He smiled airily as if it were a new game they were going to play. Then, as Gretchen was silent, his smile faded, and he looked at her uncertainly.
“Well, what’s the matter?” she broke out finally. “Do you expect me to jump up and sing? You do enough work as it is. If you try to do any more you’ll end up with a nervous breakdown. I read about a—”
“Don’t worry about me,” he interrupted; “I’m all right. But you’re going to be bored to death sitting here every evening.”
“No, I won’t,” she said without conviction—“except tonight.”
“What about tonight?”
“George Tompkins asked us to dinner.”
“Did you accept?”
“Of course I did,” she said impatiently. “Why not? You’re always talking about what a terrible neighborhood this is, and I thought maybe you’d like to go to a nicer one for a change.”
“When I go to a nicer neighborhood I want to go for good,” he said grimly.
“Well, can we go?”
“I suppose we’ll have to if you’ve accepted.”
Somewhat to his annoyance the conversation abruptly ended. Gretchen jumped up and kissed him sketchily and rushed into the kitchen to light the hot water for a bath. With a sigh he carefully deposited his portfolio behind the bookcase—it contained only sketches and layouts for display advertising, but it seemed to him the first thing a burglar would look for. Then he went abstractedly upstairs, dropped into the baby’s room for a casual moist kiss, and began dressing for dinner.
They had no automobile, so George Tompkins called for them at 6:30. Tompkins was a successful interior decorator, a broad, rosy man with a handsome mustache and a strong odor of jasmine. He and Roger had once roomed side by side in a boardinghouse in New York, but they had met only intermittently in the past five years.
“We ought to see each other more,” he told Roger tonight. “You ought to go out more often, old boy. Cocktail?”
“No, thanks.”
“No? Well, your fair wife will—won’t you, Gretchen?”
“I love this house,” she exclaimed, taking the glass and looking admiringly at ship models, Colonial whiskey bottles, and other fashionable debris of 1925.
“I like it,” said Tompkins with satisfaction. “I did it to please myself, and I succeeded.”
Roger stared moodily around the stiff, plain room, wondering if they could have blundered into the kitchen by mistake.
“You look like the devil, Roger,” said his host. “Have a cocktail and cheer up.”
“Have one,” urged Gretchen.
“What?” Roger turned around absently. “Oh, no, thanks. I’ve got to work after I get home.”
“Work!” Tompkins smiled. “Listen, Roger, you’ll kill yourself with work. Why don’t you bring a little balance into your life—work a little, then play a little?”
“That’s what I tell him,” said Gretchen.
“Do you know an average business man’s day?” demanded Tompkins as they went in to dinner. “Coffee in the morning, eight hours’ work interrupted by a bolted luncheon, and then home again with dyspepsia and a bad temper to give the wife a pleasant evening.”
Roger laughed shortly.
“You’ve been going to the movies too much,” he said dryly.
“What?” Tompkins looked at him with some irritation. “Movies? I’ve hardly ever been to the movies in my life. I think the movies are atrocious. My opinions on life are drawn from my own observations. I believe in a balanced life.”
“What’s that?” demanded Roger.
“Well”—he hesitated—“probably the best way to tell you would be to describe my own day. Would that seem horribly egotistic?”
“Oh, no!” Gretchen looked at him with interest. “I’d love to hear about it.”
“Well, in the morning I get up and go through a series of exercises. I’ve got one room fitted up as a little gymnasium, and I punch the bag and do shadowboxing and weight-pulling for an hour. Then after a cold bath—There’s a thing now! Do you take a daily cold bath?”
“No,” admitted Roger, “I take a hot bath in the evening three or four times a week.”
A horrified silence fell. Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance as if something obscene had been said.
“What’s the matter?” broke out Roger, glancing from one to the other in some irritation. “You know I don’t take a bath every day—I haven’t got the time.”
Tompkins gave a prolonged sigh.
“After my bath,” he continued, drawing a merciful veil of silence over the matter, “I have breakfast and drive to my office in New York, where I work until four. Then I lay off, and if it’s summer I hurry out here for nine holes of golf, or if it’s winter I play squash for an hour at my club. Then a good snappy game of bridge until dinner. Dinner is liable to have something to do with business, but in a pleasant way. Perhaps I’ve just finished a house for some customer, and he wants me to be on hand for his first party to see that the lighting is soft enough and all that sort of thing. Or maybe I sit down with a good book of poetry and spend the evening alone. At any rate, I do something every night to get me out of myself.”
“It must be wonderful,” said Gretchen enthusiastically. “I wish we lived like that.”
Tompkins bent forward earnestly over the table.
“You can,” he said impressively. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Look here, if Roger’ll play nine holes of golf every day it’ll do wonders for him. He won’t know himself. He’ll do his work better, never get that tired, nervous feeling—What’s the matter?”
He broke off. Roger had perceptibly yawned.
“Roger,” cried Gretchen sharply, “there’s no need to be so rude. If you did what George said, you’d be a lot better off.” She turned indignantly to their host. “The latest is that he’s going to work at night for the next six weeks. He says he’s going to pull down the blinds and shut us up
