The darling, June thought, as she finished reviewing the incident and turned to making the bed. There was a gorgeous Indian blanket on it which he had picked up in Mexico, which if sold would more than pay for another suit. But treasures once acquired, he refused to part with.
“I’ve had to beg or steal or sweat for most of the things I have and I’m not going to part with them now,” he justified himself. “A day will come when I’ll have fifty dollars in my pocket which won’t have to go for rent or food and which I won’t be tempted to use for poker and drink. It sounds impossible but the impossible has been known to have happened.”
The bed was made with as much care as those in the hospital and as the sheets for a double bed are never the size of those for a single bed in the hospital, it was a longer job to get the lower one pinned neatly (and so it would not tear) and pulled free of wrinkles.
It was a comfort to see her picture of Amenemhat III framed and hung on one side of the bed. He looked more like Dick than ever. (That was the way she put it now. It wasn’t that Dick looked more like Amenemhat. She loved her own absurdities.)
There were dishes to do, but when you had only two plates and two cups, queer bits of pottery from South Carolina, it was the work of a moment to wash them and put them away. One frying pan, one coffee pot, some silverware. It took a minute to mop the floor.
The bathroom still had a warm smell of shaving soap and talcum powder. An intimate, man’s smell.
June would have preferred to have worked so that the long day would come to an end sooner. But it was sweet to be his woman too. She liked to have him use the phrase. It was more possessive than the phrase “his wife.” “You’re my woman and you have to wait on me hand and foot. I don’t want you independent. I like to think of you sitting at home and thinking of me all day. While you’re mine, you’ve got to be all mine so you needn’t have any interest outside of me.”
It was delightfully humiliating to be talked to in such a way. It was humiliating but she invited it. As long as he crushed her in his arms meanwhile, he could say anything. “You are nothing but a damn little fool so don’t you dare tell me Conrad knows how to write a story. I tell you he doesn’t so you might as well shut up.” She wasn’t even allowed to look as though Conrad could write novels. She could only snuggle her face closer in Dick’s neck and say—“You are the most wonderful lover in the world and I’ll never read Conrad again.” (She gathered from Schopenhauer that he expected her to lie to him.)
At any rate she could spend the day in her armchair intermittently mending and reading books which he recommended—The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and the three volumes which followed their adventures, Heine’s prose—his poetry was not worth looking at—and any Scandinavian literature, for all Scandinavian literature was great.
For the most part, though, she was content to curl up in the morris chair and dream.
You could dream over sewing if you had any material to sew on. June became a collector of remnants. Every week when she had paid the milk and butter bill and enough groceries had been purchased to last for the coming week, there were usually several dollars left over. Although they talked of everything else in the world, the subject of money was never touched on. Every week Dick brought in forty dollars (his salary was fifty, but the temptation of drawing ahead on it was one of those meant to be succumbed to as he himself would put it.) Fifteen of this had to go to pay the rent. The egg and milk bill was around four dollars and the groceries never were more than five. June washed her own clothes in order to keep down the laundry bill which was always more than two dollars. Thirty dollars covered all these bills.
Now for the remnant! Silk mull, voile for lingerie, lawn, batiste, nainsook, flowered crepe, cross-barred muslins, cotton Georgette—all these may be found on the cotton remnant table. But you never went directly to that display of bargains. Across the aisle there are silk remnants—crepe de chine, silk Georgette crepe, taffeta, satins and brocaded silks in all colors and designs.
Would she rather have a flame-colored nightgown or a black one of slinky silk, or perhaps palest of green? The material should be very thin.
The black would be the most
