“As a matter of fact,” said Anthony, “you know nothing at all about it. With me it’s simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria’s reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn’t go where we’re not wanted. And people don’t want us. We’re too much the ideal bad examples.”
“Nonsense! You can’t park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work.”
“Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week—with luck. That’s if I could get a job at all; there’s an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I’d be any happier? Do you think that if I don’t get this money of my grandfather’s life will be endurable?”
Muriel smiled complacently.
“Well,” she said, “that may be clever but it isn’t common sense.”
A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual “Hi!”
“I’ve been talking philosophy with your husband,” cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.
“We took up some fundamental concepts,” said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days’ growth of beard.
Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly:
“Anthony’s right. It’s no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way.”
He broke in plaintively:
“Don’t you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend, won’t come to see us it’s high time to stop calling people up?” Tears were standing in his eyes.
“That was your fault about Maury Noble,” said Gloria coolly.
“It wasn’t.”
“It most certainly was.”
Muriel intervened quickly:
“I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn’t drink any more. He’s getting pretty cagey.”
“Doesn’t?”
“Practically not at all. He’s making piles of money. He’s sort of changed since the war. He’s going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee—anyhow, that’s what Town Tattle said.”
“He’s thirty-three,” said Anthony, thinking aloud. “But it’s odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant.”
“He was,” murmured Gloria, “in a way.”
“But brilliant people don’t settle down in business—or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?”
“You drift apart,” suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.
“They change,” said Gloria. “All the qualities that they don’t use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up.”
“The last thing he said to me,” recollected Anthony, “was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for.”
Muriel caught at this quickly.
“That’s what you ought to do,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Of course I shouldn’t think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it’d give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever sees you at Montmartre or—or anywhere. Are you economizing?”
Gloria laughed scornfully, glancing at Anthony from the corners of her eyes.
“Well,” he demanded, “what are you laughing at?”
“You know what I’m laughing at,” she answered coldly.
“At that case of whiskey?”
“Yes”—she turned to Muriel—“he paid seventy-five dollars for a case of whiskey yesterday.”
“What if I did? It’s cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle. You needn’t pretend that you won’t drink any of it.”
“At least I don’t drink in the daytime.”
“That’s a fine distinction!” he cried, springing to his feet in a weak rage. “What’s more, I’ll be damned if you can hurl that at me every few minutes!”
“It’s true.”
“It is not! And I’m getting sick of this eternal business of criticising me before visitors!” He had worked himself up to such a state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. “You’d think everything was my fault. You’d think you hadn’t encouraged me to spend money—and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot.”
Now Gloria rose to her feet.
“I won’t let you talk to me that way!”
“All right, then; by Heaven, you don’t have to!”
In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the hall and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair. Her face was lovely in the lamplight, composed, inscrutable.
“Oh—!” cried Muriel in distress. “Oh, what is the matter?”
“Nothing particularly. He’s just drunk.”
“Drunk? Why, he’s perfectly sober. He talked—”
Gloria shook her head.
“Oh, no, he doesn’t show it any more unless he can hardly stand up, and he talks all right until he gets excited. He talks much better than he does when he’s sober. But he’s been sitting here all day drinking—except for the time it took him to walk to the corner for a newspaper.”
“Oh, how terrible!” Muriel was sincerely moved. Her eyes filled with tears. “Has this happened much?”
“Drinking, you mean?”
“No, this—leaving you?”
“Oh, yes. Frequently. He’ll come in about midnight—and weep and ask me to forgive him.”
“And do you?”
“I don’t know. We just go on.”
The two women sat there in the lamplight and looked at each other, each in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty, as pretty as she would ever be again—her cheeks were flushed and she was wearing a new dress that she had bought—imprudently—for fifty dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out tonight, to a restaurant or even to one of the great, gorgeous moving picture palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at whom she could bear to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew her cheeks were flushed and because her dress was new and becomingly fragile.
