His trip to New York aroused no flicker of apprehension. He had made it clear that his interest in Celia was more than casual, but even if he were the kind of man to look into past history before committing himself—and Celia suspected coolly that he was—what could he discover? She had kept her life tightly compartmented, so that if he took the trouble to look up his distant cousin, in whom he had shown only the most perfunctory interest, he could still only be led back as far as Blanca Devlin and LADY. Blanca did not even suspect the existence of Mrs. Pond and the Hotel Alexandra; Mrs. Pond, in turn, knew nothing of the Vestrys or Mr. Tomlinson.
So Celia retired contentedly in her elegant little shell on Theodore Street. Her own particular brand of cruelty had no conception—then—of the remorseless patience with which a watcher could allow a beetle to toil up a slippery surface and let it reach the very lip before flicking it contemptuously to the bottom.
She had wronged Jules Wain in her appraisal. In that respect, she was even safer than she knew.
Like many successful men, Wain had a boundless respect for his own judgment of people. He knew, and vaguely approved the fact, that the corporation of which he was board chairman took long hard looks at would-be file clerks and, when it came to secretaries, dug into references like a terrier after rats. Well and good; that was the function of personnel departments. To suggest that Jules Wain himself go in search of supportive evidence in the case of a young woman who attracted him strongly would be to imply an intolerable slur on his powers of assessment. He would feel like a yokel furtively trying to scratch glass with a sparkling stone.
It was true that his first marriage had been a disaster from which his memory flinched even now, but just as ships’ hulls had been restructured after the Titanic, so had his views of women. He had acquired a protective shield against vivacity and dazzle, and he did not care at all for cocktail wit, which he somehow lumped in with divorcees. Widows, simply because they had outlived their husbands and this carried a lurking unpleasantness for a man who took good physical care of himself, had no appeal.
But Celia Brett, now—obviously good family; no trouble there. Attractive, clearly healthy, and . . . thoughtful. Poised. Even-tempered; not one of the ecstasy-or-despair females who lit up an evening like a rocket and could be found fizzling in a hangover the next day. When he had been in New York a week, Wain telephoned Celia. The following morning he sent her flowers.
Celia brightened the interval before his return in learning what she could about the divorce. She was growing increasingly confident, and it would be helpful to know where your predecessor had gone wrong—because as Jules had money and social position, there could be no other side of it.
She said carelessly to Barbara Wivenhoe, “It’s nice to meet a man who doesn’t go around casting the blame on his ex-wife, at least.”
“Well, Jules doesn’t actually have to, if it comes to that. I never knew her—they were living in Chicago then —but we had friends who did, and it seems that she was given to making the most appalling public scenes. Which of course wasn’t doing Jules the least little bit of good with his company,” said Mrs. Wivenhoe with critical detachment. “The polite version was that she had had a nervous breakdown, but everybody could see that the real trouble was drinking. So . . .”
Celia was not chilled at the cool expediency of such a divorce, but relieved. Something neutral like “incompatibility” would have given her no guideline at all.
The weeks after Jules’s return from New York were for Celia like walking a tightrope with no slack at all. To take even more pains with her appearance than before, to be available when he called without an air of hanging hopefully about the telephone, to pretend pleasure at events like a horse show and a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan—to do all this and still maintain her attitude of relaxed poise was a severe strain. She knew that it was going to be worthwhile on an evening when Wain, having kissed her with more than his usual warmth, asked her to lunch at his home the next day to meet the widowed sister-in-law who acted as his hostess.
Up until now, in what was a considered approach rather than a courtship, they had moved on neutral and uncommitted ground, in the company of an age group younger than Wain’s, older than Celia’s, which assimilated them both with ease. Celia knew of the existence of Adelaide Corliss Wain, and at once sensed an enemy in the person of an older woman so comfortably entrenched. Accordingly, she dressed and readied herself the next day with the care used so infinitely long ago in preparing to meet a strange girl who had an apartment to share.
Even aside from the fact that he owned it, as a convenient way of fife for a bachelor who was absent from his domain a good deal of the time, Wain’s apartment had the spacious and settled air of a luxurious home. A uniformed maid opened the door, and Celia, piloted lightly by Jules’s hand under her arm, had a confused impression of heavy rugs, the quiet gleam of mirrors, paneling set here and there with lighted paintings, and ultimately Mrs. Wain, ensconced in a pale-blue brocade chair.
Mrs. Wain, a fragile, handsome, gray-haired woman a few years older than her brother-in-law, smiled through introductions, apologized charmingly for her infirmity— arthritis—and revealed herself as the opposition when the maid came to stand expectantly in the doorway. “Do you care to take something before lunch, Miss Brett?” (Another drinker in the house.) “We have some really excellent
