“—and what I suppose you were really hinting at was that I may have been handsomely kissed by my ardent Jewish friend, before I left Deauville. Well, I was! And I liked it! It doesn’t matter if I never see him again—Oh, Sam, if you could only understand how humiliating and infuriating it was of you to suggest that my desire to stay here had anything whatever to do with Arnold! But he was charming. If you could only have seen him, lolling among the sand dunes as though (I used to tell him) he were a Maharajah among gold cushions, with white flannels, and his hair wild and his shirt open at the throat—It would’ve looked silly and pretentious with any other man, but on him it seemed natural. And all the while, with all his gorgeousness, talking so simply, so confidingly—really, it was touching. But haven’t we talked enough of him? We must still make our plans—”
“Let’s get him settled first. I’ve got—”
“Sam, the thing you never could realize about him, even if you met him, was how touching he was. Clever and handsome and rich and so on, and yet such a child! He needed someone like me to talk to. Oh, I was just an audience for him—nice old mother confessor. He was condescending enough to say that for a venerable dame of forty-two, I was still an excellent imitation of a pretty wench, and he’d supposed I was five years younger than himself, not two years older. And that I was the best dancer he’d found in Europe. But of course the bouquets were just preliminary to his talking about himself and his unhappy childhood, and you know what a fool I am about children—the least hint that anybody has had an unhappy childhood and I dissolve in tears! Poor Arnold! He suffered as a boy because he was clever and strong. Nobody could believe how sensitive he was. And his mother was a grim, relentless old dragon, who hated weakness of any kind, or what she thought was weakness, and when she’d find him daydreaming, she’d accuse him of loafing—Oh, it must have been hell, for so fine a spirit! And then in college, the usual trouble of the too clever and too handsome Jew—high-hatted by the stupidest, drabbest, meanest Yankees and Middlewesterners—they looked down on him, just the way a dray-horse might look down on a fine racehorse. Poor Arnold! Of course I was touched by so proud a person as he caring to tell me about his real self.”
“Fran! You don’t suppose that this is the first time your Mr. Israel has used the neglected-childhood approach? And apparently successfully!”
“Are you again hinting that I fell for him?”
“I am! It’s rather important to know! Did you?”
“Well, then—yes. I did.”
“Oh!”
“And I’m proud of it! I couldn’t, once—under your heavy-handed tutelage, my dear Samuel!—have believed it possible to be an ‘erring wife’! What blind hypocrites people are! And when it did happen, it all seemed so right, so natural and sweet—”
While she raced on he was incredulously admitting that this abominable thing, this newspaper-headline, divorce-court, sensational-novel degradation had actually happened to him—to her—to Emily and Brent. He had a fascinated desire to know details. He pictured this Arnold Israel, this black leopard of a man—no, too big for a black leopard, but that sort of gracefulness—returning to her Deauville hotel with her, shirt open at his too smooth throat—no, he’d be coming home with her in evening clothes, probably with a cape thrown back. He’d accompany her to her room at the hotel in Deauville; whisper, “Just let me come in for one good night kiss.” Then Fran became real. Since he had arrived, Sam’s eyes had seen her but cloudily, his ears had heard her only as a stranger. Now he peered at her, was conscious of her, in black and silver, conscious of the curve from shoulder to breast; and he was raging at the thought of Israel.
All his long thinking and his wrath slid by in five seconds and he had not missed a word as she panted:
“You think it’s an overwhelming attack on Arnold to suggest that he’s used the same tactics before! Of course he has—of course he’s had other affairs—perhaps lots of them! Thank Heaven for that! He’s had some training in the arts of love. He understands women. He doesn’t think they’re merely business partners. Let me tell you, my dear Samuel, it would be better for you, and for me both, if you’d devoted a little of your valuable time to the despised art of rousing a woman to some degree of romantic passion—if you’d given some of the attention you’ve lavished on carburetors to me—and possibly even to other women—I suppose you have been what is called ‘faithful’ to me since our marriage.”
“I have!”
“Well, doubtless I ought to be highly gratified—”
“Fran! Do you want to marry this fellow Israel?”
“Heavens no! … Anyway, I don’t think so.”
“And yet you want to see him every day this fall.”
“That’s different. But not marry him. He’s too much like plum cake—wonderful at a Christmas feast, but he’d bring indigestion. For a permanent diet I’d prefer good, honest, dependable bread—which you are—please don’t think that’s insulting; it’s really a great compliment. No! Besides, he doesn’t want to! I doubt if he’d care for any one woman for more than six months. Oh, I believe him when he says that he’s almost morbidly faithful to the one woman while it lasts, but—”
“Has he got a wife some place?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know! Heavens! Does it matter?”
“It may!”
“Oh, don’t try to be melodramatic! It doesn’t suit your Strong Calm Manly type! Anyway, Arnold wouldn’t marry me, because I’m not a Jew. He’s just as proud of being a Jew as you are of being a Nordic. He ought to be! He’s more
