“Agnes,” interrupted Jane, “is he always like this?”
“Always,” said Agnes, with great good cheer. She looked distinctly relieved by Jane’s frivolous question. She knew now that Jane was taking Jimmy in the right spirit. “Sometimes he’s worse.” She placed her hand affectionately on Jimmy’s shoulder. “How did the music go today, old top?”
“Oh—rotten!” said Jimmy lightly. “My rondo’s a flop.”
“He’s writing a concerto for the violin,” explained Agnes, with a glance at the music on the sofa.
“Really?” cried Jane, honestly impressed. Then, turning to Jimmy, “Aren’t you excited about it?”
He met her shining eyes with an ironical smile.
“Well,” he said calmly, “I’ve lost my first fine careless rapture. I’ve been writing it for ten years.”
“Some of it’s very good,” said Agnes.
“And some of it isn’t,” pursued Jimmy cheerfully.
“I want him to finish it,” said Agnes.
“And I’m eager to please,” said Jimmy. “So I sit here, day after day, pouring my full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art, while Agnes supports me in the style to which I was never accustomed before she laid me on the lap of luxury. I don’t get much done, however.”
His voice sounded a little discouraged, Jane thought, in spite of his levity. Agnes changed the subject abruptly.
“We’re dining out at a restaurant,” she said. “I won’t cook dinner in hot weather.”
“She’s a swell cook, you know,” said Jimmy to Jane.
“I’ve known it for twenty years,” said Jane to Jimmy.
“Come with me while I clean the child,” said Agnes. She opened the door through which Jimmy had vanished in quest of his necktie. It led into a narrow dark corridor. Agnes pushed open another door and Jane found herself in a bedroom. A very dark bedroom, with one corner window opening on a dingy airshaft.
“No electricity,” said Agnes. “It’s a curse.” She struck a match and lit a flaring gas-jet beside a maple bureau. The bureau and two iron beds completely filled the room. One bed was neatly made and covered with a cotton counterpane. The other was in complete disorder.
“Jimmy never gets up until after I’ve gone in the morning,” said Agnes apologetically, “so he never gets his bed made until I come home at night.” As she spoke she picked up a pair of pajamas from the floor and hung them on a peg behind the door. A couple of discarded neckties were strewn on top of the bureau. Agnes added them to a long row of other neckties that hung from the brass gas-bracket. Then she tossed off her hat, without even a glance at the mirror, and opening a bureau drawer, took out a clean blue romper for the child. Jane suddenly realized that Agnes looked tired. Her hair was really very grey.
“I’ll make the bed,” said Jane.
“Oh—do you want to?” asked Agnes. Jane nodded. “Well, it would save time.” She vanished into the bathroom with her daughter.
Jane walked very soberly over to the bed and pulled off the sheets and turned the mattress. She heard once more the sound of running water. This bedroom was not fit to live in, thought Jane. A black hole of Calcutta. How could Agnes put up with it? How could Agnes put up with a husband who didn’t get out of bed in the morning until after she had gone down to her office to earn his living? Jane tucked the bottom sheet firmly under the mattress. She’d like to take Jimmy by the ear, she thought, and make him make his own bed, while Agnes sat in a rocking-chair and watched him do it. Jane was thoroughly shocked by Agnes’s revelation. Lots of wives, of course, lay serenely in bed every morning until long after the breadwinner had departed for his day’s work. But that seemed different, somehow. Why did it? If Jimmy had nothing in life to get up for, there was, of course, no real reason for his getting up. Still Jane smoothed the blankets and turned to pick up the counterpane from the windowsill. Wasn’t Jimmy acting just the way she had always wished that Stephen sometimes would? Stephen thought the world would come to an end if he did not catch the eight o’clock train every morning at the Lakewood Station. Jane had been mocking that delusion of Stephen’s for the last fifteen years.
Agnes reentered the room with a clean blue-rompered daughter at her side. Jane smoothed the counterpane over the pillow. Agnes walked over to the bureau and, still without glancing in the mirror, ran a comb casually through her low pompadour. Agnes did her hair just the way she always had since the day that she first put it up—a big figure eight twisted halfway up her head in the back. She had always run a comb through it just like that, without a thought for a looking-glass.
“Come on,” said Agnes.
Jimmy rose from the sofa as they entered the living-room.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “Tony’s?”
“I thought so,” said Agnes. Then, turning to Jane, “Or do you hate Italian food?”
The night was so hot that Jane thought that she would hate food of any nationality.
“I love it,” she said falsely.
They all walked down the corridor and the uncarpeted stairs into the odour of cooking cabbage and out into the comparative freshness of the sultry street.
“Tony’s is just around the corner,” said Agnes. She slipped one arm through Jane’s and the other through Jimmy’s. Little Agnes skipped on ahead of them. She seemed to know the way to Tony’s quite as well as her parents did. Jane threw a glance past Agnes’s clever, contented face to Jimmy’s faun-like countenance. It was clever, too, but it wasn’t very contented, Jane thought. In the grey September twilight Jimmy looked older than he had in the softer light of the chintz-hung living-room. Suddenly he met her eyes and smiled.
“This is swell!” he said cheerfully. “But an embarrassment of riches! Taking two beautiful women out to dinner at Tony’s the
