“Well, he looks to me like a crook. And what about the young gigolos that are always hanging around Mrs. Pénable?”
“I do think it’s too gracious of you to take the word ‘gigolo,’ which I taught you in the first place—”
“You did not!”
“—and use it against me, my dear polylingual Sam! I suppose you are referring to boys like Gioserro and Billy Dawson. Yes, they’re not at all like American businessmen, are they! They actually enjoy being charming to women, they enjoy sharing their leisure with women, they dance beautifully, they talk about something besides the stock-market—”
“Oh, they enjoy leisure, all right! Oh, now, Fran, I don’t mean to be nasty about them, but you know they graft on women—”
“My dear man, Captain Gioserro (and he could call himself Count Gioserro, if he wanted to!) has a perfectly good family income, as his people have had before him, for generations—”
“Whoa now! Hold up! I question his having a very good family income. I notice that whenever he’s with us, he always manages to let me pay. Not that I mind, but—Why say, I’ve never seen him spend a cent except tonight, when he gave ten centimes to the fellow that opened the cab door. Now please listen, Fran, and don’t go off into a tantrum. Don’t you and Mrs. Pénable almost always pay the bills—for feeds, for taxis, for tips, for tickets—for Gioserro and young Dawson and most of these other slick young men that she has hanging around?”
“What of it? We can afford it. (The name, by the way, as I have remarked several hundred times before, is Madame de Pénable!) Or are you—” She became regally outraged and deliberate. “Are you perhaps hinting that because you so generously support me, you have the right to dictate on whom and for what I spend every cent? Do you desire me to give you a detailed account of my expenses, like an office boy? Then let me remind you—oh, this is so distasteful to me, but I must remind you that I have twenty thousand a year of my own, and now that I have a chance to be happy, with amusing people—”
She was sobbing. He caught her shoulders, and demanded, “Will you stop self-dramatizing yourself, my young lady? You know, and you know good and well, that I’m criticizing these young men for grafting just because I want to point out that they’re no good; nothing but a lot of butterflies.”
She broke away from his grasp and from her own sobs, and she was tart again: “Then thank God for the butterflies! I’m so tired of the worthy ants! … Sam, we might just as well have this out … if we’re going on together.”
The last five words chilled him. He was incredulous. She seemed a little to mean it, and she went on resolutely:
“Let’s get it straight—just what we are up to; what we want. Now that we are meeting them, do you appreciate people with wit and elegance, or have you already had enough of them? Are you going to insist on returning to—oh, decent enough people, but people that can’t see anything in life more amusing than poker and golf and motoring, that are afraid of suave manners, that think to be roughneck is to be strong? Does the accumulated civilization of two thousand years of Europe mean something to you or—”
“Oh, come off it, Fran! I’m not a roughneck and you know it. And I’m not uncivilized. And I like nice manners. But I like nice manners in people that are something more than amateur headwaiters and—And after all, a rock takes a better polish than a sponge! These people, even Pénable herself, are parrots. What I’d like to meet—Well, you take the colonial administrators and so on out in the British possessions. People that are doing something besides going night after night to these restaurants where your gigolos hang out—”
“Sam, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve stood all the insults to my friends that I can for one night! You can think up a few new ones for tomorrow. I’m going to sleep. And now.”
Whether she slept or not, she was rigidly silent, her face turned from him.
He expected her to be soft, fluttery, apologetic, in the morning. But, awakening at nine, she looked unrepentant as steel. He trundled out talk about breakfast, about the laundry, then he grumbled, “I don’t know that I made myself quite clear last evening—”
“Oh yes, you did! Thoroughly! And I don’t think I care to discuss it. Shall we not say anything more about it?” She was so brightly forgiving and superior that he was infuriated. “I’m going out now. I’ll be back here about twelve. I’m lunching with Renée de Pénable, and if you think you can endure another hour with my degenerate friends, I should be glad to have you join us.”
She vanished into the bathroom, to dress, and nothing more could he get out of her. When she was gone, he sat in bathrobe and slippers, over a second order of coffee.
She’d never before let a quarrel last overnight, at least when she’d been in the wrong—
Or was it possible that she had not been in the wrong in their controversy?
And (each second he was more confused) just what was the controversy about?
Anyway, she couldn’t really have meant anything by her “if we’re going on together.” But suppose she had? Married couples did break up, quite incredibly, after years. Did he, in order to hold her, have to obey her, to associate forever with peacocks like this Mrs. Sittingwall and this fellow Andillet—who was certainly a little more than friendly with the Pénable woman?
No, hanged if he would!
But if that meant losing Fran? Good God! Why, now that he had no work, he had nothing to absorb him save Fran, Emily, Brent, and three or four friends like Tub Pearson. Nor
