“Helen! Helen! What the devil?”
She opened the bedroom door and stood smiling brightly on the threshold. “ ’Morning, Bert dear! Behold, the early bird’s gone with his bill still open!”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you open the door and tell him to stop that confounded noise? Were you afraid of disturbing him?”
He knew how it hurt her, but she was trained not to show it. It appeared to her now that she had been criminally selfish in not guarding Bert’s sleep. She saw herself a useless incumbrance to her husband’s career, costing him a great deal and doing nothing whatever to repay him.
“That’s the trouble—it wouldn’t have disturbed him a bit!” she laughed bravely. “Somebody ought to catch a collector and study the species and find out what will disturb ’em. I think they’re made of cast-iron. I wonder does collecting run in families, or do they just catch ’em young and harden them.”
Sometimes even in the mornings talk like this made him smile. But this morning he only growled unintelligibly, turning his head on the pillow. She went softly past the bed into the dressing-room.
Bert had scouted her idea of getting an apartment with a kitchenette. He said he had not married a cook, and he hated women with burned complexions and red hands. He made her feel plebeian and common in preferring a home to a hotel. But she had found when she interviewed the apartment-house manager and had spent a happy morning buying a coffee percolator and dainty cups and napkins, that he did not mind her giving him coffee in bed. She found a deep pleasure in doing it.
The percolator stood behind a screen in the dressing-room. She turned on the electric switch and, sitting down before the mirror, took off her lace cap and released her hair from its curlers. Bert liked her hair curled. Its dark mist framed a face that she regarded anxiously in the mirror. The features had sharpened a little, and her complexion had lost a shade of its freshness. Bert would insist on her drinking with him, and she knew she must do it to keep her hold on him. A sense of the unreasonableness of men in loving women for their beauty and then destroying it came into her mind, nebulous, almost a thought. But she disregarded it, from a habit she had formed of disregarding many things, and began combing and coiling her hair, carefully inspecting the result from all angles with a hand mirror.
A few minutes later she came into the bedroom, carrying a tray and kicking the trailing lengths of her negligee before her. She held the tray in one hand while she cleared the bedside table with the other, and when she had poured the coffee she went through the sitting-room and brought in the morning paper. It had been the taxicab man. His bill, stuck in the crack of the door, fluttered down when she opened it, and after glancing at the figures hastily, she thrust it out of sight.
Bert was sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee, and the smile he threw at her made her happy. She curled on the bed beside his drawn-up knees and, taking her own cup from the tray, smiled at him in turn. She never loved him more than at such moments as this, when his rumpled hair and the eyes miraculously cleared and softened by sleep made him seem almost boyish.
“Good?”
“You’re some little chef when it comes to coffee!” he replied. “It hits the spot.” He yawned. “Good Lord, we must have had a time last night! Did I fight a chauffeur or did I dream it?”
“It was only a—rather a—dispute,” she said hurriedly.
“That little blond doll was some baby!”
He could not intend to be so cruel, not even to punish her for letting the bell waken him. It was only that he liked to feel his own power over her. He cared only for women that he could control, and she knew that it was the constant struggle between them, in which he was always victorious, that gave her her greatest hold on him. But it did hurt her cruelly in this moment of security to be reminded of the dangers that always threatened that hold.
“Oh, stunning!” she agreed, keeping her eyes clear and smiling. She would not fall into the error and the confession of being catty. But she felt that he perceived her motive, and she knew that in any case he held the advantage over her. She was in the helpless position of the one who gives the greater love.
They sipped their coffee in silence broken only by the crackling of the newspaper. Then, pushing it away, he set down his cup and leaned back against the pillows, his hands behind his head. A moment had arrived in which she could talk to him, and behind her carefully casual manner her nerves tightened.
“It was pretty good coffee,” she remarked. “You know, I think it would be fun if we had a real place, with a breakfast-room, don’t you? Then we’d have grapefruit and hot muffins and all that sort of thing, too. I’d like to have a place like that. And then we’d have parties,” she added hastily. “We could keep them going all night long if we wanted to in our own place.”
He yawned.
“Dream on, little one,” he said. But his voice was pleasant.
“Now listen, dear. I really mean it. We could do it. It wouldn’t be a bit more trouble to you than a hotel, really. I’d see that it wasn’t. I really want it awfully badly. I know you’d like it if you’d just let me try it once. You don’t know how nice I’d make it for you.”
His silence was too careless to be antagonistic, but he was listening. She was encouraged.
“You don’t realize how much time I have when you’re gone. I could keep a house running beautifully, and you’d never even see the wheels go round.
