thing she had never encountered until now, rang for the elevator and went slowly down to the street.

She found Wilder relieving his tedium by walking slowly up and down before the house. He turned the moment she appeared and came quickly back to her.

“Where’s Lorraine?” he said. “I thought she said you were going to get dressed.”

Angela glowered at him. “You expect me to wear the clothes of a woman like that?” she snapped. “I can’t think of a worse insult.”

“Hullo! What’s happened between you two?” he said, ushering her into the cab.

“You’re a man of the world,” she answered; “you probably understood her much sooner than I did. I don’t owe you any thanks for bringing us together.”

“Please don’t blame me for anything!” he protested. “I met her first through your brother, if you remember.”

She had to admit that he was right about that. Oh, Gil was a peach, you bet, running around town with every one in sight. He’d get a bullet in him one of these days.

“You’d rather go straight home, I suppose?” probed Wilder, with the air of a man exploring a barrel of gunpowder with a match.

“Rather,” said Angela shortly.

“Cathedral Parkway,” he told the driver. “I don’t blame you,” he said to her; “I’m miserably sorry it happened that way. But won’t you let me make up for it some other time? I mean, won’t you let there be a some other time as far as I’m concerned?”

“I don’t see why not,” she answered, uncordially, however.

Wilder was a Florentine when it came to strategy. “I want to explain this to your husband, as one gentleman to another,” he proceeded. “Won’t you let me meet him?”

“To be perfectly frank with you,” said Angela, mollified, “I’d rather you didn’t try to explain just this one thing. It isn’t necessary to tell all one knows, you know.” She gave him a smile, as much as to say, “I can’t be angry with you.”

“Please,” she said, “it wasn’t your fault. We won’t talk about it any more.”

He uncapped a small gold fountain pen and, under difficulties owing to the shaking of the machine, jotted something down on a card. Angela, refusing to admit to herself that she knew perfectly well what he was doing, looked out of the window, her chin on the edge of her hand.

Their good night was the most formal good night imaginable, cold-bloodedly well-bred.

“Good night. So nice. You must call us up sometime.”

The us and the tone of voice, the languid drawl, with which it was said, made it obvious that it was not a suggestion she wished him to carry out.

“Good night,” he said. “Thank you for the evening. It’s been perfectly charming.”

This latter remark, of course, arbitrarily taking no account of the difficulty with Lorraine.

In the elevator she took off her cap once more and carefully smoothed her hair. She decided she had had enough of it the way it was. She was going to let it grow in, either full length or else a three-quarter length, one of those bushy Cleopatra bobs. She felt more womanly than she ever remembered having felt before. She was asking herself a question and listening delightedly to the answer. And then a sudden spasm of remorse:

“But I can’t go ahead with him. It’s not to be thought of.”

The maid had left the door unlatched for her, as had been agreed upon between them. Dewey had gone to his room long ago. She tiptoed to her own room with her head bent as though she were listening carefully.

She shut the door and lit the lights and threw her coat off to the waist, keeping it pinned to her by the elbows. A white card fell from somewhere or other, out of one of the pockets most likely. She picked it up and read it, cocking her head at it as though she had expected it to pop out some place sooner or later in just this way.

Angela went into a brown study, fanning it thoughtfully against her teeth for a while, then put it down on the dressing table, under the eyes of Giroflé-Girofla, the doll with the mandolin.

In the morning it was still there when she sat down to her mirrors. How else? She hadn’t expected it to get up and walk away in the middle of the night, had she? She was glad it was there, and at the same time sorry. It was on her mind. She didn’t know what to do with it. Finally she went over to her desk and took out a little address book that she had had before she met Dewey. There hadn’t been many entries made in it lately. She opened it at a blank page and wrote:

Then she tore the card up and dropped the little pieces into the wastebasket, and went into breakfast feeling very deceitful and quite pleased with herself.

Dewey was looking rather pale and she noticed he hadn’t bothered to shave.

“Well, how was the ice?” he wanted to know.

“Cold and slippery,” she answered crossly.

“Thanks.” He looked at her complacently through half-veiled lashes, the sort of look a cat might give a mouse.

Angela picked up the paper, ruffled it in his face, and leaned sidewise on her elbow, pretending to read.

“What time is the last session over?” he asked presently.

“We didn’t wait for it to be over. I took Lorraine home first and then came on here. Why? What was your idea in bringing that up?” she challenged.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.”

“What’s the matter, did you run short of Gillettes?” was her remark.

“Is it very noticeable?” he said, undisturbed.

“Noticeable? I think it’s horrible.”

“Well, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to look at me.”

She discarded the paper with a great fluttering and crackling of leaves with the result that it lay all about her feet. The maid picked it up and folded it for her.

“Let me tell you one thing,” she said, “if you come in looking like that again, I won’t sit down at the table with you.”

“Can I depend on that?” he answered sardonically.

“You certainly can. I’m used to meeting gentlemen at the breakfast table, not bearded monkeys.”

She crushed the top of an egg with the flat of her knife.

“Is the breakfast table the only place you’re used to meeting gentlemen?”

Something within her grew very still at that, like a squirrel in a squirrel cage that pauses, quivering.

“What do you mean by that?” she said.

“Florence, the paper,” he said. He inclined his head toward Angela before opening it. “You’re through with it, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. She stared moodily at the closely printed sheets that covered his face as though he, and not she, were the one embarrassed.

Presently she got up, her appetite having left her, and went back to her room without saying anything. He seemed to take no notice of her departure.

In the mornings after this, he was very careful to shave and dust his cheeks with the almond-colored talcum that the men of her set commonly used. But at the same time there remained that paleness, a wanness or peakedness, more and more noticeable, as though he hadn’t had a good night’s rest in some time. Studying his face surreptitiously at times when he bent over the coffee cup, she took note of the rings under his brows and the haggard impression he gave, and it was often on the tip of her tongue to say, “Aren’t you sleeping well, Dew?” but she refrained from commenting.

One morning toward five o’clock, Angela had a headache. She couldn’t sleep. She turned on the bedlight and got up to get herself a cigarette. The aquamarine-studded gilt box on the table, in spite of its plaintive little tune, was empty when she raised the lid.

“Damn!” she said and let it fall again.

Angela was not one to deny herself anything once she had made up her mind to it, so she tiptoed to Dewey’s room to help herself to some of his. He usually had a package or two lying around on his dresser. She thought she could get them and steal out again without waking him. But when she had located the dresser in the dim light that came in from a parchment lamp two rooms away, and her hands had darted over it like a blind pianist at a muffled keyboard, and all she had managed to do was upset a bottle of bay rum, she decided that there was such a thing as being too considerate, so she turned on the lights.

She discovered three things simultaneously. First, that there were no cigarettes, secondly, that she looked frightful, as the mirror plainly showed her, and lastly, that Dewey wasn’t in there at all. This last, naturally, interested her more than either of the other two. She went over to the bed and stood looking down at it, holding the back of her hand before her mouth. The bed had not been slept in. There was not a dent in the pillow, not a crease on the blue cover with its embroidered gilt baskets.

“Dewey,” she mewed again, and turned and ran far as the door, and stood there looking out, frightened to death.

“He’s gone and left me,” came the terrifying thought, in just those words. “He’s gone away and left me.”

“Dewey,” she mewed again, and turned and ran back to the bed and stood there helplessly.

“And he didn’t say anything, didn’t say anything about it. What did I do?”

She tore the closet door open almost entirely by force of her nails, forgetting to touch the knob. Several pairs of his old shoes with the wooden trees in them confronted her in a row, the ones she had wanted to throw out so many times. How glad she was he hadn’t let her send them down in the dumbwaiter. She knelt down and cried over them, her face buried in the flats of her hands. Then she got up and stood leaning her back against the door, and a cluster of his long-suffering neckties hanging on a hook drooped down over one of her shoulders like a ribbon rosette, and she ran her hands through them again and again, and felt extremely miserable, as miserable as only the very young and the very pretty can feel on being suddenly left quite all alone.