“No,” he agreed, “but I’vebeen expecting for the last three months that some of Belle’s kinfolks would be coming here to see what sort of animal I am.”
“They wouldn’t have sent me, though,” she replied. “You can be easy on that.” They went onlong the street. Horace responded to greetings, buthe strode on with that feline poise of hers; he was aware that men turned to look after her, but in her air there was neither awareness nor disregard of it, conscious or otherwise. And again he remembered that tiger yawning with bored and lazy contempt while round and static eyes stared down its cavernous pink gullet. “I want to stop here “ she said, as they reached the drug store. “Do you have to go back to the store, or whatever it is?”
“Office,” he corrected. “Not right away.”
“That’s right,” she agreed, and he swung the doorpen for her, “you’re a dentist, aren’t you? Belle told me.”.
“Then I’m afraid she’s deceiving us both,” he angered drily. She glanced at him with her level, speculative gaze, and he added:. “She’s got the names confused arid sent you to the wrong man.”
“You seem to be clever,” she said over her shoulder, “and I despise clever men. Don’t you know any better than to waste cleverness on women? Save it for your friends.” A youthful clerk in a white jacketapproached, staring at her boldly; she asked him with contemptuous politeness to rewrap her parcel. Horace stopped beside her.
“Women friends?” he asked.
“Women what?” She stooped down, peering into a showcase of cosmetics; “Well, maybe so,” she said indifferently. “But I never believe ‘em, though. Cheap sports.” She straightened up. “Belle’s all right, ifthat’s what you want to ask. It’s done her good. She doesn’t look so bad-humored and settled down, now. Sort of fat and sullen.”
“I’m glad you think that. But what I am wondering is, how you happened to come here. Harry’s living at the hotel, isn’t he?”
“He’s opened the house again, now. He just wanted somebody to talk to. I came to see what you look like,” she told him.
“What I look like?”
“Yes. To see the man that could make old Belle kick over the traces.” Her eyeswere coldly contemplative, a little curious. “What did you do to her? I’ll bet you haven’t even got any money to speak of.”
Horace grinned a little. “I must seem rather thoroughly impossible to you, then,” he suggested.
“Oh, there’s no accounting for the men women pick out. I sometimes wonder at myself. Only I’ve never chosen one I had to nurse, yet” The clerk returned with her package, and she made a trifling purchase and gathered up her effects.“I suppose you have to stick around your office all day, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s the toothache season now, you know.”
“You sound like a college boy, now,” she said coldly. “I suppose Belle’s ghost will let you out at night, though?”
“It goes along too,” he answered.
“Well. I’m not afraid of ghosts; I carry a few around, myself.”
“You mean dripping flesh and bloody bones, don’t you?” She looked at him again, with her flecked eyes that should have been warm but were not
“I imagine you could be quite a nuisance,” she told him. He opened the door and she passed through it. And gave him a brief nod, and while he stood on the street with his hat lifted she strode on, without even a conventional Thank you or Goodbye.
That evening while he sat at his lonely supper, shetelephoned him, and thirty minutes later she came in Harry’s car for him. Andforthe next three hours she drove him about while he sat hunched into his overcoat against the raw air. She wore no coat herself and appeared impervious to the chill, and she carried him on short excursions into the muddy winter countryside, the car sliding and skidding while he sat with tensed anticipatory muscles. But mostly they drove monotonously around town while he felt more and more like a faded and succulent eating- creature in a suave parading cage. Sometimes she talked, but usually she drove in a lazy preoccupation, seemingly utterly oblivious of him.
Later, when she had begun coming to his house, coming without secrecy and with an unhurried contempt for possible eyes and ears and tongues—a contempt that also disregarded Horace’s acute unease on that score, she still fell frequently into those periods of aloof and purring “repose. Then, sitting before the fire in his living room, with the bronze and electric disorder of her hair and the firelight glowing in little red points in her unwinking eyes, she was like a sheathed poniard, like Chablis in a tall-stemmed glass. At these times she would utterly ignore him,cold and inaccessible. Then she would rouse and talk brutally of her lovers. Never of herself, other than to give him the salient points in her history that Belle had hinted at with a sort of belligerent prudery. The surface history was brief and simple enough. Married at eighteen to a man three times her age, she had deserted him in Honolulu and fled to Australia with an Englishman, assuming his name; was divorced by her husband, discovered by first- hand experience that no Englishman out of his .native island has any honor about women; was deserted by him in Bombay, and in Calcutta, she married again. An American, a young man, an employee of Standard Oil company. A year later she divorced him, and since then her career had been devious and alittleobscure, due to her restlessness. Her family would know next to nothing of her whereabouts, receiving her brief, infrequent letters from random points half the world apart. Her first husband had made a settlement on her, and from time to time and without warning she returned home and spent a day or a week or a month in the company of her father’s bitter reserve and her mother’s ready tearful uncomplaint, while neighbors, older people who had known her all her life, girls with whom she had played in pinafores and boys with whom she had sweethearted during the spring and summer of adolescence, and newcomers to the town, looked after her on the street.
Forthright and inscrutable and unpredictable: sometimes she stayed an hour motionless before the fire while he sat nearby and did not dare touch her; sometimes she lay beside him while the firelight, fallen to a steady glow of coals, filled his bedroom with looming and motionless shadows until midnight or later, talking about her former lovers with a brutality that caused him hopeless and despairing angerand something of a child’s hurt disillusion; speaking of them with that same utter lack of vanity and conventional modesty with which she discussed her body, asking him to tell her again that he thought her body beautiful, asking him if he had ever seen a match for her legs, then taking him with a savage and carnivorous suddenness that left him spent. Yet all the while remote beyond that barrier of cold inscrutability which he was never able to break downs and rising at last, again that other feline and inaccessible self and departing without even the formality of a final kiss or a Goodbye and leaving him to
