June suddenly remembered a story of Billy’s.
“He was one peach,” referring to a lover of the night before. “He tied my lavender chemise around the electric light—said it gave me a pensively chaste look. It made him a damn sight handsomer than I thought he was. Anyway, the fool thing caught fire at the most unpropitious moment!
“He sent me another one the next day—a floozy kind, of course. Just the kind a man would buy. Pink satin with bows and lace around the top.”
June gave up the idea of colored lampshades and startling nighties and proceeded to the cotton counter. She found just what she wanted there—enough sheer cotton Georgette crepe of very pale yellow to make her nightgown and after buying some black silk with which to stitch it her shopping was finished for the week.
She seldom had to go out. It was better to sit curled up in the big chair. There was no hurry about the sewing. She had a week in which to finish the new article of underwear and it would be a week before she could get new material to begin another. While June had been working she had observed the slogan, “a book a week.” Now it was, “an article of clothing once a week.” Her wardrobe became extensive. Little short white undershirts were cheap and not as repulsively sensible as the union suits for which you had to pay ninety cents. You could get the former in the ten cent store. You could get enough silk to make the most frivolous of chemises for one dollar and thirty-nine cents. Stockings were a dollar and a half and you could get along with one pair a month.
Silk and jersey for smocks was reasonably cheap and that year one embroidered them in wool. They were very gay. By December she had two, one woolen one and one of black silk. There was nothing she could do for the shabby lining of her coat. It just had to stay shabby. If she took it out, she reflected, the inner lining would have to come out too. She could make it look decent by facing the seams with silk and passing it off for a summer coat. But she needed something heavier those cold months. It was humiliating to expose her poverty in a restaurant when a waiter started to assist her in taking off her jacket. And still more uncomfortable to leave it on and bake. In order to divert her mind June ran out to the closet to look at the new velvet hat which her mother had given her.
June had called up a few weeks after she had joined Dick, just as she had done when she had been away from home working, and asked Mother Grace if she could come home for supper. Dick would not be home until twelve now that the snow had commenced.
“You bet, come along,” her mother had said brightly. “I’ve got a lot of housecleaning to do and you can help me.”
She kissed June affectionately at the door. “How are you getting on? That’s fine. I’ve a little wedding present for you.”
The wedding present proved to be six knives and forks and spoons which June received gratefully. She could discard the ten cent store things now. They were abominable to eat with.
“Dick will like these,” she said. “He fusses every morning at breakfast at the incongruity of our china which is very nice and the ‘silverware’ which is aluminum. I think the forks spoil the taste for him. He’s very fastidious.”
It was in casual references such as these that Mother Grace learned of the new member of her family as she called him.
“Dick is so careful of his appearance that I’ve become engrossed in my own. I spend hours every day manicuring and bathing and primping.” Or,
“Dick is very finicky about his breakfasts. The eggs must be fried so that there aren’t any little frills of crispness around them and the coffee must be French coffee and just come to a boil and the toast must be ready the last minute when he’s ready to sit down to the table. Not really too finicky you know, because he’s just as ready to get my breakfast for me and he does it perfectly. On Sunday mornings we have eggs Benedict with truffles on the top. I don’t know how to make Hollandaise sauce, so he makes the breakfast then.
“He doesn’t ever have to leave until around twelve, so every morning the breakfasts are lovely.
“Dick met Billy and Ivan and Hugh Brace and Ellen Winter and Chester. He seems to like them all well enough, and he’s willing for us all to go on parties together either after the theatre or when he has a night off, but he objects to my seeing any of them when he isn’t with me. I think he’s jealous.”
June was convinced that he was jealous a few months later. Billy and some friends of hers and Dick and June were having a late supper one night after the show, and June with her usual freedom of gesture, put her hand on the shoulder of the man next to her when she leaned over to talk to Billy.
Dick pushed back his chair roughly and stood up. When June turned to speak to him she was startled to see how pale he was. He seemed about to go without speaking to her, and then thought better of it.
“I’ll leave you here,” he sneered, “to embrace the gentleman on your right.”
In her surprise and anger, June did not answer him. The blow was unexpected and she felt suddenly ill. She wanted to run after him, to embrace him and tell him she
