“A house!” He was aroused. “Great Scott, doesn’t it cost enough for the two of us to live as it is? Don’t you make my life miserable whining about bills?”
The color came into her cheeks, but she had never risked letting herself feel resentment at anything he chose to say. She laughed quite naturally. “My goodness!” she said. “You’re talking as if I were a puppy! I’ve never whined a single whine; it’s the howling of the collectors you’ve heard. Let ’em howl; it’s good enough for ’em! No, but really, sweetheart, please just let me finish. I’ve thought it all out. You don’t know what a good manager I am.” She hurried on, forestalling the words on his lips. “You don’t know how much I want to be just a little bit of help. I can’t be much, I know. But I’m sure I could save money—”
“Old stuff!” he interrupted. “It isn’t the money you save; it’s the money you make that counts.”
“I know!” she agreed quickly. “But we could get a house, we could buy a house, for less than we’re paying here in rent. A very nice house. I wouldn’t ask you to do it, if it cost any more than we’re spending now. But—of course I don’t know anything about such things—but I should think it would give you an advantage in business if you owned some property. Wouldn’t—wouldn’t it—make people put more confidence—” She faltered miserably at the look in his eyes, and before he could speak she had changed her tactics, laughing.
“I’m just trying to tease you into giving me something I want, and I know I’m awfully silly about it.” She nestled closer to him, slipping an arm under his neck. “Oh, honey, it wouldn’t cost anything at all, and I do so want to have a house to do things to. I feel so—so unsettled, living this way. I feel as if I were always sitting on the edge of a chair waiting to go somewhere else. And I’m used to working and—and managing a little money. I know it wasn’t much money, but I liked to do it. You’re letting a lot of perfectly good energy go to waste in me, really you are.”
He laughed, tightening his arm about her shoulders, and for one deliriously happy moment she thought she had won. Then he kissed her, and before he spoke she knew she had lost.
“I should worry! You’re giving me all I want,” he said, and there was different delight in the words. She was satisfying him, and for the moment it was enough. He made the mistake of overconfidence in emphasizing a point already won and so losing it.
“And as long as I’m giving you three meals a day and glad rags, it isn’t up to you to worry. I’ll look after the finances if you’ll take care of your complexion. It’s beginning to need it,” he added with brutality that defeated its own purpose. Even in her pain she had an instant of seeing him clearly and feeling that she hated him.
She slipped to her feet and stood trembling, not looking down at him.
“Well, that’s settled, then,” she said in a clear, hard little voice. “I’ll go and dress. It’s nearly noon.”
She felt that her own anger was threatening the most precious thing in her life; she felt that she was two persons who were tearing each other to pieces. With a blind instinct of reaching out to him for help she turned at the dressing-room door. “I know you don’t realize what you’re doing to me—you don’t realize—what you’re throwing away,” she said.
There was a cool amusement in his eyes.
“Well, but why the melodrama?” he asked reasonably. She stood convicted of hysteria and stupidity, and she felt again his superiority and his mastery over her.
When she came from the dressing-room to find him, careless, good-humored, handsome, tugging his tie into its knot before the mirror, she knew that nothing mattered except that she loved him and that she must hold his love for her. She came close to him, longing for a reassurance that she would not ask. Unless he gave it to her, left her with it to hold in her heart, she would be tortured by miserable doubts and flickering jealousies until he came back. She would be tied to the telephone, waiting for a call from him, trying to follow in her imagination the intricate business affairs from which she was shut out, telling herself that it was business and nothing else that kept him from her.
“Well, bye-bye,” he said, putting on his hat.
“Goodbye.” Her voice was like a detaining hand. “You—you won’t be gone long?”
He relented.
“I’m going down to see Clark & Hayward. I’m going to put through a deal with them that’ll put us on velvet,” he declared.
“Clark & Hayward? They’re the real-estate people?”
“You’re some little guesser. They certainly are. We’re going to be millionaires when I get through with them! Farewell!”
The very door seemed to click triumphantly behind him, and she heard him whistling while he waited for the elevator. When he appeared on the sidewalk below, she was leaning from the window, and she would have waved to him if he had looked up. Her occupation for the day vanished when he swung into a streetcar and was carried out of sight.
She picked up the pragmatism book again and read a few paragraphs, put it down restlessly. The untidy bedroom nagged at her nerves, but Bert was paying for hotel service, and once when she had made the bed he had told her impatiently that there was no sense in letting the very servants know she was not used to living decently.
She would go for a walk. There might be something new to see in the shop windows. She would take the book with her and read it in the dairy lunchroom where she ate when alone. It seemed criminal to her to spend money unnecessarily when they owed so much, and she
