“I’m making biscuits,” chattered Roxanne gravely. “Can your wife make biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can make biscuits can surely do no—”
“You’ll have to come out here and live,” said Jeffrey. “Get a place out in the country like us, for you and Kitty.”
“You don’t know Kitty. She hates the country. She’s got to have her theatres and vaudevilles.”
“Bring her out,” repeated Jeffrey. “We’ll have a colony. There’s an awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!”
They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture toward a dilapidated structure on the right.
“The garage,” she announced. “It will also be Jeffrey’s writing-room within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I will mix a cocktail.”
The two men ascended to the second floor—that is, they ascended halfway, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest’s suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed:
“For God’s sake, Harry, how do you like her?”
“We will go upstairs,” answered his guest, “and we will shut the door.”
Half an hour later as they were sitting together in the library Roxanne reissued from the kitchen, bearing before her a pan of biscuits. Jeffrey and Harry rose.
“They’re beautiful, dear,” said the husband, intensely.
“Exquisite,” murmured Harry.
Roxanne beamed.
“Taste one. I couldn’t bear to touch them before you’d seen them all and I can’t bear to take them back until I find what they taste like.”
“Like manna, darling.”
Simultaneously the two men raised the biscuits to their lips, nibbled tentatively. Simultaneously they tried to change the subject. But Roxanne undeceived, set down the pan and seized a biscuit. After a second her comment rang out with lugubrious finality:
“Absolutely bum!”
“Really—”
“Why, I didn’t notice—”
Roxanne roared.
“Oh, I’m useless,” she cried laughing. “Turn me out, Jeffrey—I’m a parasite; I’m no good—”
Jeffrey put his arm around her.
“Darling, I’ll eat your biscuits.”
“They’re beautiful, anyway,” insisted Roxanne.
“They’re—they’re decorative,” suggested Harry.
Jeffrey took him up wildly.
“That’s the word. They’re decorative; they’re masterpieces. We’ll use them.”
He rushed to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a handful of nails.
“We’ll use them, by golly, Roxanne! We’ll make a frieze out of them.”
“Don’t!” wailed Roxanne. “Our beautiful house.”
“Never mind. We’re going to have the library repapered in October. Don’t you remember?”
“Well—”
Bang! The first biscuit was impaled to the wall, where it quivered for a moment like a live thing.
Bang! …
When Roxanne returned, with a second round of cocktails the biscuits were in a perpendicular row, twelve of them, like a collection of primitive spearheads.
“Roxanne,” exclaimed Jeffrey, “you’re an artist! Cook?—nonsense! You shall illustrate my books!”
During dinner the twilight faltered into dusk, and later it was a starry dark outside, filled and permeated with the frail gorgeousness of Roxanne’s white dress and her tremulous, low laugh.
Such a little girl she is,
thought Harry. Not as old as Kitty.
He compared the two. Kitty—nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light—and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own adolescent laughter.
A good match for Jeffrey,
he thought again. Two very young people, the sort who’ll stay very young until they suddenly find themselves old.
Harry thought these things between his constant thoughts about Kitty. He was depressed about Kitty. It seemed to him that she was well enough to come back to Chicago and bring his little son. He was thinking vaguely of Kitty when he said good night to his friend’s wife and his friend at the foot of the stairs.
“You’re our first real house guest,” called Roxanne after him. “Aren’t you thrilled and proud?”
When he was out of sight around the stair corner she turned to Jeffrey, who was standing beside her resting his hand on the end of the banister.
“Are you tired, my dearest?”
Jeffrey rubbed the centre of his forehead with his fingers.
“A little. How did you know?”
“Oh, how could I help knowing about you?”
“It’s a headache,” he said moodily. “Splitting. I’ll take some aspirin.”
She reached over and snapped out the light, and with his arm tight about her waist they walked up the stairs together.
II
Harry’s week passed. They drove about the dreaming lanes or idled in cheerful inanity upon lake or lawn. In the evening Roxanne, sitting inside, played to them while the ashes whitened on the glowing ends of their cigars. Then came a telegram from Kitty saying that she wanted Harry to come East and get her, so Roxanne and Jeffrey were left alone in that privacy of which they never seemed to tire.
“Alone” thrilled them again. They wandered about the house, each feeling intimately the presence of the other; they sat on the same side of the table like honeymooners; they were intensely absorbed, intensely happy.
The town of Marlowe, though a comparatively old settlement, had only recently acquired a “society.” Five or six years before, alarmed at the smoky swelling of Chicago, two or three young married couples, “bungalow people,” had moved out; their friends had followed. The Jeffrey Curtains found an already formed “set” prepared to welcome them; a country club, ballroom, and golf links yawned for them, and there were bridge parties, and poker parties, and parties where they drank beer, and parties where they drank nothing at all.
It was at a poker party that they found themselves a week after Harry’s departure. There were two tables, and a good proportion of the young wives were smoking and shouting their bets, and being very daringly mannish for those days.
Roxanne had left the game early and taken to perambulation; she wandered into the pantry and found herself some grape juice—beer gave her a
