The years of poring over the magazines devoted to the great of her world (“Mrs. Thomas Benton Knowles II chooses jade and white for her charming sitting room at Broadmere, the Knowles’ summer home at Newport”) paid off handsomely. Even in the grudging eyes of Adelaide Wain, Celia did not put a foot wrong.
Could all this now be in the balance?
In the restaurant where she had arrived first, Celia watched Jules presently threading his way toward her, urbane, well-tailored, lifting a hand occasionally in greeting. He paused once at a table where a white-haired general stood up to shake his hand cordially; after a moment both men turned to gaze across the intervening tables at Celia, who tipped her head a little and smiled in recognition of the general’s gallant bow. She knew that Jules enjoyed presenting her to people, even at a distance, and it did not distress her in the least that at such times he took on their air of interested but uninvolved appraisal, much like a man joining in the inspection of a costly new car.
As usual when Jules was seated, there was a waiter there at once. Also as usual, Jules offered a cocktail punctiliously although he himself almost never drank at lunch, a discipline in accord with his twice-weekly twenty laps in his club’s pool, but here there was a departure from custom. Instead of declining, Celia said with promptness, “I’d love one.
Jules regarded her with faint apprehension. He knew that she was to have spent a part of the morning at the apartment with Adelaide, deciding which china and silver should be kept and which sent to storage. He also knew that his sister-in-law’s frosty dislike of Celia was as strong as ever under her benevolent smiles, and like any other man he had hoped that a truce could be maintained until the wedding. If, on the other hand, Adelaide was going to start ruffling his pleasant world—
Celia read his expression accurately. “No, darling, nothing like that. I didn’t get to the apartment at all; in fact, I seem to have spent the entire morning on the phone. The Friths want to give us an enormous cocktail party next week, and someone on the Examiner society staff asked about our wedding trip, and a photographer will do the pictures for nothing if we let him do some exclusive shots of us both in various spots in your apartment.”
She gazed at him with delicate ruefulness over the rim of the daiquiri she hadn’t wanted at all and had only ordered to guarantee a little extra alertness on Jules’s part. “It’s impossible, I know, but I had the maddest wish that we could just go off and be married quietly somewhere where we don’t know a soul.”
This was a carefully three-pronged attack. It strengthened the illusion that Celia was not marrying Jules for the sake of wealth and parade; it catered to his own distaste for publicity; it posed a challenge. Unless she were very much mistaken, he would say—
Jules considered olives, decided against them, helped himself to a spoonful of marinated mushrooms. He said with deliberation, “Why is it impossible?”
Celia dropped her lashes to conceal her cautious jubilation. “Oh, Jules. Your sister-in-law”—she refused to say Mrs. Wain and could not quite venture upon Adelaide— “has been to so much trouble. The invitations haven’t gone to the engraver yet, but all your friends . . . people will expect . . .”
She could not have hit on a more successful note. Jules Wain’s innate arrogance seldom came to the surface— seldom had to—but it was there immediately in the measured lift of his still-dark brows. “‘People?’ Politicians have to defer to them, of course, but our marriage is hardly in the public domain.” He had liked the mushrooms; he took more, with an air of growing absorption. “Odd how these coincidences come up. I was on the phone this morning with a friend of mine who owns a lodge in Santa Fe. He’s a great ski-country enthusiast, naturally, and he suggested that we have the wedding there.”
“Oh? Do you know, I’ve always wanted to see Santa Fe,” said Celia, sounding only dreamily reflective. She stroked the stem of her glass with a steady finger, as though she did not feel her safety to be balanced on a knife edge.
“It’s quite—distinctive,” said Jules temperately as the waiter placed deviled crab before them, “and surprisingly cosmopolitan. According to Roger, the mountain view from his lodge—he’s called it The Priory—is spectacular at this time of year.”
The small salt-and-pepper busying interval was less like a silence than a tapestry beginning to show a few colored threads.
“Of course, it would be extremely cold, but it’s a dry cold because of the altitude,” said Jules.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” said Celia, still carefully idle; she had heard nothing of the kind, and was not even entirely sure what state Santa Fe was in. Colorado? New Mexico? Fairly far removed from San Francisco, at any rate.
Jules gave the crab his judicious attention—he was not a man to whom meals made only a necessary division of the day—but Celia’s idea was clearly gaining ground. He squeezed lemon with an air of thought. “There’d be a minimum residency period, but I shouldn’t imagine it would be more than three days or so. I’ll have Mrs. Dewey look into it this afternoon.”
Careful . . . careful. “Darling, do you think we actually could? Just have it tiny and quiet and anonymous, with no newspaper fuss?”
A wistfulness in Celia’s tone, a lingering suggestion that there might be something which even Jules Wain could not acceptably do, was
